Logorrhea

by John Klima

  I realized, then, that I’d seriously misinterpreted the situation on this street.

  Oswald leapt down from the little scrap of flat floor just inside the door, landing in a crouch on the dirt before me. He moved more like a spider than a man, which made sense; he wasn’t a spider, but he wasn’t a man, either. I started to rise up, and he threw a rock at my head, hard enough that I don’t remember the impact at all, just the coming of the darkness.

  “Vocabulary word,” Oswald said later, tying up my wrists with lengths of wire. I was naked, and the rocks in his house were cutting into my skin. “Chthonic. Dwelling under the earth. Gods of the underworld. Me.”

  “Oswald,” I said, alarmed at the slur in my voice. How hard had that rock hit my head? Way too hard, judging by the pounding in my skull. “We can work something out.”

  “Another: Autarch. Absolute ruler. Tyrant. Me, here, in this place.” He wired my legs together.

  “You don’t have to do this.” I tried to twist, to kick, but he was agile, and I wasn’t, and he didn’t even stop talking while he dodged my flailing.

  “Another: Autochthonous. Originating where it is found. Native. From around here. Me, me, me.” He kicked me in the chest on the last word, and darker black dots swam into my vision against the darkness inside his housepit, and I gasped for breath.

  “This is my place,” Oswald said, “and Ike Train was my man. He made the proper sacrifices to me, kept me fed, kept me happy. And you spoiled that, stranger, outside agitator, you ruined it, and now I have to cultivate another man. But you’ll die. Not a sacrifice to me. Just somebody who got in the way.” He gnashed his teeth, and they clacked together like gemstones. “You didn’t have to burn Ike. He wouldn’t have killed that little bitch Sadie you like so much. She has too many friends. We only kill the ones no one will miss. Well, usually. Someone might miss you, but I don’t care.”

  Oswald was the reason Ike Train’s deepdown self had been so strange. I couldn’t make a deal with Ike, because he’d already made a bargain with a creature like me. Well, sort of like me. Oswald and I had the same means, but different methods and motivations. That explained why nobody had ever discovered Ike Train’s murders—Oswald had used his powers to protect him, and he probably did other things, too, like keeping the neighborhood safe from danger, but the price he demanded was just too high.

  As far as Oswald knew, I was just a guy, somebody who came to town and discovered his lackey’s secret. He didn’t know what he was dealing with. Fortunately.

  Oswald stood up, letting his human shape drop, revealing the shambling earthen thing underneath, the creature of the dark and deep who’d lived here, on this spot, for centuries. Oswald was a local spirit, tied to this place, but he was an ugly one, who chose to live off pain instead of prosperity. He reached out to me with arms of darkness, endless limbs that stank of minerals and stale air. “Vocabulary word,” he hissed, in a voice that could never be mistaken for human. “Decapitate. To cut off a head. Another: Decedent. One who has died. You.”

  Then he killed me.

  While I was dying, I remembered the problem with having a body.

  The problem is pain.

  I wasn’t able to return for a few days. My new body was Korean, older, shorter, dressed in a plaid shirt and khaki pants. I’d needed to pick up some supplies, and they were tricky to get, since I didn’t have money, and had to rely on the kindness of locals. I traded a lucky gambling streak for the truck, and the miraculous regeneration of some missing fingers for the stun gun.

  I knocked on Oswald’s door, late that evening. He opened the door, scowled at me, and I hit him with the stun gun. He was fully in his body then, so he went down shuddering, and I bundled him up and got him in the back of the truck, one of those little moving vans you can rent, though this one belonged to me for as long as I wanted it. I drove fast, hitting the highway and racing, because if Oswald woke up too close to his neighborhood, he would shed that body like a baggy suit and come crashing right through the roof, and then we’d have the kind of epic fight that leads to waste and desolation and legends. Lucky for me Oswald didn’t wake until we were miles and miles away from the place he called home, and he couldn’t do anything but kick the wall behind the driver’s seat with his very human feet.

  I went north and east for miles and miles until I reached a good remote spot, down some dirt roads, out by a few old mines. It seemed appropriate for Oswald’s end to come in a place with underground tunnels. I couldn’t abide him to live, but I could respect his origins. I parked, cut the lights, and went around back to slide open the door. Oswald was on his side, still tied up. “Vocabulary word,” he said, voice thick and a little slurry. “Fucked. What you are, once I get loose.”

  “You don’t remember me, Oswald?” I said, climbing into the truck. “It’s me, Reva. Last time you saw me, I had a different body, and you tore it to pieces and buried it in your lair. That wasn’t very pleasant. I doubt this is going to be very pleasant for you.”

  He looked up at me from the floor. “Oh,” he said, after a moment, then frowned. “You’re like me. But you shouldn’t have been able to take me, not in my place, so far from yours.”

  “It’s true,” I said, kneeling beside him. “I’m a long way from the place I began. I’ve got a vocabulary word for you. Reva. It means habitation, or firmament, or water, or sky, or abyss, or god. Sometimes it’s rewa or neva or other things, depending on where you are. It’s a word from the islands, where I’m from. I used to be the spirit of an island, just a little patch of land in the sea, a long time ago. But you know what happened?”

  I leaned in close to him. “The island sank. All the people who lived on it left, and I was alone for years. I could have just dissolved into the sea, but I made myself a body, and found myself a boat, and went with the currents.”

  “You abandoned your place,” Oswald said, and tried to bite my face. “You’re worthless.”

  “I didn’t abandon it, it disappeared, so I had new options, Oswald. My people were travelers, and I became a traveler too. Anywhere I go is home, because I treat every place I go as home.” I shook my head. “You’re a monster. You poison the place you should protect.”

  “I do protect it. I keep it safe for the ones who belong there. I keep the trash out.”

  “You and I have different philosophies,” I said, reaching over to open the toolbox I’d brought. There were lots of tools there, which I planned to use for purposes they weren’t meant for. “My philosophy wins. Because you’re so far away from home that you’re just a man in a body now, and you don’t have a choice.”

  He fought me, but he didn’t know much about fighting without his usual powers, since he’d never left his street. I didn’t try to cause him suffering, but I didn’t go out of my way to prevent it, either.

  By the time I was finished, he was altogether dead. Even if his spirit did manage to pull itself together again over the next decades, seeping out of the pieces of his corpse to reassemble, there was nothing around here but played-out mines, no people for him to make suffer, no sacrifices for him to draw strength from. I’d just made his neighborhood a better place for the people who lived there. They wouldn’t have Oswald’s protection anymore, it was true, but the price he demanded for that protection was too high. I didn’t regret a thing.

  I buried Oswald in about ten different places, left the truck where it was, and started walking the long way back to the neighborhood I now called home.

  I didn’t have any illusions about Sadie recognizing the real me in this new body, but I thought maybe I could be charming, and make her care about a middle-aged Korean guy. Stupid idea, but love—or even infatuation—lends itself to those. The thing was, once I knocked on her door, and she answered it, she didn’t look the same. Or, well, she did, but the way she looked didn’t do anything for me. My new body wasn’t interested in her, not at all—this brain, this flesh, was attracted to a different kind of person, apparently. I always forgot how much
“feelings” depend on the particular glands and muscles and nerve endings you happen to have at the moment. Having a body makes it hard to remember the limitations of being human.

  “Can I help you?” she said.

  “Ah,” I said. “Reva asked me to give you a message. He said he had to leave town unexpectedly, and he’s really sorry.”

  “Huh,” she said. “Well, if you talk to him, tell him he doesn’t have to be sorry. He doesn’t owe me anything.” I could tell from her face that she was hurt, and angry, and trying to hide it, and I wished she was from around here so I could talk to her deepdown parts, and make amends, give her something, apologize. But she wasn’t, and I couldn’t.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll tell him.”

  She shut the door in my face.

  I walked downstairs, and stood on the sidewalk, and looked up the street. I felt as hollow as Oswald’s house, as burned-out as the lot where Ike Train had lived. Why had I wanted to stay here? I wasn’t needed anymore. I’d made things better. This wasn’t my home, not really, no more than any other place.

  Maybe I’d go south, down to the Inland Empire, to see those pretty black walnut trees. I could make myself at home there, for a while, at least.

  * * *

  V•I•G•N•E•T•T•E

  vi·gnette vin-'yet, vēn-'yet

  noun

  1: a running ornament (as of vine leaves, tendrils, and grapes) put on or just before a title page or at the beginning or end of a chapter; also: a small decorative design or picture so placed

  2 a: a picture (as an engraving or photograph) that shades off gradually into the surrounding paper

  2 b: the pictorial part of a postage stamp design as distinguished from the frame and lettering

  3 a: a short descriptive literary sketch

  3 b: a brief incident or scene (as in a play or movie)

  verb transitive

  1: to finish (as a photograph) like a vignette

  2: to describe briefly

  * * *

  Vignette

  ELIZABETH HAND

  THE ROLLTOP DESK in this cabin belonged to your parents, you told me last night. Earlier in the evening you pointed to a top shelf in the lodge kitchen, three blown-glass bottles shaped like little birds, red, piss yellow, the deep brownish violet of kelp on the ledges outside.

  “Those glass things were my grandmother’s. They were always in her house in Stony Brook. Now they’re here. It’s so weird, this stuff. All this stuff.”

  I would have said, It follows you. I was there; I am here now. One of the things that followed you.

  This morning you interviewed me in your cabin, your computer set up on another desk, a big microphone on a stand. You sat in the chair before the computer and adjusted the mike, singing snatches of an old Bill Withers song, whispering, clicking your tongue, snapping your fingers.

  “Don’t look at this.” You pointed at the monitor. Fizzy spikes rose and fell as you spoke. “It can be distracting. Seeing your voice.”

  You’re interviewing all the visitors to the island. One by one all last week, today, after I leave. The Marriage Project. They go to your cabin and you ask them Have you ever been married? What does love mean to you? The sound bites are beautiful, spliced into swooping piano cadences, your guitar. Back on the mainland flames erupt, lines of people snake outside airports. Here on the island, there is music, wind in the trees, the persistent thump of the windmill that gives us power, rising from the island’s highest point, a giant with one great eye. From your computer the sound of a woman laughing—we’re all doomed—your brother’s voice soft with alcohol. Your cigarette smoke in the cabin around me. Prayer flags strung from the ceiling, tiny red lights. A piano, every year the piano tuner stays on the island for a week in exchange for keeping it in tune. Your Gibson guitar. Bottles of your medication silhouetted against the window, sunlight glinting from the plastic vials like a tiny cityscape. A city I visit. You live there.

  Neither of us lives here. Nothing can be sustained. Sex, drugs, art, electricity, even the trees. It’s over.

  Yesterday morning you showed me a letter, written to you by the poet who left the day before I arrived. Almost twenty years younger than me; you showed me her poems as well. Hard-edged, hard for me to read.

  “This letter she wrote to me. It reminded me of your letters.”

  You handed it to me. The letter typed, an inky scrawl across the envelope. The boy in the tree. My name for you since we were seventeen. She has read all my books, she was explaining them to you, explaining what it means. The boy in the tree, a Dionysian figure, the consort of the goddess, a symbol of the eternal return.

  Blah blah blah, I thought.

  Then panic. My letters to you were written thirty-two years ago. She wasn’t born yet.

  Yesterday we walked along the ledges above the sea. Immense granite boulders split in two; we jumped between them, that horrifying jolt when I saw the long black mouth opening and knew how quickly it could happen.

  “I feel like it’s checking in on me regularly now,” you said. Matter-of-fact, as always. You lit another cigarette. Your voice dropped. “Every month or so it taps me on the shoulder. ‘Hey, Just checking. Just checking in.’ Another month.”

  I felt sick, with nothing to steady myself against. If you. If we fell. Eventually they would find us, or the tide would. No radio here, no TV; one computer tied in to a router. Sometimes I hear a burst of static and words bleat from the radio on Billy’s boat.

  Everything is falling.

  “We’ll go up that way,” you said, and pointed. A green spill of moss and lichen, cat firs. We clambered up the last long expanse of granite and into the woods, and returned to your cabin.

  There are eleven people here. Writers, poets, painters. One performer: you. Your brother, who owns the island. A cook. The caretaker, Billy, who lives in Ellisport. Every year someone disappears; one person, maybe two. Usually they show up again in their hometowns, weeks or months later.

  But sometimes people never come back. A few years ago, the body of one woman, a poet, was found in the woods near her home in Montana. Bones, hair, teeth; no clothing or jewelry. Her front teeth had been worn away to nubs. The first two joints of all her fingers were gone. There was no other sign of trauma. The official cause of death was exposure.

  I arrived in Ellisport early in the morning. Billy came to get me in the boat.

  “That all you got?” He looked at my one bag. “Some of these people, they bring everything. Cases of wine. One lady, she had two white Persian cats. She didn’t last long.”

  “Cats?”

  He nodded and peered at the boat’s nav screen. Outlines of rocks, Ellisport’s coastline. The island. “Traps, they don’t show up,” he said as the boat eased away from the dock. In the dark water, hundreds of bobbing lobster buoys, neon orange and green and blue and red. “That lady with the cats, she just showed up at the dock on the island yesterday morning, told me to bring her back. Never said anything, just left.”

  “Maybe the cats didn’t like it.”

  Billy laughed. “The cats were gone. She was freaking crazy about it, too.”

  “Gone? Like they got lost?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe. Well, no. Something got them.”

  “Like an animal?”

  “Something. No animals on the island. I mean, birds. Sometimes a moose might swim over, that happened once.” He squinted to where the sun shone through the morning fog. Jagged rocks and huge clumps of drifting kelp. Rising from the fog a grey-green cloud, your brother’s island. “Nope. Something got ’em, though.”

  You were waiting at the dock when we arrived.

  I could not stop trembling. We kissed in the clearing by the island sawmill. We had kissed the week before that at my house on the mainland, two bottles of wine, a joint. I hadn’t been stoned in twenty years. A stash I’d saved for all that time, for when I might need it. Medicinal; now.

  The full moon rose above the l
ake, yellow. Liquid, everything falling away into your mouth. Salt, smoke, your tongue sour with nicotine. Lying on your bed last night you said, “This is a great blowjob—this is the most beautiful blowjob. Much better than the other night.”

  “I was drunk then,” I said.

  I kissed you last week for the first time in twenty-six years. Your smell was the same. Your eyes, I always write of them as green, leaf green, sap green, beryl.

  But they’re not green. They’re blue, turquoise, the most astonishing aquamarine. Liquid. Everything else about you is burning away. When I licked the blood from your cock I tasted ash. Your skin like the leaden bloom that covers the tiny fir seedlings in the forest; I touch it and it disappears, until I draw my hand before my face and smell you. Rotting wood. Rain and the sea. Blue not green. That glow from the mainland. Everything is burning away.

  “I had an ominous voicemail from my dentist.” You lit another cigarette. We were sitting by the picnic table outside your brother’s house on the windward side of the island, the only place where a cell phone can pick up a signal. All day long people drift there and back again, walking in slow circles, talking to ghosts on the mainland. “He said, Angus, call me right away. We have to talk about your x-rays.”

  You laughed. I felt my heart skip. “Are you going to call?”

  “Nah. When I go home. I don’t want to hear any of that shit here. Work. Someone else quit this morning. Everyone’s leaving.”