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The Terrarium
There were complications in the terrarium;
The tortoise was bisexual, the blue gravel
Just a little too blue. There were dead flies
Everywhere, and the limbs from dried out
Fir trees hugged the corners of the tank
Like nobody's business. The terrarium
Itself was a mess, but people came to see
It every day, hoping by this very act that
Their dreams would be fulfilled and sometimes
They were. Their lives were like the flammable trucks
In the wind when they gazed upon the terrarium's
Wrecked beauty. Their memories of it were velvet
Like fine sand. Some would come away weeping
Remnants of a strange fugue, and wonder if this was
The way their lives began. Others would ride
Away on donkey-like chaos, looking up
For airplanes with folded wings. Others still
Would light their nails on fire before being asked
To leave but these were rare. In the end
It all made sense, and I wondered
If it was time for me to say my goodbyes as somehow,
I felt my dream of utter completion and been reached.
It must have been, because just the other day,
The tortoise winked at me in multiples of three.
The Home of the Cubit Idea
"Your dizzy is my dizzy," she said,
And, "I'll give you a swift kick in your apocrypha."
Then there was the smudge of elements
On an empty Sunday, a long bird flying overhead.
Freedom came gusting in, the yonder of his reflections.
"I convenant you, my paramour, my satellite.
You are all potential, the coin before it's been called,
The future without a gloaming.
You eat in my house and in a full saloon-
Girl suit, you salute me. Giddyup!"
They lived in an arena of tangents,
Yet the tangential was as close to them as a stigmatic sun
Walking on bloodied snowcaps.
Let's just say they had syntax on their hands,
And torched their burnished grammar to the hilt.
Things sat around in pots for weeks and sprouted.
Then they sprouted, and kept sprouting,
And still, kept sprouting.
Finally they moved far away from the small violence
Of their younger days to a star-shaped apartment in a field.
They missed their old crazy vegetation,
But found that telling a good joke over a stale beer
Is just as satisfying and in fact, emotionally healthier.
But their corn still goes, "Rye!"
The potted plant goes, "La, la."
The Possessed Clock
I was the waitress in your dream,
Its warm rivulets of Tabasco on your eyelids.
But the restaurant, it was French,
And you fell for me like felled fruit in the sun
Even though I was very mean.
But now, not in the dream, I can say,
Here every hunk of junk likes me,
Here every red onion likes me,
And I can mumble over and over,
The same story, the same story, the same story,
While a red onion weeps deliriously.
I was the waitress, or maybe I wasn't.
Maybe I brought you maniacally shaking plates
One after the other until I elbowed my consciousness
Into wanderings of the marsupial
Hind legs of a thousand rainy days.
Yes, I think it's all about me, then and now,
In your dreams, not in your dreams,
Because I hold the crucible of iron eyeballs
That touch but cannot see.
Noelle Kocot's poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, New American Writing, Fence, Conduit, and The American Poetry Review (which awarded her the S. J. Marks Memorial Prize), and The Best American Poetry 2001. Kocot's first collection of poems, 4 (Four Way Books, 2001), was chosen by Michael Ryan to be the recipient of the Levis Prize. Her next collection, The Raving Fortune, will be published by Four Way in 2004. A seventeen-page poem, "Poem for the End of Time," is forthcoming in The Iowa Review and is the title piece from her forthcoming third book. Kocot was born and raised in Brooklyn and now lives in Oberlin, Ohio with her husband of ten years, composer Damon Tomblin.
Ander Monson
Lossary
1) Hole, halo in the snow, rosary and reminder
of descent an angel fish-shaped rock
at the base, heated in the sauna stove,
thrown out into the settling January powder
mechanism; 2) an immigration, illegible,
some thoughts of L. and elevation scrawled
in the wall with ballpoint pens and folding pocketknives
that are the size of pens; 3) considering Gary Snyder
here in the Finnish hotbox with Kai; 4) the end of mining
in Michigan; 5) creating jobs to plug or box over the holes
with chicken wire, padlocked doors, boards and two-inch
nails; 6) scary danger signage; 7) photographs
of all the letterforms naturally occurring; 8) tree-crotch
Xs; 9) good gone radio; 10) a sense of progress; 11) the letter S.
What If There Is No Ice
What if there is no ice
no Liz no X no equal sign
no skin on the lake for an answer
no long gone winter song
no throng of mourners
black in coats against the white
dikes that line the sides of roads
when plows have passed
What if there is no lake
no wet mouth on stampsand
(the iron ore afterbirth)
no hive for fish no base to rap against
with your head while diving
no repository for your bones
no grief node
What if there is no snow
no sign of weather left behind
on rinks or the hill behind Pamida
that kids sled down & hope
they can stop before entering the highway
What if there is no mine no earth
to tunnel through, no father disappearing
into the ground each day what if all is gas
is glass and tests in school: all transparency
and hard to hold, easy to be wrong about,
easy to inhale, go through.
Answers to Examination Questions
(1) yes; (2) the colossus; (3) a bloodless cross-ice pass;
(4) apex & crux; (5) late night shift with fear of hold-up;
(6) one-fourth; (7) feel loved, regardless of what your
father says; (8) related to your difficulties with girls; (9)
pine resin on wood; (10) "Take me home tonight;"
(11) bits of graduation speech, overblown & soporific;
(12) sparagmos, from the Greek, "to tear limb from limb,
dismember;" (13) file finish; (14) star in cast iron; (15) to
leave; (16) suggestion of lemon Pledge scent;
(17) dismantle; (18) your brother's breath moored in
freezing air; (19) an unstoppable plan; (20) true; necessity
of prom; (21) light & weight; (22) to go without;
(23) discarded code; (24) the purpose of the witness;
(25) cancelled check & locker key; (26) both a & c;
(27) permission to reprint your love letters in all detail;
(28) stunned conundrum; (29) esophagus & throat; (30)
b., before you knew; (31) no; (32) cored; (33) to show
the interior construction of an object; (34) sink, risk, &
rink; (35) triage; (36) brief love action; (37) 3/8"; (38)
punctuated by silence; (39) at your locker after your
death, feeling returnable & empty; (40) answers come by
dream or autopsy; (41) formal considerations; (42)
paregoric; (43) how blood moves when stirred up;
(44) to excise; (45) over, now, done; (46) parabolic arc;
(47) pilot light, out; (48) bitter bullet anger strong enough
to keep you up at night; (49) sound or explanation;
(50) somnambulist; (51) Pastor Sam's sinister daughter;
(52) dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, dot-dot-dot;
(53) delinquency & bell-ring; (54) "its" instead of "it's;"
(55) instance of violent crime; (56) everybody drowns
or is consumed; (57) voice & face; (58) sour & spur;
weather; (59) the remembered life.
Ander Monson is from Upper Michigan but lives in Alabama where he edits the magazine Diagram (thediagram.com) and does other things. Find his recent work in Pleiades, Field, Fence, Ploughshares, and North American Review.
Danielle Pafunda
The Opposite of Making Out
Felt like a cheap crown to go with my mood.
It even looked like prom, but it was just someplace
I was living at. A girl with lukewarm hair
and a flat ass liked to come by. I went back to bed
whenever I wanted.
Could've had a ring on. Could've made my
arm an example of intent. Put my name in
the style box. Stopped pressing my luck
when it got thin enough to fit in my purse.
Everything I owned reminded me of a tampon.
Some nights I went through my own garbage.
The things people throw out. Even on good days,
the mailman made me nervous. I danced in the corner
where he couldn't see it. Not through the windows,
not with a periscope.
Suburban Hierarchy
We stopped off to take a piss in a gravel lot. White at the edges,
pebbles collected. We were supposed to be there
an hour ago. Under the dashboard a small bulb, a lonely
Christmas light, did its job keeping a circle in place.
I did the same, I made the o and everything fit together.
But wasn't it a bad party? My boyfriend had his tongue
on the table, looking for something to touch it to. It wasn't ugly
between us, it was compromised. The driveway was just
another room for misgivings. The moon was punched out,
the stars had their own arguments. I made an o
with nothing to fill it. Someone said, We work our way up.
My name was everywhere; I looked around me.
Saltbox Brothel
I was a body. I was a laboratory. I was okay with that.
We used my house. We climbed the back stairs,
told my mother we were meditating. She caught on,
but her old plaid nightgown like a cocktail dress
and the little straw sweating over the glass
I didn't mention her Bailey's and she
didn't mention my looks.
On the happiest day of my life. On Presidents' Day.
Upstairs, a good citizen, my dress was big and my bed even bigger.
Three kids came to see me. We took turns on the mattress.
I said Be quiet at regular intervals. Someone said
What next? Someone suggested we use a coin.
Crossed my legs, made my pretty face, listened
for my father's car. He was head-on. He'd be
home soon, but I didn't say so. Watched a blonde head
on a brown one. Watched my own hand go down. At some point
it occurred to me, this was going to be fun.
Danielle Pafunda's poems have appeared in Nerve, Poetry Daily, Pleiades, and Crowd. Her first collection, Pretty Young Thing, is forthcoming from Soft Skull Press. She currently lives in Athens, Georgia and is the coeditor of La Petite Zine.
Prageeta Sharma
Underpants
My sweetie's underpants have argyles on them and grip his thighs.
O his European underpants with pastel colors,
how they illustrate his unassuming ways.
His secrets are feasts and traumas
and he is sometimes the loneliest under blankets.
His underpants represent the unconscious,
innocent, nervy, and true.
I can't help feeling eager.
O how he is an old man in his underpants.
When he is sleeping he has the softness of a child,
unquestioning and quietly fitful,
I kiss his head and wings,
for he in his underpants travels like a griffin
to himself, a fabled monster of certain
sadness, when he sleeps it all goes inward,
in his lion and eagle.
Neighborhoods in Language
I crave talking to people more than taking baths.
So my hunt is just so reoccurring, finding my locale
of people, to switch my stance from the tail to the pitch
and greedily drink up tanks flown in, dried off, or carried away.
Into little pieces, a casual nothing wanes,
it brandishes solace for marching recreations.
Saturday cries out to my brain
to run out of the house and go see Sam,
back from Laos. For our work has dropped,
our energy put down to exhaustion.
The hunger to talk and spit words out.
We are adults, I exclaim. I can't wait to begin.
The encircling little worlds of variables.
Plans of friends triumph the day from
demons at play to decorative normalcy.
Prageeta Sharma is the author of Bliss To Fill (subpress, 2000). She currently writes for National Organization for Women on contemporary poetry. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Bill Spratch
Mother Rattling in Her Husk
Industrial red rubber gloves protect his skin to the elbow. Bask does the dishes in Mother's old porcelain stained-brown sink. Church bells ring somewhere. Bask has never been able to locate the actual church during his neighborhood strolls. He has carried out thorough investigations, gone into serious sleuth mode, carrying a scrap of paper as if looking for an address so people won't think him nuts. He has stopped to cup hand to ear, peered for a steeple through treetops flocked with roosting birds, but has found only the usual worshipless structures. He can hear Nurse Sandy in the next room over the running water and dish rinse. She's probably turning Mother, doing the bedsore tango. The telephone chirps and he takes it from the wall and cradles it in his neck and shoulder, works at some burnt flour in a saucepan
A voice says, "My name is Toumes." Asks, "Am I speaking to Bobby B. Bask?"
Bask tells the voice yes.
Toumes says, "The Bobby B. Bask, correct?"
"Yes. The," Bask assures him.
Toumes asks about the Ramada in Reno. Bask remembers gin straight from the shaker, its perfect chilled hissing. Bask remembers the desert out there beyond the peopled brilliance, how it pressed loneliness against the city on all sides like a box made of sand that held frenzied shine. He remembers how glowy. All the possible words, every hoped-for combination of letters tubed across the night in neon. Even the moon got in on the action, threw in its chips and became another sign of pinked innuendo scrawl. His blood remembers too. It still sings out with want, although
quieter now.
Amphetamines, pleads his blood. Thanks for those, it says.
Toumes says, "Do you remember?"
Bask remembers silk jackets with slick shawl collars. He remembers the luster of oily crowd faces beneath blue muted lights. The dazzle of sequins sheathing bodies. Sometimes the shine and the glare smack-dabbed him. Powders there too precious for the face. But when the pills and booze and stage-rush pumped him into heady bright highs he believed he could dim every light around him single-handedly. With his teeth he might pop each sequin from a woman's dress. He could snuff table candles with licked fingers, even if it burned a little.
Bask says, "Yeah the Ramada. But that was how many years ago?"
"Can you still sing and play is what I want to know."
"I play nearly every day. I keep at least my fingers in practice
anyway. The voice is maybe just a little rusty."
"Too rusty for kids? Can you do I'm a little teapot short and stout and that sort of thing? It's just for a week maybe two at the Compound."
"The what pound?"
"Everything you need to know is being delivered. I'm sending info. There will be plane tickets and itinerary. A driver will greet you at the airport."
"Tickets?"
"You may bring one guest. Maybe Claire wants to come with?"
"Who is Claire?"
"Funny."
"Is this the guy from Toronto that time?"
"I assume you're saying yes. The itinerary and tickets will arrive tomorrow. Bring Claire. She'll love it. To her she'll think it's a hoot."
"Maybe you do have the wrong guy."
"This is The Bobby B. Bask, correct?"
"This is a very confused The Bobby B. Bask."
"Tickets and itinerary are coming. They're on their way right now."
"I don't know any Claire. I'm strictly a solo act. As you should know."
"Ticket then," Toumes conceded. "It's on its way."
The opportunity to play for the not-dying appealed to Bask.
They lived through machines, Bask and Mother did. He made recordings and instructed Nurse Sandy to press play when necessary, to crank the volume when Mother showed signs of disturbance. Bask and his mother told each other lies, they became the lies, two devices communing in their stead during essential absences. His cassettes said, Here I am, Mom, like always. The steady rhythm of her blips said, I am enjoying this, like always. Keep playing my dear. Or the flared sudden jags, the new rushed rhythms of emergency said, Where are you, Robert? Where are you? Where is my Robert?
Even though her withered hands could no longer knead dough or cut chicken, his mother still held a small spark of life. You could see it blipping along on the green monitors. Her eyelids remained nailed down with coma. And even though she seemed mostly unaware of his fingers in her brittle blue hair and his cooing in her ear, she always felt it when Bask grew weary of stroking sound from the piano. The last note upset some final note inside her and made a dissonance in her chest hollows until she responded with a sudden coda of beep-beep-beep. Down the dark hall Nurse Sandy's white shoes flashed like low moths. She would enter Mother's room and press rewind and restore the melodies and everything else.
The music was always a bond. Their only one. Bask dwells on moments spent with her, Mother standing behind him while he did his scales. Or if not standing directly behind him, then at least seated nearby and thumbing through a suspenseful paperback, the kind in which an aristocrat invites his buddies to some mountain retreat, a hidden Gothic compound, then begins strangling them one by one, doing it probably with piano wire. His mother insisted he continue playing while she was deep in her novels. The music does not disturb me Robert, she would tell him. It was true. She always seemed most uneasy without it, no matter how awfully he played when he was younger. Only when watching TV was their time not measured out this way. But even the music that accompanied her best-loved programs affected her in strange ways. Young Bask would lay curled on the thick beige carpet as she drifted slowly away then toward him in her rocking chair. When the music on the tube suggested immediate drama he would glance back slyly, looking from the corner of one eye, from her face to the show, judging the scene's emotional weight. He measured each grainy picture with its tinny sound against the moisture building on her eyes. A new lens, a liquid salt shield, to block the scene or at least blur it maybe to avoid feeling too much. A little crying prevents a lot.
Bask leans back against the bar between sets and mops sweat with a polka-dot handkerchief. Toumes had arranged for him to play a small nearby club before the two-week gig at the Compound. A little practice, some warming up, get back in the groove and so forth, Toumes said. Bask admires his drink. Cold yes. Cold and perfect with its yellow squiggled zest of lemon. People press around him, most heading back to the gaming floor and its chirping slots, all with barely contained jitters. Glass chimes against glass. The audience sustains its murmur. They smile and gawp, come close for a subtle touch as they move past Bask to fresh forms of distraction, rub his fabric or reach for the glad hand.
He gets into a little boozy reverie, the misty philosophy before weeping. The stage has its own life, one he only borrows from. After a while it reaches a point where it has to empty itself of him, maintain its sense of place where things happen and not just place where Bobby B. Bask shines. Even though it gives his heart a good squeeze he is okay with this, he realizes. The mic stand still shaky from his touch. The dim spotlight. The star now faded. He had been standing exactly like this when he got the telephone call that put his career on hiatus, so he naturally makes connections between a
desolate stage and every other kind of desolation. A nurse had called and said his mother had had an accident. She gave details and insisted Do not worry everything will be okay. Apparently she had suffered a stroke, some backyard paroxysm while taking air on her new deck, new blond wood still without stain or sealant. Mother went into a tumble of arms and legs and fell
headlong into cement, then coma.
"Are you still there?" the nurse said to his silence. "Can you hear me?"
He sat there feeling everything at once. Guilt and shock were
headlining.
Nurse, continuing: "She emerged for a second, then slipped right back in. That's a pretty good sign."
"Do they keep doing that until they wake up for good? What
does it mean?"
"There is hope for a swift recovery. Prospects at this time are good."
"Good, but not great."
"Pretty good. Really good. She said your name, in fact."
Bask had waited. He had lost his heart and tongue. There was a lull then his heart reminded him where it was. Here comes the Benzedrine surge. He thought he felt the breath of the nurse on his face, whispering comfort. He smelled nurse lotion through the telephone wiring. The lotion contained natural colloidal oatmeal. The bottle said dermatologist-recommended. He wished for penitence or mythic floor-swallowed escape. He wished for wings, sudden flight. He could not remember Mother's face.
"Are you there?" asked the nurse. "I can hear you breathing."
This time between sets Toumes has arranged for sweet girls to greet Bask and lead him to a back room. This is more like it, more like the old days without telephone interruption and gloomy trauma news. They remove his jacket and rub his shoulders, place cucumber slices on his eyes and anoint him with face creams. One girl strokes his wrist, rolls up a shirtsleeve. He sips something from a straw and feels completely wonderful. Slender fingers are seeking a vein. No, he demurs, I don't do that anymore. In the past few years while taking care of Mother, Bask has had the occasional half benny here, a quarter benny there. But orally. No more shooting, no more cold soaks in tablespoon water. He feels woozy then woozier. A needle goes in. Of course he wasn't resisting half as hard as he should with these hands all over caressing and the cold sliced cukes on his eyes. He waits for the warm flow, the tingle that announces okay hyperaware now, that makes you smell the stars burning. But nothing like that comes. There is no jolt and euphoria tang. Instead he falls asleep.
As planned, a car arrives at his front door and delivers him
promptly to the airport. Once seated with his bag crammed overhead Bask stretches his feet into the additional emergency exit space, completely content after a few cocktails in the Fuselage Lounge. All the people around him read owner's manuals for communication devices. They have become so tiny, he realizes. They adhere, a microwafer, to the wall of the ear canal, a thin sliver pasted to the thumbnail with spirit gum. They are practically injected into the bloodstream. So small now that the only display of clout and high-tech cachet comes from publicly reading the owner's manuals for your unseen gadgets. Hold it high and proud for everyone to see. Bask has his own methods of garnering social esteem. He buys drinks, one after another. Keep them coming, sweetheart. Drinking on airplanes is a display of largesse he cannot do without. He will not fly first class for this reason: He wants witnesses to the cash transaction. Sure, the constant refills and actual glassware in first class are undeniable perks, but he wants eyeballs on his money. Bask waves his obvious cash.
"Sir, are you capable?" The attendant leans in breasty, straightens magazines and puke sacks in their wooly pouch. Bask gives her a look of sheer blank. She taps a fingernail on the small screen that has descended above his head and directs him to the video currently playing. Men in neckties taking off their suit coats and opening the emergency exit door. Men rolling up their sleeves to get the job done. Passengers sliding on yellow inflated
plastic to salvation.
Bask gets it. He looks at the door he's leaning against then looks back at her, nods and grins, lets her see he gets it. He is very capable.
"You have to say yes," she insists.
"Oh hell yeah," he tells her, "definitely."
"You have to tell me the word yes."
"I just did I think."
"Yeah," she says. "You said yeah. I need to hear yes specifically. And you have to please look into my eyes when you say it. It's like a contract. Like a
verbal agreement between us so it needs to be formal. I need a formal yes."
"Yes yes yes."
She smiles. "I'm sorry. Don't mean to be a pain. Rules you know." She rolls her eyes to one side as if the airline charter floats there unseen, constant harassment at her side, keeping her toes to the line.
A few drinks later and she's back. Bask has an empty yellow can of tonic crushed into his small plastic cup with a wadded napkin.
"Are you ready, sir?" she asks as she takes his beverage refuse and shakes the small empty gin bottle.
"Yes," Bask cries from his half doze, "yes!"
The renewed and earnest drinking these past several days after years without, not to mention the one-night performance with its feeling of rebirth, all this brings back a little bit of the old jackass. The old Bobby B. Bask, not the subdued Robert.
"Sir?"
"Yes I am very ready. I am very capable. In fact," he shakes his finger at her and looks sidelong through one eye, "in fact here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to tear that door out of its molding and hold it high and triumphant over my head. My shirt in tatters. I will roar heroically and hurl the door out into the debris and bent trees and other evidence of our catastrophe. I will save you."
She leans over and whispers. "You better be good. Somebody else hears you they'll put your name on a list. Plus I won't be able to serve you alcoholic beverages."
"Thank you," he tells her. He reaches for a Skyways magazine with its typically flawed crossword.
After deplaning he lumbers with everyone else down a corridor of waxed tile and shoeshine and occasional stained maroon carpet sections duct-taped down. His steps are exaggerated and heavy due to the walkway slope and luggage drag. A woman wearing a gray business suit stops abruptly before a steamed glass cube of pretzels. Bask watches her turn and place one finger against her ear, scowling. She holds a user's manual.
"Can you help me please?" she asks, looking at Bask. "Please."
He approaches her. "I'm not talking to you," she says.
"I'm sorry." Bask turns and walks away confused.
"Please help me, Bobby," she says to his back.
Bask faces her again. "Me?" he asks.
"Yes. I need you please."
"What do you need?"
"Not you."
"Okay."
"Help me, Bobby."
"Tell me how."
"A different Bobby," she pleads. "A different Bobby," she repeats to Bask.
A small twitchy man holds a BASK cardboard sign. Bask gives him a nod, points at the placard and says, "That's me." The man folds away the sign, places it in some inner jacket pocket, and attempts to take Bask's luggage. Bask refuses and they struggle good-naturedly for a moment until the man relents and leads Bask with quick short strides past electric doors into the smoky heat of the tarmac. He points to a car on the curb: a long limo for which stretch is understatement. Bask gets in back and begins pilfering the minibar as dark glass rises electrically to divide him from the driver.
It takes him, the long black sleekness of it, hurtling past blurred green pastures and fleeting stands of cattle with their mottled hides. Hills shoulder greenly, smoothing away in humps like the roll of waves. There are pocketed clumps of wildflowers he has no name for. This could be Somewhere Unsung, New Jersey, the deep leafy unappreciated parts with granite outbreaks poking through fog. This could be Laurel, Mississippi draped with ineradicable kudzu, or Brenham, Texas with its verdant hills and ice cream farms.
After nearly two hours they reach the so-called Compound. The limo goes past a swinging mechanical arm, the guard in the guardhouse touches his hat and sips coffee from a cup. Bask sees a tremendous office tower, thirty-four stories at least, far from any cluttered urban skyline where it might belong. Its shadow cants sundial-style, falling across a fenced-off playground. Bask squints, a little bewildered at what resembles an air traffic control tower uprooted from an airport and jammed into the soft earth of the playground. Bask strolls over, grips the wire diamonds, pressing his face against cool fence metal, and watches the kids play. All the standard playground mayhem is evident. One girl, maybe five years old, plucks daisy petals with her lips, chews them up, and spits the flowery paste on whatever playmate happens to come shrieking along next. A blond boy stares in amazement at the small gray tail of a lizard that flicks in his palm while its owner skitters along the fence. It seems like more than a hundred kids. They swing on swings, slide on slides. If he were to count, he'd discover the
playground holds no more than twenty.
"What a bunch of unloved whelps."
A man silently approaches and stands next to Bask. Bask turns and offers his hand. "Robert Bask," he says.
"AKA Bobby Bask?" the man asks as they shake. His hand feels cool, soft and damp.
"The very same."
"Toumes," he introduces himself. "We spoke on the phone."
"Yes we did."
They stand together staring through the fence lattice. Toumes is shorter than Bask, and broader. His stringy hair reaches his collar, parted to one side. His eyes are small and dark, and there is a large chip in his front top incisor shaped like a shark fin.
"How about we go talk over some lunch," Toumes says. He
sounds choked.
"Are you okay?" asks Bask.
"My mouth fills too quickly and I choke on it. I have a saliva
problem." His words do sound watery. "Also I'm too full of love for my own damn good."
"Yeah."
The Compound resulted from major business plans gone awry. Toumes had hoped to lure prospective business here, dot com start-ups, all the various harbingers of the new economy, the technology that took breath and promised a new world at your fingers. Here quiet office space
overlooked vistas of cattle and wild greenery and threading creeks, far from the mad moil, the citied choke. But the new economy soured and no one arrived, so Toumes populated the taupe carpet corridors and green glass bowers with new dreams. There were classrooms, dormitories, a nurse's office, and a fully staffed cafeteria.
The two men sit and stare at one another across a long folding table. Bask removes plastic wrap from his chicken salad on a roll. Wide windows provide a playground view. Their coffee cups send fingers of vapor tracing upward. The table is covered in faux woodgrain plastic laminate, peeling at the edges.
"You want to know why you are here I guess?"
"Sure. Why not."
"I am pure burning hurt. The love-scorch of loss."
Basks sits lost and silent, awaiting a punch line. "Well damn," he says.
Toumes launches into his injustice list, descriptions of cumulative suffering experienced throughout his adult life. He describes how he remained always sidelined. He always inhabited the shunned periphery of various small human dramas, ignored by women or thwarted by other men, or both. He was the eclipsed moon. Toumes indicates the empty corners of the room as he speaks, as if others sit there enduring their portion of blame. There was the painter with his ponytail and black T-shirt, his red wine and smeary canvases. Poets holding forth in caf‚s, waving their dirty fingernails. Tech-savvy young men with the latest idea, eyes ablaze with killer new apps. A fresh young populist, the people's candidate sprung from bumfuck into the national political spotlight making sure regular folks got a fair shake. There was the musician on stage, Toumes complains, with the authority of the microphone, surrounded by shiny instruments.
"Everyone I loved loved another." He sounds like he's about to launch into song or poetry himself, or else some scripty I know why the oak tree sways pabulum.
"That's history of the sexes volume one."
"I thought money money money. I thought money equals women."
"You thought get a little scratch, get a little snatch. I know. I hear you." Bask is not sure what Toumes means or what's going on. He's not even certain what he's saying. But he continues to go along anyway. "Get some coin in your pocket and get ready to beat the ladies away with a stick."
"Yes."
"Well, there are those clich‚s about money, happiness and so forth."
There was more to it than not getting the girl, Toumes explains. In most cases the men ended up leaving. Sometimes the women came back to Toumes, but usually under needful circumstances. "Many of my loves were finally given back inconvenienced by these bastards," he says. Then, "Bastard is an insensitive term I should not be throwing around." He runs fingers through his hair. "Shit, on the other hand, this place is practically
Bastard, Inc."
It started when a particular woman returned to him pregnant. He wielded his money gladly, thought his affluence finally had some use. He was ready to assume the savior role. He thought that caring for her and the child would absolutely win her over, earn her love and ceaseless gratitude. The scheme failed along with all the others he had ever concocted.
Bask interrupts, near understanding, starting to get very
uncomfortable.
"This Claire you keep talking about. You know I don't even know who that is right?"
"Exactly."
After the first child came others, not all of them from women he pursued. He set up a foundation and amassed, rather than love, a passel of these kids. Toumes merged his two great failures and brought all the children to the isolated hulking tower. He hired nurses and teachers, brought in cooks to staff the cafeteria.
The more Bask listens, the more he wants to peel himself away, peel the laminate from the particleboard table and envelope himself in its ersatz language of woody whorls, to go howling into the nearby pastures among the stands of astonished cattle, crook his arms branchlike and pretend he's some lone and pastoral scrub oak.
Toumes stands and walks to the large window. The blinds clatter when he touches them. Bask thinks: bird bones in a metal cup. Even though he has never actually heard bird bones in a cup, metal or otherwise. Sound images like these come to him often. Sometimes they make great titles for some of the jazzier or more experimental pieces he composes for himself. Toumes turns to Bask. "You know we did some blood work. The standard run of tests."
"You did what work?"
"The girls the other night after your show."
Toumes regards Bask with his small and dark deepsunk eyes and points toward the children in the playground. "One of them is yours."
Bask laughs. "Get out of here. What is this? Is this Hidden Camera Fuck with Your Friends? This is Saul's doing. Where is that fuck? You can come out now, Saul, you fuck."
"Follow me."
Toumes moves for the door, ignoring Bask's denial.
Bask's stomach makes a fist. It shudders and seizes. This is not possible. He stands, prepares to follow Toumes, then immediately sits back down. He licks lip sweat. He tries to think. Who in the hell is Claire? Was she that redhead that time? Which child could possibly be running through the playground with some part of him?
Bask catches up with Toumes down near the playground. "This is ridiculous."
Toumes has fingers hooked in the fence. He inclines his head. "There," he says. "Did you see? Look there. That one right there. See? That one is yours. Or maybe. That. One. There." He speaks like a birdwatcher trying to indicate a flash in the leaves for an unseasoned eye, some hinted color in the forest blend. Bask imagines Toumes waiting among the sparkling cars on the dark parking lot of the nightclub for the women to bring him blood, then rushing back here to his tower in the hills. Blood spun in
centrifuged tubes. Cells spread on cool glass like dollops of briny roe
wobbling on crackers.
"Come on," says Toumes.
He escorts Bask through the playground to the base of the small tower. They climb a narrow staircase to a trapdoor. A padlock clatters in its hasp. Toumes unlocks it and climbs inside. Bask clambers through after him and finds a microphone, a piano, a PA system. He scans the faces below, susses out whatever resemblance, looks for traces of himself. That boy there has Mother's nose. Where among you kids is my dimpled chin?
"Play for your child," Toumes says, standing with his head hanging, soft damp hands clasped behind his back. "Play," he says.
Bask sits down and cracks his knuckles. Which child is the one? And who is the mother? Is it the boy who cries with a closed mouth while snailtrails of saliva and mud streak from his unmoving lips? There is a girl with a wild red tangle of hair. Who is Claire? Did her hair tangle wildly and redly? Bask tries to remember any woman with hair like that. Beyond the distant hills the faraway city clusters like coral. Out there cassette tape unspools into a way-away echo of the song he plays. Mother listens, dreaming perhaps of a girl who munches flower petals or a boy who takes the tails from lizards for keepsies, encased in her chrysalis of deep sleep.
Bill Spratch has had stories appear in failbetter, Pindeldyboz, La Petite Zine, Monkey Bicycle, and DIAGRAM: An Anthology of Text, Art, and Schematic. His story "Mercury" was recently selected as a finalist for the 2003 Mississippi Review Prize. His story "The Breakers" was recently selected as a finalist for the 2003 One Story Fiction Prize.
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