by Jess Arndt
Jeff.
It’s spring now. The blossoms are out. I don’t walk on Hamilton Avenue anymore. Sheila and I ignore each other in the photocopy room. She giggles up to Buzz Snyder without mercy.
La Gueule de Bois
In the city whose sole monument is a comically upturned syringe and whose light is not like gauze but is, it was as if I’d borrowed all my language from an obsolete guidebook. I kept saying things like:
“I understand only station.”
“My dear Mr. Singing Club! I have pig.”
And most often, for no reason that was clear to me—
“Stay on the carpet.”
Still, these expressions allowed my transit, and the strangers whom I was always meeting seemed to accept them with good humor. Actually, they completely ignored my lingual botch jobs. I was sure they knew I was talking nonsense, but since they stubbornly refused to admit it, I was left alone in a strange cloud of non-meaning that smelled, of all things, like linden trees.
For the last week everywhere had smelled like linden trees. The blossomy funk was inside the clubs where I’d been hiding out, traveling all the way down to the pervasive always-popular dark rooms, and back up, along the river, clinging to my skin and to each particle of wet air. It was summer now, the trees were telling me. Did I care? I was interested only in all-night parties.
But this morning, something was wrong. I flopped up from my mattress and crawled to the nearby mirror. My hands were pale screens. My hair had remnants of old fruit in it from some bacchanalia or another. Oh no, I moaned, looking.
I’d woken up with the wooden face.
I regarded the mirror again. There was no getting around it. A flat broad block—it must have been five inches deep, a foot wide, a foot high—was my only expression. To make it worse, there was no grain in the wood at all. It was only thick and smooth and hard and hot.
But what had I been doing with my face? My heart was racing. Only, my memory, like my face, was entirely blank.
I did my best to get dressed. My T-shirt neck refused to stretch over the wood slab. I sat at the bare window, completely unformed, squeezing a glass of water. Below, near the falafel shop, squat dogs sped turds onto the ground.
Does it go on like this? I thought. On and on forever? It was hard to tell the hour. Here the sun was a flea jumping out of the night’s thin batter; it never stayed down for long.
* * *
All over the tiny apartment that I rented weekly, beer and wine bottles, empty, hunched. I believed they’d accumulated over time but then again, was it possible there’d been a party? Luckily I’d discovered a metal box on my corner, whose symbols led me to believe that it was a recycling bin. Simple enough. Open the slot and toss your bottle down the hole.
I shoveled myself into a duffel coat and picked up the nearest glass armful. See, I could still participate, be useful. I stepped onto the third-floor landing. Near the banister, an old stove nestled as if vagrant—it too removed from its home. Suddenly I was pushing my foot against it.
“And that’s for loving me!” I said, bashing away. “And that’s for not!”
Behind me, the door to my flat lunged closed, locking
me out.
“Never mind,” I insisted.
I pounded down the stairs and kept on, doggedly, out onto the street. I could quickly tell it wasn’t morning but here it never is. Here morning is like an unkempt relative we never visit. Sure, they want us to! But who likes visiting?
At the corner, I opened the slot and tossed in the first bottle. As it passed my fingers I saw its label, cryptic—a variety I’d never heard of let alone bought. If I’d been drinking that, well. Anxiously I leaned forward and then farther forward and even farther down—my wood face was almost inside the chamber.
My oxygen was constricting. I wanted, more than anything, to hear the gorgeous bell of that mysterious wine tanker smash. Yet there was no sound.
I shifted my load.
Something about that endless chasm reminded me that maybe I was mistranslating my predicament. What did I know about here and there, definitions, attaching things together? La gueule de bois—“the wooden face.” The stiff plank I now wore on my neck. Could it also mean a face of woods? That seemed freer. Thinking along those lines, I began to breathe again in short quick bursts, feeling a certain soft bark grow over my cheeks and the possibility of one teenage moosling, obviously a symbol of self-worth, stepping knock-kneed between my many trunks.
I took another breath. When I’d arrived in this strange city from New York and set up camp in the minuscule bottle-polluted flat overlooking the canal, I’d been fixated on one thing only: to avoid pain at all cost.
Was this that?
Now I glanced in King Falafel’s window with fresh hope: be gone. But between the cone of shaved meat and my reflection, the plank persisted. A big chunk of hard wood clamped onto my shoulders and underneath it, the rest of my body Gumby-like by comparison, barely there.
Just then a man passed me beneath the lindens, a man I may have recognized. I set down the bottles, smoothing my jacket.
“Hey, was it you?” I called out. I was sure that with this added obstruction, I was speaking only more gobbledygook and that he would continue on.
Instead, he stopped. I leaned my weight against the metal box that held the bottomless hole.
“Yes, it’s me,” he said.
Me, me. And who was that? His eyes were small oceans and the skin around them was fiery red.
“As you can see, I have the wooden face,” I said.
I touched the surface, rapping my knuckles to demonstrate.
He paused thoughtfully, and as he did he turned sideways. Meeting his lake-tanned neck, I was struck with a squall of recognition. How could I forget that last night he and I had been in that bullion pot of a swimming pool (itself housed in a makeshift club), that between the synth beats he’d grabbed my ankle and laughed. We’re all so happy! he’d said, as his urine ran down my legs. We’re all so happy, we’re peeing in the pool!
The memory swam up from the chlorine abyss and I felt a something tugging beneath it. The peeing had only been at the night’s start.
“There’s nothing wrong with your face,” he said, interrupting my memory’s possible rebound. “Albeit you look a little puffy from this party you had.”
Gold light clung peach-like to the swarming clouds. This was the clearest conversation I’d had in months. I wished I were anywhere else, walking along the canal. I shifted my feet and my toe clodded into a bottle that fell, bursting.
“I’m not here by accident,” he continued. “I left my cat in your apartment and I’m here to pick it up.”
But now I was adamant. I could feel my chin bobbling, or trying to, through the uniform block.
“My face,” I said.
It was impossible to me that he could not see it. I was sure, suddenly, with absolute certainty, that this wooden face is what I had been searching for all along. That it was the necessary scaffolding for my mush-like feelings that would not recede, even here—an entire Atlantic away—but kept always slopping forth.
“Chi Chi,” he said. “My cat.”
I scanned backward. Impossible, a cat. And I was locked out of my flat anyway! At last I had found a boundary and could be firm.
But he hauled closer to me still, brushing gooseflesh onto my arm, and as he did my stomach gouged and I felt us skirting around that club through a high-fenced pitch-black park, pausing under a linden tree whose low-hanging buds—his fingers on my sodden thigh—my lips troughing out sideways—the megacosm shearing past us at mock speed and spunk-like green linden smell of yeast and caving in, of being fucked all the way up the middle—a river the color of currywurst that I kept—
I wanted to be another person.
“Come with me,” he said, trying to gather me toward King Falafel. “At least a beer.”
But my head had begun to throb an
d my vision sworl. There were grains now, too many of them to count, as if I were looking through tissue. Around us it was growing dark. I saw that out on the street, in clumps or pairs, many others were having this same conversation.
“A beer?” “A beer.” “A beer?” “Yes. A beer.”
I knew then that I would have to travel home.
Been a Storm
“IT’S AROUND BACK,” HE SAID.
I must have been staring. I’d recently turned a bend in my life where staring was okay, unobjectionable. On subways, for instance. I no longer pretended not to look.
I read it again: “Crawlers in the Cooler.”
“Around around back,” he repeated.
The black marker behind his head scrawled out—wormy too. He had those free teenage muscles and his Nikes up on the counter. Whenever I did that I spilled something. Like this morning: coffee everywhere on my half-done papers, which quickly transferred to my badly ironed shirt and more yelling on the phone about directions, flood weather, town names I couldn’t decipher.
Now I was late to something you couldn’t be late for. The 278 traffic smear, the blades of water in the ditches along the road—no excuse. I slapped my keys on the counter. From a
dislocated speaker above the Coke case Stevie Nicks was singing that song that’s too sad to feel with your whole body. It was past capacity.
I have always, she said. Always.
“You’re going to Dawdson’s, right?” he said, nodding. “Storm fish. They been catching a bunch.”
Meanwhile a girl in a knee-length hoodie was trying to get him to come outside onto the porch.
“’Scuuuuse me,” she said, snapping her fingers in front of his eyes. “For a smoke. Please! It’s good for you.”
“It’s not good for you,” he said, staring back at me, “it’s smoking.”
She snapped again with more elbow.
“Just lemme help this brah,” he insisted.
I’d stopped here why? But I couldn’t sit in the car anymore with the radio dipping out of reception and the June green so wet it was blinding me. It was hard to remember that
brah/bro/dude/him didn’t mean anything in particular, didn’t mean stud, winner-at-life, or even, most basically, attractive. There were ugly brahs. Dumb brahs. Brahs with bad breath and boring thoughts.
Eggs floated eye-level in a scummy mason jar. A half-split watermelon slowly saturated the wood counter with its gestational juices. Over the weekend I’d been at the beach. We drank cans of sudsy beer then tried for the sandbar. The swell was enormous, whipped up by something offscreen that was maybe now arriving, days later, with the rain. Just out of depth, I’d press my foot down on the bar as securely as I could, trying to hold it there before the next wave, always bigger, knocked me off.
* * *
The screen door whanged. The aisles were empty except for the musky insinuation of wet that had been following me from New York.
“But you fish, right?” he prodded.
He flipped a Bic across his knuckles.
I heard life grinding on the road outside. Me in time-jelly.
He expelled air past his bottom lip as if: well, which is it.
Deep down I’d always been a pleaser. Or what was it exactly? Wanting the other person to be right about me. Relieved, I’d happily grab on to whatever solution or version of self they offered up.
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Lots.”
I walked past the sign that read “toilet” with a handdrawn smiley face and x’s for eyes, the raw plywood walls of a storage room. Invariably (usually within minutes) my new identity became impossible to upkeep. Desperate not to reveal their blunder, I’d stutter and second-guess myself, trying to diminish my contact with whoever it was until I was monosyllabic or, better yet, gone.
“Keep heading,” his voice followed me, agreeing.
The gravel lot behind the store was empty too. A retriever was wagging and scratching between the gouts of mud. Some part of me had been kinked up in the car. A wand of light seemed to swivel out of the Dumpster and inject the tubby clouds.
“Bait,” read another sign, then an arrow.
Everyone writes a fishing story sooner or later. There’s that Carver one, or is it Cheever, where he disappoints his dad. And what about Gordon Lish, with all of those blowfish stuck on the string that’s really just an old drapes cord?
I mean, c’mon, boyhood fifties crap. I did have fishing stories. Father stories. On boats I had a free pass—my body was totally employed, I barely noticed it.
The girl was huddled next to a rust-tracked Igloo. I’d just watched a Swedish drama where a woman’s body showed up in a similar chest freezer. Half a body actually—the bottom, now unusable half.
The Igloo coughed or clunked. “They’re in there,” she said, pointing. “The worms.”
She was wolfing down her cigarette. She reminded me of someone I’d regularly seen at coke parties in SF.
I shrugged. I didn’t want to see them.
“Why’d you come out then,” she accused, “if you don’t want crawlers?”
She was pretty in a way. I considered calling the dog to me and rubbing it. Panic unrolled somewhere between my adductors and belly. What about the dog? Who would mix his raw food, wake up early enough, or, when he became too difficult—continue to watch him?
“Cut the BS,” she said. She rolled up her sleeve. “See this?”
The UCONN sweatshirt bagged in huge folds around her thin elbow. There seemed to be a runty scar. I bent my head toward her skin and inhaled some kind of tuberose scent that will always make me think about locker rooms; girls with coils of wet hair.
She slammed me in the ear with her flat small fist.
“What the fuck?” I said, recoiling from the sharp beak of pain.
“Crawlers!” she said, opening the freezer top. Icy steam poured out of the cooler box. “Yeah right. I know you came back here to gobble his cock.”
The tuberose was drifting around the parking lot, getting stronger. Those gym class years I had dreamed of getting hit.
“What?!” I said, trying to rub off the purpling mark. “I’m like a . . . you know.”
She assessed me. My shiny uncreased shoes and too-new pants. The duffel bags bulging on the conveyer belt under my eyes.
“Where are you going anyway?” she said, as if I was just now coming into focus. “A funeral?”
I put on my best face. “I’m going to Dawdson’s,” I said. “Give me twenty killers, okay?”
Back on the freeway they livened up to steamy car temp, twitching their tube-like bodies on the seat next to me. “St. Mary’s Church on Hillhouse,” the directions read. It was the wrong thing to bring. Way worse than nothing. I fed more dirt into their Styrofoam cup. I’d been apologizing for it my whole life but something had to live.
Shadow of an Ape
San Francisco: July something-th, 1860.
Phew, night’s kaput! I tell the canting ceiling and its mysterious mushrooming water stain. My mattress is thick as a single sock. My pillow, paste. I stare into the room’s armpit, suddenly dry-mouthed. That hairy space—there—behind the chair?
Four floors below, some stupid clatter. Outside, same fog blob for sun.
“Señor Pinkie,” the landlady accuses my keyhole.
I pull the raggy coverlet over my head.
As soon as I signed her terms—“no boot-slop in rooms, no succor with whores, no smoking vile poppy”—she delivered her litany. How the California waterfront’s stuffed (she relished the word, beating my name in her ledger book) with shanghaiing outfits—“crimps” ready to sell you off to the nearest seagoing vessel, poisoners trafficking in chloroform-drenched cloths and knockout drops.
As if I wasn’t from Valparaiso! (We locals call it Valapai.) Mush, I’d said, finger to my lips, ending it. And now what’s she want from me? Taste my breakfast stew?
She moves off down the row. Ugh, I hat
e to miss things. Shooting up from my punisher, I’m already at the washstand. I blink around again, searching for the regular male chests in-
flating—bushy and dank—but for once, I’ve scored a single slot.
Lately luck’s on every side. Me, Sr. Pinkie, shipping via registered packet all the way up from the greatest port in Chile. And the formal drama of my departure, the crying, red-faced Espacio, the attention of the uniformed guard? Back in glossy Chile I was popular and full of potential, a made man with a ticket north.
This town is so crammed up I’m stuck at “Every Man Welcome,” a pay-by-week at the dullest end of Dupont. At least five blocks down everything’s modern and cutting edge—“Terrific” Street with its groggeries and drugstores, its cow lots whose habitués are female impersonators, its lace curtains and monte tables.
I lean closer to the spotty glass. Face bones nicely excavated, my pores jump at me like fleas. I keep my face bare bare.
All that skin up close makes me woozy. In Valapai there had been that roast chicken dinner (a chicken the size of a dodo) and tin cups of pisco (they kept pouring themselves) and the fresh-from-Frisco stranger who’d made a beeline for me—diving over the knock-kneed table to whisper the mathematics of a gold-mining operation north of Placerville, California.
Prospering, he’d said, practically foaming.
Then cuddled me to him, drawing it all out like he was relaying a recent conquest: here, Pinkie, are the tender arms, here, the protected entrance, now hurry over here the dynamite KABLOOEY!—another small vein to probe.
I dampen a cloth in the basin and try to cool myself.
Find Butt Riley, he’d insisted, pressing the lode claim of a lifetime to my palm. Jeez god, his heat was immense.
I rush down to breakfast; the corridors are narrow, a series of collapsing tunnels punctuated by numberless identical doors. At least the canteen’s marked. Ahem, I compose myself, enter. Every Man’s eyes skate around me as if I’m not here. I’m small, 150 pounds with my gut out, but I stand up straight. I have reason to—twenty acres, my own mill site, nuggets the size of small shits.