by Michael Gira
He snapped a chunk of cement loose from the ledge and dropped it down into the rubble. A stunned confetti-cloud of seagulls rose up, hovered in a chaos of conflicting spirals, then landed again just as suddenly, feeding in the garbage. He fingered a single whisker that had sprouted curling from his chin in the night, breaking through the white shell of pancake make-up he refreshed daily without washing. He twisted the brittle hair in his finger, then yanked it loose from his face. He rolled it between two fingers, tickling his fat red lower lip with the frail wire, his pinkie foppishly extended. A two inch length of hardened brown nail grew out of the nub-finger like a flattened claw. He released the hair and inserted the nail into the space between his front teeth, snagging a shred of last night’s beef. Plucking a wooden match from the piles of junk on the table, he scraped the moistened scum from beneath the nail, wiping the paste and meat fibers into his greasy pant leg. He filed the nail meticulously with a tear of fine oily sandpaper, progressively honing the edge thinner as it flattened out, like the head of a precision screwdriver. Testing this fresh edge, he took a circuitry panel from the convolutions of scavenged electronic junk on the table and snaked a finger around a transistor, snugging in a tiny silver screw. He took the bottle up again, pumped down the remainder of the syrup, and sent the empty vessel smashing against a wall behind him in the darkness.
An ancient and hairless chihuahua emerged from the fading warmth of their bed wracked with trembling, and clicked yapping towards the light. It skidded across the floor and stood coughing up at the dwarf on his stool. The dwarf made an abbreviated choking sound, as if he’d been lightly punched in the stomach — one “word” in his vocabulary of guttural clicks and wheezes — and the dog jumped the impossible distance up to the table without apparent effort, then to his lap, where it laid quivering and nuzzling into the dwarfs crotch for warmth, looking up with black eyes rolling insanely in its head.
Directly beneath his window, three stories down and level with the sea of rubble, the old lady stuck her head out her window and began her morning song. Out from a throat that was corroded and burned with twenty years of cheap vodka leaked an aimless extended croak that hung strangled in the cold a few feet beyond her window. Cracked consonants and tongue rolls punctuated the feeble drone. These tuneless phrases were born in mountain-peasant squalor ten centuries back and passed on in decadent form 78 years ago as childhood folk songs she memorized and now repeated without memory of their meaning, except as they implied nostalgia and warmth. If she’d had a home and children, she would have been singing these empty sagas of wolves and kings and little girls to her grandchildren. Instead she offered up her wheezing lullabies to the feral hoards of cats that prowled and bred beneath the ruins.
She set out a dozen large bowls overflowing with warm curdled milk. The milk slopped onto the granulated asphalt slabs of shredded roofing that butted up to her window sill and steamed in the cold like porridge. She tossed out handfuls of gnarled chicken parts and looked up at the dwarf with a sawtoothed smile. He waved down to her, his only neighbor in the derelict building.
Quickly appearing, slithering out from the buried labyrinths woven through the rubble, the predator cats approached in a crowd, drawn to the old lady’s offerings like piranhas swarming on a drowning child. As the old lady withdrew back into the darkness of the building, the cats were joined by rats of equal size, unafraid as they lapped the milk and ground the chicken bones in their teeth side by side with the cats, as if each species’ assigned genetic hatred had been erased. As the dwarf watched them feed, he imagined their mutual indifference was due to the bloated contentment the old lady provided them, as well as to the swollen piles of torn and leaking garbage bags that clogged the streets of the neighborhood, dumped down from the windows of the squats above or trucked in from the affluent areas of the city and left to rot where they lay.
The old lady came back to the window, squawking obscurities and gargling her vodka like mouthwash. The rats withdrew a sullen distance as she reached out and petted the growling cats, huge mounds of nicked and tangled fur that rubbed up against her wrist and licked her fingers with abrasive tongues for grease. But the rats sensed her soggy dementia and soon drew back in to feed with the cats. She’d long ago lost any ability to sense danger, or exude threat, and her instinct for survival had been reduced to a daily routine of trash picking and panhandling a few blocks away in a better neighborhood, where her extended styrofoam cup was quickly filled with dollar bills, presenting as she did to the guilty passerby such a perfect example of pathetic decrepitude.
The old lady disappeared again into the wall. A few minutes later, the dwarf watched her reappear climbing up and out the plywood hatch at the edge of the lot by the sidewalk. The hatch covered an old unused access tunnel that led under the debris and connected to the basement of the building. The basement was filled with a flat black expanse of standing water six inches deep. The air was sodden and warm with decay. Mosquitoes continued to breed in the water even in the winter. A weak grey light filtered in through the dense cobwebs that grew on the rusted metal grating of the slitted air vents in the upper walls. A wobbly path of broken cinder blocks led through the water, connecting the tunnel to the ancient moss-clothed stairs that led up into the dark interior of their building.
When the old lady steeped up into the light, she spat back down into the rank hole to clear her mouth of the smell, and batted and swiped at her hair to knock loose any spiders that might have attached themselves in the basement. Despite the weight of the double thickness plywood and her encumbering cloak of layered coats and robes, she slid the hatch cover closed like light cardboard. The dwarf watched her lumber purposefully down the street with her capes flowing behind her, pumping fog out her nose in a cloud around her head like a lathering workhorse. She adjusted her yoke of mismatched scarves and shawls around her head and neck, paused to drink from the bottle hidden deep in her wrap, then proceeded on, deliberate and slow, taking on the hunched waddle of a destitute babushka as she moved toward the fertile begging-grounds of the more populous and prosperous avenues nearby.
When she’d disappeared around a corner, the dwarf turned his attention to the mob of rats and cats finishing off their food. Soon everything was devoured, and they receded like an ocean tide back into the underworld beneath the rubble.
The dwarf spent his days selling off the grim trinkets and gadgets he’d repaired in the night, spreading them out on a blanket on the sidewalk. Later, he’d leave the unsold junk where it lay and he’d wander through the city, trolling in rubbish piles and dumpsters. If he came across a sealed tenement-tomb, he’d pry loose the plywood from a window and scavenge in the cool black musk. He’d drag his meager treasures out of the building and lay them carefully in the shopping cart he half-pushed and half-hung from in his migrations. The chihuahua trailed behind on a long leash of twine, dragged haplessly through alleys ankle-deep in broken glass and used syringes, where the urine vapors were so impenetrably sour the dog hacked and sneezed uncontrollably until the dwarf lifted it up onto the front edge of the cart where it perched like a featherless bird or a deranged shivering hood ornament.
Often they worked their way through the better neighborhoods, where they stood out among the sleek fashions and polished glass like filthy exiles from a depraved medieval circus. Here the dwarf would rifle through the corner trash cans, flinging coffee cups and newspapers and half-eaten sandwiches into the air like a madman. He’d sometimes pause at a payphone and unleash a stream of incoherent phonetics into the dangling receiver as if he were vehemently condemning some outrage or injustice to an indifferent bureaucrat. His white make-up cracked with the contortions of his rage and his tongue was a meaty red snake attacked by his yellow teeth. The ripe odor of his scummed and unwashed body rose through the mildewed layers of his clothing and spread out in a protective cloud, keeping pedestrians at their distance. The dog snapped out at them as they passed, though it was too nearsighted to see them.
&nbs
p; *
The old lady had moved in a few weeks ago. One morning when the dwarf made his way down the black stairwell in his building, there was an unexpected flood of sunlight pouring out a doorway. She’d managed to pull the plywood covering loose from the window and was sweeping up a dense roil of decades-old dust. She stood furiously working in the center of the cyclone like a hag-witch violently stirring up a pestilent storm. He hung back in the darkness watching her. When the dust settled, he saw that she’d already dragged in a mattress, heaped with her coals in the corner, and that she’d adorned the window ledge with personal items — a cheap plastic crucifix, a few boxes of candles, bottles of water and vodka. He moved into the light gently, so as not to shock her. She leaned on her broom as they stared at each other for a while in silence. Finally she smiled, and he moved on. Eventually, over the weeks, they developed as much of a rapport as either of them was capable of achieving, considering her apparent total lack of comprehensible English and his vocabulary of frenetic gestures and meaningless vocalizations.
Before her arrival, the only visitors to his building had been the dope-fiends he’d heard late at night, stripping the copper from the telephone lines, hacking loose plumbing fixtures, picking at the corpse of the architecture. The dope-fiends hung out in small crowds on the street corners of the neighborhood, kicking the ground and shouting for no reason, always on the lookout for an opportunity. They must have seen him coming in and out of the hatch very soon after he’d managed to break into the building and to take over the top floor, because almost immediately he’d been awakened from the dark smells beneath his mound of blankets to the distant hammering and scraping, gradually getting louder over the next few days as they worked their way up, cannibalizing each floor as they approached. The dwarf had run a well-concealed electric line down behind the stairs and connected it to the base of a street light, covering the connection and line with trash, and he’d been very careful not to burn an electric light at night for fear of attracting the police, or worse, dope-fiends. But soon, they were outside his door anyway as he worked in the piles of transformers, TV screens, cassette players and electric toys — so they’d heard his drills and smelled his solder and now knew there was something valuable inside.
One morning as he sat drinking his cough syrup, he’d looked up to see a dope-fiend leering in from the doorway. The dwarf grabbed a rusty butcher knife from the heap on the table and leapt like a crazed chimpanzee down from his stool. Cackling and screeching like a macaw, he scuttled towards the door. The dope-fiend jumped blindly down the dark stairs, shocked by the sight of the imbecile midget-clown with the porcelain face and the stretched scarlet mouth emitting a scream like a cartoon sound-effect depicting the agonies of hell. That night, the dwarf scavenged a dead bolt and police bar and secured it on his door, so he felt safe inside his room. But the following night, he awoke to a furtive sawing at his door and the muffled giggles of the prying dope-fiends. He flung open the door and threw a cupful of battery acid straight in the face of one of them and sliced at the hands of another one as the chihuahua yammered like scraping tin and he shrieked his war cry. They’d fled again, howling as they tumbled down the stairs. They hadn’t been back since. The old lady moved in the next day.
*
He sat at his window looking out at the flattened field bathed in cold moonlight and dissected in jigsaw shadows, as if it were the outer shell of the earth breaking up in slabs as it expanded from within. A hidden substratum of rebar and lathing and shredded metal rose from beneath it like a creeping web of weeds. Across the field, a dim light flickered behind a rippling blanket hung over a window in the hunched silhouette of a squat. An impotent flutter of guitar strums accompanied by what sounded like the whining of a spoiled child echoed across the lot, broken by sporadic shouts of drunken encouragement and bottles shattering on the bricks below. Out in the middle of the debris, on a large tilting concrete slab, a tangle of dogs exploded in a whirl of vicious blood and fangs, devouring each other with the collective enthusiasm of a mob of crazed drunks roaring cathartic encouragement at a second-rate boxing event. The carnage stopped suddenly and gradually a sound which must have been there all along revealed itself — a distant moan, low and aimless, as if someone were calling out the dreary wordless emotions of an oppressive dream as they slept. He realized it was coming from inside the building, beneath him, that it must be the old woman. He took his flashlight, undid the locks on his door, and worked his way down the stairs, the dog trailing behind him. The moan called, guiding him. As he descended, he heard a suppressed wheezing, encroaching through the blackness that surrounded him, as if the sound was leeching through the curtain of darkness. He half-expected rough hands to reach out and blindly caress his face. Then, around one last sightless twist in the stairwell, he saw the anemic light of her candles wavering from light to dark as the wind entered her window. At the door, the dog inched back behind him, an idling engine of growls.
The old lady lay flat on her back in the center of the floor with her arms and legs spread out as if in a macabre imitation of calisthenics. Spit dribbled from the corners of her mouth, then sprayed up in a fine mist as she groaned from deep inside her chest. Her eyes stared up at a fixed point in the diffusing smoke and darkness above her as if she were deciphering a secret message written in the haze. A bottle of vodka lay dripping in a dark puddle beside her head.
A huddle of cats and rats fed on her bare feet, which were paralyzed by her stroke. They lapped the blood from the rended flesh lazily, like nestling wolf cubs at their mother’s milk. Up beneath her skirt, a rat the size of a football chewed at the softness between her legs. The dwarf screamed, charging, expecting the demon animals to flee, but instead they only shifted slightly, together as a herd, annoyed.
The dog wailed in panic out in the hall. Kicking ineffectually at the rats and cats, the dwarf looked out the door into the diminishing light to see the chihuahua caught fully in the mouth of an oversized pit bull. The monster adjusted its jaws around the tiny dog casually, then shook it furiously, its eyes dead and impassive as blood fanned out from the crushed body in its teeth.
The crowding dope-fiends snickered in approval and moved in from the dark. The dwarf lunged through them, swinging and scratching, smelling murder beneath their clothes. He clawed at the face of an attacker. Some flesh came loose in his hand — the skin boiled loose from the battery acid.
He broke free and leapt up into the darkened stairway towards his room. He felt them behind him laboring, clutching. He made it to his door and slammed it shut, but before he could twist the lock the pit bull flew into it, heavier than the dwarf, and with more force than he could resist. He fell back, and the dog was instantly at his wrist.
Then they were all inside, laughing and congratulating each other like football players after a great play. They called off the dog and carried the dwarf struggling to the table. They wanted to know where the money was hidden. They knew he had cash because they’d seen him selling his junk around town, and they wanted it, now. One of them shined a weak flashlight around the room, illuminating the heaps of electronic treasure. Someone put a cigarette out on his cheek. He tried to talk, letting out a string of idiotic syllables, in fear. They laughed again, apparently pleased that he seemed to be mocking them. One of them grabbed a pair of pliers from the junk pile on the floor.
“Talk! Man, you better talk!”
He rammed the pliers into the dwarf’s mouth. The hand was bloody and grimy, the blood puffed just beneath the surface, ready to seep. The dwarf sang out in a stretched ululating “Ahhhhhhhh” like a car trying to start as the pliers grabbed his tongue and pulled it out of his mouth like thick elastic.
Now his song was high-pitched, droning insanely, accelerating like sped-up audiotape. His body flailed on the table like a collapsing balloon.
“Ah fuck you man, just fuck you!” said the dope-fiend with the red bubbled face as he pushed through the crowd and cut away the tongue with a rusted child’s pock
etknife, flinging it back into the darkness like something diseased. Beneath the sound of his own wailing, the mute dwarf could hear the pit bull ripping into the useless organ.
(1993)
HOW I LOVE HER
The skin is stretched taut and translucent over the frame of her hand. The blood is visible as it beats through the delicate web of veins. The knuckles and joints seem vulnerable, over-large, exposed. Random pulses of electrical energy tick the fingers in involuntary jumps — spasms she responds to by moving her hand through her honey-blonde hair, smoothing out her pant leg, massaging her temples.
The hand sits quivering on the desk, like a tensed animal looking up at her as she stares at her reflection in the mirror. A pinpoint of light is thrown in through the bullet-sized hole in the frosted window to her left and lands on the joint of her thumb. She seems to feel the heat this conveys, as if it had passed through a magnifying glass, and she moves her hand slightly to one side. The wafer of light now rests on the formica surface of the desk. As it moves across the desk in a slow arc, it stretches into an oval and eventually blends out into a larger indeterminate shape.
She seems to be daydreaming, losing herself in her reflection in the mirror, in the perfect symmetry of her face. It’s cool out and the window to her right is open. She’s shirtless. She must be cold, but she shows no sign of it. Her breasts rise and fall with the subtle rhythm of her breathing, the delicate skin slightly textured like an orange peel from the cold, the amber nipples hard and uplifted. Her eyes seem to be flooded with tears, but nothing drains from them onto her cheeks. She rarely blinks. A truck backfires in the street below, setting off a chorus of car alarms bouncing chaotically between the buildings, but she gives no sign of response, as if she lived in a superior, parallel dimension inhabited by the esoteric few, in unspoiled hermetic calm. I wonder if she’s meditating, using her face as a mesmeric charm. Is she plotting dispassionate revenge for some girlish betrayal her friends committed at school, or simply hypnotized, as I am, by the light the vulnerable center of her body shines out through her eyes?