yumeclicky

[yumeclicky]

I begin by holding the bakelite telephone in my left hand.  The speaker is three inches from my ear.  My silver ashtray rests on the telephone table, near the cradle.  I try to breathe so that they cannot hear me on the other end of the line, cupping the receiver with my right palm.  Their voices are light.  I can scarecely hear her -- it's hardly better than pressing my ear against the wall.  I can feel the edge in her voice like it's a physical object.  It is a sharp, lonely cut. 

The other voice is high, desperate.  It's got a lot to lose.  The skin between my toes feels itchy. 

Attachment is the dream that by strangling someone, we might live forever.

[yumeclicky]

You sigh.  The eternal cascade of nights stretches behind you like hallways in the basement of  a museum.  What you have feared was lost in a blind alley, will take several turns to emerge.  Near the elevator is a very tiny Picasso -- you could put it in your pocket and take it with you.  Without the lights on, the halls seem to be the color of a beige Ford Tempo.  You are holding a thick brush in your left hand.  You are not an apprentice.

[yumeclicky]

"I gotta get the motor up to speed.  I've gotta get the juices flowing" you say to yourself but there are only so many hollowed out tree stumps in which to hide the knife.  Overhead the moon is a milk-light, perfectly pure as a mallomar against the great basin of eternity.  The first stars flick up their lighters and elucidate the broken, chalky rock and dusty dirt of your solitary path.

Obvious exits are a circle of ever receding space -- the dream is here, and waking is elsewhere.  You begin to panic.

"I have not had a birthday like this since I began elementary school."  What you are saying is a weightless void.  To your left and right are Tree and Other Tree.  Your hands are red and muddy with birthday cake.

"The popess is most displeased."  You  are rambling.  The sky alternates between Red and Green.  You succumb to Rock Dizziness.  The owl above you is invisible.

"Sleep," he says.  "I am very hungry," he says.

[yumeclicky]

(Bent down for a low, yowling hiss.  The sound is terrible to hear)

Kitty.  Kitty.  I need you to get up off the floor kitty.

The carpet is that grungy rented-house brown.  It's grubby to the touch, even if it's vacuumed.  It feels like it might be the 90's in here, or something terrible.  White light filters in through the single window along the back wall, revealing the silhouette of your body.  You are not wearing any pants but you still feel hot.  Some terrible process is in the middle of happening.  You touch your forehead down to the carpet and close your eyes.  You see yellow light from the open bathroom door spilling down the hall.  It is daytime.

Kitty just pick up the phone.  Crawl over to the phone and take it off the hook.  Lie flat on your back with the phone sitting flush to the floor, like you did when you were a child.  Just, kitty.  Kitty.  Answer the phone.

[yumeclicky]

Water from the storm pours down the entrance to the 12th street tunnel like tears and effluvia from a hemmoraged saint.  The sky is purple during the day, and greenish at night.  In the deep of the city, fortunately, there's little mud.  We can all make our way through the boxy, winded buildings. 

You know that someone has not been here long if their cigarettes are still dry enough to light.

There is no crime.  Everyone creeps around, very carefully, watching.  I like  to do a fair amount of watching too.  It keeps me in a fitness and away from the damp. 

Some days I'll pass the entire day in the foyer of the Astoria, sitting beneath those ugly high ceilings and above that carpet.  Bellhops mill about, carrying half-empty suitcases, pushing full-empty steel racks, holding naked coat-hangers in their hands like startled birds.  

Even though the roof is intact, I imagine a light dusting of rain coming down, like motes of dirt, catching the occasional bright, flat white from the large windows.  At the far end of the room, the bank of elevators stands idle, every door open.  Nearby are the phone booths, wood-panelled and gleaming.  The door to the last one is closed. 

I step into the adjacent phonebooth and close the door. 

The black telephone sits there, like a snake in a basket.  I hear its rattle.

[yumeclicky]

Dear ________,

  Modem aside, the mechanism is pretty simple.  Basically the toilet works the same way a space heater or a hair iron works -- there's a little electric element in the seat of the pot which heats up to the desired temperature.

Now, this is a good idea in theory, but when applied to areas like public toilets it runs afoul of certain highly interesting tendencies in human psychology.  For example, let's say you pull up to a toilet to release some cargo, sit down and the bitch- bastard fuckbucket of a doily fluffer is too fucking cold oh my God.  You sit there dejected and miserable, a most unsatisfying stream of frankly too hot and under-hydrated urine dripping like a sprung leak in your thermal exhaust.  You reach for the dial, and think you motherfuckers this is to you you did this to me you fucks, you barmy mudclippers, you Grecian strumpets and jack that dial all the way to ten and a half.   You've already peed, but yankee-hotel-foxtrot if you're gonna move before this cuntnubber makes you feel like the lord of hosts is alive.  Maybe you cross your leg and close your eyes in anticipation.  And slowly, you start to feel it.  It's like the well stocked afterparty for an especially gracious and extraterrestrial B.M.  You bask in the glow for a while, after wiping, then stand up and flush, sweeping your feet back and forth to make sure you don't have any toilet paper stuck to them.  Exeunt Omnes.

  And then, a ripple in space-time opens up.  A dizzying quantum cavalcade swallows up the world we know, and you find that you are no longer precisely yourself, you are yourself through the prism of a temporal flux, and have as a consequence the whole sorry business in the W.C. to do over again.  You enter the same stall, a sickening shade of deja-vu sliding down like puce shades over your vision.  The walls are wrong.  The walls are wrong.  Looking down, you see an un-stucked piece of toilet paper on the dingy tile.  The Nancy Drew living in your inner ear takes a jump to the left.  Filled with trepidation, you rub your short cropped red hair, turn around, and sit on the seat.  Instantly you are furious.  Your voice rings out like a tongue-eating demon:

"ITS TOO FUCKING HOT." Some cock-mongling sock-mopper must have turned the heat all the way up and left it.  In a fearsome fury you jerk the knob to sub-zero.  You wait and pee at the same time.  Finally, as you're about to leave, the seat has cooled to the optimum,slightly hotter than human body temperature.  You walk out of the bathroom.  

Outside of the bathroom, waiting always and forever, is an endless line of you in infinite procession,  occupying every possible shape.  You step out of the frame, and another you steps forward.

                                                           Illiterati Lumens Fidei

[yumeclicky]

Stepping back into the office I had to unpop my collar and straighten the lapels of my long coat, both of which had been dishabituated by the sudden coming of spring winds.  Nobody tells you when you're dressing in the morning that you're gonna walk out and slam straight right into the spring.  Even a newshuman like me is caught out of the loop.

Anyway, I have my own area of concentration.  I walk over to the city desk and stare down at Bob's bald head.

"Hi Bob."

"Yeah.  Yeah.  Cop pesticides.  Got it.  Don't worry, I don't even remember. Catch you later."

"Bob."

"Oh!  Aren't you supposed to be out in the killing fields?"

"Just gotta drop off my coat."

"The news don't wait for no one forever.  Especially not how you do it."

He was right.  I could hear the stories crackling their tinder-digits.  I had to get out there.  I hurriedly conducted my desk business, dumped my stuff, and made moxy for the exit.

"Just remember!" Bob yelled as I dashed back out the door.  "Don't dig too deep!  There's roots what you don't wanna meet."

Out on the beat, everything feels white-hot.  There's barely enough time to move, let alone think how one piece meets another.  A million stories, teeming, squirming, hardening, breaking off, getting stuck in the branches, rattling on windy, ghost-filled nights, falling to the ground, being picked up and re-purposed into swords and magic wands.  

And only me between them and the world. 

Time to call the Stick Witch.

Stick Witch was sitting down on a warm, flat stone on a grassy hill overlooking Briar's Park.

"How's my twiggy?" she began in that kind of nutty, bird-y chortle.  Twig oracles don't come cheap, no matter what anyone tells you.

"Fine, fine."

"Are you getting...enough...to eat" she asked.  Her twig-stalk eyes were bloodshot.

"You know why I'm here.  I'm on a deadline."

"Everyone is."

I close my eyes for a second, and take a deep breath.  Yes.  Okay.  "You know what I need to know.  Where is the twig market moving?  What's the exchange gonna bottom at?"

"If you knew the pleasure of the twig-arts, you wouldn't need to ask me these questions."

(If I knew the pleasure of the twig-arts, I wouldn't need to be a reporter)

[yumeclicky]

Previously, we have seen a kind of beginning.  The middle happened somewhere offstage.  What we see now is the end.

[yumeclicky]

The other piece of paper:  Half-way down the page the cursive script stops, and in a large, flat, block print the words TRIPTYCH FOR FRANCIS BACON are written, with a weird spiral circling around them.  You look up and wonder where she's gotten to, wonder whether she's taken your pen.  You look back down at the words of the page.  The cursive is your hand writing.  The block print is not her hand-writing.  You try to figure out what it is you're missing.

On the floor, next to your foot, you see a beige bra with the hook-flap slightly frayed so that it bends a little backward, just barely exposing the clasps when hooked to the tightest hoops.

You have to go to the restroom.

You tap the folded notebook against your left knee, idly.  The thought is not coming.

You have to pee.

You're standing up but you keep thinking about sitting down.  There is a disused saucer and a cup half-full of cold coffee.  You go in the bathroom.  

You sit down on the toilet.  When you do so, you rest your elbows on your knees, like usual.  Like usual, you cradle your head in your hands.  When you do this, you realize your fingers are covered in black ink.  

"So," you think.  A grateful stream of urine emerges, like a sighing breath.

[yumeclicky]

Nine brittle peels sound down the vaulted slope of the sky and all is gray dawning.  Amid the scramble of postmen and children in silver minivan's and dilatory birds flocking back and forth like black clouds of static, or black sesame seeds ground into fine dust by a pestle,or pepper thrown by malicious hand into the careening winds, slow, silent forms wind their way through the early morning streets, single file, cracking and dragging their long black skirts through sidewalkless suburban lanes.  From a helicopter, they look like lidded balls of mercury rolling mercilessly toward some magnetic force -- turn of the century, four story, converted into apartments some time in the 1950's, converted into nothing in the 1990's.  Twelve of them gathered, standing in a rough triangle before the porch door.

The first one said "The time is swift approaching."

The second one, in an orange hat, said "The bill must be paid."

The third one, timid, in blue: "The ringing shall heal us."

Four: "By your cord we may grow mighty."

Five: "The curve of your handset corresponds to the longing in hungry hearts."

Six: "I open the door of the well to you, O Birdphone."

Seven: "Our voice shall be arrayed against vast spaces."

Eight: "I will attend you in silent hopelessness."

Nine: "I hope you will sing for me."

Ten: "I regard you with apprehension."

Eleven: "Do not cry out in fear.  It is so dark."

Twelve, red-haired, shimmering, dressed all in red, turns her green eyes to the hollow doorway.  An immense rattling issues forth.  

"Cuck-Kaw!"

"The Birdphone Stirs."

Every eye watches the doorway.  Is that the light tap of steps?  The wait is unbearable.

[yumeclicky]

"For one?"

  "No I'm expecting someone."

  "...Smoking?"

  "Whatever."

  The third solid week of winter rain had soaked Cecilia to the seal.  Even just stepping out left her with a damp, broth-y aura clinging to her body.  She felt like so much beef bones.

  "Here -- let me just...wipe this down here.  We're pretty full today.  A lot of funerals.

  "When the weather gets like this people just start feeling like having a funeral."  Cecelia removed her pea-coat and tugged a strand of hair back from her eyelid.  In the restaurant's murder light her eyes looked amber-colored.  She was wearing yesterday's mascara.

  "You want --"

  "--coffee.  Yeah."

  "I'll be right back."  He stepped off, visibly relieved.  She pulled out a private smirk.

  God these places made her sick.  It was getting to be that she couldn't hardly go anywhere.  Some kid's high, whining voice pricked at her skin.  Jesus, Jesus.  Dumb middle-class bitches who bought their hair at a carpet store were looking over here --

  (no they're not they're looking in the direction of the child's voice; long after they had dwindled like the fading bloom of the rose, still they look.  Imagine!  The cutting Glave of instantaneous, mitochondrial terror.  A fear that can appear any place -- an inundation of pre-fab dread.  Fuck, fuck)

  --she turned away the windshield frame of the booth's window.  Her wan reflection regarded her with envious eyes.  She turned back away and flipped up her phone.  7:30.  Late.

  "Goddamn, there you are!  I thought we were meeting earlier..."

  "I don't like that."

  "What?"

  "We were meeting earlier.  Don't you check mail?"

  "Don't even turn the fucking thing on anymore."

  "Missing out.  Flash had made some real strides."

  "I bet."

"Get that from a movie?"

  "Fuck off I'm credentialed like a motherfucker.  Have you been...tweezing?"

  Cecilia blinked.  Once.  "No."

  "Oh no come on let me see..."

  "I -- look, come on."

  "No just"

  "Stop!"

  "I wouldn't have to do things like this if you weren't such a goddamn liar!"

  "Keep your voice down!  This place is lousy with Christians!"

  Jenny choked into a giggle.  "That's a cunt I know.  You bring a gun in your purse so they can shoot themselves after genuflecting before the master rhetorician?"

  "...I can't pass the background check."  Her mouth capsized into a Charlie Brown W as her head floated down to the table top.

  "T'aunt mieux.  Pay a policeman buy it for you."

  "Ahhhh."

  "Well this is bad, huh?"

  "This is bad.  My eyelids feel oily."

  "This smoking?"

  "I...I don't even know."

  "Fuuuck."

  "Coffee should be here."

  "Coffee's shit here."

  "Wanna go to Starbucks?"

  "No.  Fuck it.  We're here."

  "Yeah."

  "You really do look like shit you know."

  "Why do I call you?"

  "Fuck if I know."

  "You know, I coulda used this time to answer Craigslist fatty ads looking for people to suck their dick while they play American Empire: Shoot the Fucking Deigo's."

  "I guess that's a step up."

  "Involves reading and everything."

  The waiter returned with their coffee.

  "Uhhh, two eggs, easy, wheat toast... hash browns."

  "You?"

  "English muffin and two links of sausage."

  He went back away.

Outside the window, in the gray world, the rain was beginning to freeze.

  Waiter, again.  "Two eggs, and for you an English muffin.  Anything else I can get..."

  "I'm fine.  Thanks."

  Cecilia stared down into her plate.  The plate regarded her calmly, with the half-lid, narcotized gaze of a foreign god.  The glare of the overhead lamps made it unearthly.  Its pallor was fast-sinking fashion.  God god god god you are stealing my breakfast and my life.  You are stealing my oxygen.  

  Jenny chewed and swallowed.  "You gonna call?"

  "I'm...maybe."

  "Why don't you call?"

  "Why don't I call..."  She hiccuped.

  "Okay."

  Cecilia closed her eyes.  Her voice rolled out carefully like a presidential carpet.  "I'm not going to call her because I often feel lonely."  The row was draped in red.

  First thing after getting home Cecilia called in sick to work.  The mauve deluge infected her with its stifling kludge -- she was out of sick days, but what, really, did it matter.  Being medium-poor was a condition that would survive occupational failure.  No one could ever die anymore here.  The closest you came was a vicious, grating sense of discomfort.  No one could ever, ever die.  Late morning, and the light was still dusky and half brimmed.

  "I have a mood disorder," Cecilia said to herself.  "I'm a joke.  I need to do something; I need to be more entertaining."  Christ, the wallpaper was waggish like a cutpurse.  She walked across the living room, stopped in front of the tv, thought about turning it on.  In the regard of its deadened eye she looked plain and washed out.  Whatever channel she was on had a low signal.  She did not turn the tv on.  She backed up and played a smile into her reflection.  The house filled in silent spaces with its special coolness, so that every room filled with black, medicine-y Jello.  It'll be a while before you see Jenny again, yes.

  If Richard had been able to call right at that moment, she would have said something.  Instead, she was left standing there staring out into a quickly graying dawn.  Fine mist obscured the line of arched roofs drawing off to the horizon.  A single sick tree cracked its blackening fingers.  Fucked.

  (And then she turned back to the coffee machine, removed its basket, discarded wet grounds, replaced its filter, replaced the basket, took the hermetically sealed coffee jar from the cupboard, unsealed the hermetically sealed coffee jar, removed the coffee scoop from the counter-top drawer, scooped coffee from the hermetically sealed coffee jar into the waiting filtered basket, closed the hermetically sealed coffee jar, replaced it in the cupboard, replaced the coffee scoop, closed the coffee maker, turned the coffee maker on)

  Her mouth was sick and dry.  Outside it looked like the sky could start crying any minute.  She could wait it out.  From her bedroom the a.m. radio mumbled on; in the ears of a mono speaker Opera Seria was as good as electric static.  Her notebook was still seated at the kitchen table from the previous night.  

  (the coffee maker pumped and gurgled like a broken derrick, like a consumptive cat.  Black milk poured down like 40-weight oil -- it required waiting.)

  The open page of her notebook read "Still-life with Martyr" and then further down "Angie lost the store-keys."  She flipped up her phone to check the time, frowned.  She turned over a blank piece of paper and drew a thick circle.  In the middle, in careful block print, she wrote: THE VOID.  The sighing of trees in the wind rained down like a caul of sickly birds.  She tapped her pen in the center of the circle.  The coffee-maker played out its last chuckle.

  There is a special emptiness that comes from being married to a supernatural being.  Sometimes when you walk outside, you can feel its presence in the wind; the trees whisper of a secret love that exists outside of space and time.  when you call out its name, it does not answer in any way that a human can understand.  At night you sit in the fullness of waiting, candles burning.  Sometimes there is a whisper, again, it does not say anything.  The whisper is the pressure of its spiritual body entering your pocket of space.  You thought that present aloneness could be its own form of reward, that you could wait forever while its empty voice plied keys like a file over dry ice.  You thought, "I can wait a little longer."  You can wait a little longer.

The storm does not pass as you expected it to -- it rumbles on and on.  When the night has finally passed, when it should be growing light out, it is dark.  Still you wait in a half sleep.  The phone murmurs like a bubbling brook.

"Goddamn it."

"What?"

"Don't what.  What happened?"

"I don't know yet."

"Have you checked around?"

Cecilia looked around the dark bedroom.  The fine circle of rice around her bed was slightly misshapen.

"I don't know."

"God."

"It's harder than it looks!"

"You make it look plenty hard!"

"I think maybe it was here."

"Did you see it?"

"No."

"...did you fall asleep again?"

"I don't think so."

"You don't think so?"

"I was...mostly aware."

"But you didn't feel it?"

"I don't think it came very close."

"Obviously."

"But I think it was here.  In the room.  I think it worked."

"Holy shit."

"What?"

"Well, to be honest, I never thought much would probably come of this."

"You didn't think it would work?"

"Well, it's not like ordering a pizza."

"I'll talk to you later."

Cecilia got up and felt around in the bathtub.  Some drops of water were left behind from where it had drawn itself a bath.  The towel was still slightly damp as she dried her hands.  It looked like it had taken some milk from the refrigerator as well.  Fine.  Fair enough.  It was safe to say the ghost-trap was not working.  She got back on the phone.

[yumeclicky]

Boss stood behind his desk, staring down a red telephone.  The cheap plyboard walls were really getting to him at this point.  Tapping his temple with a pencil eraser, he heaved a heavy sigh.  

"Sir," the phone said.  "Sir."

Boss had a glassy look.  His dyspepsia was fighting with the black coffee he drank.  His hemorrhoids were fighting with the black coffee he drank.  His tongue felt dry against the roof of his mouth.

"Sir," the red telephone said again.

"I'm here.  I'm listening."

"Sir," the red phone blinked in time with each word.  "It's about the Nancy Drew factory."

Boss's stomach gurgled.  He needed to sit down.  He didn't want to break line-of-sight with the phone.  He didn't want the phone to sense weakness, or smell the rancid, frying-grease reek of fear on his stump-withered, forty-seven-year-old body.  His teeth clicked together.

"Okay.  So it's the Nancy Drew factory.  Is it on fire again?"

"No.  It's much worse.  We're having trouble in quality control.  Nancy Drew keeps rolling off the line with her father's handgun in her left coat pocket.  We can't find the roadster keys anywhere!"

Boss's stomach bottomed out.  How much more of this can he take?  He swallowed, and started to clear his throat.

"Alright.  Here's what we need to do.  Do you remember the Mystery of the Old Clock?"

"Sir?"

"The Mystery of the Old Clock."

"Let me just look at my charts."

Boss closed his eyes.  It was like no one could remember these things anymore.  Everything he had spent his whole life building toward was enfeebled and sickly.  The Old Clock.   And they didn't even remember.

"Okay.  Oh.  Oh.  I see now."

"Yes."

"Of course sir.  Thank you."

The phone went black as a dead deer's eye.  Boss leaned against his desk for a moment, and then walked over to the glass window that looked over row after endless row, stretching toward the unvarnished horizon, of moving belts and whirring, hissing tubes, turning out amiable, for-the-moment well armed Nancy Drews.  That would stop soon enough.  How could she keep a gun in her left coat pocket if she has no pockets to begin with.  Boss sighs.