rjmollie-blog

[rjmollie-blog]

Withdrawals

“Mom, you’ve been scrubbing the counter for six hours.”

I look down at the countertop and find the marbled blue surface opening up to reveal the enamel-yellow plastic underneath.

“I don’t like the color as much.” But it’s already exposed, I think. I can’t just leave the one spot out here all alone. “It doesn’t match the cabinets.”

My son Samuel, the one who brought this issue to my attention, is sitting at the kitchen table, watching me. It occurs to me that I can’t remember the last time he ate. He looks sallow and I can see a sheen of sweat on his forehead.

“You look terrible, buddy. I think you should stay home from school today.”

“We’re all staying home today,” my daughter, Katrina, calls from the couch in the living room. “This flu is killer.” It seems to me that she is speaking in front of an oscillating fan, two voices emitting from her at once, one her own and the other lower, masculine and foreign. Alarmed, I move to the doorway in the living room to get a closer look. It’s a relief to see that she still has just the one voice box, and the man is speaking from the television screen.

“As you can see… or hear, I suppose. Or feel, or taste, or smell… any number of senses, really. Well, five max…” He speaks into a microphone that says KIRO 7 News and looks into the camera. I can tell he has something important to say but he’s trying to say too much at once.

“Just slow down, we’re all listening,” I tell him. He seems comforted by this and continues.

“The fire at the Oxadone Water Treatment Center continues to rage after the explosion yesterday morning, and has spread to several surrounding buildings including the drycleaners my dad used to take me to when he picked up his suits.” He looks at the ground, reminiscing. “The effort to salvage the treatment plant is ongoing, and officials continue to work toward reconnecting the city’s water supply to a sanitizing source. In the meantime, specialists are urging the public to stock up on Home Oxadone powder, which is being sold at all major supermarkets in the area, and dissolve it in untreated water immediately before consumption to ensure that their families have access to the necessary vitamins and minerals normally provided by the treatment facility.”

“Hey, do you wanna try?”  he is interrupted. We all watch as a nearby firefighter sheepishly approaches the newscaster and hands him the firehose.

“I wonder if the water they’re using to put out the fire has been treated with Oxadone,” says Katrina. “That would be deliciously ironic.”

“It would certainly make for a compelling Greek tragedy,” I tell her, “but the treated water is all evaporated in the fire and everything else is so dirty it can hardly be called water at all! Now, turn off that TV, the fire is making it too hot in here.”

“I knew we should have gotten flu shots this year. My muscles ache. They’re burning!” She is frantic.

“That’s odd,” says Sam. “Mine are frozen solid.”

For a while time is moving six times faster than usual and we repeat our conversations eight or nine times, until I hear someone call out from the ceiling and the clock slows. “Hey, someone’s calling me.”

“Who?” my children chant. I look up. “I guess it must be the sun.” I brace myself to go outside – my nerves are misfiring and my limbs are having trouble processing this breakdown in communication. I set my brow and fling myself toward the door. Katrina is vomiting.

“I’ll wash the counter while you’re gone,” says Sam, lying on the kitchen floor.

I look out at our street from the doorway and find my neighbors putting on an elaborate acrobatic performance. The smoke from the fire casts a violet light over everything, a nice artistic touch to the show. The performers are nearing the end of Act I; some star in melancholy scenes of repose from within crashed cars; others contemplate the development face down in the street; still others shriek loudly and tear at their skin with their fingernails.

“Overacting,” I mutter.

“You can say that again,” says the sun. I look up.

“Everyone’s a critic.” I shrug.

“You’re dying, you know,” the sun informs me from behind the purple glow.

“That may be true but the clock broke a little while ago so I’m not too worried about it.” I look at my wrist to confirm this fact and am surprised to find the bones in my hand and arm have disappeared.

“You’ll thank me for that,” says the sun. “Anyone who still has bones in the next couple of days is in for a world of hurt.”

“Thanks. Why me?”

“Because you listened when I called your name.” He ushers me back inside, then blinks himself off and the world goes blind.

[rjmollie-blog]

Starvation pt. I & II

                He is staring longingly through the bars. His past is not his anymore. There is no justice, no crime and punishment; whatever laws confined him before have been tangibly replaced by concrete and steel. His reality is limited to his cell walls, and me, his future. My boy (for he is mine; from dust they arose and to dust they shall return, as they say), nothing to his name but his own hunger (it shows most clearly in his eyes), reflects back to me my own vastness, my own incalculability, lusting after the innumerable particles of red and brown that in their hue alone promise liberation from the gray confines of the prison.

               In my benevolence – I love my children very much – I embed myself in the lock on his cell. My coarse grains inhibit lock and key, and my boy’s hungry eyes quickly register the urgency with which I have carved out this boy-sized window from his barred door. He runs, at last, into my open arms.

               But no sooner had we embraced than a shriek of pain and betrayal emitted from somewhere inside his dilapidated chest. His hungry eyes closed to me, red, streaming, his hands clutching at them as if tearing them from his head will ease their starvation. He rejects my embrace, frantically brushing away the vibrancy of liberation and returns, blind, to his colorless and solitary punishment. He is no longer hungry.

II 

               My eyes are still adjusting. The morning is dull and bright and the first thing I notice is the smell. Every day it changes slightly and I wonder how something so stationary can produce such a variance of odors. I hang up my duster and snap on my belt, feeling the weight of my keys and cuffs and rifle. Smearing a glob of Vicks under my nose I go to unlock the cell so my prisoner can be led to breakfast.

               My key sticks in the lock but I notice there is no need to turn it because in the bars has dissolved a peculiarly man-shaped hole. The gray bricks are permeated with dusty red desert and a streak of light stains my uniform momentarily. I wipe it off quickly and turn back down the hall.

               Exasperation mingled with my usual dull disgust for the cell’s inhabitant I wait in my office chair for the familiar grinding sounds of toxic sand-on-cornea. The prisoner returns, clothes torn off, skin polished smooth and red, and with the symptomatic loss of eyesight that always follows failed escape attempts. My prisoner walks, blind, back through the man-shaped hole and sits in the gray. I don’t bother bringing his breakfast; he is no longer hungry.

[rjmollie-blog]

Agoraphobia

The microwave beeped four times and Leonard Berner rose to retrieve his coq a vin. His Giorgio Armany (with a ‘y’) clopped across the living room floor, crisp on the original hardwood. Berner had avoided installing carpet because of its inevitable fading and moldering and needing to be replaced – wood might get scuffed but only by his own knockoff Italian footwear. The living room itself was poorly lit and drab, but with some evidence of tasteful decoration. The foyer ushered you into the living room, which had a large bay window and green-checked curtains, whose sunlit shade cast an emerald glow over the room but themselves had not been opened since Watergate.

He had accumulated a motley collection of wall decorations, including an unframed Un Homme Qui Dort movie poster, and a small 3-dimensional inlet containing a tiny living room dating back to the Revolution, left to him by his mother. On the wall opposite the bay window hung Francisco Goya’s Los Caprichos etchings, purchased in a museum gift shop, each a two-inch cell in the larger 24”x36” collective. Among other things, one of the reasons Berner had to keep the bay window curtains permanently drawn was to protect his Goya from exposure to corrosive natural light.

Adjacent to the living room was an expansive dining room, with an antique banquet table that he kept as a private joke but never ate at. In his eat-in kitchen, rather, he kept a fully-stocked spice rack, the same green-checked curtains, an empty refrigerator and an Igloo cooler to keep frozen dinners in.

A petrified layer of dust gave everything in the house a softer edge, as though you were looking through an unfocused camera, or there was something on your glasses. The only thing in sharp focus was Berner’s Crosley CR47 turntable, blocking the front door, which he polished daily. Music, to Berner, was the only faculty humankind had to create rather than destroy.

Berner considered himself too young to have discovered this disdain for humanity he had become privy to, though he had always been precocious; it usually took a lifetime for people to seek out isolation the way he did, and his muscles were not even atrophied yet. He was exceedingly well-dressed for a shut-in, personal hygiene and outward appearance being integral parts of his daily routine. He removed the sizzling cardboard square from the microwave and sat down to eat.

He did not care about impressing anyone, he would say, back before the nausea caused by face-to-face interaction became unbearable. He was simply using his appearance as a lens of intellectual and existential superiority to show them that their social conventions were a joke. Berner believed that, whether he liked it or not, there was one inescapable truth governing life on earth, to which the rest of society remained willfully ignorant: humanity was a malignant cancer, whose biological objective was to multiply and spread until the host body was shriveled and depleted. Nothing humans had ever done in any capacity or in any era, as he saw it, had been worthwhile; anything seemingly constructive they may have contributed was an illusion, simply a way of making up for some past injustice committed by their forebears. The planet was an ailing hospice patient, a conclusion at which Berner had unhappily arrived too early on in life. Repulsed, he opted not to participate.

As he ate his frozen French cuisine, Berner noticed an inconsistency in the green-checked curtain. The frayed edges suggested vermin, which made him uneasy; one or two rats he could take care of, but he was ill-equipped to eradicate a larger population, and refused to consider inviting a so-called “exterminator” into his home. He investigated the portal, and remembered reading somewhere that rats were repelled by peppermint, so checked the spice rack but found it unexpectedly lacking. Grabbing the sage and oregano instead, he lined the edges of his living room floors with a dusting of the dried powdered leaves.

Having done this, he returned to his chicken and rumination. To his annoyance, the usual pleasant emerald flush of the room was interrupted by a buttery yellow beam of unobstructed sunlight. He could see particles of dust dancing in the column, which ended in a spot-lit circle on his hardwood floor. The sensory customs of his living room seemed to be rapidly changing; he regretted seasoning the floors. He again set down his dinner and grabbed a sewing needle, thread, and a green pocket square he hardly ever used. As he fitted the patch, he saw through the hole and caught sight of his long-estranged front yard. Yellow, overgrown, at once an arid wasteland and a fascinating ecological experiment, across the street from which someone walked into the one of the suburban side-paneled houses. A neighbor, presumably, but he had no idea how long they had lived there. It was an old woman, doubly accompanied by a walker and a pimply teenaged spotter. Berner watched their slow procession until the youth ditched the woman at the doorstep and returned to her own car. Taking a moment to observe the face of his neighbor’s house, he considered the coexistence of individuals, ignorant of their part in the Tumor, whose lives looked deceptively similar to his own. She even had the same bay window.

Berner stared. This woman had the admirable quality of imminent self-remission – she did not have to continue living as a cancerous cell for much longer. Indeed, she couldn’t participate, at least not without strenuous effort. His own efforts felt false in comparison, like he was lying about something. He cursed his vitality.

The sudden feeling of solidarity with this woman gave him pause in closing off the hole. Perhaps his décor would be complimented by a touch of yellow amid the green. It was a regal combination, he decided. Anyway, he might want to use that pocket square one day. He left the curtain hole unpatched. In the living room, he carefully ran a lint roller over his suit, selected a Vivaldi to settle into for the afternoon, closed his eyes and contemplated the scene he had just witnessed. He pictured his fragile neighbor, framed with dying yellow flora, flanked by her oblivious youthful companion. It reminded him of Botticelli’s Venus being blown by the Winds, riding on a shell made of aluminum with tennis balls on the bottom for traction. A far more apt image of perfection, he thought, human or divine. How many millennia, and thousands of religions, had attempted to depict a personified model of the ne plus ultra, and here it had been, in his front yard. For how far off the mark the Greeks and Romans were, it seemed they had come the closest. He thought of the Garden of Eden. How could God have been surprised? If there were a thousand Gardens of Eden, each with its own human microcosm, an Adam and Eve, a Harold and Bonnie, a Jerry and Mark, an Alice and Sabine– none would have been able to avoid being cast into oblivion. Exploitation was the most basic of human instincts. Freud almost had it, but sexualized it too much. Berner fell asleep to Vivaldi’s caresses and Freud’s reprimands, and dreamt that he was naked but for a fig leaf over his genitals, and carved from marble – a work of art. He was walking through a jungle, and came across a stately throne underneath the canopy, its ornateness pornographic in comparison with its surroundings. In it sat a proud looking woman, also naked, but a contrast to his smooth complexion; she was covered in cavernous wrinkles. He fell to his knees before her and crawled closer, close enough to kiss her feet, close enough to fall into the caverns…

*****

Today the delivery service was scheduled to drop off his weekly groceries. He had fashioned a drop box in the wall next to the bay window, through which deliveries could be sent without Berner ever having to see the delivery person. Berner, fastening his suit jacket and nestling his pocket square into its position, put on his Duke Ellington and selected a well-worn book from his shelf. He opened the book to somewhere midway through. Berner never liked to start reading a book from the beginning, and there were some books on his shelf of which Berner knew only the climax and declining action, preferring to deduce for himself the initial plot setup.

“And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing…”

Berner was frustrated to find himself unable to retain the words on the page, feeling his attention compelled away from the book and toward the bay window. His eyes strayed again to the chewed curtain hole and he found himself crouching by the window, his book dog-eared on the chair. She was sitting at a table in front of the bay window, laboriously eating breakfast. Even from a distance he could see the valiant effort she was devoting to her food. She brought each spoonful of semi-solid beige substance imperially to her mouth, her hand shaking noticeably even at a distance, occasionally dribbling down her front and wiping it away, dignified, with a linen napkin. He smiled at this and stood up to grab a pillow on which to more comfortably sit.

There was a tap at the window. Berner froze. His only direct exposure to the Tumor in years and already it was trying to infiltrate his home and chastise him! He stood still, waiting for the stranger to go away. The drop box by the window slid open toward him, bearing three full bags of frozen dinners. He stared. As he approached to retrieve his groceries, the outsider tapped on the glass again. He slammed the drop box shut loudly and took the bags to the Igloo to deposit his meals.

*****

To the individual who delivers my groceries,

Due to an unfortunate malady of the skin I am unable to open my curtains even a crack, for fear of exposing myself to direct sunlight. What you may have seen yesterday was in fact a dangerous encounter, resulting from my having stumbled and pulled on the curtains to prevent myself from falling; in my clumsiness I accidentally tore a hole in the curtain edge, a lapse for which I am currently paying dearly with unspeakable pain.

I am writing now to clarify my seemingly poor manners and assure you that civility does, in fact, dwell here. I wonder also, do you deliver to any other residences on this block? I hate to think that you venture out here solely on my behalf.

I hope this letter finds you well, and invite you to offer your response at your delivery next week, orally and in person, through the window (curtains closed of course). I look forward to our continued correspondence.

Kind regards,

L. Berner

           Thrilled at having written the first half of a conversation with another human being since his mother’s 75th birthday some years ago, Berner deposited the letter into the drop box and went back to his records to wait out the week. He was glad to have ample time before the conversation continued, preferring to limit his exposure to the carcinogenic public as much as his curiosity would permit.

           Berner relished his interactions with his neighbor. He had taken to looking in at her only at night, to prevent any more disturbances by those who may have seen him. This did not bother him, as the lights from inside offered a charming silhouette of her and her home in the surrounding dark. She graciously conducted most of her life, it seemed, at the table right in front of her bay window – he watched as she ate, read, wrote, took phone calls, or gazed, as he did, into the night. Everything she did was with such graceful acceptance not only of her own mortality but the absurdity that anyone should believe that life ends in anything but decay; her defiant transferal of forkfuls to her dying mouth, willing her body to make the choice – convert the food into energy to keep living or else wedge the food into her windpipe and suffocate her – Berner was moved.

           He wanted to see how she talked. Did she gesticulate? Did she make eye contact, or grimace when others spoke? Was her voice politely indifferent or overtly contemptuous? He knew what she must be thinking when others addressed her, for he had the same thoughts. He wanted to see the look on all of their faces when they realized how inferior to her they were.

           The week transpired and Berner prepared himself the following Monday to entertain his guest. Bathed in a cloud of 20-year-old Gucci cologne he sat by the curtain hole, having pried the window open hours prior to the delivery time to avoid gagging at the face-to-face contact. Gravel crunched beneath tires, and footsteps approached the drop box. He could hear the hesitation before stuffing the bags in. After a moment, frozen dinners in hand, he heard a tap on the window.

*****

“Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic?... Maybe you’re playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience…”

*****

           Berner’s suspicions were confirmed during the unremarkable conversation that followed; his neighbor, whose name was Cathy Tottenham, was indeed another recipient of the meal delivery service he patronized. The name was perfect – aristocratic. He wrote it down, and felt the letters drip from his pen like molten gold. He could almost hear it in her voice – You may call me Cathy. He needed to hear it, and for the rest of the world to hear it too, for it seemed a crime for anyone to go on in ignorance. This was his miracle cure – for his own disdain, yes, but also for the whole of humankind. This is what they should be emulating, this is what would save them from themselves. Cathy Tottenham, benign and unassuming, yet the first truly good thing put forth in recent human memory. Over the next several hours he combed his house for loose papers, stacked them neatly on the banquet table, and wrote her name at the top of each one. He dug out his phone book, and added the names and mailing addresses of the city’s prominent service providers: chiropractors, milkmen, moving companies, plumbers, windowpane sellers, journalists, pool installation companies, realtors, police, government officials. Beneath these, he set forth his predicament:

           Dear Mr. _____

I would like to request a formal consultation with your office/an initial prospective delivery be made/to schedule an appointment with one of your representatives at two o’clock tomorrow afternoon, at my home address of 54 Adder St. Due to my declining health I am currently bedridden, and must therefore insist on house-calls – I am prepared to incur any additional transportation fees as well as any other compensation you or your representative may require. Thank you very much for your prompt service – I am confident that my patronage is well-placed!

Kind regards,

Ms. C. Tottenham

           Berner creased each of the papers in a meticulous tri-fold, sealed and stamped the envelopes, and sent them through the drop box. He was breathless.

           He sat in the chair by his Crosley all night, staring at the curtain hole but not through it this time. He awoke to the sound of a scratching record needle at the end of its track and an unfamiliar din of voices from outside. Anxiously he approached the curtain hole. Hundreds of uniformed service people, professionals in suit and tie, people wearing hazmat suits, and a local news reporter and cameraman all stood outside his window – a worthy crowd! He heard the faint sound of an ambulance’s siren, and registered with mild interest that perhaps someone had been trampled in the chaos. How easily he had dictated their lives! They, who had no idea of his existence let alone their own doomed metastasis. How predictable they were! What had these oncologists been doing all these years, when cancerous cells could simply be willed into one place with a polite written invitation? Here they were, an amassed target, about to come face-to-face with their curative biopsy: Ms. Tottenham. She was the radiation treatment humanity needed, and he had given it to them.

           Berner opened his eyes. The green- and yellow-tinted living room was muted in the darkness, but was permeated by a foreign red. The light penetrated loudly through the curtain hole, and the sound of the siren played in sharper focus. He looked through the hole…

His tears gleamed in the ambulance’s flashing red lights. He watched the EMTs role a gurney into the vehicle, slowly, without urgency, a sheet pulled over the passenger’s face, apparently not realizing the significance of their vessel. He needed them to know. Berner pushed his Crosley in front of the bay window, opened the door, and prepared to wade into the sea of malignant tissue. For her.