by Jim Nisbet
It is possible that Pauley was nearly as fascinated as his father by the course of the systematic destruction that a mere electrical fluke had managed to fashion out of a heretofore obedient appendage; and it’s conceivable that both reflected on the irony that, if the recipient of such devastation were overdue for it, its instrument–his father’s hand–was sanctioned by time, experience and irony, and on any other subject they might never have agreed so completely. But is it likely that his father’s mind cast up such an irreverent aside as the boy’s did, in thinking that it had been a long time if ever since they had lived in an apartment capable of dispensing such an unmitigated abundance of hot water, continuously instanter?
But the dream, intent as it was on useful psychological invigoration, dispensed with impious reflection and zoomed in on the severing of the artery which, in due course, deprived Mark’s father of his life. The strange fluttering and sawing mechanism which had been his father’s hand simply continued carving its arcs down the man’s cheek, right out from under the other hand, which still held the jowl taut, the head tilted, to the purpose. It looked like a pose evolved to answer the necessity of cutting a throat with the least amount of trouble. The hand worked much like a swallow its field at dusk, made a sweep in one direction, fluttered, then came back slightly further down, shredding the cheek, the jowl, and the throat as it descended. The hatching lines of blood soon ceased to be discernible as lines, as the older upper sources flooded the lower newer ones like seepage nurturing moss on an old stone wall. And long before this process had attained its fruition Mark Paulos the younger had come to realize that his hatred had found a focus; that remorse, penance, guilt, regret, penitence, anguish, reconciliation, atonement, attrition, contrition, regret, sorrow were being distilled, even as flecks of foam reddened by their common blood ticked against the countertop and the mirror, and that he was receiving from this new liquor some kind of satisfaction or nourishment of the type usually attributed to a square meal, or confined to dreams.
Perhaps trees two hundred years old really did fall on men who beat dogs without cause or mercy. Perhaps man had adapted to the exigencies of the treeless bathroom, and nature along with him.
The lifeless progenitor remained vertical for some time. Mark never stopped watching. On the wall beyond his father’s husk the leather strop symbolically pulsed between the electrical poles like a flayed conjunction, like the Oregon Trail on an old map, connecting a new world with a newer one. Then the cadaver sagged into a crimson reverie, vertical to horizontal, with a pop and a tinkle and a flash as it pulled the wire and the socket and the bulb down with it.
Among the many odors flirted a hint of burning meat, nature’s recording medium. Mark found himself still holding the empty whiskey glass. Now he stepped over the extended treacherous arm, set the glass on the counter, and turned off the hot water. A different warmth pooled along the edges of his bare feet. He backed two steps beyond the threshold and waited.
After four minutes in near darkness the corpse emitted an appalling, life-like sigh.
Chapter Three
PRIMARILY BECAUSE HE’D OWNED ONLY ONE VEHICLE IN HIS life, Martin Seam had never sold a used car to anybody. But he was vaguely reassured that used car dealers often sold used cars that had their little secrets, a venerable tradition and a good one, because his used car had a little secret and needed to be sold. Since everybody else was getting away with it, why shouldn’t he get away with it, too?
Seam’s used car was actually a pickup truck. Long ago it had been an excellent ride; for several years after that it had been a very good one. Martin purchased it for $1400 and in two years had driven it into the ground. It hadn’t been inevitable that he drive it into the ground. It had been a good truck when Martin bought it and it would have been a good truck still if Martin had taken care of it. But nobody’d told him to change the oil or check the water and what was he, after all, a mechanic? All he knew about the Toyota were its jet-black paint, its double-bladed windshield wipers with little airfoils on them, its cookie-cutter wheels of ersatz magnesium, the tinted sunroof, and the various products intended to keep them glossy. Plus, women were showing a lot of leg getting in and out of similar if newer boss rides on television. Martin was pretty sure that he was heterosexual, and, if heterosexuality were to be his thing, he needed a little something extra to attract other, girl, heterosexuals, something more than just his personality.
At one-tenth its showroom price the truck had cost him dearly, more than his job at the Emporium cosmetics counter could comfortably afford him; even so, a few weeks after the big purchase, he’d managed to pay for a cheap pair of lavender stripes, which, applied front to back, he subsequently kept waxed to a high sheen. His labor cost him no hard cash, after all. Labor, time, energy–to Martin these seemed to be things the universe had provided him the most of. A good thing too, for the universe apparently had an endless appetite for taking them back. Many was the Sunday morning when, having arisen late after a night of dancing with the woman with whom he had a very chaste relationship–a little drunken mutual masturbation was permitted now and then, but never intercourse what with the threats of AIDS and pregnancy and all, she was right, and besides, why wreck an otherwise reliable friendship, or open the door to expensive aromatherapy?–when, having arisen with only a mild headache–what can three grasshoppers do to a head, or five or six for that matter, it’s the stomach they attack–having scanned the Sunday entertainment supplement for the latest from Disney (he actually owned a single original pornographic animation cell from the suppressed postwar counterfeit Mickey Goes to Amsterdam, handed down to him by a profligate uncle), despite that Walt had been dead since before Martin was born he kept up with everything Disney did, and having a forty-dollar all-nouvelle brunch with a liter of bodaciously-priced Chardonnay at the Zuni Cafe on his plastic with three or four of his wittier friends, most of them people he saw every day at work, separate checks, Martin keeps the cash, friends are where you find them and, often, having abjured the pleasure of further wooden hilarity, walked home: many was the Sunday when, he felt, he had the time, the energy, and the strength to simply take over the world by engirdling it, beginning with his very next day off. Or at least to clean the apartment. If the walk home hadn’t simply exhausted him.
But so far he hadn’t taken over the world, no more than he’d circumnavigated it. He had conjured the good sense to sell the truck’s silly wheels with their fat low profile “racing tyres” for a hundred dollars. But then some butch prick with a junkyard had nipped him $80 for the stock replacements, and the Vietnamese gas station had gotten $40 for taking off the old fancy ones and balancing and remounting the new used ones. At least the guy he’d sold the old ones to gave him cash and the Vietnamese had let him put the twenty difference on the credit card, a paper victory and slim at that. At the time he’d dimly wondered how in the world anyone managed to stay in business at all. It was so marginal!
More confusing had been the more recent news from the Vietnamese mechanics. Martin hadn’t even noticed the overheating problem until the radiator blew sky-high in Berkeley coming back from the George Winston show at the Greek Theater and his date Marcie had caught a ride home with a friend (she hadn’t even called later to see if he had gotten home all right! just wait and see how long it would be before he took Marcie to another really special concert) because Martin had to hang around to wait for the truck to tow the Toyota all the way back across the Bay Bridge, nothing like having your girl along to watch you struggle with the idea of giving the rest of your paycheck to a Vietnamese gas station, even if they were the only people he could afford to trust to put a wrench on his ride. They said that at the very least he’d have to “surface the cylinder head” because he’d “overheated” it so bad, and hadn’t it started “pinging” real obvious and been putting out “shuddering-whistling” kinds of sounds before it blew? It might have saved him some trouble if he’d watched the temperature gauge, and even more if he’d checked
the water, and by the way when was the last time he’d paid them to change the oil on this thing? As if it made any difference to him, cosmetics was his game, automobile engines was theirs, maybe they could ride along to the next George Winston concert and watch the temperature gauge while he listened to the music, a temperature gauge didn’t mean a thing to him. You mean like in a sauna? But as usual they made no value judgments on his driving ability and made a great price for doing the work which they said would involve replacing a “blown head gasket” and “surfacing the cylinder head” which would take a couple of days because they had to “send out the head” and they’d call him if anything changed and sign here please authorizing $243, they had to disassemble the whole upper part of the engine, a great price.
He told them to take their time.
Walking was getting to be a kind of habit with him, like deficit wage-earning, like his perfect recall of the amount of every invoice he’d been obligated to pay over the last two or three weeks, always in Arabic numerals, like the perfectly impenetrable oblivion into which automatically was consigned whichever fantastic total such invoices might sum to, he didn’t really mind walking it was a special solitude, he was kind of getting to like it and public transportation was pretty good in San Francisco these days and besides, parking was getting worse and worse all you had to do was carry a book and a Walkman with you everywhere you went, they were on sale he’d nicked one anyway and a belly-pack too for the extra tapes although that book of color Disney reproductions was pretty darn big and heavy too so okay maybe next time a rucksack instead, although the straps would be pretty hard on the shoulderpads in all his jackets, maybe get a new jacket to wear, and his clothes he could fold neatly into the pack and carry the book or leave them at work. Of course, a safari jacket would have all those pockets, including a pouch in back to carry ducks they shot in the nineteenth century but in modern times to carry the book of color Disney reproductions or shoplifted stuff. But they look so square.
He’d priced a bicycle, a really nice Peugeot, and then a really cheap Peugeot, but by the time you buy the aerodynamic clothes specially colored so you don’t get run over and a helmet for the concussion which ruins your hair and they make these shoes that go in these kind of little stirrups you know the whole deal costs at least $500 on top of the bike and some people are spending thousands on their cycling it’s easy it’s really good for you it’s expensive so Martin just got into this mellow space with public transportation, which he was mostly taking to work anyway unless he had to get to a concert at Shoreline or leave for the wine country real early or a sale or something.
And when the phone calls started coming in at work from the Vietnamese, Martin’s supervisor started to get pissed. They said they’d found a “head gasket” easily enough but the shop they’d sent the “head” out to had called and said the “head” was “cracked” Martin had overheated it so bad (“So hot! So hot!” the fool kept saying over the phone to him like it was Hunan food or Martin’s fault or something) and that maybe he could “weld it” which cost more money or anyway about the same price and you got something more reliable than if you were to go out and get a used one instead.
And it wasn’t the same price for “shaving the head” as it was to get a used one–which the jerk told Martin it would be a good idea to go ahead and shave the new used one anyway before he put it back on the truck because you could never tell where these things had been and who they’d been doing it with. Well–Martin said that last part. He claimed experience. Herb Lee, the Vietnamese gas-station guy with the Chinese name and the pan-ethnic sense of humor, agreed with Martin ha ha just so. Then he said he wanted another $200 for a used cylinder head on top of the $50 for shaving the thing, which was included in the original price, except for the “magnafluxing” which had detected the crack in the first place and Martin said look guy this isn’t a pedigreed Siamese cat or something it’s just a pickup truck and Herb Lee shrugged, Martin could hear him shrugging over the phone and there was a long silence with his supervisor Mrs. Hillegass glaring at him while Martin waited for Chauncey to finish with the register calculator so Martin could figure out to the best of his memory which credit card might be able to handle the Arabic numerals germane to this problem, which none of them could handle anyway, so Martin told Herb Lee the mechanic to go ahead with the used cylinder head and didn’t bother to mention that he’d have to make out two invoices so he could bill the thing to two different credit cards they do it all the time at the cosmetics counter you know some of these people that come in use a lot of cologne and don’t apparently work, a secret we’d all like to be let in on, but Martin didn’t have time to hassle it out with him on the phone and besides he didn’t want the deal to get any more hung up than it already was you know, once Herb Lee had finished the work what choice would he have, if he wanted his money he’d have to make out a pair of invoices instead of one, there was a guy once who had picked out a whole bunch of expensive toiletries and tried to get Martin to make out three invoices, his ID checked out and everything but Martin wouldn’t do it for him. The guy was weird.
So then about a half hour later Herb Lee calls back and Martin’s supervisor calls him to the phone and hands it to him personally, doesn’t say a word, and Herb Lee tells Martin that price he gave him on the used cylinder head was if Martin went and got it himself, not if the guy who called Herb Lee had to go get it, or if Herb Lee himself had to go get it. What the hell, Martin asked him loud, so Mrs. Hillegass would hear him, don’t you think I’ve got to get some work done around here? I don’t have time to go after that thing–Madonna, I don’t even know what a cracked cylinder head looks like!–and besides, on Saturday which is the only day it’s impossible Gone with the Wind only comes once a year restored cut to the wide screen like the director originally intended at the you know the Castro Theater–and Herb Lee says it’s only twenty-five bucks for pickup and delivery, from the junkyard to the cylinderhead shop to his gas station, and normally he wouldn’t even mention such a small amount but just spend it and get on with the job, but he realizes how it is with Martin, he’s sharp with every penny–you ever heard a man who’s been rocketed by Viet Cong tell a guy like Martin he’s sharp?–besides, twenty-five dollars is very reasonable, and Martin supposed it was reasonable but at that point he’s tapped and to make a long story short Martin stalls the repair deal until the following Saturday–he can see Gone with the Wind on the big screen like the director originally intended again next year–when he gets on a bus out to Hunter’s Point, misses the street to the junkyard, walks ten or fifteen blocks back on the only day in the entire year when the temperature is above 80 degrees, a perfect day to be in a cool dark theater watching Gone with the Wind, buys the cylinder head in a joint called All America Wrecking whereat some artist has spray-appended an apostrophe s to America and the Environment to the end of the sign, that’s packed with junkyard rats arguing over “synchro rings” and the goddamn 49ers it’s not even football season, and in this environment which is the last environment in which you’d expect him to be able to get away with it precisely because he looks so like the type who would try to get away with it they aren’t ready for him Martin kites a check–they don’t take plastic what do they expect?–gets them to wrap the cylinderhead in newspaper, but they’ve never seen anybody like Martin in this place, they even fit the head in his backpack while he holds it open. He finds a bus stop, makes a couple of connections over to the Vietnamese gas station, he’s making good time and it’s only about ten blocks from the Castro but of course Herb Lee doesn’t even want to see this cylinder head until it’s been surfaced over to Yuan’s Valves and Engines, which is in the Tenderloin, quite the opposite direction from the Castro, though it is on the way to Atlanta, at which point Martin comes close to freaking out, he’s already ruined this $150 shirt he’d stolen from Men’s in a regular if pathologically sartorial commando operation only a couple of weeks ago that Marcie had pointed out as pretty cool the only time she�
�d seen him lately with his coat off, when he was faking to work under the hood of the overheated truck, which would now only be good for polishing the goddamn fenders, if he ever got it running again, on account of motor oil seeping through the side of the backpack.
But he got it down to the Tenderloin just before the place closed and of course hardly anybody was there and the ones who were there spoke no English at all or Spanish either which you probably don’t know but Martin speaks a really really passable Spanish especially when he’s in Mexico in restaurants north of the border they don’t speak right like the food and it’s even weirder although Dios only knows how you say “used cylinderhead” in Spanish but he managed to visit his old cylinderhead while he was there and it didn’t look anything like the one he was carrying around in his backpack but he put that potential glitch out of his mind and besides the check wasn’t any good yet and left the new one there anyway I mean dumped it right on the guy’s desk and bussed it back to Herb Lee’s the guy never goes home. Herb Lee sits at his metal desk in the Union 76 office in his blue coveralls with one greased-out cordless phone on his shoulder chopsticking really vast amounts of Chinese takeout directly into the conversation, but he speaks English because it was the language they tortured him in as a matter of nationalistic irony so Martin could get it through to him that he would have to call Yuan’s Valves and Engines on Monday morning to make sure that they knew what that cylinder head was for on Yuan’s desk and Herb Lee could see that Martin was a little upset at this point his hair was falling down and that mousse runs in your eyes and stings you should always use that cool Menthol Dancing Mousse under all environmental conditions, pork fried shrimp or eight treasures on rice pretty nice of Herb to offer but Martin declined there’s only a couple of Chinese restaurants he’ll eat in and he’s sure that on this side of town Herb Lee’s getting his takeout from that place on 14th, MSG on everything, besides, Martin could see that Herb Lee was worn out which is hardly surprising the guy never goes home but you can also see that as long as he isn’t getting shot at Herb Lee is only too happy to be trying to run down an out-of-date PCV valve at 5:30 on a Saturday afternoon with his mouth full of non-traditional food. Really pleased. Though Martin had heard Herb Lee wax sentimental over the idea of a duck egg boiled just before the little chick inside was supposed to hatch, an illustration not to be found in the book of Disney reproductions. Really sentimental the guy practically broke down to think he and Herb Lee were developing a relationship. They certainly see enough of each other.