C. discreet
D. detritus
In the city council chamber, the floor was opened for public comment. Two citizens came to the microphone.
Ms. Patricia Wilson, who was represented by Mr. Kyle in the Sixth Ward said: “My friend Amy, who is a nurse at the VA hospital, she can get me as much Percodan as I want. And I want a lot.”
Mr. Jim Smitts, who was represented by Ms. Turnbull in the First Ward said: “I’d just like to say one thing? My neighbor across the street, he’s got a daughter? She’s fourteen? And she’s real cute? And I seen her washing her Daddy’s car, and she was wearing shorts and she got wet? And now I’m sitting in my living room all the time, looking over there and hoping to see something like that again? That’s all I’d like to say.”
The correct answer is C.
2. Many administrative assistants fail because they are not sufficiently__________.
A. versatile
B. voracious
C. varicolored
D. venal
On his way to a board meeting, Mr. Matthews stopped by Jane’s desk. “Pull the files on the Brandywine account for me,” he said. “I’d like to review them when I get back this afternoon.”
“They’ll be on your desk.”
“Is that letter ready for my signature?”
She gave him the letter. He signed it.
“Oh,” he said, “and I noticed on my way in that there’s a Cape buffalo by the water cooler.”
“Is there?” said Jane.
“Yes. A dead one. Take care of it, will you?”
“Of course.” She got up from her desk to have a look.
The buffalo was a big one, weighing many hundreds of pounds. It lay on its side, eyes open. Jane put her hand on one massive hoof and pushed. The leg yielded. The buffalo hadn’t been dead for long.
Jane knew that an animal of this size was more than she could handle alone, so she went from office to office, from cubicle to cubicle, gathering the other administrative assistants. Then Jane crouched close to the buffalo. With her powerful claws, she tore open the still-warm carcass and used her teeth to rip out a gobbet of flesh. The other administrative assistants fell to, as well. Soon their hands and faces were smeared with blood. They gorged on flesh until they could eat no more. Then they retreated to their work stations to doze a while and renew their appetites.
However, even after a second round of feeding, the buffalo was scarcely half devoured when Mr. Matthews returned from his meeting. He scowled at Jane. “Is that all?” he said. “You’ve barely started on the entrails, and one of the forelegs hasn’t even been touched!” He shook his head. “I’m sorry to say this, Jane, but I’m going to have to let you go.” He looked at the others. “You, too. The lot of you. You’re all fired!”
The correct answer is B.
3. The best way to choose a soldier for a suicide mission is to pick someone__________by drawing lots.
A. rationally
B. randomly
C. repeatedly
D. retroactively
The night before the selection was to be made, the officers gathered in the Colonel’s bunker to decide which of the enlisted men they most disliked. It came down to Mimsby, Hawkins and Pimm. The officers then considered which of these three men, by his permanent absence from the trenches, might actually have a positive impact on morale. Without a doubt, the answer was Pimm, but he was so defective that he might not be able to carry off even a simple suicide mission. Hawkins seemed the next best choice until one of the captains said he rather liked Hawkins playing the harmonica of an evening, and maybe not all the enlisted chaps hated it. Perhaps those who enjoyed the harmonica simply hadn’t spoken up. So the officers settled on Mimsby. In the morning, one of the majors went among the men with a bundle of sticks. Short stick would draw the mission. “Don’t pick the blue one,” the major said to each man in turn, and when he came at last to Mimsby, there was only one stick left, the one painted blue. It was the short stick.
“Sorry about that, lad,” major told him. “Luck of the draw, what?”
The correct answer is A.
4. Mr. Evans objected to the day care center next to his home because the children were__________.
A. obstreperous
B. ovoid
C. officious
D. obsequious
“Good Lord, but they are noisy today,” Mrs. Evans said.
Mr. Evans grunted, put down his paper, and went to the open window. “Hey!” he shouted. “Pipe down out there!”
“Sorry, Mr. Evans,” said one of the children.
“We didn’t mean to disturb you,” said another.
“We appreciate your letting us know that we were getting out of hand,” said a third. “We’re happy to have you as neighbors. We appreciate some contact with the older, wiser generation.”
“We’ll try to play more quietly now. Don’t hesitate to tell us if we’re bothering you again.”
“Yeah, okay,” said Mr. Evans, and to his wife he said, “God, they give me the creeps!”
She said, “I know what you mean.”
A few minutes later, the doorbell rang. It was the children. “My, you are looking well today, Mrs. Evans,” said one of the boys. “Have you lost weight?”
“Why, no, I…What can I do for you?”
“Is Mr. Evans home?”
Mr. Evans came to the door. “What?”
“Mr. Evans, we couldn’t help noticing that the leaves are collecting in your gutters. You really ought to do something about that.”
“I don’t see how that’s any business of yours,” said Mr. Evans. “Go away.”
“Mr. Evans, those leaves could eventually block your down spouts,” said a girl. “You could get water under your eaves, and dry rot.”
Another girl added, “You can buy a plastic gutter scoop at Home Depot for under five dollars, a very good price, I’m sure you’ll agree.”
“Or,” said a boy, “you could let us clean out your gutters. We’d be happy to do it at no cost to you. Just say the word!”
“No,” said Mr. Evans. He closed the door and shivered.
“I know,” said Mrs. Evans. “They are so unnaturally helpful and polite for children.”
“Polite, hell!” said Mr. Evans. “Haven’t you noticed the shape of their heads?”
The correct answer is B.
Résumé
I WAS A LONG, NARROW-SHOULDERED man with a briefcase that hung open and empty from my hand. I was stretched over the back of the post office bench, every part of me limp except for the hand clinging to the briefcase handle. My head hung back and my Adam’s apple pointed at the sky. It was about four in the afternoon, hot, and no one else was on the street when the old woman found me. She gave me a tap with her walking stick to see if I was alive. I didn’t move. She walked around me and tapped from the other side. Nothing. Then she gave my shins a good whack with the stick and that convinced her that I was dead. She tried to steal the briefcase, but it wouldn’t come out of my hand. The old woman went away, muttering.
I was a long, narrow-shouldered man floating face-down in a swimming pool. The pool maintenance man found me when he pulled the cover back. I had obviously been in the water for a long time. I was swollen. The owners of the pool were questioned, but not detained. I carried no identification. The broken clasp of my briefcase was engraved with three initials. This detail was not given to the press.
I was a tall, narrow-shouldered man found hanging from a bridge. My noose had been constructed from a neck tie. One of the coroner’s assistants made a joke about that as he carried a tray of instruments into the room. The coroner might have thought the joke was funny, but he wasn’t listening. He was trying to take the open briefcase from my hand.
I was a tall, narrow-shouldered man in the television studio audience. I didn’t clap for the contestants when everyone else did. For one thing, the handle of the briefcase with the broken clasp was in my hand. For another, I was dead.
The B
lack Forest was dying. The trees stood stripped of needles like tall, narrow-shouldered men. One misty morning, a hiker noticed briefcases hanging from the branches. Each briefcase had a broken clasp, so they all hung open. Dew drops collected on the leather.
I was the lost father. I wandered everywhere looking for you, carrying inside my briefcase the photograph of the two of us together for the last time in 1964.
I was a tall, narrow-shouldered man asleep on the heating grate. Or so it seemed.
On the enemy beach, I washed ashore as planned. The enemy soldiers found me, found the obviously forged papers in my breast pocket. It was hoped that they would also force the lock on the briefcase that was chained to my hand and find the papers there, the photographs of beaches with landing zones marked in red. But the clasp had broken open in the waves. The briefcase was empty.
I was a tall, narrow-shouldered man discovered in a block of glacial ice. I was thawed out, and the contents of my stomach were analyzed. My diet had consisted partly of alpine flowers. The briefcase in my hand was not taken seriously.
I was a tall, narrow-shouldered man found twenty hours after the hijacking, the partly-opened parachute tangled by the wind amongst the sagebrush. The open briefcase in my hand held no trace of the hundred-thousand dollars. There were no recent tracks in the sand.
The coroner’s assistant opened my drawer by mistake, pulled the sheet back from my face, and the woman cried, “That’s him! That’s my brother!” The assistant realized his mistake, but the woman insisted: “That’s his briefcase! That was what he was carrying when he left home thirty years ago!” I was not as she remembered me, though. Now I was taller, narrower of shoulder. “I knew you when you were a baby,” she told me.
I was a tall, narrow-shouldered man you met once at a party. You talked to me for a long time about Nicaragua. Then, six months later, you thought you saw me in a newspaper photograph of the war dead in Managua. The briefcase partly obscured my face.
I was a tall, narrow-shouldered man stretched out on the park bench, maybe dead, maybe asleep. There was a briefcase in my hand, a briefcase opened wide, and the papers inside were flying off with the wind, messages carried to anyone willing to receive them.
One Thing After Another
1.
One word follows another.
2.
Life is good for Brigit and Michael. Then one morning, mastodon bones erupt through the front lawn. Natural history people come. “These bones belong in a museum,” says a woman with a clipboard. She gives Brigit a dirty look. Trucks and cranes arrive. When they leave, there is a hole big enough for a living mastodon to fall into. The possibility keeps Michael awake, listening to the dark.
3.
Getting older is bad enough. Hair in the nose, hair in the ears. But then cat fur starts to grow on the inside of Larry’s mouth, too thick and fast-growing to shave. He develops an allergic wheeze. Worse, he can’t get words to form with his furry tongue. It makes him angry. There was still a lot more he wanted to say.
4.
Nancy comes home from her job at the grief clinic. Her house is on fire. No one has to tell her that her husband and children were trapped inside. Some teenagers are leaning on their cars, watching the flames and listening to music. She walks over to them. She asks them to turn the music up. Then, partly to find out who she is now, she asks them, “Who wants to dance?”
5.
Once Gabriel decides about her, his concentration is shot. He calls her. He sends her notes with flowers. Things slide at work. He calls some more, sends more flowers. “All right,” she says. After they make love for the first time, he notices that one of her teeth is not straight. It will not be the last thing he notices.
6.
Paul’s technical manual about oil-rig fires went out of print thirty years ago. He is surprised to find a copy in the Loveland, Ohio, library, a thousand miles from home. Someone has highlighted passages. On the last page are a few lines of feminine handwriting in purple ink. “The author is afraid of death. He takes long walks alone at night, thinking of Rilke’s angels. He is young, but already there are secrets he will take to his grave.” When he looks up from reading, Paul doesn’t really expect someone to be watching him. And no one is.
7.
First there’s a word, then there’s the next one. One after another. Another leaf drops. Drops of rain strike the window with a sound close to breathing. Breathing the same darkness, we hold each other. Other leaves will drop, other storms will shake down rain, other words will tumble out of us and we will come back to this place again and again hoping to find the one thing our bodies long for us to say. Say something else for now. Now say the thing you think of first.
Invasions
INVADING THE FARM, WE ROUND UP the livestock for questioning. Invading the grocery store check-out lanes, we hold ten or fewer items hostage. Invading Invasion headquarters, we make a guest appearance on the nightly news. The interviewer asks us what we’re trying to accomplish. We say, “Invasions.”
The drawbridge opens just after we’ve passed over. The railroad crossing barriers come down behind us when there is no train. Bright lights meant to illuminate us for the snipers refuse to shine in our direction. The time is right for these invasions. Everything is on our side.
Invading music, we organize the notes by duration: whole notes at the beginning of songs, sixteenths at the end. Invading the spectrum, we give microwaves the freedom to be as big as they want. Invading this sentence, syntax the scramble we.
Invading this paragraph, we capture the topic sentence, leaving the remaining sentences leaderless. The tribe’s arrival in the valley had been preceded by two major displacements. That’s what friends are for. Less commercially important, perhaps, is camphor. Uncanny is not quite the right term. Pull and release in a steady motion. Bump, bump, bump went the shoe as it tumbled down the stairs.
Invading your cat, we arm it and give it the means to carry off the plots it has plotted all along. Invading your old dog, we teach it new tricks. One of them is to tell you to get the hell off the couch, that’s not a place for people.
Invading the kitchen, we teach the forks to loathe the spoons for their lazy roundness, the spoons to hate the knives for their edginess, the knives to distrust the forks for their inability to come to just one point. Utensils conspire against one another. How did that spoon end up in the garbage disposal? Who put these forks in the trash? How did this knife get bent unto a U?
Invading the opera, we force the fat lady to sing early. Invading the library, we judge books by their covers. Blue is good, but red is a sign of dangerous thoughts.
Invading the snack cake factory, we confiscate the creme filling and build a pyramid of golden sponge cake. At the top of this pyramid our priests will cut out the hearts of healthy people. We distribute the creme filling at schools and workplaces. Every citizen must eat a share, or else mount the golden steps.
Invading the taste buds, we see to it that lettuce and rose petals are indistinguishable except by their crunch. We teach roses to be crunchy.
Invading the weather service, we make our own forecasts. The weather tomorrow will be vanilla with touches of cumin and clove in the afternoon. Strong ginger overnight. The following day will be burlap changing to silk by evening. Look for brass Saturday and Sunday with a possible trace of woodwinds, changing to strings and percussion by Monday. The six-day extended outlook calls for seasonably loquacious days and above normal enunciation.
Justice is swift in the new order. If you can’t sing the Invasion Anthem, you’d better make one up on the spot. We’re not kidding.
Invading the schools, we look around and consider whether independent thought can survive such institutions. Are we in favor of independent thought? Which side are we on? We’re still waiting for someone to tell us. In the meantime, we alter the curriculum so that future citizens will understand the meanings of Burma Shave and “They laughed when I sat down at the piano.”
; Invading the piano, we laugh whenever anyone sits down at it.
Invading sleep, we collect large fees for product placement in your dreams.
Invading the air, we become the biggest, bluest butterflies anyone has ever seen. Invading the oceans, we become finned serpents a mile long. Invading the cornfields, we become crows the size of eagles. Invading the swimming pool, we become sharks too small to be seen with the naked eye.
Invading the senior center, we alter all the Jimmy Dorsey records so that they sound more like Eddie Van Halen. Soon enough. Soon enough. Soon enough no one will be left who notices the change.
Invading the garbage trucks, we stop to marvel at how much perfectly good stuff people throw away. This toothbrush may smell bad, but it’s hardly been used!
Invading the university, we reorganize the departments. No more Mechanical Engineering Department. No more English Department or Psychology Department. Now it’s the Department of Things That Got Rhythm, the Department of Panhandler Studies, the Department of Mood Swing Engineering. Students must change their majors. Some will get their degrees in Enormity, Repetition, or Yellow Stuff Science. One or two will minor in Perturbation. A course in fortune telling will be required so that every graduate has something to fall back on.
Invading the commodities market, we halt trading to alter the nomenclature. After we’re done, Free Love for September delivery opens a penny higher. December Humdingers are down the limit. March contracts on the Roily Polly 500 are off by 27 points.
Invading the museums, we tie up the guards and impersonate great works of art.
Invading the homes of married couples, we wear our most elegant suits, our slinkiest gowns. We come bearing chocolate and flavored oils. We wear one velvet glove. We float in on a miasma of intoxicating scents. We awaken the passions that familiarity and routine have allowed to sleep. We teach passionate utterances in other tongues. “Comme ça. Oui. ¡Tan dulces tus cariños! Presto! Si! Presto! Presto!” And then we leave while the passions are hot and husbands and wives have nowhere to direct that heat but at one another.
The Keyhole Opera Page 8