by Justin Chin
I’m rooting for the ape. I affectionately call him Preparation Ape. The only person who would find that amusing is my husband. And on cue, I hear him guffaw, then the snoring resumes.
8.
Those three little words rear their icky hydra heads. No, not “Here’s some cash!” though that’s quite good, too. The other three words that mean everything and nothing, which encompasses the constellation to a wad of phlegm at the bottom of your lung, which spins the axis of living things but is powerless to stop a door closing, which is unspeakable yet uttered every 2.3 seconds by someone somewhere in the world in whatever language, some might even mean what they say, but mostly it’s a matter of what the other hears. You will succumb to it; everyone does once at least, eventually. You may triumph over it, or think you do, or you might let it ruin you, turn you into fungus.
Oops. It’s 2 seconds, 2 point 1, 2 point 2, do you hear someone saying it?
Someone says, “I love you.”
Someone else says, “Okay. Define Love.”
“I love you, too, but I’m married.”
“You don’t love me, you just think that you do because I represent the freedom that you desire in your cloistered life.”
2 seconds, 2 point 1, 2 point 2, someone else says:
“I’m sorry, couldn’t quite hear you. What was that again?”
“Let’s be friends!”
“Stop, don’t spoil what we have together by saying that.”
“Who are you? Stop following me or I’ll call the police.”
2 seconds, 2 point 1, 2 point 2, someone else says:
“No. You lust me. But that’s okay.”
“Love is an artificial construct but it’s not your fault that you’ve been oppressed, brainwashed even, by our late Capitalist culture. Hey, can I get a backrub?”
2 seconds, 2 point 1, 2 point 2, someone else says:
“But the Winter Olympic pairs figure skating tryouts are in three weeks, we have to focus. This is not the right time.”
“I can only love Jesus Christ, my personal lord and savior. Do you know that He died for you? So you could have eternal life? Do you?”
“You amuse me! You say the most outrageous things.”
2 seconds, 2 point 1, 2 point 2, someone else says:
“Shut up! My pimp will hear you! He hates anyone saying that.”
2 seconds, 2 point 1, 2 point 2. Or perhaps someone else says:
Thank you for telling me that. And I want you to know that I mean every single thing I’m telling you now, even as I can’t look you in the eye – here, let me lean my head against you to slow down this cyclone all around me. I think that you are a spectacular and amazing person and I like you very very much and I think I might even love you or be able to fall in love with you. But I haven’t been in that state of being for such a long time, and past experiences have gnawed and beaten me up so much that I’m not sure I even know what that state feels like anymore, or that I would recognize it even if it crawled up my leg and bit me on the inside of my arse. So I ask that you be patient with me. Be patient with me and forgive me. Forgive me, for I am an incomplete idiot even at the best of times and circumstances. Forgive me, for I will cling to illogicalities, I will wear down the hooks and hooves of my insecurities on your back. My timing will be arrhythmic and as dependable as a fake Seiko under water, as precise as a cockeyed raccoon ballet. Forgive me because I know I will inevitably hurt your feelings while not even being aware that I’m doing it. I will be defensive and unthinking and lash out to protect all that is void or nonexistent or useless. So forgive me ever more and be ever more patient with me. And when the time comes, should I not be in love with you, then I’m a complete fool who doesn’t deserve yours or anyone else’s love, for who could not love someone with such qualities of patience and forgiveness and open-heartedness? Now hold me tight as I lean closer into you, tighter still, because I have this incredible and uncontrollable urge to simply and quietly cry as I lean into you and remind myself what you smell like, as I remember what home smells like.
First
There is a proper name for everything that exists in this world. The groove in corduroy. The piece of green paper in take-away sushi packs, cut to look like grass that separates the wet ginger from the moisture-hungry seaweed. The bulging nodes at the base of Morning Glory stems that bend when touched. The blue fluid inside ice-packs. That small dot behind the eye of the clownfish.
There is a name for all ephemeral things, too. Emotions, thoughts, processes, all named by scientists, poets, novelists, dictionary compilers, university professors, journalists, and celebrities, all recorded and stored in the Library of Congress, the Patent and Trademark Offices, local libraries, in endless files stacked up in nameless offices and museums basements around the world.
The sound of Velcro coming apart. The red-tinted ghosts with long oily hair that haunt rubber plantations in Malaysia. The sexual fetish of being aroused by having your genitals touched with barbecue tongs. The different stages of rigor mortis. The bacteria that hangs in the San Francisco air which causes sourdough to turn so. The particular sort of blistering that crack smoke burns in the soft tissue of the throat. The gradients of sweat and their odors.
Then there are the phobias. Each dutifully studied, catalogued, and named by a psychologist with the care of a father naming a first-born. The fear of horseradish. The fear of brown paper bags. The fear of plastic products, velour, wooden chopsticks. Even something as specific as the paralyzing fear of Sesame Street characters has a name. I’m being serious. I once knew a woman who, as a young innocent college intern, worked at the studio where one of the many versions of that venerable children’s show was produced. The man inside of Big Bird would strut around in his yellow-feathered costume, without the head and beak, of course, and sexually harass her, making lewd comments and touching her inappropriately with his big yellow-feathered wings. This went on for weeks, she said, but she really wanted the job and was young, confused, and scared, and did not know what to do. Eventually, the men whose hands were shoved up all day inside fluffy furry Ernie, Bert, and Oscar the Grouch started to pull their hands out of their Muppets and desired to put them inside the woolly sweaters she wore, as was the fashion at the time. It was as if they had this thing for fuzzy fabric, she said. One day while channel-surfing, she accidentally clicked on NBC’s Muppets On Ice special. The sight of Big Bird and the whole motley crew on ice skates doings loops and salchows made her scream uncontrollably; she had a nervous breakdown and had to be institutionalized. To this day, the mere suggestion of those Muppets makes her break into a panic attack.
There is a name for everything that exists, which no longer exists, or will soon cease to exist. Whether you know its proper name is another matter altogether.
Adam is dreaming. What can the first person on the planet possibly be dreaming about? What could be lurking in his mind given the vast expanse of unnamed terrain that lies before him: a colossal ice desert, an equally eternal sand desert, immeasurable forests, the acrid savannah teaming with insects, rainforest upon rainforest filled with flora and fauna, beasties and buggies. Time he knows of. Seven days to be exact and many more of this cycle will follow. Until weeks turn to endless years. But apart from that, he has no memory, no history; he was born an adult, slapped together with primeval mud and the snot of God.
The only clues we may have in understanding his experiences are those of amnesia victims and Donald Duck.
Amnesia victims are the easy one. Car crash, severe shock, visitations by evil spirits, and some folks’ minds are blasted into a state of chaos, their neurons and synaptic switches become as tangled as a phone cord and suddenly, they forget everything prior to a stated moment. Some manage to get jarred into recovery; others wander through life and eventually recover their memories in bits and pieces. Some become another person completely, a person born an adult with no past and no lived references. The only remnants of this past lived life are a language that the per
son has no idea how he learned or even how eloquent or mumbly he ever used it, and mementos, lots of them, which their past gleefully foists on them. But in vain: the teddy bear with the punched-in nose has no sentimental value anymore. A once cherished wedding ring reeks with crassness. Photo albums become useless burdens and gather dust on the top shelves. The record collection does not trigger any memories, fond or foul.
Forced to live within the locus of their bodies, the amnesia victims are nothing but humans wrecked on a seashore of foundless memories, fogged in by their billion imploded brain cells. They will recollect or recreate.
On the other hand, Donald Duck, the hot-tempered, lovably mischievous but well-intentioned character that Disney created to shadow Mickey’s bland niceness and squeaky clean-cut values, lives beyond his plump feathered body. He has traveled to the center of the earth, beyond Neptune and Pluto, to mythical lands of legends and lore, to every continent in great adventures, and still he has no memory of his travels, his experiences, the people he met, the creatures he fought, the exotic food he greedily scoffed down, or the pleasures of which he partook. In some narratives, he’s foolish, the dunce, unable to remember facts accurately; in another, he’s a mechanical genius; in yet another, the rugged outdoorsman. The only constants in his life are his nephews, his miserly Uncle Scrooge, and his passion for Daisy Duck. And even then, their own mental states are somewhat in question, too.
In a parody postcard that can be found in gift shops, Donald is sitting on a green stool, the yellow stripe on the right sleeve of his trusty sailor suit tightened into a tourniquet as Donald devilishly grips a hypodermic needle in his left hand and shoots up. His eyes, blotted out by a black strip, belie a fiendish squint. Donald, unable to remember any of his experiences, will never be able to remember this high, he will not know the comforting warm sting of fluid pumping into his vein. He will not know the unplumbed horrors of coming down or withdrawal. Or the agony of the infection gurgling in that awful festering abscess on his forearm, his veins bruised and collapsed. His addiction will never exacerbate nor will it ever abate, qualities quite uncommon for an addict.
Adam is leaning against a tree sleeping and he is dreaming. His lost rib, the gargantuan task of naming all other living creatures, plagues his mind, we can surmise. But how will these stresses manifest themselves in Adam’s subconscious? There is no way that he can know what to make of his dream-life, or even his waking life. Nothing has yet been named, he cannot lift his hand to his mouth and call it suppressing a yawn. He cannot scratch his groin and call it itchy. He cannot piss and shake his penis in relief. All these he can do, but he will have no context as to how or why or what he is doing and why he has done it or how it should feel.
Adam’s task is indeed colossal. Even with the historic breath of language, grammar, and colloquialism, we still have problems naming certain things for sure. Even something as simple and as everyday as a city. What is a city? Is it an incorporated municipality within defined boundaries with legal powers established in a charter? Some could define a city simply as a town of significant size. The academics will think of something undecipherable and frightfully tedious. The humanists would probably define a city by its inhabitants.
Hmmmm. Imagine a city where the inhabitants do not know where they are; perhaps they have all been hypnotized by carnies at the turnpike or more likely have all been drunk driving in an alcoholic black-out. They wake up/sober up/regain consciousness to find themselves in this particular place and have decided to stay here. Why not? There is ample cheap housing, the cost of living is peanuts, and moreover, there are extended Happy Hours and a Velcro Human Fly game in all of the city’s 642 bars and 2324 mini-bars.
What a city this will be: filled with the alcoholic surly, the alcoholic pathological, the alcoholic happy, and the recovering alcoholic. The word ‘bi-polar’ would have been invented here, if Adam had not already done his job. The industries that will emerge from this city, and come to characterize it, would be 12-Step Support Groups, Self-Help Psychobabble, Psychotherapy, and Gastroenterology, in both their traditional and holistic forms. This would also be the place where the concept of the Super-Bar, the Mega-Bar, and the Hyper-Bar was conceived over an early draft of the mojito (had chicory, too many mint twigs, but you could see where it was headed). Each of these bar types differed from the next by the number of imported beers served, the shape and volume of the beer mugs, the ratio of video games and pool tables to the height of the chairs, and of course, by the available merchandising. Only Hyper-Bars are licensed to make lobsterflavored saltine crackers emblazoned with the establishment’s name. Clam dip was always optional.
And if I woke and found myself here, what would I do? How will I live here? Can I even? I’m such a lightweight drinker; but then I have contexts, notions, ideas to help tool me along. I might manage.
“How’s it going, Adam man!” It’s been Happy Hour for more than an hour, and Adam has finally staggered in, looking quite ratty. His tie and his breast pocket are stained with ink that is leaking from his ballpoint pen. Just last week, I helped him name Pocket Protector, but he just doesn’t get it. His hair is a mess (we had helped him name Wedge Cut last year), and his eyes are ringed with big dark circles. (Charmaine, the bar wench, helped him name Clinique Ultra-Hydroxy Moisturizing Eye Gel. Non-comedogenic will be named next week, and we shall all be thankful.)
“I need something, something double,” he groans. The bartender takes pity and pours him a triple Jack Daniels, which confuses Adam, but he drinks it nonetheless. Adam named Double years and years ago, but the whole idea of relativity still hasn’t sunk in yet. He’s a little hung up on weights and measures, and he should be, that one project took years to finish, and only with a huge grant from the Sung Dynasty who were trying to push it so that they could get along with that damn silk trade: huge bins of silk worms twitching their little silken asses off into silky spindles were dawdling in bins all across the Canton harbor, and the Arabs were getting antsy for new fabrics for their new line of harem pants.
We’re all drinking margaritas because it is Happy Hour and the margarita is a happy drink. The secret ingredient is Triple Sec, which hasn’t been officially named yet, but it’ll be easy to slip that one in later.
Adam starts, “I’m so glad evolution has slowed down, I only have fifteen animal species left to name. Then there’s all these frogs in Mendocino that have been growing new limbs or less limbs and some of them have been growing more eyes and turning into some other thing altogether. Maybe in a few more years they’ll turn to birds. It’s screwing up my filing system. The work was piling up and I sent a memo to God for help, and so he got rid of a few species. Extinction, it’s my Labor Day present from the big guy.
“And that’s just the animals. I have all these other stuff to name, too. This week alone, I had to name five new cheeses. Why don’t those goddamn Dutch just stop it already? It’s hard to name cheese, you should try it sometime. Do it wrong and Kraft calls you up to bitch about how they can’t sell it by such a sissy name. Gruyere was a lovely name, I thought.”
“Here, you need to try this Velcro Human Bar Fly game,” I tell him, leading him to the section of the bar set up for this very amusement, and helping him into the Velcro suit.
“What’s this pokey stuff?” Adam asks.
“Velcro,” I tell him.
“Velcro? Who named that? I didn’t name this stuff. I hadn’t even gotten to it yet.”
“Hey, things get named, we all just can’t wait for you to get around to it, can we?” I tell him as I shoot him from the launcher. Adam flies through the air and smashes into the Velcro wall target, groin right smack in the red spot of the bull’s-eye.
“Ow,” he whines, “this is fucked. This is definitely fucked.” And the midget that always trails Adam with a notepad and a laptop computer duly notes ‘Fucked.’
“Next week, they’re getting the inflatable sumo wrestling game! It’s a flesh-colored suit you put on and they fill it up
with air so that you’re big and puffy like a sumo wrestler and then you smash into each other until someone vomits,” the lush at the end of the bar who looks not unlike Faye Dunaway in Barfly tells us.
“Ah, sumo. That was one of my easiest ones to name. The Japanese ones were so easy!” Adam sighs, “Why can’t they all be like that. I am just not naming any more things in French. Or Korean.”
“So, Adam, I want to ask you for a favor,” I say. “Can you put something on the fast track?”
“Oh shit, it’s not some new beast or cheese, is it?”
“No, no, nothing of that sort. Well, you see, there’s this guy…”
“Ah! Lover. Boyfriend. Significant other. Friend. Date. Husband, diminutive: hubby. Old-man. Other half. Master. Mister. Beau. Best mate. Best man. Fiancé. Soul mate,” Adam rattles off.
“Nothing like that, nothing so formed. It’s something that’s just in the initial bits,” I say.
“We have names for that kind of stuff!” Adam beams. “Swain. Inamorata. Adorer. Amorist. Infatuate. Paramour. Suitor, Wooer. Pursuer. Flame. Casanova. Romeo. Don Juan.” The midget taps Adam on the knee, Adam leans down, and the midget whispers in his ear and shows him the computer screen. “Oh yes, Idol. Jewel. Pet. Cherished. Crush. Any of those work so far?”
“Well, no, it’s….”
“Aha! No problemo!” Adam exclaims, “I have just the thing! Sweetheart. Honey. Snuggle bunny. Pookie, variation: Pookie-bear. Snookums, variation: Snookie. Woo-woo. Puppy, variation: Puppy-pooh. Pooh-bear. Feel free to offer variations such as Honey-Pookie-Snuggle-Bunny, or Snookie-Pookie, or Pookie-Woo-Woo. I don’t quite care for the woo-woo thing myself, but it’s quite common and popular in Australia, I’m told.”
“I wish I could use those,” I sigh. “But the circumstances are a little more hazy. I don’t know where this whole thing is heading. I think of him constantly, and he possesses my every waking thought. I even called the radio psychic to find out my destiny.”