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There was this guy named Blair. He didn't have any friends except for his cat, and his cat was a loner. Blair had learned to fill up his days with little rituals. Some arose out of the paying of too much attention to the banal details of daily living, like making sure he flipped his toothbrush in the air three times before catching it by the handle and putting on the toothpaste; others would seem, to an outsider, to be more sinister in nature and had, in the main, evolved from reading too much.
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I'n not sure it counts as thread drift when one insane person walks into a conversation and starts chatting with the invisible unicorn that lives in his nose Posts: 3950 | Registered: Mar 2006
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One day Blair went to the bathroom, as usual, after his double expresso and toasted baguette with a little virgin olive oil drizzled on top, followed by a slight grinding of sea salt, having skimmed the headlines of his local paper and double checked the familiar presence of his neighbour's 1966 Dodge Monaco in its spot below and wondered, again, about the extent of its owner's tattoos which, to date, he had only glimpsed flickering above the waistband of her pyjamas when she went for her morning smoke; so, into the bathroom for a ritual bowel movement that never failed to satisfy, at least in the way it sketched out the negative space of some future disability from whose perspective today, that is this shit, would seem a blessing from heaven, you know, things only get worse...well, just then, wiping up with the somewhat frustrating single ply toilet paper which, once he'd finished the 67 remaining rolls, he would never buy again since you needed about 20 feet to handle even a minor bowel movement...just then, he looked into the bowl, as we all do, to admire his excrescence, when he noticed what he thought, at first, was an onion ring.
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Imagine a spanish onion. You chop it up, let's say you're making spagetti sauce, an amatriciana to be precise and you know those thick slices near the end of the onion? The ones that are hard to slice any thinner without risking your fingertips because of the onion's decreasing radius, the ones which therfore remain on the cutting board and seem too thick to add to the soffritto? One of those onion rings was in there, except Blair hadn't eaten any onions.
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It was, of course, a tapeworm. More precisely the tail segement of such a beast which had, in the course of digestive events, become entangled in some passing roughage, probably those celery stalks he'd been chewing on the previous evening while watching his cat watch whatever it is that rustles between the walls.
Blair's worst fear was that there was a snake in between the walls. His upstairs neighbour, whom he had only met two times in seven years, most recently upon answering a violent knocking on the door just after Easter, had lost his snake and seen it heading down through a hole in the floor where there had once been an electrical plug box.
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I tried like three times to read the entirety of either of those posts, but it's like my brain has a filter that clicks off my cognizant awareness of the later half of the text once it's determined the total effort-reward calculation.
Like I do the same thing with Family Circus. After a while it's like it doesn't really exist on the page.
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They aren't random gibberish or something; in and of themselves, they're coherent. I'm finding them pretty entertaining, actually.
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Far be it for me to dither on about the mind's passage from apprehension to comprehension. Sickness is, after all, the imaginary friend one always finds in the loneliest corner of the playgorund.
Blair raised his eyebrow, coughed and flushed. To his horror, he then watched the onion ring unfurl to an astonishing length as the vortex attempted to swallow it down. It even appeared to wiggle before vanishing, as if trying to swim against the current.
He stood there in the bathroom watching the bowl water calm then listening to the toilet reservoir refill up to that choking cadenza which introduced a sublime but anxious silence.
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Somewhere, beyond the old walls of Blair's tiny apartment, a large grey heron rose from the reeds and began its illogical flight.
The bird's shadow would later slide across the lowered blinds of Blair's living room and seem, to him, a response to an unvoiced question.
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In the land of the dead, a king from a black castle spoke only with the wise woman of the marsh. He sometimes wore the bones of his enemies as trophies, and when he spoke, long story short, deerpark is a nutter.
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At the not exactly local, polyvalent Drop-in clinic cum pharmacy, sitting on a plastic chair, trying to discern the psychiatric out-patients from the run of the mill cold catchers, Blair waited while his worm curled into a warm thick wall of his large intestine.
He thought he could feel it moving, slithering, laying eggs, or whatever else a tapeworm does when it's not sleeping.
Eventually, he hears his name called in that clinically perfected intonation that seems to both affirm his adminstrative existance while denying any part his life may have hoped to play in the events about to transpire.
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I'm in failing health, both psychic and buccal--I'm not sure I can go on and on and on much longer. First, there is the question concerning the scratching noises, then the inevitable sunrise, and added to this is the surprising distraction of proposition 8, cities emptied in fatal sorties into the void, and the stunning failure of Adorno to close the gap.
Nevertheless, the doctor has snapped on his latex gloves and asked the patient to bend over. Blair, gripping the stainless steel foot yokes, spread-eagled face down on the examination table, watches a drop of his own forehead sweat drop and puddle on the green flecked linoleum floor, dissolving what now appears to have been a drop of dried blood left over from the last patient. The Dr. has asked him to "Relax", which has caused his sphincter to tighten into a coiled spring. He hears the Dr. open a drawer and the ensuing scuffle of instruments, including something that sounds heavy and precise (having blocked the idea of 'sharp' from his overfertile imagination.). The Dr. asks, in a more insistant tone, for Blair to "Relax", more warning then suggestion, and, in a valiant attempt to comply, Blair unleashes an involutary but nevertheless tremendous blast of flatulence which shapes a portentous silence in the examination room followed by a lingering and unspeakable odour of Kraft Dinner.
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"I didn't realize you could speak French?" quipped the Doctor, stifling an accute flash of raw hysteria.
Blair lifted his eyes and stared out the little crack between the window sill and the lowered venetian. One floor down, across the road, somebody had spray painted a brick wall.
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Five foot tall alternating, dayglo orange and pink letters formed a sentence that ran the length of the windowless side wall of Happy's 24-hour Diner. The wall faced a smallish parking lot and shared the space, near the back, with one of those once hopeful inner city gardens gone beyond seed to a tangle of thistle and blasted milkweed which, along with some parked cars, obscured parts of the author's formulation.
Discerning something like this, the final question mark looking like it was planted in the garden:
"WHRZ...Y C..RR...T.R..?"
Blair felt no less puzzled.
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No. Less. Puzzled. But wait-- Dr. Karl-Heinz Puplicher, choking down the last spasms of his misplaced hilarity, breathing carefully,deeply and unfortunately through his nose, pulled at his latex gloves and then selected from the drawer a lemon tart, a cherry tart, and an Eastwing roofing hammer, all of which he placed carefully and strategically between Blair's knees. In the blink of an eye, the head and neck section of a large tapeworm stretched out from Blair's innards to gobble up the lemon then the cherry tart and idly sniffed at the hammer before glancing up towards the ceiling with a typical wormlike gaze. Dr. Puplicher raised his eyebrows and quietly bounced the five fingertips of his left hand on those of his righthand while Blair wrenched his head around in a pathetic attempt to see what had happened. Puplicher, summoning the remains of his professional demeanour, simply nodded and intoned "Effectivement."
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Bolting into a sitting position on the examiniation table, Blair felt the cold steel hammer grind on his tailbone, the blue rubber handle sticking out inexpressively from beneath his hairless white rear end. Puplicher reached out to snatch the instrument away, in what should have been the 'nick of time', and, miscalculating, caught a rather profound chunk of Blair's right ass cheek in the claws of the hammer.
With some assurance we can now say that the visit entered the realm of trauma.
The Dr. ,immediately conscious of his error, only pulled harder, as if to get it over with more quickly; Blair, impaled on wings of stainless steel, merely screamed as he was yanked off the slippery bench onto the linoleum floor; the tapeworm braced himself for impact.
In the waiting room, the eyes of the insane, the sane, and the receptionist were rivetted on the examination room door.
Outside on the sidewalk a young girl looked up and a car pulled out of the parking lot revealing another letter.
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The Doctor opened the examination room door and stepped out into the corridor, the hammer dangling from his hand along his leg below his knee. He closed the door carefully and then asked the receptionist to call an ambulance. He cast a distracted gaze over the occupants of the waiting room, most of whom were looking beyond the Doctor at the now slowly reopening door of the examination room directly behind him.
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Blair has always loved bees and had, in fact, worked as a beekeeper for years before a three week binge in Las Vegas had wiped out his savings and left him with nearly $20,000 of credit card debt, mainly from a quirky little strip club on Fremont. For the rest of his life he would associate Rum&Coke or even just the jangle of ice cubes with the small of Melissa's supple Lithuanean back. How he had managed to spend $19,487 in three nights without ever taking his pants off was still a tantalizing mystery.
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The financial and moral consequences of the Vegas fiasco were magnified through the diamond lens of his collapsing marriage. When he finally made it home, she was gone, this time for good, leaving little to do but read back issues of the Times Literary Supplement while drinking through the gallons of Mead they'd hoped to sell at the Farmer's Market that season. Soon, the bees left too. The collapsing wave finally washed him up onto the beach of his rocking chair, within arms' reach of the telephone which Bell's billing system had miraculously spared disconnecting for another month, a telephone from which, consciousness permitting, he dialed old friends now long lost to families and lives, squeezing the last drops of sweet care from the old days.
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But now everyone was watching except for Puplicher who was attempting to hand the hammer to his receptionist in the fashion of a surgeon returning a scalpel to his attending nurse. To his growing incredulity, this only resulted in a slow rhythmic ondulation of arm and hammer, like a perplexed Golden Retreiver who reaches his paw out again and again for an unforthcoming handshake, as the weight of the hammer inexorably cancelled out any remaining pretense of professional reflex in a corrosive and annihilating dialectic.
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Outside. Wait. There wasn't any (outside, that is).
Nevertheless,
Somewhere, beyond the walls of the Medical Arts Building, down at street level on the other side of the road, in the slowly emptying parking lot that snuggled up against the long brick sidewall of Happy's 24 hour diner, maybe behind the dried husks of milkweed and chicory--you know, in that deep, greasy shade in the corner where the brick wall of the diner abuts the cool grey cement back wall of some anonymous institute, where there's some unsuspected cranny or vent clogged with the remains of some soiled t-shirt and pieces of wet cardboard now crushed to a paste, the elemental infrastructure of desolation, where if staring you will note a slight deformation of ones ordinary sense of time from the mode of the busy mundane into the fatal everpresent (often accompanied by the aural sensation of a sudden hush)-- well, in there, in that cool deep shade, fluttered the pages of a notebook.
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It is not even clear to me how it got there.
We might make the assumption that the notebook was left behind by the prosaic graffiti artist, the one who did the wall.
Little of these deliberations would make any difference to Blair, who, standing in the doorframe of the examination room like an astronaut in an airlock who's forgotten his helmet, was about to have a sort of fit. Nor had the existence and qualities of the notebook cast even a shadow across the consciousness of Dr. Puplicher, who had now simply dropped the hammer with a muffled thud on the floor and begun to turn back towards his office.
However, the light-blue lined pages of the notebook riffled back and forth in the thrall of some unearthly aeolean tempo, revealing swaths of ballpoint, felt-tip, pencil and painted words, all densely packing the available surface of the pages, some of which appeared to be partially torn and others blackened by burning.
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Huddled in the corner, the graffiti artist used the tip of his cigarette to light the top of a dog-eared page and watched a long thin flame rise. Reading out loud, just ahead of the burn line spreading like spilled black ink down the page, "...and the tapeworm, oblivious to the drama unfolding just beyond the thin bladder fascia, coiled himself into a digestive position and wondered whether, in fact, he preferred the cherry to the lemon tart?..." He sighed,took a quick drag on his cigarette and then blew the flame out. It was the wrong page.
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He was looking for the funny part. The graffiti artist was a pretty funny guy, at least, that's what he thought. He was very tall and very skinny, a skeleton living in borrowed skin. He crouched in the classic third-world squat with his knees up around his ears and his toes squirting out from his blasted hightops. He didn't have any shoulders, just arms dangling down into the deeper darkness below his crotch where the notebook now lay. None of this would even draw a glance from a nervous passerby if it weren't for his enormous head. If you were to see him walking back to the Sally Ann in contre-jour, a black silhouette against a bruised pink twilight sky, you would say "Look, that guys carrying a huge watermelon on his shoulder...it looks like it's his head!" And it was. Or "Look, a gaint dwarf!" Some sort of screwed up genetic mutation escaped from the NBA power-forward breeding program in Manchuria. He should of been on a shelf in a large jar of formaldehyde somewhere.
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Tonight he felt weird, a persistant sense that eyes were watching, from behind or above, and he turned thinking that no one was ever there, not a soul. The city was empty. Sometimes he'd hear the strains of a song seep out from inside the diner when the door opened, and, if they turned left, he'd even see a figure walk out of the warm red neon through a slow strobe of alternating puddles of streetlight and dark, making their way back to wherever they come from. Sometimes a person would suddenly glance right at him, not seeing but feeling he was there. Frozen in place, he counted the footfalls until they were gone and the city was empty again.
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Time to write. It was the tart, the incongruity of the tart and the tapeworm. Cherry tarts were the funniest and the most pathetic, they reminded him of Christmas, so he started to whistle "Deck the Halls" and did it, he wrote: Wherz My Cherry Tart? in tall orange and pink letters, befitting his wingspan, on the long brick sidewall of the diner. Shambling back to gain perspective, he immediately regretted the 'Z'. The 'Z' was a lie.
He dropped the cans of spray paint on the pavement and felt his head spin with the exertion and the paint fumes which sweetly whirled inside the hollow corridors and tangled ductwork of his enormous cranium.
He remembered that the tapeworm, as usual, would eventually speak for itself and then get its head splattered by a hammer. After a few Proustian minutes, he shuffled back and picked up his notebook; caring less now about concealment and more about the worm, he approached the brittle spot of streetlight and took a nib of golf pencil from his pocket. He had to pick away at the wood to get a usable pimple of lead exposed and felt the incredibly comforting glide of the soft, greasy rounded tip on the paper. He drew a worm. Below the worm he scribbled "You never can tell with worms." Finally, rest.
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You say rest, but what of it? Sitting in a lawn chair wearing your old fishing hat, the smell of that last Bass permeating the hot, sticky air. The Puplicher variation, troubled as it is by the poorly managed complexities of voice and narrative, peters out in a shuffling and monotonous endgame where, inevitably, the players are forced into perpetual check.
Players? Player.
Blair simply brushes by a petrified Puplicher and walks home, perhaps a little stiffly. Home. The worm and he are home again.
Puplicher tells his receptionist that he's taking the rest of the day off, to the releif of some of the waiting patients.
Their egress from the Medical Arts building, seperated by approximately 15 minutes, is remarked upon by a flock of pigeons aligned along the faux-Corinthian trimwork of the edifice, 8 storeys up.
Both the Doctor and Blair remark, in passing Happy's Diner, the "Wherz my Cherry Tart?" spray-painted on the wall. Blair repeats the phrase quietly to himself, a walking mantra, each footfall landing on the corresponding stressed syllable (in a trochaic scansion...). The Doctor, who has unconsciously remarked the phrase over the last months in his many comings and goings, for the first time halts and pushes his glasses up the bridge of his long nose. What he might have thought is interrupted by a flock of pigeons swooping down for a perfect landing just in front of him. Stupid pigeons.
The graffiti artist, long gone -- the letters had faded substantially since that night, now over two years ago -- would turn out to have died, under somewhat inexplicable circumstances, in the middle of nowhere. That is, in the middle of the forest, in the low scrub just off a washboard rutted dirt road, where it rose to cross a ramshackle jerry-rigged bridge that one imagines had once permitted 4-wheelers to ford the swampy black stream that ondulated beneath. A pair of large horns had been, somehow, tied or glued to his head and appeared, by local accounts, to be literally fused into his skull. He was discovered by two local fishermen, one of whom claimed he was still breathing although autopsy results confirmed that the body, in late stages of decay, had been there for at least a month. The investigation by Police forensic teams was impeded by severe weather, including a small tornado which may have touched down near the site.
The great blue heron landed on a deadhead. Moonrise.
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Two young men have skipped work to go fishing on Big Fish Lake. They have parked their old car in the tall grass off the dead-end turnaround of a very raw dirt road; they’ve taken their canoe from the roof and nosed it into a creek spanned by a rickety bridge which can only be crossed by foot. They are fiddling with their rods and paraphernalia near the car, in preparation for disembarking.
--O F***. I broke it ++You broke it? --Yeah, I twisted it right off; you’re just supposed to pull it out. Look. (Waving broken handle of fishing reel.) ++Holy shit! Can't you just stick it in the other side? --No, it’s totally f***ed. It's so stupid, I just kept on twisting…but, you just have to pull it out. ++You can use mine. --Shit. I don’t believe it. I’m so f***ing stupid. I twisted the bloody handle right off... anyway, it’s probably too windy for both of us to fish. I get to paddle you around. ++Look how fast the water’s going beneath the bridge. --It’s pretty windy. This is garbage.(Places broken reel on top of car) ++Something smells rotten. Man, can you smell it? --Someone probably cleaned their fish and threw the guts into the bush. ++No. Look at all the flies. Something’s dead. --Christ, that’s a leg, that’s someone’s leg… ++No, it’s a dead cow or something. It’s a baby cow. Look, there’s its head. --It’s got f***ing huge horns. It’s not a cow. There’s no eyes or mouth. (Pointing.) What…is… that? ++(Poking with fishing rod.) I don’t know… --Jesus, it’s a head. That’s the back of someone’s head! There’s horns coming out… ++Can you hear that? It’s like bells ringing. --It's all the flies. ++You know who that is?
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Predictably, "++" was thinking that it was Satan, minus the red suit and pointy tail.
Unpredictably, the rhetorical invocation of the beast under such odd circumstances had far reaching consequences.
"--" had already begun to believe. As subsequent events would underscore, context and feedback play critical roles in the literal incarnation of efil...err...evil.
Of course, neither "++" nor "--" knew who or what lay there. Both, however, were deeply unsettled by the feeling that it was not really dead.
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No, more of a crash landing. Broke my damned nose. However, lying here, waiting for something to happen, fly blown, my immortal mind turned to a joke I once heard... Eyewoncerd Aywuncered
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I always hated it when you called me that, but I'm glad you remember. Those were the days! The hum of the water chillers! The raised floors! The removable DASD! Remember the first RISC instruction set? There were words for everything. You forsaw this, didn't you? The iterative looping, the simple accretion, the infernal logic and you got away, before the collapse into pure surfaces. I can't say I understand what's happened. The light's changed. My left eye is swollen. You were the math guy, the category theorist, the topologist, and I was just the space filling curve.
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That you've got to consider the possibilities:
a) the fishermen are dreaming; b) the fishermen are fictitious; c) the figure of the Devil is allegorical: d) one of the two will fall down, and e) the other will run to the car; but, f) it was too late g) to stop the narrative from h) exploring another fetid curl-- i) don't know how to say it i)n the large i)ntestine i)f you know what I) mean i)t.
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