Volume III - Ghoulish Delights

EXPLORE VOLUME III OF THE SUNDAY SCARIES

Volume I • Volume II

1. On My Way to Work the Other Morning

I was waiting for the bus when I heard him yell my name. He was pulled up at the red light and had rolled the passenger window down. I hadn’t seen him for five years and we’d had some hard words between us, but I walked over and got in the car without a moment’s hesitation.
         He drove me to work. He talked: He was enthusiastic, almost manic. In twenty minutes I learned a lot of new things about his life. He didn’t ask me much about mine—that was okay, not much to report anyway. He had a new wife! Just married a year ago. Some adopted children! This was new for him, a guy who I knew invented new ways to fuck things up for himself every couple of months, at least in my experience. We didn’t go over any of the old sore points. It was great.
         In the driveway circle outside my office building we talked about getting together again soon. For my part, I meant it. I meant to give it another try. I remembered when we were seventeen, when I’d dropped by his place early one morning after spending the night at my girlfriend’s. This sounds like such a little thing, I suppose. I’d forgotten a book or a CD or something at his place. But also, I had lied to my parents about where I was, I’d said I was with him, and as it happened that night my aunt had died and in the morning my folks’d had a hell of a time getting ahold of me. They’d called him, there were many improvised lies: he was good at making shit up on the spot. When he told me this all that news put me in a state. I’m not sure what I said. It was barely past dawn and he was hardly awake. Look at him in his dumb pajamas.
         I walked home. There were words among the family: Where, etc. Disrespect, etc. What would she think—and mom, dad, I loved her too, though. Why are you on me about cutting my hair for the funeral? She never said one fucking word about my hair.
         Ten minutes later the doorbell rang and he was at the front door; he’d quick-dressed and followed me back home. We walked around the neighborhood together, talked about whatever bullshit. He calmed me down. Like I say, it probably seems trivial but I think it was the sweetest thing anyone has ever done for me.
         That time later the other morning, this last time, the day I’m talking about, after he drove away I worked a normal day. I friended him (again) on social media, and left a note on his page. I thought, why not, even though five years earlier, drunk as fuck and kissing him on the mouth I’d shoved him into a cab and said I never wanted to speak to him again. What melodramatic bullshit. For months after that, wherever I was, I was spooked at the thought of him showing up unexpectedly and we’d have to get into it all all over again—but he never did, he kept away, respect.
So later that night after that morning he drove me to work, I got a message from his cousin. He’d seen the note I’d left on his page. He, cousin, was sorry to have to be the one to tell me this, but: he’d had a heart attack two days ago, it was very sudden, everyone’s still in shock, his wife and stepkids desolated. What? What? What.
         I couldn’t believe it. How could I believe it, when there he’d been, in a car, a car I’d never seen before, that day, that very day, with his mouth and voice and his new stories that I hadn’t known anything about: about kids and wife and even some intimate details that even at the time I thought inappropriate but you know, on brand for him. But, cousin confirmed, there was no mistake. He was dead.
         At the funeral and after that I never breathed a word of what I’m saying to you now, why would I? It’s ridiculous, but you asked me when was the last time I saw him alive and if this wasn’t it then I can’t remember when it was.
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2. The Toys Are Black and Brown

The bodies had been taken away. The inspectors had left the scene. What was left of the house was cordoned off with danger tape. The smell of the fire would linger in the neighborhood for weeks.
         In the morning the city dropped off a dumpster. What wasn’t needed for evidence was hauled from the house and thrown away. When Daniel drove by that afternoon it was already piled high, with scorched couches and chairs visible above the lip of it. Part of a baby’s crib. That evening some of the local boys went diving and took away some junk, including a charred Nintendo and a perfectly good baseball bat. They left stuff strewn on the sidewalk, and that’s where Daniel, the next morning, first saw the toys.
         Half a dozen dolls in various stages of disintegration: some Barbies, or Barbie-like things, but the plastic had mostly melted. The fabric ones had survived better for some reason: they reeked, they were blackened, but few were missing more than a limb or two. Most rugged of all were a set of half a dozen wooden soldiers, impressively carved, at least a foot high, their red coats stained and bubbled and discolored into umber, but each complete, lying on the grass as if felled all at once by enemy cannon.
         The next day the toys were gone, then the dumpster, and soon enough the house as well, demolished, the basement dug out and filled with earth, sod laid atop it all and a realtor’s sign planted optimistically in the cheerful new-green lot. It was as if the Trujillos, and their lives, had never been.
         When the immigration raids increased, the neighborhood reacted in force. Whistles sounded every day before dawn. Groceries were bought and distributed to those people too afraid to leave their homes. Men in masks were pursued and shamed as they brutalized. The weather turned cold; there was a blizzard or two. The men with masks were screamed at, hit by snowballs. Hysterically they teargassed. They painted the snowdrifts with pepper spray. They found their tires slashed, their electricals ripped out from under their hoods. Tiny footprints in the snow, flecks of soot and a sharp odor of matches. One agent ran his car off an overpass and broke his neck.
         In the predawn cold, booted, gloved, double-jacked, with his passport and birth certificate in his pocket and a whistle around his neck, Daniel drove around looking for the trouble. And there it was, a dark SUV, idling, driver’s and passenger’s doors ajar, pulled up in front of the mercado. He was about to roll down his window and give the signal, but hesitated. Movement in the alley, near the garbage? He parked and got out to take a look.
         There, in the shadow behind the dumpster, two men twitching in the ruddy snow, and surrounding them a dozen small dark figures armed with rusty nails and shards of glass. Everywhere the smell of burning—a real dumpster fire, he thought, but he wouldn’t remember the joke afterward.
         He backed away. They meant well, he knew, but this was going to lead to a lot of problems.
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3. Deserters

When I was picking a place to grow old in, I thought a lot about tornadoes, and the news reports I’d seen all the time growing up: rolled cars, mobile homes wrapped around telephone poles and chickens with all their feathers stripped off, clucking in embarrassment. So even though I don’t like California politics, they don’t have tornadoes so I drove out there, using up most of the last of my money on gas, and I planted the trailer in an RV park outside of San Bernadino, put it up on blocks and settled into the divorced-and-retired life, baby.
         They’re probably going to get rid of Social Security but who gives a shit, I’ll be dead then, and in the meantime I’ve got enough for beer, and sure it gets hot, but it’s the desert, you don’t have to worry about fires like those rich dopes in the hills.
         But even with a satellite dish you get bored, so I started hanging out with the neighbors. Some nice people, Mexican families mostly but some white folks too, kind of drop-outs. One guy’s an ex-biker, tattoos and iron crosses and that, and he does ride a bike but I think most of his stories are full of shit. We get into it sometimes over politics, he’s a real right-wing guy, which is fine but you can take it too far.
         I started getting interested in this dude who lived a few miles further out into the desert. He has a house, or a shack, and all around it are these big pieces of rusty metal, taken from old cars mostly, but also stuff from oil rigs and sump pumps, and neon signs and even a couple single-engine airplanes, and he’s gone and welded it all into big robot-looking sculptures, some of them thirty feet high, and painted them all sorts of bright colors that’ve faded and been repainted over the years, so they look sort of futuristic and prehistoric at the same time. Also he’d put all sorts of mirrors in them, so no matter where you are for miles around you get flashes or reflections of flashes everywhere you look.
         All the folks in the park avoided him, even the biker, because the guy threatened to shoot anyone who came on his property, but I figure you only live once, so I headed out there one morning with a case of beer, and long story short, now we’re friends.
         Turns out the inside of Bobby’s house is almost as weird as the outside, he has a whole library of books and magazines and comic books in there, smushed together on shelves and piled up on the floor, just leaving a kind of narrow path from the front door to the toilet and his bed. He can talk all night about philosophy and transhumanism and the ancient Greeks and the decline of the West and that sort of thing. He doesn’t have the Internet, just those books, and he says nothing past 1980 is worth paying attention to anyway.
         He makes a lot of sense sometimes, but he can be frustrating, because he makes up these names for things I don’t understand. So for instance, when he talks about the feminization of the culture he calls it Florabelle, and talks like it’s a person: Florabelle did this in 1950, she did this in 1975. There’s a caveman called Rock-Ego who’s been sleeping since the old days but wakes up now and then and is going to wake up for good someday soon. He has a whole cast of characters: Billy Badman; Miss Kitten; Rod Randomagus; Firesmoke, who’s a hellhound; The Mouse, who nibbles on your stuff while you’re asleep; Whitesoul (posthumanity); and a big-nosed guy whose name I shouldn’t repeat. All of these people, or whatever you want to call them, have intricate life stories and destinies, and the big robot sculptures outside his shack are his representations of them. His pantheon, he says. They were exiles from a different world, he says, one where humans evolved into some sort of perfected things, but the pantheon couldn’t get along with it, so they came here and they all fight with each other instead.
         Plus he’s been working on a book of his own, which he calls a syncretism of a lifetime of reading and learning. He showed me some of it: it’s full of diagrams and cartoons and a lot of dirty sketches. When he’s finished he’s going to pay to have it published. But he’s been working on it for forty years, I don’t suppose he’ll be finishing it any time soon.
         I admit I get a little tired of him, so these days I don’t go over there as much, though I should drop by soon to return these old Hustlers. He’s got other friends now anyways. He must have made it up with my biker pal, because I see him and his biker buddies heading out there most nights these days. In the daytime I can see the sunlight flashing off their bike mirrors and the pantheon’s mirrors, and at night I can hear the rumble of their engines like an earthquake and I can smell their exhaust and burning rubber all the way over here in the park, even though there’s never any breeze in the desert.
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4. Midnight in the Churchyard

The crypt. The web-draped statuary. Unlit candles in iron candelabras. Moon-bright images in stained glass: youth and death and eternity: Christ suffering, Christ is risen. Floral bas-reliefs with secret skeletons engraved. Beautiful lips kissing holy skulls and other emptinesses ecclesiastically enshrined (as George Eliot once wrote). The tomb and inscribed effigies. Within, the mortal dust of the prince and his wife, too soon removed from us. The grave mold, the conquering worm, the bracelet of bright hair about the bone. The Gothic adoration.
         Fervid she prayed, her knees stinging on the cracked uneven stones.
         She was answered. A hollow voice emerged from the carved mouth of the dead prince, carried on a miasmic fetor: Whence comes this woman-thing?
         Lord, forgive my hope. Dearly I desire an intercession.
         Speak.
         A tale she told of grave illness in the family: one child lost, a father too, and a tiny boy whose soul was balanced between heaven and earth. No money for a doctor.
         A dragging silence. Then the response: The boy will recover his strength. He will be a comfort to you in your old age.
         She departed in gratitude.
         Some time later, the princess spoke to her man: That was not kind.
         What did she expect me to do about it? came the reply. Amn’t I dead?
         The boy died the next morning.
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5. The Monkey is Online!

This isn’t right, this can’t be happening. There’s a firewall to protect this. But somehow she’s gotten around it.
         After so many weeks of careful information-grooming, to see the monkey go wild on all this, fuuuuuck: Wikipedia, Facebook, TikTok, X. On the other side of the bulletproof glass, this monkey, screeching and tangling her wires, is just drinking it all in. At the base of her neck, the receiver blinks an angry red.
         The emergency response team is burning through the locks, but who knows how long that’ll take. The kill team is here too, but they’re just standing around like douchebags: facemasks and limp M4s.
         I watch Doctor Mebble bleed out under his computer station, the monkey, jumping, splashing pawprints in his blood, speckling the glass. The lab team is scattered everywhere.
         Reddit, eBay, YouTube, ChatGPT.
         We’d picked her specifically for her docility. Doctor Mebble raised her since birth. The brain surgery had been impeccable, that level of thing could have won major prizes if made public. Hormones in the spine, aloe on the fur, a continuous wash across the eyeballs. The information drip.
         No one could have predicted. The firewall! But maybe the cognitive— Metastastize— Oh, this is bad.
         Temu, Yandex.
         The monkey is visibly in heat. With her augmented limbs she shatters monitors, ceiling tiles, CPUs, bodies. She chews everything into bits. She punches cracks into the viewing windows.
         Twitch, xHamster, Bing. The rage of her!
         The door is breached. The kill team moves in, and dies. The monkey erupts out into the viewing chamber, trailing brain matter and bloody broken wires, and praise God, she leaves the rest of us alone. She smashes through a window and, I assume, thirty stories below us she hits the ground, or maybe a person, but whatever it is she’s unfazed, and hops up and runs away, who knows where. And now we’re all fucked!
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6. Whispers

At first he thinks it’s a scarecrow, but then he notices all the flies. And it smells. My God, he has to tell the cops! But there’s no cell service in these endless rows of corn, this blue-sky-hot-sun Midwest nostalgia dream that has now become a Stephen King landscape of fear. The scarecrow is still dripping.
         He pushes his way through the rows, back the way he came. A sparrow swoops in front of his face. A corn snake slithers in the shade. Here is another scarecrow, a woman. He turns and runs parallel to the rows—although the vanishing point seems miles away, surely he will eventually exit into the normal world again. A breeze picks up behind him, and the corn to either side swishes and rustles, keeping pace with him.
         It must be just about noon. Dark shadows are mixed with the golden susurrating stalks, crucified arms outspread. He stumbles but keeps running. He is breathing some sort of corn dust; it is stinging his eyes. Here is a row of scarecrows, a whole family. Parts of a whole family.
         Somewhere ahead of him a dog is barking. Should he go toward it? But someone has planted these people in the fields—best to go another way. And so in this manner he outthinks himself and becomes lost. His pace reduced to a jumpy walk, he tries to pick a direction and keep to it. But he has seen this particular scarecrow-man before, he knows, so he’s not getting anywhere.
         He’s sunburnt. He rests for a few minutes under the man, staying away from the pool of sticky mud. As the only remotely human things in sight, by now the scarecrows are almost a source of comfort. Eventually he moves on, he hopes more methodically.
         In the end he counts more than forty of them before he escapes. He drives his car back to the hotel, but he does not inform the police, or his wife or children. In the bad years to come he often likes to lie in bed while Laura sleeps, and close his eyes, and return to them in his imagination, where they counsel and console him, and whisper surprising and unusual ideas that adjust his thinking and give him the resolve to carry on, even just a little longer.
         Even just a little longer, they whisper with their cornsilk mouths.
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7. The nam-rorriM

The Mirror-man grew up playing amusing little tricks. He reversed his sister’s face when she was ten years old; now, when she looked in the mirror, Abby saw her mole on her left cheek and not the right one where it had always appeared to be before. It was a bizarre family mystery that their parents never stopped talking about.
         Later he got an internship in a hospital. Once or twice he’d secretly reverse patients’ inner organs right before their surgeries, to the shock of the surgeon and the medical team. Mostly he contented himself with flipping tumors around, or switching a bum knee for a healthy one randomly throughout the week. He found confusion and pain to be great fun.
         On walks around town he caused accidents by reversing engine blocks, reversing axles. Detours pointed the wrong way. He swapped street signs and house numbers into illegibility.
         He might have gone on along his cruel but only semi-harmful way except that he read an article on chirality in Nature. Who knew that molecules could be right-handed or left-handed? It was news to him! Proteins are right-handed, DNA is left-handed. T-cells, amino acids, all of that. Their shapes allowed them to interact with other molecules—if they were the other way round, it would be like trying to put a right-handed glove on your left hand. It just won’t work.
         He bought some books on organic chemistry and decided to give it a whirl. He killed a few plants by reversing their carbohydrates, then executed a local politician by reversing his immune system. But he made a mistake when he reversed his landlady’s DNA—she boiled away with cancers within the week, but something had aroused suspicion, and he was arrested. Then he panicked and accidentally killed all the cops in the jailhouse.
         Now no one will go near him. The entire city block has been evacuated. He can reverse the cell door lock, he supposes, but one step out that door and he’ll probably get a sniper’s bullet in his head. He is contemplating drastic measures. He’d read that mirror bacteria would be able to slip around antibiotics and amoeboid predators, and infect all sorts of things: humans, animals…. It couldn’t be contained and it couldn’t be cured. It’s a possibility.
         He doesn’t want to die in this cell, but if he has to, he’ll kill the world while he’s at it.
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8. Criollo

The gaucho reached over the horse’s shoulder and with two quick jabs of his facón he punctured the animal’s eyes. It screamed. It kicked but its legs were bound. Now it was on its knees. Blood sprayed on the sand. I accepted the knife from my man.
         Across the courtyard my daughter knelt in her filthy wedding dress, weeping, hands behind her back. As behind me they wrestled his famous stallion to the dirt I crossed to her, cut her zip ties and flung the knife to the ground.
         That last of his will trot freely on our estancia, I informed her. Blind, it will receive no harm or help from no one, until finally it loses its footing on a river stone and breaks a foreleg, and is eaten by foxes.
         She wailed, and clawed at the dirt.
         As for the man you call your husband, I have personally cut off his penis and balls, and thrown them to my cats. Later, when he died, my men put aside their baseball bats and took up hacksaws. There is much of him still around, if you care to look.
         In two years, I said, you will have learned from our Sisters at—
         A horse’s scream behind me.
         Some manners and propriety, I said. A spray of sand hit the back of my neck. I turned.
         His rodeo stallion, blind and enraged, its hoofs crusted with gore, my men sprawled at its feet among the broken ropes. It rears and rushes; a horse-cock huge and crimson swats me as the stallion tramples by, punching divots in the chests of my fallen men. It stops before my daughter, who stands to kiss the shredded eyes, and mounts him. She digs her bloody fingers into its mane and spreads herself on its back, and they ride away without a look back from her.
         The ground is black. Everywhere is the smell of piss and copper. Someone gurgles. Something, I realize, is leaking from me.
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9. Balm of Gilead

Pestilent, pustulant, riddled by vice and wracked with pain, the King lay abed, and his subjects rejoiced, but secretly, and in expectation.
         The doctors, such of them who had not yet been killed, consulted their Galen and Avicenna and were united in their advice: alcohol and narcotics, so that the King be kept in a permanent stupor. In this way they hoped to wait out the storm. But the King, whose stomach had been flayed by a lifetime of excess, could no longer keep most liquids down, and spent his days sitting bedsore in a state of glittering fury.
         Astrologers and alchemists arrived, employing poultices, oils, ointments, linaments, douches and creams, and departed with no result and no payment except their lives. Servants left his chamber weeping, escorted by guards, and rarely returned.
         The King made his terrible command: I shall be cured within a week or everyone in this household shall die, by which he meant, beyond his doctors and servants, also his brother and sisters and children and grandchildren and mistresses and his new young mouse of a queen.
         Non interna, ergo externa, the doctors reasoned, and with the assistance of the queen they prepared a mixture of balsam and spirits of wine, in which they soaked his sheets and nightclothes and wrapped him therein, and sat all of them in eager attendance around the royal bed.
         That night the King writhed as the cloths burned his seeping skin but in the morning he showed more animation than he had in months. The process was repeated, with still more heartening results.
         On the fourth day the King proclaimed himself fit enough to hear the Holy Word, and it was read to him, such lessons on mercy and forgiveness as he desired to hear, and he wept at their truth. Thus it was also on the fifth and sixth days. His sores had dried, his lungs no longer rattled.
         On the seventh day he announced himself well enough to return to affairs of state the following morning. All in attendance proclaimed the glory of God. Solitude for this last night, prescribed the doctors, weepingly supported in this suggestion by the queen. So by the light of the late afternoon he read the gospels, and when the chamber grew dim he drew a bedside candle closer and in this way ignited his bedclothes and was engulfed in a terrible holocaust. He burned with his family Bible and although the horrified servants extinguished the inferno as quickly as they could, he perished in terrible voiceless agony over the following week, and all his subjects, much relieved, proclaimed the glory of God.
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10. Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex but Were Afraid

Someone, probably one of my aunts, bought Dr. Reuben’s book when it came out in paperback, and when my grandfather found out he banished it to the attic. Why he didn’t throw it out I don’t know, but I found it there when I was about eleven years old and immediately read it from cover to cover.
         It wasn’t until years later that I began to realize how bad most of it was. Recently I looked through an issue of Playboy from the month I was born and I found a long article by Betty Rollin just demolishing everything about the book. So even at the time, lots of people knew it was nonsense.
         Still, the damage had been done, to me at least. I grew up with weird ideas about gay people, and prostitutes, and the female orgasm, and consent, and milk for some reason.
         I’m looking at the book right now. I have it on my dining room table sitting next to Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter, a book I stole from the public library when I was thirteen. Everything I knew about hippies I learned from that book. Both paperbacks have lurid yellow covers and insistent title fonts. When I set them side by side like this, I can imagine them talking to each other, sharing secrets and harmful advice. I imagine my preteen self whispering to these books, I am curious, yellows.
         Sometimes I glance over my bookshelves, which contain much of a lifetime of my own reading, and I mentally sort the authors into categories: narcissist, racist, alcoholic, junkie, rapist, anti-Semite, fraud, charlatan, abuser, criminal, murderer, nazi. William S. Burroughs shot his wife. Rimbaud smuggled slaves and ivory. Alice Walker and her lizard people. Ezra Pound, my God. These are the men (and less often, women), who have formed my mind. I look at these books, and I imagine multiplying them a million million times, until I have a bookshelf the size of the world, and then I imagine a million billion mindless termites eating their way through it all, chewing away at any wisdom or goodness or compassion or human dignity, leaving behind just the ugliness to be preserved for future generations. That’s my vision of the future and I think it’s coming true. Sometimes I think it would be better if everybody forgot everything.
         I masturbate, and ejaculate clotted curds of cum onto the cover of Dr. Reuben’s book. Something is crawling around in my head so I smack myself and smack myself again until I dislodge a few termites from my ear, where they have crawled after hatching in the rottenest areas of my brain. They fly. I watch them circle each other in the air, then drop down to land in my spunk, and their wings yank off and they begin to mate—and with my notepad and pencil I document it all.
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11. Mostly I Object to His Adverbs

Pronouns? No, I don’t care what he calls himself. I object to his adverbs. A novelist should know better than this. He can’t just write about a guy walking to the store. He has to say that the guy walked there pensively or distractedly or whatever. You hear him tell a story, and it’s like he wants to nail down every possible element of it so hard that there’s no room for you to work any imagination. Plus, adverbs are all sort of boring anyway. He can’t say that a flight was long, or tedious, or even long and tedious. He has to call it a tediously long flight. For real, what does that add? It’s almost an anti-word. It sucks meaning out of the sentence. And it’s pompous. Some writers like to pad their word count and make fatter books, but that’s not what’s going on here: long and tedious is three words, tediously long is two. The flowers blossomed aromatically, my God. And the bees! The bees buzzed cheerfully. Do you know how many neurons there are in the human brain? Twenty-one billion. A bee has 170 thousand. That’s about 123,000 times fewer neurons. Do you think a bee is buzzing around feeling cheerful? Or feeling anything at all that we would consider feeling? It’s the pathetic fallacy on top of everything else. Liquidly, languidly, lavishly, lividly. Are there proportionately more adverbs that start with the letter L? Or is that just another weird tic of his? Luckily, lucratively. Lustily. That’s another thing. Sex talk is not improved with adverbs. She approached seductively, I can just about allow that one. But she rasped huskily? Or husked raspily, or whatever it was? Tantalizingly, delectably, spicily. Thirstily, get her a drink of water, my man. Women pose fetchingly. Guns are waved menacingly. Cars speed off rapidly. Bad guys act sinisterly. Look, a minute ago I used the word proportionately, I know you think that’s a gotcha but what other word would you use? You’d probably say in proportion to, but then you have to rearrange the whole sentence to work it that way and it’s awkward. Sometimes you don’t have a choice, I’m not a fundamentalist about this. But there’s a limit. To be clear, I don’t object to flat adverbs. A car can drive fast. The color blue can be a deep blue, at least it’s not coloring bluely or whatever. It’s those -ly sounds, every time I hear one, the prose deflates a little more. Oh, and plus, his books are also just full of people with names ending in -ly. Beverly, Bailey, Emily, Billy, Tilly, Lily, it’s like he’s self-aware enough to know he’s overusing the sound and is making jokes about it. But you can’t just say, I have a bad habit, and then just keep drawing everybody’s attention to your bad habit. That doesn’t improve life for anybody. It just makes you seem like a jerk.
I met a guy in the airport bar the other day, we got to talking and he asked me, If you had one wish, etc., and I said, I want to get rid of every adverb in the world. And he said, Thy benefaction shall be consummated ere the eve of the next full moon, and at first I thought he said it menacingly, but then I realized I was wrong and he had just said it in a menacing manner, and who knows, maybe the guy wasn’t just some crank, because I’m reading the new novel at the moment and I have to say it’s a whole lot better in the adverb regard.
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12. Family Planning

There were new neighbors on the other side of the double bungalow. The older gay guys had bought a condo and moved out, and these new kids sucked. They threw a party (thanks for the heads-up, guys) and invited Phillip and Sherry over. They’d already made the place their own, as Phillip, annoyed by a week of noisy hammering and thumping, was aware. The place was like a Victorian brothel, walls draped with dark brown fabrics in Indian patterns. Crummy old couches, beanbag chairs, a plastic bead curtain that clicked and clacked every time you went into the kitchen. A smell of marijuana (Phil had no objection to that) but also patchouli and sandalwood, jasmine, rose and musk. Plus all their longhaired party guests stank of B.O. All this on the other side of their own wall.
         The skinny one, Rocket (did he hear that name right?) kept touching Phil on the shoulder as they talked and using his name a lot: You see what I mean, Phil; look at it this way, Phil; you get it, right, Phil?
         Rocket kept talking about boundaries, house rules, expectations, good neighborliness. (Who are you to talk this way, when Sherry and I have lived here five years? Phil had never met such a condescending son of a bitch.)
         They’d brought over some canned margaritas, and to get away from Rocket and his friends (roommates? who else lived here anyway?), Phil went to get some drinks. The kitchen was unoccupied except for two little girls, each about two years old, sitting alone on the kitchen table. They seemed happy enough playing with each other, but that was no place for them. Where are your mommies? asked Phil. Where are your mommies and daddies?
         One of the girls said: Up-stairs, and pointed. But upstairs was only the shared attic space. He lifted both girls down from the table and led them out of the kitchen.
         The party had moved to the backyard. At least you can breathe back here, he thought.
         One of the roommates (?) came over to Phil. He seemed to ignore the kids. You’re welcome to use our grill, he said, but please clean it afterward, and don’t grill any meat on it.
         Whose kids are these? asked Phil. The guy walked away without answering. It was starting to drizzle. Where was Sherry?
         Two cute hippie chicks were sitting on a bench eating veggie kebabs. Are these your kids? he asked them. They laughed.
         Hey everybody! he yelled. Hey everybody! Whose kids are these? No one paid any attention. The kids seemed unconcerned. He got them a couple of Sprites and sat at the picnic table. The sun came out again and Phil shivered in a sunbeam. Rocket came over and sat next to the kids but ignored them.
         You having a good time, Phil? he asked.
         These kids need their mothers, he said.
         You don’t need to worry about them, said Rocket. They take care of themselves.
         That’s not possible. They’re, like, two.
         Rocket touched him on the shoulder. You should take care of them, then, he said with a look of pity.
         Phil and Sherry raised the girls for the next four years and when the commune moved out and the young newlyweds moved in and gave the place a new coat of paint and an overall well-needed reno, Phil and Sherry packed in a rush and left the girls in the attic (no forwarding address), and when the young newlyweds found them they had no choice but to take them in, these cheerful two-year olds.
💀

13. April Fucking Fools

Barry woke up thinking it would be a good day. He’d wrapped the big work project, and had nothing on his calendar until the following Monday. So why not enjoy the perfect weather and take a walk in the park? But on his way there he fell down an open manhole and died. Fucking Barry.
         A passing samaritan saw it happen. He shouted and waved for help. A bunch of folks ran into the middle of the street and tried calling down to Barry, but he was already dead, alas. Then a big white Ford F-150, its brake lines filled with chocolate syrup, came zooming down the steep street and splattered them all. Five dead in traffic accident! read the initial news reports. But that didn’t count Barry, or, oops, the driver of the truck, who plowed into a fruit stand and broke his neck. Bananas everywhere! People slipped and cracked their spines.
         The cops arrived. They were in a foul mood: their morning jelly donuts had been filled with mayonnaise, and they had arrested the hapless baker, who now shared a cell with a psychopathic strangler. The cops shouted keep back, keep back, to the onlookers, then started tasing folks. Their taser batteries had been secretly upgraded, and the people they shocked jerked all over the place, their hair standing straight up, and smoke shot out from their shirt fronts.
         Meanwhile the fire station was on fire and all the water was off! Those guys just didn’t know what to do. The chief stood outside watching the blaze, his hands on his hips and a Kick Me sign on his back. So some guy kicked him in the knees and he fell down and then a guy kicked his face in.
         The 911 operators were trying to get their computers to stop showing porn videos starring their children. In the skyscrapers, hidden pneumatic systems blew fountains of shit at anyone flushing. Countless bicycle couriers went down, sticks in their spokes. In St. Mary’s ICU, a dozen glitter bombs went off. Throughout the city, tampons were found to contain surprise embedded ground glass (for that just-been-raped feeling!). Junkies had their stashes replaced with cement dust, and babies’ dolls wept toxic sludge. The mayor was nowhere to be found: he had been Saran-wrapped to his motel room bed, and a Do Not Disturb sign hung on the door.
         And so it went. April, its Day come round again at last, kept on fucking with all the fucking fools.
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14. Managing Expectations

It was Stage 4, and the relative five-year survival rate was 27%. But the doctor assured them that treatments were advancing all the time. It was far too early to despair.
         On the ride home she cried. He would have too, but he needed to focus on driving. At the house they laid down on the bed and held each other and let it all out.
         The next morning he felt a little better. Clearer, his mind fresh like blue skies after a thunderstorm. But every time he tried to think about it, a little twinge in his gut warned him to stay away. He found that he couldn’t raise the subject with her, but she didn’t either so he supposed she was grateful for it.
         Eventually they told their friends and family. She started chemo. They shaved her head. They took that trip to Spain. Secretly he was buying experimental drugs from China and Russia on the web and having them shipped to a PO Box rented under a false name. He slipped them in with her prescribed meds. She would never have allowed it otherwise; she had worked for thirty years as a consumer safety inspector and had seen her share of quacks.
         Her moods were erratic. She smoked a lot of pot. The cancer didn’t seem to be spreading further, that was something at least.
         A year passed in this way. She seemed to be improving. He kept giving her the weird pills. He had an affair. Eventually the doctor started using works like encouraging. He broke it off with the girlfriend. Mom found out anyway and threw him out of the house and my sister moved in with her.
         Without the extra pills she seemed to get worse. Six weeks later she died in the hospital. Sister wouldn’t speak to dad anymore. Neither would the girlfriend. He was alone except for me.
         I asked to see one of the pills. It was a capsule, not too big, red on one end and white on the other, with Cyrillic writing on it. I broke it open. Inside was nothing, literally nothing. They’d dried out, dad said, but they’d contained the tears of Russian saints and Chinese sages. He’d ordered a new batch to take himself, he said. In his mind they had given her an extra year of life, such as it was. If he took them regularly himself, who knows how many extra years he could get.
         Since then he’s lived a lot longer than the actuarial tables would suggest, but I doubt it’s a very happy life. Then again, he doesn’t ask for much: not love, not friendship, not happiness, success or recognition. All desires eliminated, a bodhisattva of boredom. I visit my father in the nursing home where he has been living for the last thirty years and bring him his share of the pills. We watch the others play bingo and we barely talk and he never once casts a single look at any of the pretty nurses.
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15. Write for Free Sample

Love potions brewed from cinnamon and the boiled sperm of ancient giants. An intoxicating liqueur distilled from a diabetic’s pancreas. Oriental smelling salts to awaken your inner chi, derived from rendered corpses provided by the Great Leap Forward. Other liquid aids for memory and alertness. These concoctions advertised in the pages of Soldier of Fortune and Werewolf by Night in their November 1972 installments, sold by mail order: cashier’s checks sent to a post office box in Omaha.
         Some weeks later, a string-tied brown paper parcel arrives. You take it to your garage to unwrap it. Instructions for use in purple mimeo: The ingurgitation of this substance to be accompanied by these particular gestures of the hands, these particular concepts strongly focused upon in the mind, no sexual intercourse for a week beforehand. Not a problem for you, you think.
         You are looking for a sense of freedom. Other men have affairs, abandon their families, write Rabbit, Run. Tinker with cars. You drink this gritty brown elixir derived from the weeping sores of asteroids and dream of traveling through space with Buck Rogers and John Carter. Nothing happens.
         You go to work, you go to the bar, you go home, you go to sleep. Your kid bothers you about homework. Your wife bothers you about money and booze. The next day you drink the seawater and ambergris potion and in your mind you hold the idea of the deep black sea and the curious luminescent fellow travelers there. Nothing happens.
         You go to work, you go to the bar, you go home, you have a fight, you go back to the bar, you go home, you go to sleep on the couch. The next day you drink the potion made from the vaginal secretions of virgins strangled with silken cords. You’re beginning to doubt the efficaciousness of all this.
         Shouldn’t you be at work? your wife asks, after the kid is gone to school. The spring day is bright and blue; you are lingering in the driveway by the car while the bees buzz and the neighbors eavesdrop. You look pale, she says.
         Your skin looks flaky, she says.
         You wave away her concern. A few winged things float free from your hand and fly away.
         What was that? she asks. Drymouthed you try to answer, but pink moths detach from the inside of your throat and the ones not mashed by your teeth escape into the morning sky.
         She backs away. Ten thousand tiny black eyes open on your skin. You flutter beneath your clothes. Then the surface of you unfolds into thousands of beautiful silken moths, which stir their tessellated wings into alertness and stream out from your sleeves and pantslegs and collar—your skin taking flight in a cloud of white wings and eyelash-fine antennae. They soar and disperse; the rest of you, abandoned, sunlight-gleaming muscles leaking, collapses in a red cascade, accompanied by your cordless screams and Mary’s terrified stare and the perplexed barking of the neighbor’s spaniel as it leaps and snaps without effect at the many parts of you now winging among the flowers and the shade.
💀

16. The Johnny Rooks

Private Warren lay all night in the freezing rain. There wasn’t much pain. The bullet had clipped something high up in his neck and now he couldn’t move or cry out. But he didn’t want to think about that, plus he was breathing normally, and no one seemed to be shooting anymore. He’d slid down the slope but, come dawn, someone from 4 or 5 Platoon would notice he was missing and get a team together to collect him. But his teeth were chattering and his fingers were blue.
         Eventually the rain stopped and the sky began to lighten. Everything was covered in mist. He couldn’t see two meters in front of him.
         Then from out of the murk came a flapping of wings. A swirl of mist, and Warren was face to face with a bird, maybe 25 centimeters tall, black with a white tail and an orange face. A sharp hooked beak. They stared at each other. The bird paced back and forth. They stared at each other. The bird paced, back and forth.
         The bird shrieked like a cat: wee-ooo! From all around, echoes and responses: we-ooo, weee-ooooo-ooooo.
         More birds arrived, some smaller, some bigger. They paced and watched him. They made clicking noises. There was a sense of careful deliberation.
         The first bird trotted over and pecked Warren on the scalp. He barely felt it, or the trickle of blood that ran down his forehead. The bird returned to its flock. More clicking. Then they advanced.
         Lieutenant Ascroft, alerted by the noise, emerged from the evaporating mist and fired his SLR into the air. The birds flew away furious.
         Onboard Mother Hen, the doctor said most of the wounds were superficial. He would eventually regain sight in his left eye, but the right one is a no-hoper, I’m afraid. As for the paralysis, we will have to wait and see. Entirely possible it’s only temporary.
         So Private Warren, sightless, his head and upper body cocooned in gauze, lay in his hospital bed in the windowless cabin on the hospital ship and dreamed of flapping wings and bloody beaks and the screams of the johnny rooks.
         Now, many years later, he is a menace to his neighbors, this half-blind old man who stalks the sidewalks and throws stones at every bird he sees and occasionally breaks a window. We honor him for his service, say the adults, but this is getting to be too much. The teenagers, for their part, have learned to imitate a variety of bird calls, and they amuse themselves by serenading him at night. No one knows that Private Warren still keeps his old Browning Hi-Power oiled and in easy reach by his bedside.
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17. The Billion-year Bloom

We visited the arboretum. There was a heck of a line. The kids were impatient, so Vicki took them to the cafeteria for a pop while I kept our place in line. I chatted with a couple from Philadelphia. You flew all the way here for this? Well, they also had a kid in college who was just a few hours away, so they’d decided to make a whole little vacation out of it. They’d heard about it in one of their Facebook groups. Me? I’d read an interesting article in Scientific American. Ooh, Scientific American, they repeated, in a tone that made it seem like some sort of accomplishment.
         The line was pretty long, and snaked all the way through the building and out into the parking lot, but it was moving pretty fast. Already while we’d been talking we must have moved a good thirty feet, and I was beginning to think I should call Vicki to make sure she and the kids got back before the staff let me in, when they came back on their own.
         They’d had ice cream, she told me. I introduced them to the Philadelphia folks: this is Vicki, Vincent and Veronica. Oh how charming, said the lady (Misty). Va-va-va-voom, said the guy (Ray), and we smiled. And I’m Kevin, I said, I don’t fit the pattern.
         There’s no crime in that, said Ray.
         Then we were in the arboretum. It was hot, with sunlight streaming through the glass roof, and humid from little nozzles spraying the plants everywhere. Up at the far end there was a crowd of people, and everywhere we looked were flowers and green plants and growing things of all sizes and shapes.
         Don’t touch anything, said Vicki, but the kids were in a happy mood, content to just look at it all.
         In a few minutes we’d made it to the front. The flower was flanked by two security guys in olive tee-shirts and earpieces, like they were guarding a President. It was a little duller in color than it had looked in the magazine photos, but taller than I expected, reaching almost to the guards’ shoulders before drooping down another foot or so, and ending in the famous leathery and wrinkled pod.
         It upended the scientific consensus, I quoted to the kids. Previously from that far back they’d only found fossils of green seaweed, but then in central Africa, a place no one would have expected it, they found a pod of it encased in a sort of amber. As usual, I wished I knew more about it so I could impress the kids. For instance, what did they mean by a sort of amber, when presumably there weren’t any trees to form amber? Did the plant make the stuff itself, as a sort of way of hibernating? If so it had worked because after many trials and errors the scientists had managed to grow a living, full-size example. And so here we are.
         Ray and Misty looked quietly at the plant, hands folded, almost reverential. Vincent said, I’m gonna go give it a kiss. Shush, said Vicki, but it was almost like the plant had heard him, because as we watched, it straightened up and swayed its wrinkled leathery pod in our direction and a crack formed along the length of the pod, with a rotten-meat stink from a long time before meat even existed, and some thick golden goo started dripping from it and it almost seemed to smile, and inside the mouth we could see a tongue studded with a hundred thorns.
         The security guys jumped back, but it was already too late for them.
💀

18. Headless Body in Tapas Bar

The menu suggests more than it explains. There are no photographs because, chef says, no reproduction could do his food justice.
         Pintxos matrimonio: Anchovies from the coast of Asturias, flown in live just this morning, filleted, cured in vinegar, dressed with garlic, parsley and Morellana Picuda, served on a lightly browned, delicately puffed pastry bed. The anchovies are also used for gilda, rustically speared with guindillas and a variety of green olives: gordal, hojiblanca and manzanilla.
         The mushroom albóndigas: grass-fed free-range beef and pork; pimentón agridulce; cremini, oyster and chanterelle mushrooms. Calamares fritos and shrimps in green sauce, again from the coast of Asturias; vegetable tortillas with locally-grown spinach, zucchini, and bell pepper; fingerling papas; sliced eggplant fried with honey; bacon-wrapped chorizo; red wine-poached chorizo; shrimp and chorizo flatbread; bonito del norte in a port wine glaze.
         Chef insists that although all of these ingredients are of the highest quality, there is no pretension here: No expense has been spared but no unnecessary expenditure has been incurred. An error among many in his profession, he says, is to equate rarity with quality. The best ingredients, he maintains, are often common and closest to home.
         We ask a few questions. Over here, he directs us: The tacos de sesos with cilantro, onion and lime; and the Sacromonte omelette, fresh from the pan and you see still steaming.
         Outside the windows the red and blue lights flash in the rain. Keeping back the crowd, the officers unspool the yellow tape.
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19. Now It Can Be Told in All Its Glory

         Now it can be told
         Now that we have met
         The world may know

         Hau sat in the shade of a date palm and reapplied his makeup. The sun was low, so the workers faced east as they dug. Soon it would be dusk, and they would retire to the camp, to begin again in the morning. But then, a shout! Hau stood and walked out onto the site.
         Amon-is-pleased approached. A chamber of some sort, he said. We have uncovered a wall but I do not recognize the writing on it. Together they descended the slope into the pit. On all sides men were hauling away dirt and sand. Under a tent lay all the old things they had discovered so far: pottery shards, strange plates of pounded brass, a worn stone that seemed to have two faces carved upon it. On the far side of the pit the workers with their camel-hair brushes swept sand from a slanted granite wall.
         Hau was a scholar, that was the reason he was here in this place, but the carvings on the wall meant nothing to him. If they represented sounds, he had no education that would reveal their meaning. If they were images, then they were of very unusual things. The men had uncovered the edges of the slab, but the light was going, and it was necessary to stop for now.
         That night he dreamt of his first love, young Peaceful-is-her-face, who had died of a wetness in the lungs when she was only twelve years old. He had not thought of her in many years, and for much of the morning her memory distracted him from his work. But soon the men had partly moved the slab, and threaded the ropes behind it, and bound it tight, and Hau gave the order to pull.
         Inside the chamber, illuminated by their torches, lay two bodies on an elevated platform, a man and a woman, entwined, dessicated but not decayed, among simple cloths that were perhaps once brightly colored. Hau reverently unfolded them. No grave-goods were to be seen, but on the walls Hau saw more of the strange inscriptions and now he knew that it was a song.
         Amon-is-pleased was astonished. Who are they? By their features they are not of Black Earth, he said. Yes, Hau agreed, it seems we are not the first people to dwell in this land. A mighty power laid these stones and entombed these lovers, but I do not know who they might have been.
         Gods? asked Amon-is-pleased.
         Possibly so, said Hau.
         He took careful drawings of the inscriptions and then ordered the slab replaced and the pit filled in. It was obvious to even the most untrustworthy worker that there was nothing of value to be robbed from here. Hau and his men then dug in other places and found many other curious things.
         Some time later, I sat in the dank, cigarette-rich club and watched the big lady take the stage, resplendent with her black lace-trimmed gown and her gleaming marcelled hair. The band swung and she sang:

         As an inspiration
         Every other tale
         Of boy meets girl is just an imitation

         The great love story
         Has never been told before
         But now
         Now it can be told

         I applauded, so moved, so deeply moved, remembering those old days, and us.
𓄣𓄣

20. Contact with the Enemy

Louis Jon had won shelfloads of awards and his plays were performed on five continents. But he had not yet worked with Dillon Hook, because Jon was an unashamed old-school communist of the New York variety and Hook had one of the most beautiful faces in show business but, when all was said and done, his politics were somewhere to the right of Torquemada. Hook’s wife was a waifish thing and his children wore little suits or plain dresses with ribbons in their hair. He hosted fundraisers for bad people. He had informed on many colleagues over the years.
         Still, there was a temptation. The circles they both moved in, though not small, had considerable overlap, and rumors would sprout: Hook had written a play (his first) and was pressing Jon to direct—or Jon had written a play on the life of Julius Evola and wanted Hook for the lead—or the two of them would put differences aside and celebrate human forgiveness in a new production of The Winter’s Tale. All of it nonsense, but neither man had completely ruled out the possibility. At the Met Gala they shared a vape and talked about Bertolt Brecht.
         Finally, the announcement: Hook would play Galileo in the new season. Immediately there were problems. Photographers captured a fistfight at rehearsal. Hook was recorded, drunk in a bar, spouting anti-Semitic slurs. Jon announced that he would not dedicate the play to the memory of a deceased right-wing podcaster. Still the production advanced.
         Opening night. The play begins thirty minutes late. The audience is in a bad mood. Hook, when he takes the stage, is stiff, and his performance is strange, almost self-mocking.
         By the second act it is clear that the play is a disaster. Two hours later it mercifully ends and it does not have a second performance. Louis Jon will not comment to the press, but this leaves the field to Hook, who controls the narrative and shatters Jon’s hitherto-invulnerable career. One wonders if this was his intention all along.
         Hook moves into film work, then pundithood. Jon drops out of sight, except from his neighbors on the Upper West Side who say hello while walking their dogs. Years later on a podcast, Hook tries to defend his performance as Galileo from a flat-earther interviewer, and comes off like an out-of-touch old fool. His pretty face has had too much work done, it is decided. He is memed and shamed online. His friends in the industry no longer return his calls. His wife’s influencer business is brigaded and destroyed. The family moves from DC back to New York. Uptown looks much the same. He meets Louis Jon for lunch every Tuesday.
         On one of these occasions he drinks too much and accuses Jon of destroying his career. The nerve of him! But Jon is sanguine: he knows what they say about frogs and scorpions, etc. Next week it is like it never happened.
         Some time later Jon drops dead from a stroke, and his wife, surprisingly, asks Hook to deliver the eulogy. Once in front of the crowd Hook impulsively discards his anodyne remarks and delivers a scathing indictment of Jon’s politics, intelligence, trustworthiness and sex life. The crowd boos him out of the synagogue. This performance does nothing for his career, but is favorably reviewed in what remains of the left-wing press.
💀

21. Someone Fleeing through a Forest—Undressed Ladies Chained to Dungeon Walls—Young Lovers Dead upon the Beach

I’m not sure what we’re watching, but it definitely is colorful. Saturated reds and blues and greens; each room of this castle—I think it’s a castle, maybe it’s a chateau—seems to have its own primary color. The director went through a lot of gel filters.
         After a prologue in which some people were chased around and killed, two sisters (blonde and brunette) came to this place as guests, or because their car broke down, and found another pair of sisters (redheads) living there. At a dinner party there were men as well, from the nearby village or estate. Some of the men dress very old-fashioned; some of them are very modern for the period, really far-out. There’s a psychedelic rock band playing over by the fireplace. A hunchbacked weirdo lurks.
         Fog.
         I don’t know what languages the actors were originally speaking; this copy is dubbed into English. They’re having a creepy conversation now: The men (who are much older than the ladies) are talking about female sexual awakening. One of them tells a story of a girl he knew when they were both fourteen; I can’t exactly follow what he’s saying, but whatever it is it’s inappropriate in the 21st century. Inappropriate for any dinner party anywhen, I think, even Italy (are we in Italy?) in the 1970s.
         Flowing nightdresses, braless breasts, candlesticks and circular stone stairways, moonlight in a rainbow of colors. A dungeon. Instruments of torture. I sneak a glance over at my girl: Is she bored? No, she seems into it. I run my hand up her thigh and she doesn’t stop me. Elsewhere in the theater, people crunch popcorn. I have a hard-on and everything smells like butter.
         One set of sisters is flogging the other two. Red slashes on their bare backs. Blood-covered tits, the shadow of pubic hair behind the diaphanous gowns. Shrieks that sound more like sex than pain. The men, from behind their dark glasses, watch with no expression. Some parts of this movie I think are meant to be a dream, but which parts?
         The hero arrives. I’d forgotten about him. A swordfight, not a very good one, but spirited. The combatants travel from the yellow library down the green stairs and into the saturated day-for-night blue of the overgrown cemetery. I lean over to kiss her behind the ear. She turns my way and sticks her tongue in my mouth. The rest of the movie is a blur.
         When the lights come up we hurry out to ocean salt spray and the whish of the waves. The boardwalk is nearly empty. The moon is full and everything is either very white or very black. We sneak down near the water by the pilings and I pull off her panties and eat her pussy, with my feet kicking in the surf. At one point she stops me, says wait wait, there’s someone, but whatever she saw I don’t see it so I go back to work. When she’s ready for it I stick it in—and after all that we’re a total mess of sand and seawater and missing underwear drifting on the tide.
         What was that movie? she asks. I laugh. We lay there and look at the sea, which is green and getting greener. A cloud filters the moonlight into blue and the streetlamps on the street above us shine bright yellow. She makes a coughing sound and I reach over and she’s really wet—and then I look at her, and then everything around us is red and getting redder.
💀

22. When I Am Murdered by ICE

When I’m murdered by ICE it’ll probably be because I blew a whistle at them. People might pretend I was up to something more important, but I’ll bet I was just on my way to the store.
         The right wing will label me a domestic terrorist and a race traitor, but because I’m a middle-aged white man with no criminal record, they will need to dig a little to smear me. They will discover my idiosyncrasies, such as not ever having a driver’s license, renting not owning (at my age!), my periods of unemployment, and the fact that I am married but have no children. My social media will tell them that I am a frothing leftist lunatic, and they will say the same about everyone I know. With an unsympathetic eye they will scan everything I have written and find evidence that I am a sexually distorted alcoholic with violent ideations. Embarrassing photos, of which there are many, will circulate on CBS and FOX.
         There is a Republican congressman who shares my name. He will get a lot of airtime. He will contrast himself, an Army Special Forces officer, with obese me, who has never served in the military. He, a gun shop owner, will deride my armchair interest in wargames and other such effeminacies. My name and his will be eternally linked; whether this harms or helps his political ambitions I can’t say.
         The people in my life will exaggerate my accomplishments and the quality of my character. It will erroneously appear that I was a critical component of many social and professional networks. Ex-girlfriends will be interviewed and will have kind things to say mostly. I hope people throw a party for me at my favorite bar, and I hope they dedicate a table to me there.
         My books will sell enormously well for a time. AI will scrape them. More people, orders of magnitude more, will read my stories than ever did during my lifetime. They will generally come away disappointed.
         A memorial, with pictures and flowers, will emerge at the spot where I was murdered. It will be vandalized, after which volunteers will guard over it. Posters of my face will appear in the neighborhood. I will join the array of those already murdered here. They will say my name at marches. (My name, not the other guy’s.) Maybe the Governor will proclaim a day for me. Maybe Bruce Springsteen will add my name to his song.
         That’s what’ll happen I suppose, and to be honest if it’s got to happen it seems like one of the more okay ways to go.
         And how will you be murdered by ICE?, I ask the pretty girl politely. But she says she needs to refill her drink and she leaves, and I don’t see her again for the rest of the night.
💀

23. The Light Breakfasters

A Caribbean morning, bright and lovely. We queue for the buffet. She takes fruit and a muffin, pours herself some tea. I load up on bacon and eggs, coffee black. What gender stereotypes we are! she laughs. I laugh too, for the benefit of the other vacationers on the patio. We are a charming young couple, perhaps on our honeymoon. Down across the water, people are swimming and waterskiing. On the beach they are soaking up the rays.
         A lone cloud drifts across the sun, and everything is momentarily pale. I pour Tabasco on my eggs and dig in.
         A brochure advertises an inexpensive day trip to the local ruins. The concierge asks if we would be interested. She and I have been there many times already, I answer. I don’t say, We were born there, rather far below there, in a lightless cavern, from a sea of sulfurous mud. One day, just for something to do I suppose, the mud generated me, or maybe she came first, but in either case the first one crawled out of the slime and not long after the other one crawled out from the first of us. And here we are!
         We make small talk with the old couple at the next table. You’re from Oregon! We’ve never been to Oregon. But, she adds for their benefit, we hear it’s beautiful and we’d love to go sometime. I tease: I hear it’s dark and rainy all the time. Oh no, they insist, there’s plenty of sunlight. How lovely! she gushes as a light rain begins to fall. We are all perfectly dry under the loggia roof. A pleasant breeze moves among us.
         What’s that you got there? the old man asks, indicating my beach reading. I show him: It is James Joyce’s Ulysses, a heavy choice for a vacation book, and he says as much. I prefer Alan Furst or John D. Macdonald, he says. Fine choices, I say, but this book has sentimental value. I remember Dublin, dear dirty Dublin as Joyce used to say, I remember its dark stones, its rain, its Nighttown.
         He was a fine stylist, I go on: We are stonecold and pure. We eat electric light. And just to underscore the point, the power on the patio goes out. We all laugh at the coincidence.
         Now there are storm clouds. The old couple begins to reevaluate their plans for the day. If it should keep up raining, we can’t… No, these tropical storms never last long, Maggie. But look at the color of the sky.
         I’m not sure color is even the right word for it, I say. It’s not much of a joke, and they don’t laugh. The four of us are alone on the patio, the others having all taken shelter somewhere.
         We should go, says the old lady. Bill, Bill where are you? From between the tiles of the patio floor, the mud bubbles up. All the light in the sky streams into it, in waves of fading iridescent colors. We sit there and finish our meal while the rain stops and the sun returns.
         Two busboys are clearing the old couple’s table. Los turistas son un desperdicio, whispers one. Mira, la señora ni siquiera le dio un mordisco a su bollo.
💀

24. Jack Cade’s Dream

Until men stop eating meat, my trade abides. In times of peace we butcher lamb and pig and cow, in war we butcher men. One’s more steady than the other, but that other is the jack of dreams, and Jack was the maker of the dream.
         To be revenged upon the lords who break our backs, who pull the houses from our heads, who ravish daughters as we watch—to drag their bodies through our towns, to burn the courts and drown the agents of the law. Abolish licences and dues, abolish history and money. In uniformity drink strong beer and gallop as we will along the lanes, up Fish Street, down Saint Magnus, to Cheapside and beyond. No wealth but all in common, all: We share our bread, we share our work and wives, and what will not be shared, we take. And all the conduits run not with piss but red with wine.
         Such the dream, God be our guide.
         But now I sleep in dirt and bathe in grass, pursued by maws, dine nightly on the worms and spiders. My brothers all are scattered, and poor Jack Cade stares sightless, bod’less top the castle gate, alone with none to kiss. The women shout, but not in terror, at my sight, and men appear with forks and fire—and poor Dick flees still farther.
         In the north, they say, live stranger kings and stranger meat and stranger women. Wishes, dreams, and power to be had, for those with will enough to dare, and on those blighted heaths, or so they tell, a butcher can become a prince. Why not? And weren’t Jack a carpenter? So there to I, shoeless, bootless, make my way, and I rest when rest might come. Three times tonight I heard a farm cat’s cry, and four a hedge-pig’s whine, and now the rain has made a river of this rut in which I lie. I freeze, I scream and starve, but tonight I dream Jack’s dream.
💀

25. A Fish Unknown to Science

Dimmi noticed a splash of color somewhere deep in the mass of flopping flounder. He slackened the net and some of the fish spilled out over the deck. The other men shouted in annoyance but he found what he was looking for: two feet long, round as a keg, with rudimentary segmented limbs sharing space with dorsal and pectoral fins, bright green eyes on either side of its bloated head, a squashed snout like a boxer’s nose. He hauled it out and placed it on ice in a garbage can.
         Later in his cabin he examined it more closely. It had personality, this one. The face, ruptured from the decompression, seemed to sneer at him, a Sid Vicious fish. It smelled of rotten salt and citrus. He took some pictures and sent them to a friend. He stored it in a cooler and slept for a few hours before the next shift.
         The friend responded while Dimmi slept: Lots of damage, but what a green! I wonder what it looked like when it was alive.
         Dimmi worked hard and he usually slept dreamlessly, but not tonight. Tonight he swam in green depths, among needlelike spires and tumbled cyclopean stones, a city ruined yet somehow intact. Underneath the silt and clay and radioactive iron, he knew to his comfort, beat a heart the size of the moon.
         In the morning he ate the eyes of the fish and cut gills into the sides of his neck. When the other men found him he was flopping on the cabin floor, vomiting seawater and gasping out his last. As the other men crossed themselves and stepped back, Alex ran to him and tried to stop his bleeding. Drooping and deflating on Dimmi’s cot, the fish watched eyelessly and dead. When the men threw it back into the sea it drifted downward for hours before regaining its proper face and life.
💀

26. Fright

To answer your question, they call me Fright because my father nicknamed me that when I was born. I think he didn’t like my face. As I grew up no one else did either. I never wanted any sort of trouble, but once you have the reputation it’s hard. When I got into fights I always tried to let the other guy get in the first punch, which I figured established me on the moral high ground. Later on, that wasn’t always feasible: With knives and guns you really have to get in there first, you know.
         In my line of work you don’t find too many people to talk to, so I sure appreciate this. Actually there was this one lady, they sent me to her in high school, she took an interest. She got me to talk about my childhood, and it did help me to put some things together.
         When I was seven I had scarlet fever—I didn’t know that, but she had my medical records. And actually I did remember it, sort of. Right before I got sick, I’d been reading this picture book, something about Oriental folk tales it must have been, and the only thing I remember about it for sure is this scene of these Chinese villagers lighting all these red lanterns and some of them they set off to float off on the lake and some of them must have been lighter because they drifted off into the night sky, so there were dozens of these red lanterns near and far, on the water and in the air and reflected on the water too. And that got mixed up in my mind with my real life, so sometimes it seemed like I was in my bed and sometimes it seemed like I was floating off somewhere with the lanterns, and sometimes I felt like each lantern floating away was taking part of me with it and leaving the rest of me behind. It might sound pretty but mostly it was lonely.
         One night when I was just about better my mother woke me up and hustled me outside. All our neighbors were there. The apartment building across the street was on fire. Yeah, it did remind me of the lanterns. We watched as the firemen put it out, and no one was hurt, but later she whispered to me, Don’t tell anyone what you did. I didn’t understand. I’d been asleep, I hadn’t done anything.
         But when I was all better it was hard to know what was real anymore and what was my imagination. I don’t have what you call dreams. What happens in my brain is real no matter what time of day it is. I got my arm cut last week and it was the same as watching sap leak out from a broken branch. When I get hit in the face I see red lanterns. I know this isn’t normal, but to me it always seems like the world is a kind of skin of scum on the water that I could brush all aside if I wanted to, or I could poke you with my fingernail and you’d pop like a bubble or just disappear into ripples.
         Now where were we?
💀

27. Malice

Maybe it’s a strange time to get into all of this, but since you asked: When I try to envision the future it just looks like more of the same, but shittier. Maybe it’s a failure of imagination on my part, I don’t know, but it does tend to make a person mean. It’s like, this is a metaphor, every hill gets steeper and steeper, or like every meal you’re ever going to eat will be worse than the shitty one you just ate. It makes you want to give up on eating, or kill the cook.
         My first girlfriend, she left me because I didn’t have a direction in life. So I picked a direction. My second girlfriend left me because I didn’t make enough money. So I made more money. My next girlfriend left me because she said I wasn’t a good person. Now that was a stumper. I’m still working on that one.
         I know it’s not what you asked, but you shared so much about yourself, I felt I should explain my position a little. I had a great childhood, I loved my parents and my brother and sisters, and they loved me. Then one by one, they died: mom cancer, dad a car accident, one sis two sis, dead sis flu sis. That wasn’t a very clear sort of joke, sorry: I mean that Emily killed herself and Jenny died of covid. My brother, I’m not proud of this, I killed myself.
         Plus you lose friendships, and relationships, and you get older and your body starts to screw up. You wake up one morning with a stiff shoulder and maybe it goes away in an hour or maybe it’s something you live with now for the rest of your life. Your favorite new TV show gets canceled after one season, you try to re-read a favorite book from your childhood and discover it sucks.
         Just a couple examples off the top of my head. It’s everything big or small, shittier and shittier every day, fractally shittier. You go on the Internet, you see that this country is getting worse all the time. Country, hell, the whole world, with climate change and all. Plus people are just getting meaner and meaner, so it tempts you to be meaner and meaner too, and that can actually be good in certain circumstances, as you know, but it wears you down after a while. At first you’re cruel because it gets you something, then you’re cruel because you like it, and you end up being cruel because it’s the easiest thing to do.
         Sure, I have good memories, but every day that goes by they get covered with more and more bad ones. Do you know what I did last week? Well, sure you do, but maybe you can imagine how that makes a person feel. Of course you can. So I’m asking you: How do you keep going after all that? I’m genuinely curious. Some people say, you got to keep up hope, but I don’t understand hope, man. People keep having kids of their own to try to fix the mistakes their own parents made raising them, but people have been doing that since the dawn of time and if it was going to work I think it’d’ve probably worked by now. You think about it, a kid’s really nothing but a fuck-trophy.
         Some people make jokes to cover it all up, but you’re a pretty serious-minded individual, I can see that. You must have some sort of secret.
         But you’re right, we probably shouldn’t waste any more time. So where were we?
💀

28. Dumpy People Having Affairs

No thank you, said Mrs. Chattington, before swanning off. I gave during the last revolution.
         Well okay!
         These rich people were getting to her a little, so Trish left Chris at the donation table and took a look round the gallery. It wasn’t a very interesting show: paintings amateurish, installations indifferent, mixed media meh. Everything had sexually transgressive names like Hatefuck, Goonstate, and Collaborative Vasectomies. That one was called Jane Russell’s Chest: well, it certainly was. She was put in mind of Carolee Schneemann, COUM, Guerrilla Girls. The music sounded like Lydia Lunch. These points of reference were all several decades old. Was she out of touch, or were the artists? No, it’s the children who are wrong, she decided, feeling elderly.
         Titties and Demigods, Whore of Fang Rock. You nerds! A murky brown gouache called Dumpy People Having Affairs. A mannequin-based thing called Hand Jobs for the Whole Family. Oh come on now. She went back to the table.
         The dumpy people in the painting made a note of her indifference. An association meeting was called—at the very least, they agreed, they had a public image problem.
         Sure, I’m not Clark Gable, said one of the dumpy people. But used to be even Elliott Gould could be a sex symbol.
         Harold, you’re no Elliott Gould, said Harriet.
         And you’re no… no Jane Russell, Harriet. My point is that I think we’ve let our standards slip a little.
         Harry, there are twelve of us in here, plus Jesus, said Arthur, and we’ve already had sex in every conceivable combination.
         He’s right, you know, said Mabel. I’m sick of every dick in here. Don’t look so hurt, Harold. It’s just overfamiliarity. We’re not giving it our all anymore.
         They brainstormed. Group counseling seemed implausible. But what to do about this rut? Hazel was the one who suggested they open it up a little.
         Open it up?
         To Jane Russell maybe? asked Harold.
         Well, I wasn’t thinking the collaborative vasectomy guys, said Hazel. But maybe also go, you know, a little exotic?
         You’re so bad, laughed Gladys, mock-slapping Hazel’s shoulder.
         Later, after most of the guests had left, Trish took one last turn around the gallery. The dumpy-people thing looked even more overcrowded than it had earlier, but maybe a smidge livelier than she’d given it credit for.
         At the table Chris was nowhere to be found. That was the problem with volunteers, she thought. No buy-in, they just want to get their hours done and go home. Kids! She packed up the flyers and the buttons and let herself out.
💀

29. Your Face is Momentary

Your face the surface of the earth reshaped: the icecaps of your eyes, your continental cheekbones with their chiseled mountain ranges, the abyss of your open-mouthed smile. The magnetic fields of your hair.
         We zoom out: your face among the poetic stars. A constellation so abstract, only a Greek navigator could love it, we used to laugh. Now I’ll make Venus your teardrop, around which everything revolves. I lie on the grass all night and watch you circle overhead. In the morning I am dewed by your condensing interstellar breath.
         In the morning also, the protruding adorable ears of the sedan’s chrome side mirrors, and the dimple in the finish of the header panel. I used to travel the bridge of your nose, crest your brow. I drive, I park in the driveway to the tsks of your engine, and now I’m home. I trip and almost fall onto the face of your misfit flagstones, in the shadow of the sun under the dovehouse wall, the shifting leaves of the boxwoods. Steady: your face in the house key, nipping my palm. The patterns in the mudroom linoleum. From the soles of my shoes to the kitchen with its expressions in the range to the nursery with the recombining mobile above the crib to little Anna’s fontanelle, your little round face with its little retroussé nose. Sluggish and startled I see approaching me from the bedroom your face the face of my sister displacing, pressing outward from under her skin, from inside the blood, emplacing your beautiful face.
         Your wrinkles in the skin of these pages. Apostrophized by Keats, by Blake delineated, sung about by all the greats, those poets. Thy gracious self, which is the god of my idolatry. In the arcs of history your frowns. This long line of windows, your gleaming teeth. These piano keys the same, your smile. The metronomic tic of your pulse. The buttons on my shirt, your wee round face.
         I think about you: I’m drunk and I’m sad and I want you to come here and kiss me. I say to my sister: I’m drunk and sad and I want you to fuck off. Then in the smashed glass of the wineglass I acknowledge your mischievous glint; I recall your sudden laughter in the slamming of the patio door. Your rouged eyeshadowed face in the calico pattern of my sister’s retreating blouse. The baby’s cries are your cries, and that’s the only reason I listen.
         My phone rings, I see you in the screen. I decline the call, I block your number. I wrap the baby in her patterned blanket, I feed her with your bottled milk-white face. The door opens and my sister returns seriously to sit down beside me. She says, let’s try this again, let me take her, and I let her take away your little baby’s face.
💀

30. Tornado Watch

FUCKFACE
Tornado Watch [tape] (Two Tates) 1988
TORNADO WATCH
Stripper Logic [tape] (Two Tates) 1988
Widening Gyre (Harder Times) 1989
Separate Bedsheets (Harder Times) 1990
Fuckytown EP (Harder Times) 1990
Encyclopedia of Brown (Matador) 1992
McPunk’s (Matador) 1994
Prion Eyes (Matador) 1996
Widening Gyre/Stripper Logic (Matador) 1997
Separate Bedsheets/Fuckytown (Matador) 1997
Sadisterotica (Matador) 1998
Night Shift (Matador) 2001
Tornado Watch: Live in Chicago (Ergot) 2009
The Bondage Reclamation Project (Ergot) 2012
Sleeping Gods (Ergot) 2014
Tornado Warning (Ergot) 2017
SARAH ANDERSON
Sarah Anderson (Ignatz) 2003
TOM TATE
Ice-9 (Siberia) 2002
Ice-9 + (Siberia) 2015
         Formed in 1987, the group eventually known as Tornado Watch cycled through a number of monikers at the beginning, including Chewface, Fuckface, Fuck Brothers, Mole People and Your Mom. The brainchild of Robert Tate (impresario, vocals and guitar), best friend Louis Romero (bass, mostly) and drummer Sean Zabel (later of Babalon; replaced by Billy Yale before the first Fuckface tape), they were soon joined by Robert’s younger brother Carl (Tom) Tate on rhythm guitar and eerie backing vocals. Early reviews used the terms noise, fuzz, and Midwest power pop, which all seem about right, if a little too precise.
         Self-produced, the first two tapes (confusingly, Tornado Watch as Fuckface and Stripper Logic as Tornado Watch) are sludgy and only semi-melodic, like Husker Dü slowed down from 45 to 33rpm. Moving on up to Harder Times, Widening Gyre does seem to widen the sound a bit, stretching from the Devo-meets-Fugazi “Mechanical Men” to a respectable cover of the Cramps’ “Can Your Pussy Do the Dog?” that even Lux Interior seemed to like.
         The next LP Separate Bedsheets and its immediate follow-up EP Fuckytown finally see the band delivering on some of their earlier promise, with multi-part jams like “Doctor Phibes” and “R’lyeh Got a Hold on Me” suggesting a possible prog (!) or jazz-fusion (!!) direction. The non-charting single “Vinegar Wine” would become a live staple.
         Improbably signed to Matador after a brief Doctor Phibes fad on Radio K, the band seemed confused about their direction, with Bob Tate suggesting a harder sound in an interview with Spin (“We’ll leave Superchunk in the dust”) and his brother Tom striking a more equivocal note (“[s]omewhere between Pavement and Comus”). In the event, the three Matador albums (Encyclopedia of Brown, McPunk’s, Prion Eyes) didn’t move the needle much, although a number of tracks such as “Eggs,” “Wednesday 1pm,” and the vertiginous “Washington Avenue” do catch fire.
         Romero briefly quit after Brown, and the bass on the latter albums was supplied variously by Bob, Tom, Tim Commerford, Kristen Pfaff (in one of her last recordings) and an uncredited Flea. A North American tour was damaged by inter-band conflicts and erratic performances.
         After that, Matador reissued two CDs rounding up the early stuff and then the band, with Romero now back on bass duty, shifted direction by adding new vocalist and jazz savant Sarah Anderson (then performing under the name Urethra Franklin) to Sadisterotica, a pseudo-concept album based around the films and music of Spanish horror movie weirdo Jess Franco. Two singles (the swingy “Red Lips” and the proggy-boppy “Kiss Me Jesus”) cracked the Billboard Top 100, but internal pressures between the two brothers made the band go up in smoke. Matador swept the ashes out the door with Night Shift, a double-disc of outtakes, magickal babblings and curiosities.
         Tom Tate released a solo album on his own Siberia label shortly after the band’s dissolution, but it made no impression (nor did its expanded edition, released over a decade later). By contrast, Sarah Anderson’s solo debut on Ignatz, which featured all the former members of Tornado Watch except Tom (even Zabel: maybe a calculated insult) charted respectably, even crossing over to the jazz charts. Despite its brevity, her later career is still too complex to outline here.
         A series of well-received 2007-2008 nostalgia shows kicked off the Tornado Watch revival, followed the next year by the release of a terrific 1999 concert on the Milwaukee-based Ergot label, featuring Anderson at the beautiful pinnacle of her rock/jazz uncertainty. This led to a full reformation of the band, including Romero but sans Anderson and Tom Tate. The Bondage Reclamation Project and Sleeping Gods both evoke a sort of fantasy middle-period Tornado Watch that never actually existed, layering jazzy improv over lurching punk rhythms. The lyrics are still occult-scented (“Darkly Shining World,” “Fifty Names”), suggesting that Tom Tate wasn’t the only member to be influenced by the Simon Necronomicon. Quality stuff, but there’s a slight wheel-spinning feeling here.
         By contrast, the band’s final album, Tornado Warning, is truly excellent, and presents any number of exciting musical directions that the band might have taken if not for the tragedy, including several avant-garde innovations brought in by Anderson on her three guest tracks. It deserves to be evaluated as a serious musical statement in its own right and not some kind of requiem mass or morbid curiosity. Since Tom Tate is the only member/former member who is still among the living—and recording facilities are likely pretty scarce in federal Supermax prison—the era of Tornado Watch is definitively over, alas.
💿

31. In the Years of Yog-Sothoth

In the years of Yog-Sothoth there were many unusual developments. To begin with, we all started to care a lot less about other people. I don’t mean that there was dislike, but rather that no one cared what anyone else did or said or thought, or whether they lived or died or anything in between. Or we.
         And that started to free our minds up for other things, like science for instance. Not biological or earth sciences, and not physics, not really. We began to think of ourselves, and all matter, as folds or tears or excrescences in the fabric of space-time. Your father a black hole, our daughter a supernova. Our history of love an adherence of quarks and gluons. You and I, nearly indistinguishable from each other on this scale. All of human history fitted into one percent of one percent of time, all of earthly space functionally zero. These perspectives excited us in the early years of Yog-Sothoth.
         You ask what did it mean for us. Did we eat or sleep? Did we work? For a while, yes. Then we largely died, but a shudder called humanity persisted. On earth we opened our eyes, and in galaxy HD1, at the same moment, we opened them as well. With these, in the eternal moment of Yog-Sothoth, we witnessed all things, sub-Planck to exoparsec, a vigintillion-year panorama of nothingness. Then we died.
         In those years which, darling, I do not think you remember, there was a great deal of unsympathetic understanding. If you could recall them as I do, I do not think this world would fill you with envy. From our perspective in the years of Yog-Sothoth, which is only a fading memory even to me, we yawned as planets burned and stars collapsed and galaxies died, and only blinked at the deaths of billions. In blankness we felt Vincent vaporize, and Elizabeth evaporate, our ancestors and descendents unspooling into unresolved probabilities. We all became immaterial, we always were and were not, as you would know if only you could only bring yourself to recall to yourself that wide-eyed time, my love, those marvelous years of the Key and of the Guardian of the Gate, of merciful Yog-Sothoth the god.
💀

32. Lady with the Alligator Purse

Lucy’s son swallowed three ounces of drain cleaner and was rushed to the hospital. In the emergency room they pumped his stomach and intubated. Later, when he’d been moved to a private room, Lucy called her mother and cried. But mom was elderly, and in Florida, and so this was Lucy’s problem and no one else’s.
         Sam was tranquilized and the nurse had left for a moment, so Lucy sort of collapsed into a chair and felt blank. Soon the nurse was back with the doctor and a middle-aged lady a little overdressed for the hospital, Lucy thought.
         The doctor went over the next steps: an endoscopy, a chest x-ray, various tests. He didn’t think Sam needed to be on an IV drip at this time. While he talked, and the nurse typed reports, the strange lady stood silent by and listened. When the others had left, she unclasped her small fashionable handbag and handed Lucy a kleenex.
         He did it on purpose, Lucy told her. The kids at school.
         The lady nodded in sympathy. Lucy couldn’t see her face behind the lacy veil.
         Lucy fell asleep in the chair.
         In the morning she felt a little better. Sam had slept through the night and the doctor said that was a good sign. The nurse brought her some food. The lady with the pillbox hat and the alligator purse stood in a corner and watched. Lucy offered to let her sit down for a while, but the lady shook her head. Lucy felt embarrassed.
         A little while later Sam woke up but couldn’t speak. Lucy explained it all to him. They cried. Sam reached over and held the lady’s gloved hand. He was in a lot of pain, so they gave him something that made him loopy.
         They pulled one tube out of his throat and sent a different one down. Sam, even with the painkillers, whimpered. The lady stood behind Lucy and hugged her shoulders with her strong white arms. They drew his blood and collected urine. They wheeled him into x-ray: Lucy and the lady watched him through the glass. All back in the patient’s room, Lucy started talking about her divorce, she didn’t know why. Sam was more lucid now; he rolled his eyes at his mother’s story, which he’d heard a thousand times.
         Then things started looking up. Minimal esophageal and stomach damage; no evidence of further penetration. He would be here for a few days still, though, and tomorrow the chaplain would visit. Lucy was a little surprised: she had sort of assumed the strange lady was the chaplain.
         That evening a policeman came. Lucy told him everything: I just went crazy, she said. I never wanted to do this alone. It’s so hard. I put it into a water bottle and squeezed it down his throat.
         The cop took a step toward her. Don’t you fucking touch me! Lucy shouted. I’m not leaving my son! Don’t you dare touch me! She shrank away from the policeman, she pushed away the doctor. She pushed away the nurse. But she never laid a finger on the lady with the alligator purse.
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33. Even at the Time I Thought It Was a Bad Idea

When his wife started working again part-time, the house became quite a mess, so Cody hired a housekeeper, a pretty young thing. Before long they were having an affair. He’d return home at lunch hour and they’d fuck, after which she’d strip the bed and do the laundry while he went back to the office. It added a novel twist to his days, and the house was clean too.
         But he couldn’t see a way to convince Erica that they should have the girl three days a week instead of only two. There just wasn’t all that much more to do around the place. Maybe in the summer, when Aiden and Finn were home more of the day, but during the school year there was no point. She would remind him that she’d been against the idea in the first place. So he had no choice but to rent a motel room a couple times a week, which was another expense of course, and itself made for a few more difficulties. He couldn’t let Erica know about the new credit card, for instance, and she had eyes on their bank account too. Plus by now he was well into the habit of buying little gifts for the girl, and she’d started going on about how she wanted to move out of her shitty apartment. So he began to embezzle from the company, and kept the money in a secret account at a new bank.
         One thing just led to another. An old boyfriend reappeared and had to be paid off. Then it turned out that the girl had a young son he hadn’t known about. The boy needed new school clothes. He needed someone to watch him while she was at work (her mother, her usual source of childcare, had died), so now there were daycare expenses again, and now and then, out of a sense of panicked economy, he would call in sick and watch the boy himself for a day. The boy, a hellion, ran around the new spendy apartment and made a mess of everything.
         He was put under internal investigation. Then he was fired. Dark hints of legal action were voiced, and now he made sure to collect the mail before Erica did, to remove any serious-looking correspondence. By this time he was tens of thousands of dollars in debt. He got a DUI while he was driving her kid and that was a hard thing to keep secret from Erica.
         The girl hooked him up with some people and one afternoon they came over and installed six internet routers in out-of-the-way closets. He watched as they logged in two, three pages’ worth of ISP addresses. He would get texts on his secret phone telling him to pick stuff up from person A and deliver it to person B. He tried a bit of the meth himself, but some residual fart of good sense kept him from going too deeply into that.
         The special requests started. Go to this person, dress this way. (He was still young, fit and attractive). At first it was older ladies, then younger men who wanted him to dress like a lady, and those clothes weren’t cheap. But at least he was keeping his head above water. Out of fear of giving her a disease, he stopped having sex with the girl (he and Erica had stopped a long time earlier). If she minded, she didn’t say anything.
         Eventually it all came crashing down. Erica left with the kids. His friends disowned him. He was due in court soon, to face the first of several charges, and the legal heat had spooked off his employers and the jobs dried up.
         As he sat on the motel room bed, contemplating the shambles he had made of his life, he wondered aloud if all that mediocre pussy had been worth it. I listened patiently as long as I could. An awful shame, I agreed. Now take off your panties.
💀

34. The Destination Wedding

Their vows were beautiful, but then the rain started. The priest blessed everybody and then drove off in an old little thing I wasn’t sure would even get up the hill. But there he went, Father Whatever, and the caterers under their tent uncovered the chafing dishes, and the deejay went to lug his stuff from his van.
         It was romantic. A little mist, a drizzle, maybe a little too loud on the tent tops, but the two of them were beautiful, so much in love, and their families you could see were so proud. The little kids were laughing and chasing each other around through the mud. Their parents yelled and objected but not very loudly, it’s a wedding, whatever, I guess.
         A little weed, discreetly back among the trees—we got damp and had to keep relighting, but that was just part of the giggle of it, as my little cousin put it, who I hadn’t seen since she was eight years old, and now we’re getting stoned together! The circle of life.
         The storm clouds darkened. The weather apps said it would clear up in twenty minutes. Some dads made dad remarks about bad omens. We drank champagne and the happy couple danced to The Magnetic Fields: The Book of Love. Then the first wedding party dance: Willie Nelson’s Sad Songs and Waltzes, kind of downbeat, I thought, but whatever, it’s Willie. Then it got started: The Electric Slide, Footloose, YMCA, Dancing Queen, Under Pressure, I Wanna Dance with Somebody, Hey Ya! The deejay had to keep turning up the volume to drown out the rain, but after a half an hour or so it had tailed off and there was a hell of a rainbow over the lake. We all took a minute to look at it, and the deejay just played some slow whatever stuff while we took our time.
         The sun was going down. Everything was slippery, and we had to push a couple of cars up the hill. We got pretty muddy, hilarious in our tuxes. Around that time it started to rain again, but the caterers and the deejay and the tents were all gone, and though we were dog-tired there wasn’t too much left to do except party, so we went back to the AirBnB. The rest of the wedding party, minus the bride and groom and a few boring bozos, were already doing shots around the pool.
         Fuck, it was coming down. I could barely toss back my tequila before the raindrops battered it out of my glass. We were all soaked to the skin, so okay, we got butt-naked, whatever. Everybody gonna strip, and jump in the pool, and doowutchyalike! There was definitely some inappropriate behavior, I admit, but most everybody was right there, seeing what their partners were doing, so although I’m not saying there aren’t going to be regrets, I don’t think there’s much we have to confess to exactly, officer.
         After a while it did seem crazy. The rain made the pool overflow, so that the patio seemed like just a shallow part of the lake, and there were beer cans and stuff bobbing around on it. Down the slopes a whole lot of dirty water came running, and uprooted plants too, and eventually we all had to get out of the pool because it was too gross. So it was about then, when we’d all about decided to go to bed, that we saw him, the groom I mean, walking out toward us butt-naked, dripping red, with his big stiff purple cock, and a brandy bottle in one hand and a big-ass knife in the other. He was in the mood to party, he said!
         Look, you said I could have a cup of coffee. Don’t be an asshole. This has been a long, a long couple of days.
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35. Clownshoes

Clownshoes was hi-larious! Face white like a ghost, lips bright red, ’fro bright red and jiggling, he rushed round and round the ring, long shoes slapping the sawdust, raising little clouds. He backflipped and rolled and tumbled and jumped and did the splits and clowned. Hilarious!
         From behind a curtain a little VW bug drove out in front of the crowd and stopped in front of Clownshoes. He stopped cavorting and watched, along with us, with lines of perspiration streaking the makeup on his cheeks, as one, two, four, six… can it really be that twelve clowns just came out of that tiny thing? Even Clownshoes seemed impressed, then he turned and ran in the other direction.
         Except he didn’t really run. He only ran in place, kicking up the sawdust with big long steps that got him nowhere. The little boy in the front row laughed a high screechy laugh, and the audience applauded.
         The other clowns crept forward, some hopping, some dragging their feet. In their hands they carried cream pies, seltzer bottles, bowling pins, plastic flowers, lead pipes. On the one hand it seemed like it took them forever to encircle Clownshoes, on the other hand it seemed like no time at all, entertained as we were.
         When they had him in their circle they went to work. A smoke bomb went off, so all we could see through the haze and kicked-up dust was the occasional limb—or shoe—popping up here and there out of the general confusion. We heard thumps, and cracks, honks, joy buzzers and slide whistles, and yelps of pain from Clownshoes, but no pleas or screams (we knew Clownshoes couldn’t talk). Eventually the whahoo died down and when the smoke cleared we watched the twelve clowns return to their car and enter it one by one before driving away. In the center of the ring lay unmoving Clownshoes, red and wet from his head to the tips of his—ha hah ha—his clownshoes.
         On the way out I heard the little boy talking to his parents: But is he really…?
         No, they assured him, Clownshoes was just fine. He did this every night and twice on Sundays.
         But they didn’t know what I knew, which was that, behind the makeup, it was always a new Clownshoes for every performance. Ha ha! A joke within a joke!
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36. Wake Up With Fleas

I know you, right? the one guy asked. You used to date that Rosie who works at Leaning Tower? The Jewish girl with the tits?
         That sounds like my type, said the other guy, but no.
         Ben tried not to look like he was obviously eavesdropping. But the barstools were pretty close and the music was low, so he couldn’t really help it if he’d tried. At last Marie showed up and he forgot about the conversation.
         Then the next week PJ wanted to catch up and they went out for pizza. Ben kept scanning the waitresses, wondering. He didn’t think any of them were all that stacked, and he wasn’t really sure what if anything made a person look Jewish. Why would he care? He’d been with Marie for twenty years.
         Then he started having sexy dreams. That hadn’t happened in a long while. Marie left for a girls’ weekend and he picked up a hooker. That was too far, and he didn’t let it happen again, not that he had much opportunity.
         Then it was autumn and there was a serial killer in the city. The details were gruesome: breasts sawn off with a guitar string, nostrils popped by Black Cat firecrackers, other even worse stuff. Make sure someone always walks you to the car, he told Marie. She tried to blow it off, but she was scared too. When they caught the guy—younger than you’d think, an incel type—he felt like celebrating. Sometimes you underestimate your anxieties and don’t take them seriously until they’re gone.
         He took Marie out for pizza. This time he was pretty sure who the girl must be. When she set the second pitcher on the table and asked if they needed anything else, he said, just the check please.
         Look at you, you old goat, said Marie, smirking. He hadn’t realized he’d been so obvious. He blushed and deflected.
         He followed the serial killer trial closely. He was disgusted. The guy had written a manifesto, and Ben looked up the influencers he cited. He thought somebody should really kill those guys. It wouldn’t be any sort of loss. Look at how they talked about people, especially women. Revenge porn, rape academies. Sicker than junkyard dogs. One of them got arrested for sex trafficking, then released. Ben flew to Florida and stabbed him to death, cut off the guy’s balls and crammed them down his throat. They arrested him before he left town. He hadn’t written a manifesto himself, an oversight.
         Marie moved to be near the prison. She gave no interviews, visited him every week. The serial killer got a lethal injection. Ben got life. A couple weeks into his sentence, the prison cafeteria served up some shitty beef pepperoni pizza. He took one bite and threw up.
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37. The Battle of Bullshit Hill

At the battle of Colline de Conneries, the United States 4th Infantry Division, having cracked the German 7th Army near Periers and having stranded remnants of the 15th Panzergrenadiers atop a rocky 120-foot elevation, detached units to storm the heights, but encountered stronger than expected resistance.
         Lieutenant Colonel Henry Hedmer ordered his battalion to fall back to the base of the hill to regroup and encircle the elevation. Shouting through a bullhorn, he called on the German troops to surrender, but received no response.
         Judging it best to resolve the situation before nightfall, when the enemy might manage to slip out through the thinly-spread cordon, he readied the men for another attack. But before the order could be given, the battalion came under small arms fire from the Germans, now descending the hill in great haste.
         Exposed as they were against the nearly vegetation-free hillside, the Germans took heavy casualties, and the Americans captured the remaining combatants. Two officers of the Waffen-SS, disguised as regular army soldiers, were exposed and summarily executed, and the remaining seventy-four men were sent to the Foucarville camp. When interrogated, none seemed to understand who had given the order to attack nor why, but many of them described a feeling of uneasiness about their hilltop position, and even a sense of relief to have left it to rush into the face of enemy fire.
         When the LTC’s battalion reconnoitered the height, they found no remaining Germans, but did discover one elderly Frenchman dressed in rags, who evidently lived in a narrow cave extending down into the flinty rock of the hill. His French dialect was unintelligible to the translators, and judging him to be harmless and the hill to be of no strategic value, Hedmer ordered his men to return to the general advance.
         Today there is a plaque at the bottom of the hill to mark the event, but few visitors make the climb to the top. Those who do say that the place smells of rat feces and is pitted by numerous small burrows in which an unlucky tourist might break an ankle.
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38. 0847

Twenty-five years ago, cell phones were a lot less common. Before then, I carried a pager. When my wife (then girlfriend) and I decided to get on a cell phone plan, we signed up at the same time and were given numbers two apart: 0846 and 0848. Over the years we’ve changed providers a couple of times, but we always kept the same digits.
         I don’t know why it took me so long to think about it, but a little while ago I started to get curious about who had the number in between ours. So I called 0847 one day and a young man answered, and I told him why I was calling and he laughed and said in my position he’d’ve done the same.
         We actually got to talking about this and that. His name was Leo, and he worked doing something in tech. He was smart, and seemed to like a lot of the same things my wife and I did, like Indian food, and Doctor Who, and Aviation cocktails, but he spoke like a young person too: adulting, based, sus, okay boomer. I told him that was offensive: I was Gen X. I told him Leo was my grandfather’s name.
         He said I should call back whenever I felt like it. I didn’t want to abuse the privilege, but I did like to talk to him so I did now and then, especially when I was feeling a little down on myself. He cheered me up in a way, but to be honest, he seemed to have it so much more together than I did, and of course he was less than half my age, with his whole life ahead, so that when I hung up I had mixed feelings about things.
         I’d ask him a lot of questions, like about his politics (they were progressive), did he have a girlfriend (yes, the latest in a short sequence), if he liked to travel (yes: Greece and Italy), what his plans were for the future (uncertain). Did he get along with his parents?
         I didn’t tell my wife about him. At first I was just embarrassed at doing this dumb thing, and then after a while I wasn’t really sure how to explain it. It’s not like she would have thought I was having an emotional affair, but… maybe I was?
         He kept saying I should visit him sometime but I haven’t gotten around to it. Anyway, I wasn’t quite sure where he lived. At first I thought it must be pretty close, since our numbers had the same area code, but that doesn’t really mean the same thing as it did back in the landline days.
         Last time, I spoke to his girlfriend too for a minute. She seemed nice. I imagined her as dark-haired, kind of short, pretty in an alternative way, temperamental, more practical than he was, like my wife at her age. He said they were about to take a trip to Paris, and he confessed to me, because he knew I wouldn’t blow the secret, that he’d propose to her there. I told him how happy I was for him and how proud.
         The marriage is next summer. He invited me and my wife, but I’m not sure we’ll go. The explanation, et cetera. I asked if he wanted children, and he said he didn’t know yet. I took the opportunity to speak as a wise elder and told him society was a lot more open about that these days, and whatever they decided, as long as they both agreed on it, I’m sure it would all work out fine. I told him to have a great trip and I’d call him when he got back to see how it all went, and that I envied him the opportunity of walking down the Champs-Élysées for the very first time.
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39. A Scratched-up Man

His sister told him a joke once. She must have been about six years old at the time. The joke was: What do you call a man with a mean cat? The answer was: A scratched-up man.
         As Brian crawled away from the wreck of the motorcycle, there were suddenly hands under his arms, helping him up and away. And a good thing too, because the fire was really starting to take hold. He could feel it in the smell of his neck hairs. You’re all right, man, you’re all right, someone kept saying. At least he wasn’t a burnt-up man, thought Brian. What a mean road, he said.
         Cops, am I right? the other man said.
         The SUV had cut him off, turning right from the center lane, zooming for the exit. It must have been going ninety. Brian had overcorrected, skidding on the shoulder, clipping the safety barrier, flipping the bike. Was it a cop? Who can even tell any more?
         Aside from the broken right leg, his face was the worst. And he deserved it, foregoing the helmet that day. Six months later you could still see the scars. His lower lip drooped funny. Sue said his left eye had changed color, that it was now more blue than brown. He took her word for it: he didn’t like looking in the mirror any more. Sue said it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as he was acting, but she would say that.
         You should sue, said Sue. Once upon a time he would have made a joke about that. But anyway, what was he supposed to do about it? Even if he could figure out who the driver was, nobody was going to be held accountable. That was just how it was these days.
         If it hadn’t been the first nice day of spring, if the snow had lingered a while longer, if he hadn’t been so stir-crazy, if he’d worn the helmet, if that guy… You could have been paralyzed, she said. You are incredibly lucky.
         She wouldn’t let him wear the full-face masks around the house, but she couldn’t control what he did when he was out. Kids found him creepy—well, he’d be creepier without the mask. Most of his work was over Teams or on the phone: he was incredibly lucky. A bird flu pandemic kept everyone at home for three months and he was happier than he’d been in a long time. He overheard Sue on the phone one day: He goes around looking like Santo, she was telling her sister.
         One day he was just limping down the street, coming home from the grocery store, and then he was surrounded by police. Down on the ground, they said. He complied, apples and oranges rolling into the gutter. Of course it was just a misunderstanding, but somebody in the neighborhood had thought it was better to call the cops on him than ask him what he was up to with the mask. He was beginning to get a sense of how black people felt.
         At the next appointment they said he was healing up nicely. There was still a twinge in his leg, but they were impressed with how well he’d kept up with the exercises. On the anniversary of the accident Sue wanted to go out, have a celebration, but that was the last thing he wanted and they had a little fight.
         After enough pestering he finally saw a therapist. She wouldn’t let him wear the mask either. She asked him to draw his own face from memory. He was actually good at that sort of thing: it was just one of those skills you never seem to have occasion to use. But, she said, examining the drawing, this doesn’t look a thing like you. It looks like Cary Grant. She thought that indicated a robust self-image, but he was puzzled. He had intended to draw a hideous face, like Deadpool or somebody, just to be a dick about it.
         A few weeks later Susana was picked up by Immigration. He went a little crazy: Where’s my wife, you fucking pigs! You pussies! They handcuffed him and in the end he spent more time at the Whipple Building than she did. My hero, she teased later: Inigo Montoya with your little scars.
         In later years he could joke about it: Oh, it was our cat, he would say. A little too excited on the catnip, but we never blamed him. He was a sweetheart normally. This was easier than explaining that, if given the chance, he would cut the throat of every cop in the world.
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40. The Pleasances of Bogg

When my great-uncle died, he willed to me, who apart from my son was his last surviving relative, a lonely mansion in the Scottish hinterlands. The home had once commanded acres upon acres of green sward and yellow-daffodilled pastures, but of late all of it had been blighted by industry, neglect and a general subsidence. Tall chimneys dominated the horizon, spilling their oily smoke into the black-clouded skies. For miles around the soil was nothing more than sticky mud alternating with stretches of lifeless dust.
         Bogg House itself, Tudor Gothic with some more recent renovations, stood battered yet still strong, its many greenhouses and walled secluded gardens choked with dead flowers and dreadful thorns, smelling of rot. Later, when William and I began to hack our way through it all, blood would drip from our lacerated arms onto the parched earth.
         We moved in and began the renovation. Even after the workmen left each day Will and I often found ourselves working far into the evening, plastering cracks, caulking holes, unclogging drains, painting walls: the house trembling and the fireplaces moaning in the autumn Scottish storms.
         One night during the first week of our repairs I awoke for an unknown reason, and, moving to the window, fancied I saw a young woman in a white shift, her hair loose about her shoulders, fleeing from our parlor out into the endless moorish night. But when I descended to the ground floor, the French doors were locked as tightly as always.
         During the second week of our repairs, William found, stuffed behind an attic rafter, an oilcloth packet of eighteenth-century bank notes, worth a fortune.
         During the third week, we hauled a large wooden trunk out from the back of a storeroom and when we opened it we discovered half a dozen men crammed into it, alive and well, it seemed. They were dressed as old-fashioned gentlemen, and their bodies were so ingeniously twisted and bent around each other that there seemed not one inch of room to spare in the man-filled trunk. We attempted to extricate them but they resisted. Woe be your touch, they complained.
         The following day we discovered a similar trunk, this one filled just as perfectly by the coils of an enormous snake, a boa or anaconda, its head hidden from our view somewhere behind its foot-thick body. From the depths of the trunk, a hissing. Through the window, in the dead garden, on the dead branch of a hazel tree, in the late afternoon light, sat an owl, a raven, a crow and a hummingbird, serenely observing us.
         William was distressed. Ghosts and spectres and harbingers, said he, monsters, living men and dead money—what a fearful benefaction we have received, father.
         Nae, ’tis worse, Will, I spoke. I fear we have inherited a house full of symbolism.
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41. Practicum 3

To begin with, build a tesseract into which you install [x] planetary biomes, as specified by the instructor. Accelerate development to global network +5. Introduce information contagion at specified rates equal to [x/100, x/50 and x/10]. Observe and document:

Ego disintegration rate at social levels 1-10
Resource and capital consolidation/fragmentation at social levels 1-10
Conflictual node development at social levels 2-10
Narrative collapse at social levels 1-10

Express as ratios, and graph. Document data set and restage for [y] cycles with new variables specified by the instructor. Develop qualitative evaluation through small-group discussion. Don’t forget to incorporate data from earlier modules!
Prepare final report and deliver to central nest with recommendation. As authorized, data collation will be ongoing until S-Day minus 40. [80% of final grade; graduates will be granted the rank of Recruit 3rd Class and made be eligible for officer training]
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