She turns to me with an amused expression and says, “How do you know it’s my painting?”
“Because you’re not admiring it. You look like you want to change something, fiddle with it.”
“So do you.”
“I’m the one who hung it here. So if it’s cocked, then I didn’t do a good job.”
“It looks alright.”
“That’s just my point. We’re not spectators admiring a piece of art in a gallery. Both of us are looking at your painting like it’s our work.”
“I hadn’t thought of it like that.”
"So it is your painting, right?"
Her smile widens and instead of basking, I forged ahead. “See, this painting over here,” I gesture further down the wall, “I didn’t hang it and you didn’t paint it, so we can go over there and admire it together.” I touch her shoulder.
“How do you know I didn’t paint this one, too?” she asks, falling into step with me.
I smile at her. “Because this one isn’t as good as yours.”
She laughs, finally. “I’m Fran.”
“And I’m Eddie.”
“So,” she asks, as we make our way down the gallery wall, “Was the painting really cocked?”
“Well, the answer to that depends.”
“On what?”
“Whether I get your phone number.”
Our first date at an Italian place away from campus goes well, after I spend 20 minutes combing each strand of my hair into place before meeting her in front of the student union. We talk about her plans, her art, what she wants to be when she grows up and makes her impact on the world. I don’t like to talk too much about changing light bulbs at the school, or chemistry and metallurgy, but she’s listening when I talk about the summer internship I spent extracting and smelting gold from junked computer parts at a reclamation plant. I try explaining to her why I like the work. How the impersonal challenge to formulate the best titration of chemicals is in fact a call to outwit and outsmart the immutable laws of physics. She nods and says that art is the same, it’s all about getting as close to your ideal vision as you can. That’s right, I say, and the little silence after that is comfortable and familiar instead of the stilted, awkward silences that sometimes happen on first dates when there will be no second. This quiet moment, shared during a plate of overcooked linguine, is when I fell for her.
It’s on the second date, sitting on the steps of the gallery, enjoying the warm summer night when Fran spots the little burn I got on my forearm I got as a souvenir from the sulfuric acid baths I set up to get the gold. She touches the squiggled scar, running a nail over it, and I kiss her even though I wouldn’t have a second earlier. She’s into the kiss, our lips work together, hers moist, and we hold hands. I touch her red hair and the back of her neck, her skin soft and warm as we draw to each other. Her eyes closed, mine open. Later that night in my apartment I touch the rest of her. We're sweaty from the press and the crush and our bodies glide smoothly over one another as we have sex for the first time. Touching her, loving her, is the same challenge of getting as close as I can to the ideal, having her enjoy it, having her wanting it to match my want of it.
One night in the dead of winter we rush inside, into the warmth of the apartment we now share, and start kissing, fooling around, dropping our things and pulling off our winter jackets and boots as we heat up together. We have sex in the kitchen because we don’t make it to the bedroom. The windows steam up and her breath catches when I touch her with my ice-cold fingers. She’d been painting something with a bright blue acrylic paint that was still on her hands and the next morning I’m laughing to myself while she gets dressed. When she asks me what’s so funny, I show her the blue streaks she’d left on my body and tell her I’d been having sex with Smurfette.
She fills out paperwork for schools, I help her assemble a portfolio and write an essay over a bottle of wine and Chinese takeout. That night we make love and I tell her that her work was good and any school would want to have her as much as I wanted to have her, and that I loved her. The next morning I mail her application on my walk to work. It gets rejected, and we send a few more a couple months later.
I finally graduate and my mom comes down and the two sit together in the auditorium while I collect my diploma. I take pictures of them both. At some point over dinner when Fran goes to the bathroom, my mother leans across the table and tells me that my father would have loved her, and that’s why I’m teary when she returns and sits down next to me and whispers “What’s wrong?” and my mother winks at me.
Fran’s father is a retired lawyer with a firm handshake and calluses like mine from working in his basement wood shop. I shake his hand when we take a trip out to her parents’ for a Thanksgiving weekend. I like her family. Her brother plays lacrosse and her mother makes the best turkey I’ve ever had, but the thing I’m taken with is her bedroom, preserved just as it must have been when she finished high school, with stuffed animals on the bed and a vanity mirror in the corner. I look through her yearbook and read the inscriptions. Fran tells me that her father worked from home and kept odd hours, sometimes working through the night, so she never got to christen the bed, not even with her old boyfriend Todd who’d drawn a heart on the back page. So we do, and joke about hearing a power saw whining through the floor as we finish.
The ring is good. My timing is bad. The ring is made out of titanium because any metallurgist knows that titanium shines brighter than silver, is stronger than steel, is more malleable than gold, and never tarnishes, all of which I think is a metaphor for love which I’m trying to articulate as I show her the ring. Fran takes it, says “Oh Eddie,” and starts to cry. She says she loves me but she doesn’t say yes and she shows me an acceptance letter from one of those schools she’d applied to months earlier. It’s bitter and ironic that she’s been rejected by her safety school right across town; I could have dropped her off on my way to work, but her dream school has admitted her. Her dream school is an art institute in New Zealand. I’m quiet for a minute as I feel a void open somewhere inside, but then I tell that she has to go and she says that she has to stay so I tell her she has to go, and somehow we end up fighting, screaming at each other, both of us so determined to make the other happy that now we’re miserable.
The day before she leaves almost everything is moved out. The place has magically transformed from our home back to a shitty ground floor two bedroom apartment in a rotting triple decker in a questionable neighborhood. Her things have been shipped back to her folks, and I’m already moved into my new place.
“I got you something,” she tells me nervously, holding out a package to me. I take it from her, the brown wrapping paper crinkling in my hands as I set it down on my coffee table, the only remaining flat surface besides the floor.
“What is it?” I ask, running my index finger over the seam where she’d taped the wrapped package closed.
“Something I want you to have.”
“What is it Fran?” I regard her warily as I still touch the wrapping paper. Lately, everything we say to each other has layers to it. What I really want to know is if the contents of this package are going to hurt me some more.
She says nothing, her arms folded under her breasts, so I rip open the paper. Inside is the painting, the one from the gallery.
“Great. I’ll be able to auction it in twenty years. I’ll tell people that ‘I knew her, way back when.’”
“Please don’t start.”
“Start? Start what?”
“Please Eddie.”
Holding up the painting, I squint at it theatrically. “You know that it wasn’t.”
“What?”
I reach out to her. She comes to me, and I kiss her. “That painting. It wasn’t—”
“Don’t!”
“It wasn’t cocked. It was perfectly level.”
She starts to cry, and her hands cover her mouth so that it almost looks like she’s y
awning, one of those little things about her that I love.
I kiss her again.
We make love, but it isn't loving the way I've enjoyed and come to expect without taking for granted; instead, it's the way I'd imagine the last meal of a condemned prisoner must be—no matter how well cooked and how delicious, the taste and texture of the food isn't what's relevant and can't cover up the reality to follow.
We kiss, lick, rub, suck, tease, squeeze, please; grunting, moaning, sweating, panting, gasping, grasping, inhaling, expelling and finally holding each other, breathing each other’s breath all for the last time.
At some point the sky lightens and I hear a car horn outside. A yellow cab.
Fran leans close, so I feel her lips against the peach fuzz on my ear. “I knew it wasn’t cocked.”
Then she kisses me, and then she’s gone.
Art awoke.
Coughing, he sat up on the bench and he touched his face, cheeks sticky with drying tears. He rubbed at the slurry in his eyes smearing his vision, rubbed until he could see straight. Staring at the ground in front of him, he leaned forward, his back cracking as he sat up straight.
“Dude,” he said, turning to Ray. “That was…I can’t even say what.”
Ray said nothing.
Art looked at him. “Worth every penny.” After a second he nudged him with his elbow. “Ray?”
The hood of his sweatshirt fell back, revealing Ray’s pale, slack face. His blue lips, parted, revealed his tongue, also blue, and a rope of drool slid out from the corner of his mouth. His glassy eyes shined wide at nothing.
“No,” Art breathed, leaning towards him. Ray’s body shifted and slid part way off the edge of the bench, his knees scraping the leaves on the ground.
At age nine, Art spent a Christmas with his cousin who lived upstate, out in the woods. Behind his cousin’s house was a scrubby polluted pond that looked idyllic, surrounded by trees all dusted with a crust of snow. When she heard them preparing to go outside, boots dragging across the vestibule floor his aunt called out "Stay off the lake, like I told you," without looking up from her game show. The two went outside, crunched their way through the snow covering his cousin’s lawn and down the short path to the lake itself. They stared at the wan sun, and at the glare it made on the frozen water. Then Art took a shaky step down, balancing himself against the shore with a tree branch he found. He shuffled a few paces across the perfectly smooth, clean ice, and turned. He slipped and almost busted his ass, moon walking to catch himself. From the shore, his cousin snorted with laughter.
“Why don’t you come here and laugh in my face?” he yelled, liking echoes.
“Cause I’m not crazy like you!” his cousin called back.
Art called him a wimp and slid a few feet further out. The ice below him sighed and cracked, loud like a gunshot in the stillness. Art’s breath caught in his throat. Pulse pounding, his body went ramrod straight and stiff. Suddenly burning hot with tension, a drop of sweat rolled into his eye, and after a long, unquantifiable time of staring at the spider web of cracked ice beneath his feet, waiting, waiting for something to happen, he slowly, timidly stepped back toward the shore, toward his cousin, now watching him, wide eyed.
The lake surface here felt solid, so he shifted his weight onto the stepping foot. Nothing. He stepped again, another mincing step toward the solid ground, and again, nothing. He let out the breath he’d been holding for so long that he couldn’t remember taking it and inhaled a fresh blast of cold air. Some of the tension washed out of him and Art relaxed a hair.
The ice gave way.
Art let out a short scream that lasted until he submerged, the freezing water going right down his gullet through his open mouth, running up the cuffs of his pants, through his shirt, soaking everything, the grey iron water so cold it didn't even feel cold, just shocking. Art thrashed around. He sank into the frigid mud at the bottom, kicking up dirt and sediment so thick it blotted out the sunlight and he couldn’t tell which direction was up, so he thrashed harder, twisting and corkscrewing himself further and further into his clothes which bound and tied him up, so that finally he lay in the muck, punching and kicking until he gasped for breath. The cold water flooded in. Now the cold inside him matched the cold of the lake outside him, and as Art’s struggling slowed down and time stretched out, each thump of his balled fist against the sticky, yielding mud took longer and longer, became more and more epic like slow motion in a movie. Too tired to panic anymore he had one last lucid thought, “This isn’t too bad,” before the blackness took him.
He didn’t remember the ambulance crew his cousin summoned, being pronounced dead, the epinephrine shot that restarted his heart, or the coma; he remembered only the cold, the terror, and the dark. The grogginess as he woke up in the hospital two days later, for once glad to see his father and mother, was worlds away.
“No!” Art repeated, “no, no, no.” He slapped at Ray’s chest, and put his face close to Ray’s, hoping to feel breath, but when Ray’s clammy corpse slid the rest of the way off the bench, Art gave up.
He stood, his stomach lurching, leaned against the fence and vomited onto the bike path until the roiling queasiness subsided. He fumbled for his keys and dropped them twice in the slimy leaves unlocking his bicycle.
He looked back at Ray, the terror junkie who'd now gone the route most terror junkies went, lying dead in front of the bench having finally scared himself to death. At his feet, the twonky lay upside down in its satchel. Art thought for a minute, frowning, then went over and retrieved it. He didn't kid himself that this was noble, or what Ray would have wanted; but he needed it. So he took it.
Art pushed his bicycle, too shaken to ride it. It was chilly outside. He needed home. Fran would warm him up. Fran could massage his shoulders or…at least she could listen to him talk about this, Fran liked to listen to him, but…Fran…Fran had left him…or…Fran was still there but he was the one who’d left.
###
Alexander Jones has a BA in English/Creative Writing. He has a novel making the rounds at literary agencies and publishing companies and is hard at work on his second. He lives in Jersey City.
The Ticket-Taker
CJ Menart
It begins with a two-hour flight, hanging by the armpits under a Municipal Recycling Transit Unit—one of those fancy flying garbage trucks they’ve got these days, patrolling every trash route the unions can’t save for human drivers. The MRTU gradually gains altitude over the last mile, so that when a blank wall swallows the horizon, I’m high enough to see a bit of sky.
It’s about as comfortable as it sounds. I didn’t want to come, but I tell myself that it’s for the best. I have to come if I want to go back to work. And what you do, if you’re an automated system who works in customer service, is play this game of pretend. Especially if you’re humanoid hardware, you play-act that you do your job because you love it and not because it’s the only reason you were manufactured. I figure there’s nothing wrong with that. It comes down to the same thing in the end.
With just enough deceleration to avoid a crash, the truck skims the factory edge and tosses me through a rectangle large enough to admit my flailing arms and legs. The duct on the other side has the kind of siding which rings when you bang on the sides. My plastic casing plays a big brass number on the way down the forty-six degree descent.
I try to stay upright, but the turns come too fast. The only clear visual I register is a copper pipe, smashing a hole through the duct’s steel-grey and rushing towards me, half a second to impact. I have just barely enough time to scream before the collision takes half my face off.
An instant later the duct spits me out onto a conveyer belt—rubbery, slow, and thick enough that I don’t have to worry about falling into the abyss on either side. The factory’s interior isn’t lit. Automated systems don’t need light, although, because I’ve fallen a long way, I can look up to constellations of transient stars, showers of sparks
and naked bulbs near roof level.
The sounds of those stars, punctuated by whale-song bursts of groaning metal, don’t fill up this endless space. I can hear my every joint squeak as I step around the neatly-spaced piles that sit on every square of conveyer belt except for mine. I know the drill here. And I can already see the diagnostic room up ahead, so I whistle myself a tune as I stroll towards it.
I haven’t taken more than a couple steps before a pair of actuated arms swoop down on me from the darkness—burly fellows, with foam-padded clamps for fingers and naked hydraulic pumps thicker around than my torso. They carry me two feet above the line and dump me in a sensor bed—which I was going to get into myself anyway—and all but hover over me like a nanny to make sure I don’t squirm while being tickled by the rainbow-colored rays.
The diagnostic room isn’t really a room—just a few I-beams and catwalks strung up in space. And the sensor bed itself really amounts to a plastic tub. I can’t help wondering why the company can’t afford to put up something a little nicer.
“You shouldn’t do that,” says a warm, neutral voice coming out of a speaker in the side of the bed. “I have three ITs submitting separate reports that you’re infected with a terrorist virus. Just let the conveyer belt take care of you. That’s what it’s for.”
“Geeze. What an uptight place.” I pretend to tip the hat I’m not wearing at the tinted window set into the wall. “If I was meant to walk, I would have been made with legs.” I look down at my legs and play the sound-FX of a gasp. “Would you look at that!” Satisfied, I fold my arms behind my head and bask in the tingle of sensors. “By the way, Mike, I need a new face.”
A camera pops out of the bed and darts around my head. “Have I not fixed that pipe yet?” The speaker produces a buzzing, synthesized sigh—and I appreciate the touch. Never heard the factory use a sound that wasn’t in its pre-recorded vocab banks before. “Just grab a new one off that counter to your left—no, actually, don’t get up. A human monitor just entered the booth.”
Bastion Science Fiction Magazine - Issue 8, November 2014 Page 2