The Orange Eats Creeps

by Grace Krilanovich

  All around us the town was falling apart, dissolving back into its prehistoric state. Dactyl had started sending the papers a series of antique postcards typewritten with his personal philosophy laid out like a rhetorical dialogue. It wasn’t funny and it wasn’t cute, but people still laughed and forgot themselves. He wanted to let us all know that he was still dating, and that, more importantly, he was in love. Cops are out in their choppers tonight, looking for large groups of headlights traveling in clusters up in the hills: tip-offs of the local kids’ pathetic house parties. I fell to the forest floor, my eyes moistening with emotion, digging at the place in front of me to be released somehow. “Was there ever a time you could take all your shit down and party at the beach in a huge crevice in the sand?” Josh cried, “Are those days over?”

  “It’s the Meth, you asshole, can’t you see that’s why they need to bust us — ?” Beer-soaked ferns and berry bushes… clumps of dust kicked up by tire tracks, the night’s blood let out on the thicket of grey moss… This forest blood, fizzing bulbous, enriched, gathering a grey film as it threaded down the banks. Rain would come and wash it all away. Rocks shifted in their places, leafy ferns slimed softly upon us; the moisture seeping up from the core; sulfurous fog of water beading up along the seams of dirt between plants. Salty pills of rain coated the thorny wild blackberry bushes. The bush cried out tiny white blossoms, blooms like a thousand pin-pricks, tiny whiskers shooting out of the black wild berries. Not shiny yet. I saw in each the faces of the many who came to Oregon to die. I felt it as I grabbed a low branch and shook out a dozen drops of blood for the many who came to Oregon to die. The wild blackberry bush consumed it all, lapped up this death, this gift that stained its own blossoms and caught like whiskers in my throat. I swallowed a wild pulpy mass of blood and tiny white whiskers gathered in the palm of my hand. My hand devours wild blackberries. We are all voracious for wild blackberries. We eat without care until the bushes are reduced to piles of whiskers and bramble. We eat all the blossoms, they plump in my mouth and I spit out half-formed blackberry babies.

  Grieving teens sit on stoops, gathering like driftwood in the stair-wells leading up from the sidewalk on the way to the beach. Sad weirdos and their twelve-pound weights for bangs, their bulky sweatshirts muffling their prematurely creaky joints. Hundred-and-eight-year-old turkey vulture hatchlings wading around in the dusk, already so bloated with misery; their limbs held on with strings, they press their sweatshirt bodies together in the rain. We’ve found our way to The Highway That Eats People. Seven summers ago it ate four wasted teens who burned in a Lincoln when it wrapped around a tree while, not far away, Death sat knitting funerary lace by light of a cookstove. A crash is a rite of passage in this neighborhood, like striking the last match. They stuff themselves into their parents’ big sensible cars and go for a drive. The highway is hungry. They have to feed it. Of the four who died that night, three were jocks so it was a big deal in town. No one knows why the one non-jock was in the car but he burned anyway. Other than that there was once a girl who jumped off a cliff into the ocean and a couple of guys who took too much heroin, but usually when it happened it was all about the cars in the hills; it was a matter of the grieving teens feeding the highway with their bodies in the middle of the night.

  A fence, no higher than my knees, contains a small race of miniature farm creatures, each part of a family with nothing more in common than their affliction. In storage for the county fair’s contracted petting zoo, they whinny and peck at the ground and charge at the fence and get mini-electrocuted. At night they sleep together in a big pile, sharing their endorphins, and suffer their plights microscopically. Their bodies are covered in flies and even the flies can’t resist them, slurping up their miniature tears… I think some of my boyfriends pulled a heist a couple of towns back. They suddenly have money but insist on jumping locals for blood and change anyway. I poured out that felt sack of bones, bits of china, sticks, and other odd pieces on the plywood footpath. It spelled good things ahead. Fortuitous journeys, I supposed. I turned the dog tooth over and over in my fingers, walking through the aisles of the giant video store like a bored shopper or maybe like a bored murderer, or maybe like both. Methodically turning objects over in that felt bag, guided by the minute clanking — I was getting close. This afternoon I woke to find Knowles softly petting Josh while he slept. They’re sweet and weird that way. Knowles spoke softly and said, cryptically, that the turning point for him was “seeing his friend’s blood.” What sealed the deal for me began one night a few years ago when Kim and I were heating up a couple of microwave burritos in the kitchen of our foster home. She picked pieces of paper towel off of hers and told me about how since she started taking her pills she felt more colonized than ever. Her fucked up anatomy was well known in the house. I don’t know, she just took a bunch of things she was given. And then the parade of side effects would begin. Oral contraceptives were a big part of the program. Not like she had fertile mucus to chart anyway, the result of some damaged cervical crypts… I could go on and on about Seth. We lived in a trailer sitting on a tuft of dirt at the edge of a long driveway leading to a house that didn’t exist anymore. In it: little versions of most household contrivances, a tiny stove with a little trap door for tiny tools, pockets carved out of the sides for stashing who-knows-what, damp, peeling sheets of “trailer tile” on the floor. Spores filled the air. To breathe was to let a part of the forest be absorbed into your body, just as the forest appeared to have chewed up this little trailer and spat it back out… Last night you came to me in a dream and we prayed for each other. I remember coming with you in my mind when we said each other’s names in the dark. I can barely remember the breathless look in your eyes, the gusts of meaning flowing between us and I felt like I wanted to be with you forever. We tested all the doors on the school buses parked in a lot adjacent to your friend’s house. There’s always going to be one left unlocked. Seth made a little bed for me at the back out of a salvaged curtain and a sleeping bag. I laid my head down in his lap as he was sitting cross-legged on this pile of cloth, fiddling with the trap of his pants for the token gesture of his fondness. He pulled me up to his kiss and we made out intensely and with focus. He kissed my hair and I thought of the time I spent two days caught up in a motel room with some guy who kept me freshly medicated. The drug made him voracious for my body but without climax, he itched with an ecstatic pang only partially sated by pushing me face down into the mattress, smothering me with his pleading gasps. I can’t remember when it was that I fell asleep around him — was it when I thought of you? Down a hillside that led so deep into a quiet, still part of the forest that was barely earth. It certainly didn’t feel like any discernable place. One day all the things I’ve lost over the years will turn up in the dirt surrounding my grave. There was so much to this growing suppleness in the wind that carried my thoughts away from the trailer where I once lived… There was other chatter amidst the yard of wilderness resting just outside our camp. Up the gravel path there were a series of terraces, of grasses littered with acorn shells and twigs for birds, bordered with berry bushes and thistle. The roots of a giant tree formed steps up to the neighbor’s redwood house. The driveway was unbelievably steep, even for walking. We fell away toward the creek at the bottom of the hill, creeping cold water defining the edge of a field against a stand of oak trees. We followed the country road out of the forest and into town, never straying far from the acrid pilings of the train tracks. It got more and more damp as we passed rotting subdivisions and it was raining by the time we made our way to the first of many neglected shopping centers along the edge of town.

  Here, patches in the linoleum have been worn through by decades of shoppers smashing grains of sand into the tiny pores. Prehistoric gas seeped up through the floor. Looking through foggy, frozen glass doors for something to drink, flicking at beads of perspiration rising on dented cans on the shelf behind me. Made note of tiny tears on frozen bags of corn. Plastic urns of flour. Syru
p covers the floor, hemmed in by aisles of aluminum shelving. The lettuce is already rotting on the bottom of its designated trough. No one wants to touch the expired milk, stashed behind some bags of grain elsewhere in the store. I pick up the new Us magazine, flipping through it, scanning for pictures of famous people in their own supermarkets; I’m taken by the blurred stares and frozen gaits, but always disappointed by what they have in their shopping cart. Out in the back alley a gutted stove sits under a pile of newspaper; the wreckage seemed to have been wrenched out from under a Mack truck. I ran across the parking lot to Walgreens, bursting through the door, “This?” I said, pointing to my sullied forearm, “you should see the layers of shit coating my inside!” The lady working at the register had a big bow in her hair. Outside a gang of vagrants sat perched like shadows of people, swollen and moist — charred effigies of benevolent clerics. The Administrator unfurled a rolled up flyer and read his own didactic signage. His mouth was moving but all I could hear was a flap flapping. He stuffed a soggy brochure in my hand, proclaiming all the while, his pupils constricted eyeballs of stone. Street people seemed to have all day to perfect their speeches. One crawled out of his spot on the sidewalk, draping himself over a bronze public sculpture. He unfurled his large cumbersome beard. It was Oratory Time. A glint of orthodoxy crept into his eyes. He seemed on the verge of pouncing on the nearest woman, tearing at her clothes with his teeth. Paring her skin from bone. I got trapped in a quasi-religious discussion with him and became more and more nerve-wracked. He moved through life as if there was sand in his pants, left a trail wherever he went. Being in this part of town always reminded me of why I left. Everywhere I went slogans bit me in the face. Missionaries shoved free samples in my hands all day long. I itched a raised sore, a pink rash the shape of a mask, on my forearm. Not equipped to deal with this life. Smells of chocolate and blackberry stained my face. A wash of stained memory hit me like a foghorn.

  We heaved open the glass doors of the liquor store and spread out in five directions. A young man sat hunched behind the counter making precise drawings, slashing at the paper while his leg jiggled. Pieces of a man’s voice filtered through a radio in the corner — Straighten up and fly right he sang. The young man stopped and looked at us sideways for a long time, for minutes, like an animal disturbed at the stream. The radio itched and sputtered behind him. The words coming out of it seemed to prod at our souls, just so —

  I get so wound up the radio yowled —

  Our purpose is to annihilate, not to disseminate Josh said —

  We aim to prevent psychic death Murph said —

  We don’t exist Knowles said —

  Whispers and screams in the basement rock show popped out of the crowd; I only caught pieces — Smash the State, go to sleep they said — Why go into the outside world anymore? Seth asked.

  Never pay for sex —

  Revolution girl-style now —

  All of a sudden our eyes were opened to all of the screams that had always lay around us, surrounding us everywhere we went. Stopping and listening only made it that much more relentless. We went to the diner and realized we were surrounded by people screaming everywhere —

  “It’s getting harder to move around!” someone shouted.

  Another: “Dreams of death are all we’ve got!”

  “Oh yeah? Not if I walk all night!”

  “I need adventure!” some kids whined.

  An accuser: “You think you’re evil but you’re not!”

  “If you’re cold, you’re dead, but if you’re cool, you’re only halfway there.”

  “ — why did I ever think I could keep you?” she sobbed.

  I love her; I hate her

  You threw it all away

  Love me like a reptile

  The wind ground down on exposed, unvarnished porches and carports in the large ’70s neighborhoods bordering Salem to the south. A particular smell, like wax or caulking, followed us all over town and then when we found a large paper mill churning at full tilt next to a slough it all made sense. I chipped away grout with a screwdriver at a bus stop. I wanted to be home; I wanted to crawl into bed with my baby. We went to meet Seth at some presidio-style barracks made of white painted bricks. I walked around inside. The buildings had been converted to small rooms and sub-apartments, one stacked inside another. It was there I realized the land surrounding it had been one huge cemetery. I looked outside and saw the grounds sloping up in graduated terraces with acre after acre of grave markers. People came from all over to live here. I sat with him on a small set of painted wooden steps leading down from a service entrance. “Did you know Kirk Cameron became a crusader for Jesus Christ?” Seth asked, apropos of nothing. “He let Jesus into his life and the LORD took hold of the controls and never let go.”

  The earth darkened below us, a settling wetness that spread out under our feet and with it, a realization of the shattering compassion, a brimming sadness — sickness, really — of Jesus Christ. Of marks made on the body, a desecrated, destroyed thing, a tattered set of remains; dragged through the dirt. Can you feel it too? A suspension of disbelief; a leap that allows for an entry, an absorption. A lapse that strings along a line of tension both fraught and tenuous, crackling and frayed. But we can cross it because we are weightless and expansive. Of a way of seeing and drawing, where we trace our eyes over a distant object, the pencil moving underneath; a transmutation of the substance that enters through our eyes and spills out over the page, through our hands and its scrap of charcoal. Suspension of disbelief? God is everywhere, can’t you feel it?… The sunset was a huge eye closing, sealing off the world on the other side of the carpeted hills. The sky hung as a dappled membrane that clung to my eyes. I looked down to the grave in front of me. It was a small suitcase containing a still-breathing organ. The case perched like a miniature torso, a limbless little self puttering away in the dark. This suitcase throbbed with sorrow; tears stained the inside. Again, darkness. Silence. This is the way of most things that are true. This is the way of most of the sealed objects.

  Tap the fly nest. Tap. Tap. Bushels of shiny brass beads fall out.

  Cockroaches drink tiny dribbles and climb the trees; they look like nameplates made out of wood. Intricately carved seals vibrating up the tree.

  I see a gas station and a smokestack off in the distance. Smoke has to go somewhere. There’s no use pretending it doesn’t go into the sky… As I walk there’s a piece, a part that’s dangerous, getting more and more loose on my body and it rattles when I walk. Got to get that replaced… We may be aliens who just landed here, but having taken a real good look around it seems like the signs all point to our ancestors having lived in this same exact spot. In fact, just the other day I went up to the graveyard and found a grave with my name on it. It was full though, and had been for 140 years. If all the people who came before us — way before any of this shit was even here — didn’t have such a “thing” about speaking of the dead, of their relatives, and if all of their props and creations weren’t so biodegradable then maybe we’d know their names too. But they’re gone and this place will never be the same.

  Our ancestral people of this land took something with them that has altered more the psychic landscape than the physical one. Their sense of doom is palpable and it tells their story in a way that artifacts can’t. Their contribution to the world lies in pockets of poison gas underground, that white swath beating at the door with the swollen fists of the unhappy dead; it wisps under the cabin window sash, animating that season’s psychos in a spark of electrified crackling fat that’s so irresistible they must drag their bones out the door, into the world outside, to launch the projects their meticulous notes and research have been building toward all winter long… Our town spit so much volcanic phlegm into the vapor in a veldt that sealed the town from the sky, that what you call “fog” is really just toxic blinding rage fading to white. It infected the consciousness of our town so much that people didn’t see it anymore; it seemed like just so
much fog overhead. The land was not to be trusted. Its climate had the potential to make those teetering on the edges of decency spill over into murderville. They sought to put more artifacts in the ground for future excavation. Earthquakes came to blow off a little steam, columns of smoke from Hell loosened up wells of fog stored deep in the ground. Psychos tried to plug up cracks with bodies, cloth, whatever’s at hand. Stem the flows. The more bodies the fewer earthquakes, is how they saw it. The killer hippie forest sprite Herbert Mullin killed to prevent earthquakes — and why wouldn’t he? Earthquakes, after all, are horrible disasters. He observed, rat-like, that earthquakes coming from below the surface of the earth indicated a residual animosity on the part of the native people who were hounded in this part of the state centuries ago. They had planted poisonous fog in the ground in the absence of any solid, real-world artifacts like pottery or sarcophagi in order to punish modern humans (descendents of the warlike New Englander meatheads) when it all got unearthed in the age of modern development, in the age of leveling the trees and digging around the beaches, escaping from pockets deep in the earth, seeping into the atmosphere and infecting everybody’s consciousness… hooo boy!… Every word was a possibility flickering along the wall in blue person-shaped shadows. The psycho itched all over with the voices of possibilities and winged creatures beating their wings below his bed.