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Volume II
Issue III
ISSN: 1062-6697
~~~````''''~~~
CORE is an electronic journal of poetry, fiction, essays,
and criticsm. Back issues are available via anonymous
ftp from ftp.eff.org from the /pub/journals directory.
Please feel free to reproduce CORE in its entirety only
throughout Cyberspace. To reproduce articles individually,
please contact the author.
Questions, submissions, and subscription requests should be
sent to core-journal@eff.org.
~~~````''''~~~
LITTLE DUCKS
ALL LINED UP IN A ROW
Randy Money . . . . Mourn the Dead
Kenneth Wolman . . . Wolma, Poland
Kyle Cassidy . . . . Badmetafiction
________________________________________________________________________
Randy Money LIBRBM@suvm.acs.syr.EDU
MOURN FOR THE DEAD
Row on row of stones jut from the ground through the snow,
landmarks of memories fading as generations rise and recline.
Trudging through ice-lined, snow-filled ruts worn into the earth by
a century of wagon wheels, carriage wheels and tires, past the
plots of other people's memories and dreams, past snuffling poodles
and straining shepherds dragging their whispering owners in solemn
prancing procession, we at last reach our destination. There my
sister lays flowers on two graves and I recall my father squatting,
a position I associate with him, either pulling weeds as he pulled
on his pipe or combing our dog or steadying a small me in a
photograph. He was felled by three strokes. She remembers our
mother ice skating; I remember our mother dancing a polka. Our
mother, rotted, carved and hollowed by cancer, did not die but
disappeared in whittlings, hair by hair, pound by pound. A few
grave sites away, my sister lays no flowers but stands, trying to
recall some good, but only remembering her father howling, howling,
howling at the pain of brain cancer chewing, chewing, chewing until
the doctors performed a lobotomy, not to ease the pain but to
destroy his awareness of it. Silence follows like a consequence of
orphanhood, and in shared sadness we mourn for the dead.
* * * * *
My sister sits back in her recliner, feet up, perplexed as she
reviews her life. Mom, her oldest son says, we are worried about
you, and she recalls another voice with the same timber but
roughened by cigarettes and liquor over fifty years earlier: her
father saying Get us some beer, as, her mother not home, he and his
cronies played poker. She recalls putting the last bottle on the
table, and that man's hand gripping her thigh and sliding up under
her skirt as her father watches and laughs then looks back at his
cards. And it happened not once but several times through her
teens, and she always retreated to her room, where she buried
herself in books or dreamed of a time when she would have children
and a husband who would kill anyone who mistreated her children.
She endured those years; she endures her memories. Mom, her oldest
son says, we are worried about you; we want your mind at rest; we
want you to rest easy. And she recalls a second voice with a
different timber but the same tone almost fifty years earlier and
arrives, blessed be, to her husband who, saved by the grace of God
almighty, and so assured of heaven, hallelujah, says to her
stepfather, No, you stay out of my home; We don't need your help;
I'll care for my wife myself when she needs it, which she does not
now, for if she is ill, she is sick on her own corruption and
because she is a lazy woman. And her stepfather says, Get the hell
out of my way or I'll kill you, slaps the door open, pushes her
husband aside and enters her bedroom, where she lay with a fever of
one hundred and three, her throat closing and her head spinning,
and picks her up and carries her to the hospital. She moves from
hospital to hospital, reaching Florida in early summer in labor
with her first child and the nurse saying, Wait, you have to hold
it, the doctor won't be here for an hour; she remembers holding and
holding and holding, ignoring the pain of tissue tearing, the
conflagration in belly and womb, fighting the urge to push, her son
straining against her straining against him. And now forty-five
years later, father, mother, step-father and husband are dead and
her oldest son says, Mom, we worry about you; We worry that you
will not rest easy; We worry that you are not repentant, that you
have not renounced your sins before the alter of God; We--including
his wife, but meaning him--want you to die assured of heaven. And
she, tired, weak, beckons to him and coughs as he bends over her
and spits square in his right eye, which she says offends her. And
as he leaves, she ponders why, now that she can travel to New York
or Boston or Toronto like she's always wanted, the doctor has said
cancer, the anti-cell, the devourer gnawing, gnawing, gnawing, and
why she is only comfortable in her recliner, traveling her life
over and over like penance for unknown sins, and she wonders if
there is redemption and grace and rest. And we look on with some
pride, but mostly in grief and helplessness and we mourn for the
dead.
* * * * *
And the old lady calls and she says,
Come see me.
My sister answers,
No, I can't, Aunt Iantha. I can't.
And Aunt Iantha's voice quivers like her hand as it picks up her
cigarette,
Come see me; Puff; You have to see me; Puff; I need to talk to
you; Puff.
And my sister squirms in her recliner and says,
I can't; You have to understand, Aunt Iantha, I can't come to
you.
And Aunt Iantha says,
The tongue is the evilest organ in the human body; Puff; You
lied to me; Puff; You said you'd always take care of me, and
now you won't even come see me; Puff.
And my sister says,
I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
And the old lady sits smoked and marinating in phlegm, the smell of
dead tobacco and moiling cigarette smoke, all compounded by the
reek of a house sealed for a generation day and night, winter and
summer. She shifts in her withered skin, and sits her crooked,
arthritic back against the straight-backed kitchen chair and she
says,
She lied to me; Puff; I have no friends left; Puff; I know she
goes to the hair-dresser; How can she go out? Puff; I had
cancer once, too; Puff; They said I'd die, but they cured me;
They'll cure her, too; Puff; So why can't she come see me?
Puff.
And I don't say to her,
You don't understand; You were childless and you and your
husband took your money, had your good times; Now she has some
time to enjoy herself as best she can and she shouldn't have
to come here and face your nagging and groaning about your
aches and pains, your constant complaints and irritations,
your scoldings that none of us do what we do the way you'd do
it, which, for you, is the only way anything should be done;
But more, she can't accept your retreat, your dead run away
from the world, not when she's struggling to survive.
Instead I say,
You don't understand; You were thirty, she's almost seventy,
and it's a different cancer, in the blood, not settled in a
spot where it can be carved away; As for the hairdressers,
they've offered to come to her house but she won't let them,
she'd rather struggle against the lungs that won't fill, the
blood that won't carry enough oxygen, the tiredness that
cramps her muscles and makes her stagger so she has to hold
something, anything after a few steps so she won't fall down,
so she can regain her breath; She walks and breathes now like
you, twenty years her senior; This is her one self-indulgence,
don't begrudge her that, don't make her feel guilty.
And the old lady says,
No, you don't understand, you don't know what it's like to be
old and widowed and childless; Puff; I've sat in this room
twenty years and watched all I knew and all I cared for fade
away and die as I sat here waiting and waiting for the ones I
wanted to come and they didn't come; Puff; and those who did
come weren't the ones I wanted to come, so I sent them all
away and waited and waited; Puff; my family never comes to see
me; Where are you? Why won't you come? Puff.
And I don't say,
because I can't stand the smell and the bitterness and the
reproaches.
And I say,
We all have families, Aunt Iantha, we all have to tend to our
own; We'll help as much as we can, but we can only help so
much.
And as I leave wondering if my sister dying isn't more alive than
Aunt Iantha, in something like horror, I mourn for the dead.
________________________________________________________________________
Kenneth Wolman Ken.Wolman@att.com
WOLMA, POLAND
(Bogdan Chmielnicki was the leader of a Cossack revolt in the Ukraine
and Poland between approximately 1648 and 1658. It is estimated that
he was responsible for the deaths of between 100,000 and 300,000 Jews
in Poland during that period.)
For Melynda C. Reid
1. PRELUDE: WEDDING DANCE
Beyle married Kalman in the fourth year of Chmielnicki, went under
the canopy,
defying danger and fate: stood with her bridegroom, thought only of
him, this pale, graying man
with his scholar's soft hands and sad gentle eyes. The wedding jester
howled with laughter, perched like a crow
on the synagogue roof, shrieked out Bride-to-be, bride-to-be, think but
a little of what now awaits you!
and they laughed at the jest, even Beyle herself, solemn in thinking of
her new estate.
Their families danced round them, pulled them apart: men with men,
women with women, circling in the dark.
Beyle sought Kalman with her dreams, her spirit in the air, apart from
the dancers and decorum of the Law:
and felt his spirit move toward hers in darkness, thinking indeed of
what awaited them:
for Beyle, at sixteen, and Kalman, at thirty, saw in each other the
meeting of souls beyond age,
and longed to cleave together, fire and air, according to their spirits:
and then soared above themselves,
joined together in air and fire, one within the other, accepted first in
fear, then in joy:
looked down on the lights below, saw not Chmielnicki but Heaven in
the distant-nearing flames,
drifted in each others' arms, and laughed to themselves, laughed to
each other, recalling the jesterUs
summons to think of what awaited: for they felt this night that what
waited was their gift to be borne.
2. THE CHILDREN
Beyle married Kalman in the fourth year of Chmielnicki, soon fled
with him from the village of Wolma
to Cracow: returned that winter, heard the nightmares: but because
there was nothing to do for them,
she could not mourn: so Beyle went like a ghost into her husband's
bed, dutifully,
as she had been instructed: but at the moment of Kalman's fulfillment,
remembered the nightmares:
how the Hetman's Cossacks sewed a terrified cat in her pregnant
sister's womb,
fed the baby she carried to an underfed sow; captured her 10-year-old
brother Avruml,
poured raw vodka into his gullet, wrapped him like fish in a scroll of
the Law, and live-buried him,
before their mother's disbelieving maddened eyes, in the synagogue
cemetery,
laughing drunkenly at the quick-fading shrieks of Mamala! from
beneath the lime:
and how their mother, reduced to a keening and babbling mad-
woman who had forgotten her prayers,
was allowed at last to die: raped first, repeatedly, on her son's fresh
grave, then beheaded;
and how a Cossack hurtled her severed head at an innkeeper in
payment for vodka and food.
She heard her brother's spectral sobbing in the draining cry of the
man thrusting inside her,
and that night twice conceived: their firstborn child, and her knowl-
edge that hearing the cry of the dead had doomed it.
She bore that summer, crying out Mamala! in her pain, as she forced
it downward, outward, cruelly,
feeling nothing for its unbegun unwanted life, ended as the midwife
severed the cord.
Kalman mourned, took solace from his books, sought and found
answers that only smothered questions,
bound the mouth that would protest: and was taught to dull questioning
God with his wife's body:
so came to Beyle again, to sow within her, this time in joyless silence,
focused,
as the rabbis taught him, not on pleasure but the task of binding his
wife to fertility.
So again she conceived, and bore again, but the child lived: and it was
the color of moonrise
beneath the dark swatch of its hair: a ghostly spectre to take Avruml's
name, Avruml himself
risen from the graveyard lime-pit, with no more life than he. Beyle
resigned herself:
and sensed this child would also die, victim of its name, a curse given
in devotion.
But it did not, and Beyle mocked herself for a false prophetess: for she
saw Death's Angel,
knew herself his priestess, dedicated to his will, even to renouncing
her children:
but not Avruml but Kalman followed in the winter that came: not
murdered, save by God's pity
and the blood-spattering cough that lived in his lungs, that made him
weep from pain and shiver
through the hottest summer nights, and that finally came to take him.
Still Beyle could not mourn:
for the sickly child, the changling-Avruml, clung to her breast,
demanded all her strength,
fought against her darkness, drank, sucked at her breast with the
lover's passion its father could not show,
lived beyond its foretold days, an ancient soul and wonder to his
mother, but would not grow.
3. THE INVADERS
The Swede has left his wife six months behind, her face by now a dim
memory of resentment,
his children, two alive, four dead, all given to fill a parish register or
country churchyard,
his wife's womb swelling again with the promise of a new chance that
neither wishes nor believes,
living on a hillside farm that mocks his wife's fecundity in its
barrenness: a farm of stones.
One morning, he looks without passion or anger at the wolf-mangled
body of a sheep,
surveys his rain-withered crop that will be neither tithe nor bread to
feed his family:
shivers and feels himself freeze dead inside, remembering the story
in church of how Hagar,
cast into the desert by the Jewess Sarah, parted from Ishmael so not
to see him die:
does not bid farewell, but disappears from the farm, spends the day
drinking in an inn filled with men
whose every breath united is curses and despair; and flees to King
Charles' army and the distant Polish wars.
Lost after battle, wandering to the village, he contemplates the
woman in the yard,
sitting in the sunlight, a baby clamped to a breast, the nipple dark-
swollen, visible,
a feminine vision to inspire not lust but memory: of his wife on the
hillside farm,
perhaps alive, perhaps not (it is all one), the child in her womb now
born, perhaps alive,
perhaps not (it is all one), her body beneath his in the night, a
shredded memory of love
turned too soon to exhaustion: she, an old woman at 25, without the
strength even to dream.
He feels suddenly seized without reason, without experience, newborn
himself, bereft of memory:
and the Jewess before him a strange, darkling creature with wolf-
eyes, clutching her child to her teat like a beast.
She looks at him, the Jewess, quickly covers her breast, extends the
child before her like a shield,
shaking her head in odorous terror, a febrile quivering fright before
a stranger:
and he walks slowly toward her, his boots sucking against the
springtime mud like a polluted kiss.
What is she crying out at him, shaking her head? He feels himself
laugh soundlessly: what would she cry but
Don't! as he takes the child, carefully, out of her arms, sets it on the
ground, turns and sees her gaping:
for he has kissed the child gently, then turned its back to what will
take place, quickly, behind the ruined house.
She knows the sure signs that she is with child again: and will bear in
the winter. What are prayers? she cries:
staggers wildly through the village, Avruml in her arms, invades the
study house, and pleads
for death at the hands of Kalman's friends as she begged the stranger
when he was done with her: extends her neck,
points at the sword in the belt he had not bothered to remove. But her
comforters hold her,
teach her the Law: how a Jewish mother bears a Jewish child, that the
child will be welcomed:
a new child, a new life, in a land that has lost its children: and the
words of her comforters
thrust into her darkness, drive her shame from her heart, forgive her,
save her from her mother's madness.
God has abandoned us, he is so distant! cries the midwife that December
as she draws forth
the red, squalling blonde-haired Viking baby boy whose cry is like the
ram's horn blown at the New Year.
But Beyle laughs, weeping, holding the child: No, God is close, in my
belly, like the cat inside my sister!
4. CRADLE SONG
Sleep my little one, show me your future,
Sleep and dream, show me your past.
Show me my sister, my mother, my brother,
Show me your father, show me what lasts.
Sleep my little one, don't wake too soon,
Sleep and dream, don't wish for dawn.
For dawn takes away all your wonderful dreaming,
And daylight shows nightmares, a life to be borne.
Wake my little one, for you are crying,
Wake my poor little one, MamalaUs here.
Wake, my little one, for you have saved me,
The past is a fouled curse, the future is here.
Rise with me, little one, come dance in my arms,
Rise and dance, come up to the air.
Look down at the lights, reach out, touch the stars,
For they are as bright as the gold in your hair.
________________________________________________________________________
Kyle Cassidy cass8806@elan.rowan.edu
BADMETAFICTION
I took formal and more or less official possession of Elvis
Hemingway's room at exactly twelve noon, February the second, 1992.
It was Groundhog's day, that's important.
The actual physical act of taking over the back room at #5b
Carpenter Street (upstairs from the _Ajax Tire Shop_ where the
violently broiling sounds of cursing, pneumatic tools and _Guns 'n
Roses_ could be heard almost continually throughout the day) was
not a pretty sight. Elvis was a fat, fading, and failing hippie.
Neo-hippie I should say. He was only 30. Most of his _hip_ness he
got from smoking dope, watching other people smoke dope, listening
to the _Grateful Dead_ (while smoking dope), and renting the video
tape of _Woodstock_ (after smoking dope). He was born in 1962
which would have made him, what? _eight_ during the concert?
_"Don't take the brown acid. The brown acid is bad,"_ he would
tirelessly intone (he thought it was funny, or poignant, or at
least vaguely _sixties_). He lived on vegetarian bean sprouts,
Tab, and clove cigarettes. He worked for _Greenpeace_-though he
kept a sock drawer you could breed maggots in. There was a bong
next to his bed with an old sweat sock stuffed in the neck.
I didn't know Elvis that well-I'd seen him for a total of about
three hours. I got to stand there and watch him pick through old
_Relix_ magazines, ostensibly looking for a picture of Bob Weir and
Bob Dyllan throwing sticks off the side of London Bridge or
something. He felt he had to show me that. He was the type to
vanish noiselessly at frequent intervals and be gone for days at a
time. He was supposed to have moved out by the 31st, but he'd
vanished again instead.
"He gone?" I said as I came banging up the hollow, wooden,
neverbeenpaintedsince1961 stairs in my huge black combat boots,
making a noise like a thousand stampeding wildebeests. Of course
this comment was directed into the empty air, and I didn't know if
anybody was home, but it was meant for my frail, new roommate,
whose name-to his misfortune, and for the sake of elucidation-was
Hershel Feinstien. I was bringing over the last of my things. I
set them down on the kitchen floor.
"Nope," he replied bleakly, looking up from the grapefruit half
he was gnawing on and away from the newspaper he was reading, "Not
gone. Haven't seen him in weeks." He was wearing a dark blue
suit-jacket and slacks, a white silk shirt and this mottled pink
and black tie with a knot about the size of a peanut. He had on
penny loafers with nickels shoved in them. The nickels didn't fit
properly and the stiff new leather was bulging and torn.
"You know, you're supposed to put _pennies_ in those." I
pointed. He followed my finger briefly with his eyes but didn't
seem to understand me. He ran four fingers through his curly red
hair, which was a little too long in the back, and shook the
_Books_ section of the paper. Over his shoulder I could read the
headline: "Sieze the Day!"
Feinstien was inherently and overpoweringly Jewish (all his
friends were either named Ira, Moses, or Saul), though he tried to
pretend otherwise. Even to the point of hiding, behind the
bathroom mirror, the tiny golden Star of David which his mother had
given him on his barmitzvah fifteen years before.
"That's why they call them _penny_ loafers."
"What?" he looked up at me.
"I brought the rest of my stuff. This is it."
"Good. That's good."
Most of my stuff was in the living room or the closet or piled
up in the corner of Hersel's room.
Hershel Feinstien was a science fiction author who was suffering
from a traumatic, acute, and near permanent case of writer's block.
In fact, he hadn't written a word in two years, ever since George
Scithers cryptically referred to him as an "ant farmer" in the
elevator at a Chicago convention. His exact meaning was never made
quite clear to me on that one, but Hersh was devastated. (This
might have been related to an incident which had taken place two
nights prior, where Hersh had gotten severely intoxicated at the
hotel bar and leapt over a table to kiss a woman whom he thought
was Ursila K. Le Guinn, and who had in fact turned out to be the
wife of a vacationing steel magnate from Pittsburgh;-whose
distempered and impassioned bodyguard proceeded then to lay
Feinstien across every table in the room, spilling a good number of
drinks in the process.) Hardly anyone called him Hershel. His
first (and only) book, _Christ & the Ceramic Belt Hammer /r_, was
published under the pseudonym Mitterand Belfgore. Most people
called him _Belf_. You kind of had to. (The book, by the way, was
a very complicated pseudo-religious tract about an intelligent, and
highly independent, race of neural impulses which existed in unused
portions of the human brain (largely in idiots) and psionically
regulated weather patters into a complex matrix of
literature/language, basically for the entertainment of some
miscellaneous and unnamed space bugs living in Dimension Z (that's
not the real name by the way, the location of the true alien home-
world escapes me at the moment). It's a real tough read, though it
garnered Hershel a glut of favorable reviews, mostly comparing him
with dead existentialists from third world countries.)
He worked at _Captain Hook's!_ restaurant for children, where he
dressed in an outsized foam rubber pirate's head (patch, hook, and
boots) and was three times a night goosed in a mock sword fight by
Staci Randall, a coquettish seventeen year old High School senior,
who looked almost too good dressed in Peter Pan's green tights and
tunic. He walked around bellowing, "shiver me timbers!" "you'll
walk the plank!" "swab the deck!" and other such nautical nonsense.
He'd first taken the job at the recommendation of his agent, Marty,
who told him (both of them in a drunken stupor) that science
fiction mogul Lester Dell Ray's daughter Cordelia worked there. To
the disappointment and unrestrained despair of all involved (except
probably Marty), Lester Dell Rey turned out not to have any
daughters named Cordelia and the girl in question turned out to be
named _Mary Kay_ and not _Dell Rey_ anyway (her father was a
plumber from Clarksboro) ... but Belf stayed on just the
same-mostly due to the way in which Staci Randall filled out her
costume, and partly because he had just been promoted to Captain
Hook (whereas before he had merely been an ordinary pirate who
didn't get to bellow anything at all except "can I take your
order?" and "would you like fries with that?").
I stomped around the apartment with an air of possessive
pride:-peeing loudly into the toilet and leaving the seat defiantly
in the air when I was finished-a purely symbolic gesture of bold
audacity directed at my last girlfriend who maintained an
obsessive, feminine, fixation about such things.
"I want that man out of my apartment!" I blared from the
bathroom, carefully placing my brushes-tooth and hair, in the
vacant medicine cabinet.
"So do I," bellowed Belf from the kitchen (he had, by now,
considerable practice in bellowing, it was well suited to his
meager form). Belf _hated_ Elvis, with a passion not to be found
on the most memorable and egregious episodes of _Divorce Court_.
While Belf was neat and orderly (he folded his trash), slim, and
polite, Elvis smelled bad, snored, came in late, and perhaps worst
of all, bragged incessantly about success with women who never
existed.
"Well, when's he coming? to get his stuff...."
"I don't know...." There was the sound of a spoon being set down
on a plate. I walked back down the hall-into the living room, "he
should have been here days ago. Weeks ago. He never should have
moved _in_. I told him he was moving out. I haven't seen him."
"Where does he go?" I asked, looking over the battered books on
the shelf, there were dozens of them with unimaginably esoteric
titles, some in foreign languages.
"I don't know. I have no idea. The only thing I know is that
people call and ask for him, late at night. All these guys with
weird accents," he was pouring himself a cup of some expensive
smooth scented coffee, "I tell them that he's dead. Every once in
a while I beat his clothes back into his room with a stick. I
mean, I _dream_ about his clothes..."
"What's that?" I asked, pausing by his desk, littered with paper
and empty coffee cups. I pointed to a large manilla envelope tied
meticulously with a white string.
"My new book," he said. Written neatly across the top of the
envelope was the single word "Badmetafiction".
"What the hell is _Badmetafiction?_"
"It's a joke," he said, "Kind of. Sort of a joke actually-it
would be funny if ... I don't know. If only it were funny." He
seemed weary and dismayed.
"Can I read it?"
"Can? well, you _could_-only there's not anything there. I
mean, it's all just blank paper. It's just a title. It's going to
be about a science fiction author who's-well, he's out of ideas,
and it turns out to be because there are these government bore-
worms inside his head ... and all he can hear are the Watergate
tapes, playing over and over ... I just thought that if the
envelope were full-stuffed with paper and all, that it would
inspire me..." His thought processes were stratospheric, neurotic,
and seldom understood by others. He sounded nasal.
I untied the string and looked inside the envelope. There was
a sheet of bond paper with "Badmetafiction" typed across it and his
pseudonym, Mitterand Belfgore beneath it. The rest of the envelope
was stuffed with coupons.
"It has an almost finished appearance to it," said Belf.
"You could fill your shelves with them."
"I could. I may." He wrung his hands pensively.
I went into my room, Elvis' room. It wasn't that there was a
lot of stuff-it just wasn't in any particular order. There was no
furniture, just dirty clothes and paper bags. Remnants of a
hundred take-out dinners at Taco Bell. There were a lot of beer
cans. It smelled like a locker room,-that particular fetid odor of
wet socks and perspiration which always reminded me of ...
something.
"I don't think he's ever done his laundry. Since he's been
here. Not once." He kicked at a sock, which rolled bumpily into a
corner, "Look at this," he crouched next to the bed pointing, as
through at an unusually large Haitian Tarantula which had just
crawled from the drain, "he uses his _shoes_ for ashtrays. His
fucking _shoes!_" Next to the bed were a pair of nondescript
brandless, canvass, running shoes-they were filled with cigarette
butts and ashes.
"Does he _dump_ them before he puts them on?"
"Yeah, he _dumps_ them all right ... he _dumps_ them here in the
corner," He pointed with his foot. His hands were shoved into his
pockets as though he were protecting them. In the corner was a
makeshift ashtray, partially obscured by a rolled up pair of long-
johns. A cookie can which must have held four pounds of butts and
ashes. They overflowed and spilled onto the floor.
"He's _never_ emptied that."
Next to the ashtray was the filthy purple bong with a sweat sock
shoved in the top-I mentioned that before.
"He actually smokes out of that. He takes the _sock_ out and
_smokes_ out of it. He puts the sock there to keep the _water from
evaporating_. Him and those damn lazy hippies. They come up here
and smoke dope and plan the revolution and meanwhile his _socks_
are sneaking out the back door and committing _armed robbery_." He
stomped out of the room.
"Well, when's he gonna get back? I mean, when can I start
putting my stuff in here? Could I shove all this in the closet?
would he mind do you think?"
There was some abstract rumbling from the kitchen.
"Does he _mind_?" Belf bellowed, "it no longer _matters_ if he
_minds_. We ought to just start a _fire_ or something. Salt the
earth," he wandered back in the room, "I say we move it _for_
him..." he was wearing this gas mask that I had gotten at a yard
sale about ten years before (I had never found an adequate use for
it, but somehow I couldn't bear to throw it away), a single yellow
dish-washing glove on his left hand, an industrial (metal shop
workers?) apron, and on his right hand he was wearing his hook
which he was brandishing wildly. He handed me a trash bag and the
other rubber glove.
"Here," he said, "sorry I only have one glove-"
I opened the trash bag and he started hooking clothes and
dropping them into the bag. His breath was fogging up the inside
of the mask and his head tilted at odd angles in order to see
through the clear parts. He picked up the million fragrant and
crumpled socks as though they were turds.
"Where are we going with this?" I asked, "I mean, what are we
going to do with it."
He stopped for a moment and looked directly at me. Except for
the hook-for-a-hand, he looked like one of those guys in the
beginning of the _Andromeda Strain_, walking through that town
filled with dead people.
"We're going to throw it in the river." He sounded like Darth
Vader. It wasn't exactly a river, to allow you to believe so would
overly glorify our town. It was sort of a wide stream, but it
passed beneath the main street about a half mile away in a splendid
and broiling waterfall that always made me think of salmon on those
PBS documentaries, you know, heroically leaping up stream and
thrashing their tails, tragically and wonderfully exerting
themselves in glorious slow motion, only to die horribly, gored and
mauled two miles upstream in the jaws of a two thousand pound
grizzly bear.
"Clog the stream?" I said, "Pollute the environment?"
"Yes. With the environmentalist's trash. Let _him_ drag it out
of the water with a stick or something. I hope it kills a fish."
He picked up Elvis' shoes with a diligent and unrelenting disdain
and dropped them into the bag.
"Tribbles like Vulcan's,"
"Huh?"
"But they _don't_ like Klingon's..."
"What the hell are you talking about?"
"We'll put the chain on the door tonight, and tomorrow we'll
change the locks and if anybody comes looking for him, we'll tell
them he _died_, that he was _shredded_ in a _combine_ accident in
Arkansas and they buried him in a fucking _mason jar_." He waved
his hook in my face, "We'll tell them he was _julienned_. Then if
he _does_ come back we can garrote him with a lamp cord and bury
him in the back yard and no one'll suspect us because they'll think
he's already _dead_." He was beginning to sweat prolifically under
the gas mask and his wet hair was sticking wildly in the air. The
plastic eye patches were completely fogged over. He emphasized his
words with savage lunges of his hook, as though he were trying to
swat a bat in mid flight.
Belf put on a long black _Botany 500_ overcoat (it was about
sixty degrees out) and dragged the first bag unceremoniously down
the stairs with his hook. I followed, giddy with some crazy,
wicked, sense of desolation and havoc. I tossed my bag up onto my
shoulder-feeling like an evil Robin-Hood-Santa-Clause. It must
have weighed fifty pounds. Together we trudged down the street.
After four blocks the bags grew fairly heavy and Belf bore down on
the _Dunkin Donuts_ with all the serious intent of a sailor coming
home to the best brothel in town after a year at sea. Slinging the
bag inside the door, kicking it across the filthy, smooth tile
floor. Groaning or sighing he sat down on a stool and pulled out
a cigarette.
"I'm going through a lot of trouble to get this dimwit out of my
house," he shoved the cigarette into the corner of his mouth and
lit it with a loud, expensive looking, silver lighter, "If there
were justice in the world, _he_ would be carrying this trash down
and throwing it in the river."
Two seats down from Belf sat a hacked old woman in an official
looking black coat specked with shiny silver buttons. She was
short and disheveled, her stringy black hair fell in her face as
she alternately pulled at a tired looking cup of coffee and chopped
a cream doughnut with widely spaced teeth. I thought at first that
she was a cop, an undercover cop or something, but then I realized
that she was a crossing guard, a ridiculous octagonal hat lay on
the counter in front of her. Her face was beleaguered and lined.
She looked straight ahead, through the walls.
Belf rapped his hook on the counter and ordered coffee. Which
was brought to him by a blue-lidded fifty year old waitress with a
beehive hairdo. She didn't look twice at his prosthesis, but
instead turned wearily to me without saying a word.
"Coke," I said, "and a Boston Creme." She scowled at me and
languorously promenaded off on flat, white shoes. Somewhere under
all that makeup there lived a sad and tormented soul, who had long
since come to grips with the damp and cheerless realities of the
world. She realized that she would never be a princess or a beauty
queen. She would never be an administrator, or even a seller of
used cars. She couldn't be a secretary because she lacked
refinement and conversational skills-and besides that, she probably
couldn't type.
Belf stirred his coffee with his hook.
"Bout time ta get goin'," said the Beehive to the crossing
guard, passing a wet rag across the counter in front of her.
"Uh-huh," said the crossing guard.
We drank our beverages. I gnawed on my doughnut while Belf
jabbered on with a continual stream of seemingly unconnected
thoughts on circumcision, computers, weather patterns, angels, ice
sculptures, and the mysteries of mezzanine floors. These he tried
to tie together with the crazy idea that he had been Galileo in not
one, but several past lives, all of which left me very confused.
This was one of the hazards of knowing him. He fell silent and
stared forward for some time, lost in himself, then he turned to
me, his thoughts completed I supposed. "Lastday," he said
caustically, looking down into his open palm.
"Huh?" I said. He showed me his hand, it was clean and young,
traced with faint pink lines.
"Lastday," he said again.
"What the hell are you talking about?"
He looked down into his palm again. "Yesterday it was red, now
it's blinking." He looked back up at me, "Let's get out of here."
He aimed a finger out the window.
"Sure," I replied, dropping the remains of my donut on the
napkin. "You're a nut," I told him. The crossing guard looked at
us and then at her watch.
"You don't believe what I was saying?" asked Belf as we again
lugged the bags down the sidewalk.
"No, that's not it, saying about what? I guess I'm ... aw hell.
I forgot what I was going to say. I don't know."
"Open the pod-bay doors, Hal," said Belf, shining his teeth like
whitewashed fenceposts at me.
_Across from us, school is out, and there is a group of kids
waiting to cross, standing on the curb and watching the traffic on
322 pass in front of the middle school. The traffic is pretty
heavy, and as far as I can see are cars in both directions. One of
the kids, who looks about thirteen, is wearing a new denim jacket
and stomping brown work boots. He looks pretty antsy, like maybe
there's a good baseball game on, or he's going to meet some girl
behind the library. He's looking left and right, up and down the
street, and instinctively my eyes follow his. Finally there comes
a small break between cars, maybe twenty feet and he runs out
between them. The instant that his foot hits the pavement, I know
he isn't going to make it.
"Look!" I say, and point. Suddenly everything is noiseless and
calm, as though one universe ended as I said those words and
instantly, another began. Belf follows my arm just in time to see
a car-it all happens so fast now that I don't even remember what
kind of car it is-smack into him. He folds almost in two, like a
carpenters ruler at an awkward place in mid-leg, somewhere around
the knee, but I can see that it is in an unhealthy direction, then
he recoils from the car like a bullet from a gun, he flies up into
the air and somehow his pants came off, completely stripped off,
and before he hits the ground I can see one of his boots flying
through the air. It must go thirty feet, I watch it and see it
land in the street. There seems to be nothing in the world but me
and that boot, now sitting upright and untied on the pavement,
looking unassuming and perfectly normal_.
"Knocked his pants off," I heard Belf say, his voice was loud
and seemed to punch through a sheet of silence which had been
stretched tight between me and the rest of the world. Suddenly,
although I didn't know that any time passed, the street was filled
with people and flashing lights and the traffic was stopped. We
picked up our bags and kept on walking, slowly, trying to get a
quick glimpse of what was going on without looking like
rubberneckers. A short, fat woman, with a recessed face and large
protruding necks, plastic rimmed glasses, dressed in pastel green,
polyester, bell bottoms and a tight white sweater, was lumbering
from the accident to my side of the street, swinging her heavy arms
in order to lift her feet. I heard her call to someone behind me:
"Both his legs are broken!" The kid was laying on the cool asphalt
with two or three blue-jeaned people kneeling over him. From the
quick glance I got between squatting bodies I could see a broken
bone sticking through the flesh of his leg, red and white and
painful. I looked away, back up the street, and as I did, I saw
the crossing guard, the one from the donut shop, and she was
running down the sidewalk really fast, holding her hat in front of
her, clutched to her chest with both hands and her hair was
streaming out behind her. I could see then that she was short and
a little over weight. There was a look of absolute terror on her
face; I knew that she could see the flashing lights, and see the
people. I knew that she knew what happened and I felt sorry for
her.
"Look," I said to Belf, pointing again, then almost wishing I
hadn't.
"Bet she feels like shit," he said.
"Yeah," I replied quietly, "yeah, I bet she does."
We lingered a couple of seconds longer but Belf wasn't
interested and he started reciting the laws of robotics, complete
with corollaries, and poking me in the arm with his hook. We
walked on down the road towards the spillway where the ground
dropped away on one side. I looked over, it must have been a mile
down. Tiny, great, crashing, furious, ruinous, clouds of water
splashed into the basin below with a distant roar and a cold spray,
like a vaporizer.
"Say goodbye to Elvis," croaked Belf with an air of melodramatic
sentimentality, his springy hair doing crazy pirouettes in the
wind. It was kind of noisy where we were standing.
"Do you think we really ought to? I mean, these are his worldly
possessions..."
"Ought to? Do I think we _ought to_?" he looked at me for a
brief interval, as though I had an enormous pimple beneath one eye,
and then he shouted: "_Into the drink you foul reeking Pig-God!_"
hurling the bag as far as he could over the side. We both leaned
against the stone wall and watched it fall. It fell slowly as the
wind wafted up from under it, spreading it out like a parachute.
It seemed to take ages to reach the bottom where it made a far off
"whumph" and vanished in the churning waves. It rose up a few
seconds later and was instantly sunk again. For some time it was
gone entirely and our eyes eagerly searched the water until it
appeared ten or twelve yards away in the calmly swirling water,
barely floating now, an oil slick upon the surface.
"Now you," said Hershel, looking over at me and closing the
collar of his coat against the cold air with a thin hand.
"Elvis Hemingway: In the name of God Almighty, I drown thy
fleas!" I lifted the bag up with some gleeful recklessness and set
it on the white wall, looked cautiously, left and right, for
police, and pushed it over the side. It opened on the way down and
his clothes began to spill out. They scattered, and the bag landed
upside down, thrashing on the churning waves. After a few minutes
the bag floated limply out of the maelstrom.
"Look," called Belf, pointing. I followed his finger and could
see one of Elvis' shoes bobbing lazily on the surface of the water.
We watched it for a while, until it was out of sight around the
bend. Then Hersh said:
"I talked to my dad on the phone yesterday. He called."
"Oh yeah? Really? What did he say?"
"Not a lot. He asked how I was doing, you know; if I had fleas,
if I'd got a job yet, if I'd written anything, was I still eating
oatmeal three times a day."
"What did you tell him?"
"I told him I'd written another book, and that it was called
_Badmetafiction_ and that it was going to blow _Christ & the
Ceramic Belt Hammer /r_ right out of the water and that it would be
on the shelves any day now. I told him it was being reviewed by
Saul Bellow in the _New York Times_ book review section, and that
I'd sold the movie rights to Steven Spielberg and that I'd be rich
and famous inside the year."
"Did he believe you?"
"No. He said: _If a schlemazl like you sold umbrellas; it would
stop raining; if he sold candles; the sun would never set; if he
made coffins; people would stop dying_."
"Some dad."
"He's got faith in me, yeah." Belf sighed and we walked back
towards our apartment.
_____________________________________________________________________
CORE is published by Rita Rouvalis March 1993
