KEN walked the day to night and his fingers were dirty. Only thing it was missing was a steak and twenty bucks. Boy golly! His cane swinging between his feet, a fedora on his head, a bandana under it, a dog end in his mouth and the jitters of awake chill in his step. His face was thin, hollows in the cheeks. Pits before the eyes. His hand moved with a twitch and the cane still swung in the hard dead night, his body moving the bone dance.
The lines ahead of him were predicted purpose, and he saw through his gift golden towers lining the edges. Families of small nine legged fairies working diligent requirements over their charges. He looked again through the faze of his view and saw only the walks on the side of the road.
His hand worked into his pocket and around in it. He brought it out, saw thirty-five cents, a booklet of matches with the name and number of a potential client who wanted a mural, and four codeine tablets. He picked the tablets out of his palm with his thumb and forefinger and dry dosed them one at a time. The change and the matchbook stayed in his dry palm.
The pills went down with their own grimaces and he put the remaining detritus back in the pocket. He started walking again. The houses on the sides were trees with tentacles of light working across a lake where fantastic fish the size of cars were floating over an illuminated bottom. Blue glowing phosphorous soaking the ruins of a leftover message from some electric people who made the smoke into garages.
Ken had not slept in four days. Ken smoked and snorted crystal meth. Ken, was a junkie. Ken, was an artist. Ken saw his world wherever he went. Ken created fantasy, and could replicate anything. Every form was his, become his own. New, fresh, and unknown. Ken, was one of those people who came to the earth once every two hundred years or so his friends would say, shaking their head at the lines of filth on his neglected palm. Ken just very well may be leaving this world sooner than those who loved him would care. Ken, walked down the street, looking like an eighty year old man. Ken, was twenty-five. Ken made a photograph the first time he used acrylics. The friends saw it and walked past, sitting in front of the painting and making comments. Genuine, real, hard, and elicited by a wonder they could explain only by it’s presence. Blood and truth the surprise guest. Hot gushers out of all their mouths. A host of accolades.
Ken came up to the house where the girl on the bus the day before had told him she lived. She was a tweeker as well. Little sores and thin sweat on her face. Sticks of arms. Rail ribs and small unformed breasts. Once a pair of something’s, now lilting small nothings on a frame of even less. Karen she had said her name was. Her voice a cracking whisper. A hush forced not by decision but by circumstance. Karen smoked the glass exclusive. Her effect had been the crickle and crack of her voice box. Now it was an old wooden one with wires frayed at the edges sticking out.
Karen had said to knock on the door to let her know so she could let the rest know. Karen said that there was always someone around, it didn’t matter what time. Did she live with a boyfriend or anything Ken had asked her? No she said. Just her dealer, his girlfriend, and someone she said was ‘real scary, this guy’ who did security for the house. That’s what the dealer had said. Security, they needed added security.
Ken saw a candle on the porch, took that for a sign, and walked up the front path to the screen door. He went in, looked down, and saw a sleeping bag with a pillow laid out, a small table with the candle in the night, a bottle of wine, and two glasses. Ken marveled at the tableau, wondered at why and where, mumbled something to himself, and sat down in one of the chairs.
Where did she get the money for the wine? Was she loaded? Parents? First tweeker he had met with such class. The thoughts were a hamster of eyeball activity and they trailed into spun word vomit. Small strips of newspaper linked together with pulp and fallow to the burnt soil of the ground beneath his tired, constantly walking feet. He opened his mouth and saw them pouring out of it, though the observer would have only seen his chapped and bloody lips moving in pained jerks over the thick film that coated his teeth and angry red gums.
Oh, his feet, the socks around them alive with the days passed in them.
The city night with each step! Bright days paced by the rhythm! Quick sounds from the grass of the future burning his ears! Walking always walking with dimensionless purpose. Caught in the twiddle of addled mystery. Fought movements transferred onto the history of the spent landscape. There was never romantic nobility. There was never truth in the gift from the vision. There was fantasy. There was illusion. All was Maya and the glammer held enchantment from the plastic shards utility. His shoulders gave the lurch down of the circular thoughts the crushed everyone. If it has two legs and belt loops, it’s a pair of pants, never mind to color.
He went to his bag that he had placed at his feet and opened the flap and began the rummage. His hands were all the eyes he ever needed when it came to his possessions.
He found the little brass case with the edges of his fingers. Out it came from the sack. He looked at the surface in the candle and read the engraving.
FIVE A DAY
The latch popped open with the required amount of encouragement from the trustful thumb and forefinger combination and he looked at the two cigarettes left inside of it. He took one out, put it in his mouth, closed the case, put it on the small table, and sparked her on up. He inhaled, tasted the oil soil and combined effort of fifty years of men in white coats’ diligence, coughed, brought up something thick and yellow, spat it out on the ground, and coughed again.
Ken secured the smoke nice and tight in his mouth and started the rummage through anew. Out it came. A small rabbit with and plastic body, and felt arms and legs. A fuzzy head, pink, with fuzzy ears and a fuzzy red smile on the head at the top. Right where it should be. The body was hollow, and there were cigarette butts in the hollow the body. Ken put the little rabbit on the small table, and looked at it through the smoke that made his eyes squint for a little while. His body turned in adjustment in his chair and he took the open bottle of wine and began to pour it into the two glasses on the table. His lips pumped on the end of the cigarette and the taste was over the grooves in his face.
His flake found the candle and he saw the small bumps where the wax was working away from the flame in the middle. The candle was standard in design, red, and the small bumps were regular around the diameter. Ken saw each of the bumps and the lines that would move from the tips of them if rays were steel wires and could be drawn in purpose for infinite duration. Ken saw them as they moved to where they would meet his chest and wondered if they went far enough if they would crest through the atmosphere to space above. Cutting the gesture to God across the surface.
He placed the cigarette in the ashtray on the small table and took a sip of the wine with his dry cracked bloody lips moving rough on the smooth surface of the glass. The wine touched the bushed skin of his lips and the moistness made them a bed of comfort. Small curls of blood ran into it from the splits in his lips. The wine moved in his mouth over his tongue and began to slide down his throat, a thick current. He felt something in his throat that was thick and not solid dislodge and move down to where it could presumably be put to better use.
His stomach received the wine and the lump with frantic need, processing it immediate, searching for some sustenance. Value. The muscles of his stomach smashed together and against each other, bleeding the membrane. The wine sloshed and smashed inside of it inside of him and Ken sat there on the porch in the light of the candle, the taste of his cigarette a forgotten curl behind the interruption of the grape.
Where was she? Ken thought. The jitter of his mind holding through the grim instability of its past endured. The important issues, the particulars, they stuck and railroaded through the tracks of importance. The procurement of the need, the next rendezvous, the new distraction. All had the same equal virtue and power over Ken’s action. They held him with their own gravity. Ken was a planet with five shifting moons and a thousand different tides.
The candle moved down to the table and the smoke continued to rise against the face of the fuzzy bunny. Ken looked over at the bunny and then to the front door, where he thought he had detected movement. Ken sat rigid and straight, his pores and glands working away at creating and negating the compounds that ushered from his form. Keeping checked balances ready for disaster Ken’s body pledged constant fealty, even through the treason of his actions.
He started taking stock of the surroundings. Tired door, wooden deck inside the enclosure of the porch. A bundle was approaching the corner but not quite making the press to the edge of the house. The middle was territory enough. The bundle was long like a sleeping bag. There were bumps in the bundle high enough to make a waist or a chest. Was somebody there? Had somebody been watching? The thoughts were faster than hands of poker with the rules little understood and Ken started in his seating position. Discomfort was the ruler of his tense back and wire ready arms. They were at his sides on the rests of the chair but here was no relaxed average to their configuration.
A lean forward to the bag on the chair with a monster creak and the nervous jitter without physicality came from inside of him and stopped at the end of his flesh. Dangerous movement. He arced out the chair with his knees pressing to the boards of the porch and creaked towards the bundle of bag with his eyes on the possible movement behind the door. The gambling twitch coming from the stars and the lines and the wax into his actions. The bag did not move. Ken did not move. The only move came from the night that mumbled the incoherence of the collective symphony of which it was the steward. Ken stretched his hand out and began to punch forward, balance and weary condition the culprit, the victim being only stealth.
His knees crashed. His chest fell forward onto the bag. His chin slapped against it. God! His mind cried. God! Where is the safety net? Why did you abandon my faith? Where is my light? Where goes my soul? What fakes my catch? Where fires the fingers?
The lumps under the bag did not move. They did not give with the soft water of the flesh supported by calculated calcium. The lumps were hard and jutting and the lumps were now his chest’s bed and no sleep would come from the jitter. Faith alone saves! Five prayers and number same the day! The lumps were not moving. No groan, no shriek, no cry and no bellow. Nothing.
The only sound the conducted night and the rustle of his chest and his chin against the soft sleeping bag. Space age material for earth bound excursions. Ken reached orbit. His blessed taste the arc of his fall. Ken moved about, wriggling worms of his coil and the sleeping bag stayed there as a juror waiting for the judge’s instruction. Ken raised himself up on his arms and they gave a bit under him and his knees and balance were his only support.
His hands were on the bag, reading the contours of the lumps beneath the landscape of nylon. A hard part stuck out from below the surface and his hand held there in betrayed pause.
Pressing down his hands with the grime over top of them a crawl of irritation, he raised himself up with the rupturing crack of his knees. The sound loud enough for the gods to hear and the sleepless night to swallow whole. Dark the night, bright the day, brighter the indoors, hotter the seating. His body came up in a cereal crackle lurch and he steadied himself with the delirium of the blood swoop in his cranium. The porch whirled around him and the universe remained as old as the distant reaches of it’s observed characteristics. Funny thing about light, it might take years for it to reach your eye from the stars, but it was beating down a constant beat even when you weren’t looking at it, so the asphalt can get a view as well.
He sat down on the chair again and sipped some more wine. There had been no one there. It had all been a hoax. Just a low down trick. Something outside of him that he couldn’t explain. He hadn’t even checked to see what was under there. He hadn’t made a move.
He got back up out of the chair and walked over to the sleeping bag, he made care this time and his body was filled with powdered glass. He pulled back the sheets. Flower pots. Some of them broken. A couple of candlesticks and an old video game system. Cords. Pads. Box with cartridges. Ken started picking up the pieces and putting them back together in his bag. His bag stuffed up. It was full. The night was empty. His teeth were yellow. His ears were prickly. His back was sore. His feet were stinking. The night was empty.
The candlestick could be made into a knife with a skull on it and a small painting inside a box made out of duct tape and warning labels. Put on a stand. The blade pointing upward. The skull with horns. Something else. He looked through his bag past the new acquisitions and found a small glass marble and a pen. He started balancing the marble on the end of the candle stick holder with his pen held in between his thumb and forefinger. The marble was the world and the candlestick was the turtle beneath the earth. Holding it back on its enormous girth.
There was no food in his belly. Dark cabooses of hunger bouncing from the squash court. Squash. Dad had played squash. Bang bang bang. Boy that place stank so bad. All those different rooms with the glass in front and the upper level with the glass roofs pulled back from the walls. It had stunk in there. All over the walls the smell crawled and stained. Nicotine of human usage. The white towels everywhere. If he ever painted a squash court it would have white towels all over the floor and the yellow would hang from the ceilings like tapestries.
The fraud of his existence was held in the lost rails of previous conflict based engagements with others of the same stock. He was tired. Very tired. The photographs in the shoebox called to his eyes with megaphone blare. About one thousand of the artwork, and about three thousand of the ex girlfriend. It worked the sweat. Boiled the belly. Murdered the past. Old bones in older carriage.
Where was she? Hadn’t she heard anything from out here? What was she doing? If she had a spread like this out then she must have some dillies. Some. Just a bit. Always enough to pull the water back long enough to sit in the wet sand and prepare for the next wave. Had to. Ken began to worry. What if she didn’t? What if they had to call, and walk, and wait, and walk, and call, and sit, and call, and wait, and walk, and climb, and sit, and wait, and then, just maybe, score.
Did she have it? The night rolled the question back to his tired sore feet. The stink from them coming up just around the top of the socks where the sweat and previous days ingestion had fused the cotton to the flesh and hair. Was there some? Waiting? And if she did, why would she share it out? It was hard, so hard, to find and link on the steady. Every need a black adventure. The bus lines and cab rides and rides from those with those rusted out tubs filled with wax coated fountain pop cups. The paper. Always paper on the floors. Over the hard plastic mats. Every movement a scrunch and bumble. The hard sound coming from the floor as the machine coasted its growl over the destination's blockade of road. A new worry every moment. The driver yelling to keep it down back there, he was trying to concentrate on tooling the rusted out beast to the goal. Once they got there, everybody won.
Free prize inside.
Another sound from beyond the light in the screen door that the mesh held reflected. A computer door! A door with a screen that could solve problems and act as transportation system for the citizens of the frame and the latex paint that fucked the elements right off. That was the ticket. Always imaging, civilizations of little people, each with their own concerns and wet desires to ache the loins, living breathing, moving and perverting active commerce across the surface of a screen mesh. Powered by hallway lights. Energy receivers microscopic in the iron filament. Safety nets and gantries and complex power distribution systems that could be used as a defense shield against their ancient enemy: The Moth.
Wine was still sitting in the bottom of the sand burns. How hot it must have been. How very very very hot to be the sand. Lava sand kingdoms, populated by the perfect people. All inspired by common motive and fairy tale purpose.
Broken lost books and the dog still tuned back to look at the one it had just sniffed. Days in the park. Little tribes with drums in the background. Everyone sitting. No ones head bobbing. The men with muscles with their shirts right off. Out, in the sun, when it, was out. In, under the brella, when it, was open. Hot angle. Acrylic. Yeah, try three. Make it come alive. Dance paste. For sure.
Fantasy pull it. Artist’s inner torment cooks the marble. The thing just wouldn’t balance on this candlestick. It was falling apart. The candlestick was inside the air now. Nothing was free. The jitter was out. Ken stopped. Nothing was pretty out of little circle vision. Everything was edged out to fuzz. There wasn’t a storm.
The wine was cold and thick in the glass with black standing. The glass was nearing cold light and the thick knuckles in his hands worked the clock closer to shutdown. Things were not going well.
He started up right then when the door banged open. There was a woman standing in the door with her hand pressing it against the exterior of the house. She was over thirty, and no prize besides. Fat hair, dog jowls with snoop droop cheeks. Little bits of pink flesh coming out in mushroomed spots from her surface. Brown things hiding in the middles of the folds, waiting to come out.
“Who the hell are you?” she asked. She was a whale of a woman. Her bosom was a bloated swell of a fruit that looked as if it had fallen from a tree in an amusement park for giants. Her face was a collection of flaps. Ken could smell the clam sweat beneath the flaps. Drying out, sweating up. Her dress was old. Holes toward the bottom, stains up the top, identifiable only by the gray spots the bleach in the wash had transposed them to. Holes in the bottom, stains at the top, now those were hard fucking times. What was with the wine? Who had the class? Where was she?
“I’m uh, waitin’ for a friend of mine..” Ken lamed. Surprise and clutch in his hands, the top of his bag just open enough. Don’t look over at the sleeping bag, Ken thought: That’s going to be bad, I just know it. Just let me know where she is and then I can talk to her, somewhere, out back, on the street, not here, with you. Do you know? Are you? What do you have to do with all this? Too quick for his mind to make answers or theory the questions came. The fear shock of seeing this unidentified whale from the future deadliness was pulling the taffy of his brain to extra long strips now. Sleep would be a game. Sleep would be a home freaking run at this point. But not here, not in this chair.
“You’re not waiting here for any damn person at all. No one here that you know! No one at all! Now..hey! What they hell you been doin' messin’ with my wine?!”
“I thought this was my friends…”
“You thieving bastard!” She screamed. Shrill and high and her arms raised up and then flapped down in a parody of the wave they do at the sporting games. Ken hadn’t been to one since the year before the teens. Ken made his mistake, one of the many that the night had drawn him into, but the only one that would make him laugh harder as the night ended. This long four day night. Ken laughed. Just laughed. And years later when he would laugh the hardest it wa’nt cuz of a funny joke or a compact run up to a tit pop of an event. He would laugh the hardest later on when he thought about that night he had laughed. It would be his gut puncher, no matter how blue.
“What the FUCK do you find so funny? You’re lucky my husband isn’t here! He’d have your guts out you hear? GUTS OUT! OUT!” she screamed. He arm pointing like the Colossus of Rhodes at the street that forget his name each time he walked on it. Big flaps of flesh hanging down, useless only unless she planned on a long trial in the desert with only her urine to drink. Then she’d have all the insurance she would need. Would the company cover the goods from under the bag where the magic person had not been?
Ken kept on laughing, his teeth doing this little scrape together, paining him so. Fuzzing the teeth with paste wasn’t really on the priorities when you jagged this long. No no. When was the last time? Must have been weeks ago now. A couple anyway. Last time he remembered the bristles it had hurt boy golly so. His spit has been red and pink in little clots and runs. They didn’t put that one in the advertisements anymore. Where had he read that? Years since a book. Words just seemed to crawl right off the end of the tablet to the floor when the glass was in full effect. Dribbling down out of the air before he could eat ‘em up. Maybe that’s what he needed. More words to eat, it might help with his gums.
“Quit fuckin’ laughin! Now you get out of ere you bum! You little shit!”
And this is where he howled. The moon his sounding board. All his he told himself. This was all his. All of it belonging to him. He was stealing more than a fat ladies wine. He was stealing the night with laughter and he wasn’t going to give it back. Forget the feet. Forget the fumbling jitterbug bone dance fingers with the grime underneath that would make a great sweet treat for any lower life form scraped out and rolled up like a ball of hash in a pipe. All right. It was all right. Thieving, crimes worse than that in Hamurabi’s code. Who was Hamurabi? For that matter what was a code?
“Okay listen lady, I’m going.” He said through the titterbug moves of his mouth. The squeaks of joy bubbled all over the place, making the porch shine just that brighter, stealing the night air. Transmuted into joke current. Pally pal all right things were okay. She would make a great sculpture. Not of her, but just her, covered in epoxy, clumped white so you couldn’t see through at certain parts, but clear gloss on theirs, specially those flaps where he bet that something, hell, anything was breeding. Waiting for a herald call to unfurl itself from the nest and take over the world with a new germ which white walls and cleaner floors had no defense.
“OUT! You little shit! Get the hell out of here! I’m calling the police!”
“Worry is the artifact of a civilization failed and found dontcha know!” Ken shrieked, picking up his pack faster than he would anything that had been left behind; folded green on a floor or walk. His knees glassing protest and the legs themselves ensconced in a nap of their own. He collapsed on the ground, made a wriggling motion and looked up, a ribbon of drool playfully dangling from his bottom lip that he could not feel because of its concurrence with his body temperature. The cool night air had not yet taught it how to inflict awareness on the ribbons or any other host.
“Raah!” the lady screamed, and that was when the hot boot that she wore inside her own house came out in a swoop that would have made any compass in a students pouch proud to the ends of its points. It connected, triangulated, reflected, and twiddled in the air. A sharp announcement was harried over the public address system that God had furnished Ken’s nerves with, and he started into a half roll that looked as much as him turning over in his sleep as it did beguile with his grimace of pain. The door of the porch banged shut from his intrusion of presence and the night remained the same, the drool now flapped across his chin, and Ken’s face was turned upward, feeling the cool half millimeter in circumference of sputum which was his new accessory.
Ken opened his eyes to see. The roof of the porch was made of cedar that had not been stained. Ken looked and thought that the builders or finishers had not figured anyone would have been given opportunity to appreciate the value of a cool gloss over rough boards. Ken ran the strokes across it, and the stain soaked in. The wood drinking the ichor.
There were seas in that trap of drying. Girls with thick blue cords of hair with carp trapped inside the interior were walking through the leashes coiled around the right eyeballs of each. Four at a time.
copyright 2004 robert lutener
illustration copyright 2007 patrick henaff
