by Brian Hodge
"Bye," she said, and this time Bobby heard the word the way she'd meant to say it.
And then she was gone.
Bobby rolled back and all that he could see was the cobweb, and a tiny spider looking down.
* 3 *
Stories are like heartbeats and breathing. They can continue to go on even when you aren't paying attention to them.
While Bobby lay on his blue stained carpet, slowly bleeding to death, Maggie hailed a taxi cab.
The cab belonged to an Afghani cab driver by the name of Daoud Nasrudin. Daoud's grandfather had ridden into tribal battle on horseback waving a tulwar as long as a big man's right arm and ululating like a blood crazed madman as he cheerfully decapitated the nonbelievers, but Daoud drove a yellow-painted taxicab and listened to country music, ululating only in traffic jams and moments of high stress.
At the moment Daoud was listening to Merle Haggard singing about a woman's hungry eyes. As he listened to the aching music Daoud watched the woman he was driving in the reflection of his rear view mirror.
She was pretty enough, Daoud supposed, but why was she wearing a bathrobe and pajamas? And what about that monkey?
The monkey looked at Daoud in the rear view mirror. Daoud felt a brief prying sensation, as if someone were poking toothpicks beneath his eyelids to see what lay beneath them.
He shook his head and looked back to his driving. Then, his gaze wandered to the rear view mirror. The woman was watching him. So was the monkey.
Daoud concentrated on the woman. She had hungry eyes, Daoud thought. Like open mouths, aching to swallow up anything in sight. Her eyes made Daoud nervous. She seemed a strange sort of woman.
Her strangeness didn't bother or surprise him. He had been born in Chicago and had lived in America for all of his life, and still most American women seemed strange to him. These women should have been so happy, living in this land of great abundance, and yet they weren't. They always wanted so much, a funnel of never-ending hunger, and when they had it they wanted even more.
Daoud was happy. He did not want for anything. He paid his bills, owned a small apartment, and a cd collection of country greats. Willy Nelson, Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson. All of the men who sang so well of wanting and not having. Daoud understood this kind of aching want. His people had lived with this want through centuries of famine, plague and invasion. The world's first country music had been played on an oud accompanied by rebabah and tabla drum.
Dauod understood this want all too well. Dauod wanted a woman. Not the woman in the back seat. She was nothing but a bookmark in his memory, holding a place for someone else. The woman that Dauod wanted was a salt and pepper haired woman that he had talked to over three years ago.
He remembered her like it was just yesterday. The salt and pepper woman had hailed his cab on a rainy Wednesday morning. She was driving to meet a man who was married to someone else. She had told Daoud of this, in the way that people will tell their secrets to taxi drivers and other wandering strangers. She had told it to him to get the weight of it from off of her heart but in doing so she had left an indelible stain on Dauod's own heart.
Daoud had fallen in love with this adulterous salt and pepper woman, leaping like a glorious burning suicide into the chasm of hopeless eternal yearning. He said nothing to her about his love. He just listened to her words over the heart felt singing of some sad country song, watching the woman's salt and pepper hair hanging down about her face. His heart ached for her and he wanted to tell her that the man she was going to see was no good for her. He wanted to tell her that he, Dauod, could make her happy.
But he had said nothing.
That was three years ago, and he still dreamed of her nightly and drove the streets alone picking up strangers and listening to sad country tunes, hoping beyond hope one day to see her once again sitting in the back of his cab.
He wondered if he would find the words, or if he would only stare at her through the safety of his rear view mirror.
"Here would be wonderful," the blue monkey woman said from the back seat.
If Daoud had not been watching through the mist of long remembered sorrow, he would have seen the blue monkey moving the woman's throat cords. He would have known that this woman was no more in control of her fate than he was.
Instead he dropped her off in a parking lot outside of the largest supermall in the city. He tried not to look at the blue monkey imbedded into the woman's throat. He had seen many people before this with safety pins, chains, hoops and bull rings poked through their face, but he had never seen anyone with a monkey plugged into their throat until now.
She was American. American women are always so strange. They would stick anything into their flesh. Once, at a party he hadn't wanted to attend, a woman with pink painted hair had propositioned him with a three pound zucchini.
"That belongs in the dirt," Dauod told her.
"All flesh is grass and belongs to the dirt," the pink painted woman had said. "And if you don't want me the way I want you, you can roll me over and kiss my dirty ass."
Now, in the present, the monkey grinned at Dauod. There was something in the monkey's grin that reminded Dauod of that pink painted vegetable lover, and something that reminded him of his salt and pepper yearning.
"I am happy to be paying you your proper fare," the monkey woman said.
At least Daoud thought she'd said it. It looked as if the monkey was talking through the woman, steering her as if she were nothing more than some strange model automobile.
He wondered if he were dreaming. He remembered a story that his mother had told him about a tulpa, a creature that came only through dreams. For a time it terrorized a village, until the local wise man fed it sour cream and beat it to death with a feather broom. Daoud hoped he was not dreaming, because she tipped well. Besides, he did not have a feathered broom or any soured cream in his taxi cab.
As he drove away, Daoud opened a window, because the entire cab stank of monkey dung. He did not realize how close he had come to a sudden and unexpected death. How close he came to being crammed into the dirt like a three pound zucchini.
He drove off listening to Johnny Cash singing about a long black veil, and dreaming about what a head full of long salt and pepper hair might smell like if it were painted pink. It was perhaps this sense of longing and hopeless want that had been the only thing that had saved the life of cabdriver Daoud Nasrudin.
* 4 *
Bobby lay there in the blue monkey dung that carpeted the floor of his office.
He was a long way past feeling any kind of pain.
He knew he was dying. The knowledge came as the death came, in a kind of slow osmotic experience. The wound in his throat felt like a frozen scream that needed release. A numbing chill that crawled out from his throat and squirmed down into his body, moving cell by cell. Death was playing checkers, jumping into each cell, one by one. As Bobby bled out the cold crawled in. The blood cells filed out one by one through the hole in his throat, like a legion of wet orderly rats fleeing a badly holed ship.
He was dying. He thought of Maggie. He heard country music playing. It sounded like Merle Haggard. Bobby didn't know why his last dying moments were spent dreaming of Merle Haggard. Maggie was gone. She wouldn't be back. Even if she did come back, he'd be long dead. Even if he wasn't dead, she wouldn't be back.
A loop.
Bobby was caught in a loop.
He didn't know if Maggie would be run down or raped. He didn't know if she would wake up to find herself belly-out and eviscerated in an ancient Mayan monkey ritual of sacrifice in the bowl of a neighbor's concrete bird bath. He didn't know if Maggie would hop on some strange downtown bus and transfer herself bus by bus into the heart of some undreamed of rain forest, fucking her brains out with an azure King Kong monkey love-god and giving birth to hordes of blind blue monkey babies.
All that he knew was that it was possible to have way too much of a vivid imagination.
The numbness continu
ed to crawl. Bobby wondered if Maggie had torn through his spinal column as well as tearing open his throat.
It was funny to think of how often he'd asked her to trim her nails. He'd bought her a new set of nail clippers every Christmas, as a stocking stuffer. Why had he even bothered? He tried to laugh, but an opened throat kills bursts of hilarity faster than a can of Raid kills west Nile mosquitoes.
He was dying. Not all of the band aids in Arabia could staunch this wound. Maggie was gone, ripped out of his life. He might as well just die.
"Wake up and smell the cappuccino, story man," a voice spoke from above. "You've gone and died two minutes ago. Weren't you paying attention, or were you too busy writing? She opened your throat like a stove-in beer keg and you bled out. Stop feeling so sorry for yourself. Being dead is no excuse for giving up."
Bobby looked up. Or rather he rolled his eyes upwards hopefully. You couldn't really call what he was doing looking. A blue form rose up out of the monkey dung. What the heck was it? The blue form pulled itself free in a slow sort of birthing process. First a couple of fat ovals, and then a double set of folding table legs, angling daintily as the blue thing wiggled each of its eight long legs, superfluously shaking the blue crud away.
It was a spider. A giant fucking spider. No other adjective would do.
"You aren't thinking about giving up on me, are you boy?"
Bobby looked up into the eyes of the giant blue spider. The spider smiled back at him with a great gap toothed piano key smile, framed by a pair of dangerous looking mandibles.
Did spiders have teeth? Bobby wondered if maybe his imagination should have run a preemptive Google search, prior to giving flesh to this dying delirium dream creature.
"What are you laying there in the dirt for?" the spider dream asked. "Crawling around in the muck like a pale pink dung beetle?"
Bobby lay there and stared. There didn't seem to be much to say. What was one more hallucination to a dying man?
"You can't die any deader than you already are," the spider said. "You just think you can."
He clambered up and over Bobby's fallen body, his turgid blue abdomen dangling over Bobby's face like a fat ugly piñata. The flesh of the bug was turgid and wet, bubbling like an active blue pus sore.
"You'd best be careful who you're calling ugly, boy," the spider said. "I'm not a bug, I'm a spider."
Bobby blinked.
The spider had heard him thinking.
He had to be dreaming.
"You're not dreaming. I heard you plain and clear. You just think too loud, story man. You've been living inside of your head for far too long."
He squatted lower, leaning closer. Bobby wasn't sure why he thought of the spider in male terms. It was sexist, perhaps. In any case, the arachnid stank of a cloying sweetness, as if he had soaked himself in black cherry soda pop. Bobby felt the stiff blue hairs of his abdomen tickling his face like a thousand tight blue erections.
"Now what in the hell would Freud make out of that metaphor?" the spider asked. "What kind of a foolish thought is that, all of those Dr. Pepper fetish hard-ons?"
"What does Freud have to do with my dying dementia?" Bobby asked. It was hard to speak through a slashed throat. Bobby felt the wound opening and closing like a ventriloquist dummy's mouth, the words leaking out. He was talking through his own slashed throat.
It should have been impossible.
"Maybe you're not speaking at all, story man. Maybe you're just thinking too loud. That's rare for a dead man, but I reckon you fell off the Toonerville Trolley sometime ago. Blue dung monkeys and giant talking spiders? What grade of ganja have you been smoking?"
Bobby didn't know what to say.
"So don't say anything. Sit back and enjoy the unpredictable delusional delight."
Bobby was still stuck on the spider's apparent familiarity with Freud.
"You knew Freud?" Bobby asked.
"That's not much of an achievement," the spider said. "Freud was a withered old Moravian turd whose life's work was a pitiful attempt to try and understand a dirty joke. He and I used to close down the Munich beer halls together. Let me tell you, that little bearded cigar-smoking bastard could drink like a born again Irish fish."
"Who are you?" Bobby asked.
"I am the tale and I am the teller," the blue spider said. "I am the weave of your imagination. I am the fabric of every single lie and story you have ever told. I am the campfire and I am he who sits around it. I am a god and I am a fiction. I am Anansi and I am here to answer your prayer."
With that he shot a thick wad of some unwholesome substance that felt a little like a mixture of wallpaper glue and Silly String, onto Bobby's open throat. He accomplished this process while simultaneously singing the theme from the old Spiderman animated series in eight part harmony. Strangely enough, he knew all the words.
"Toby McGuire's got nothing on me," he said as he finished up the patch job. "Neither does Dr. Kildare or Bob Vila."
Bobby touched the wound. It seemed to be healed up, or would that be sealed up?
"People have been using cobwebs to fill in the gaps for more centuries than I've got children. It works better than Krazy Glue," Anansi said. "Did you know that a spray-on Krazy Glue was used way back in the Vietnam war to seal up unstitchable wounds?"
That wasn't quite true. Bobby knew the facts. The glue was invented long before Viet Nam. A spray-on variation of it was used in Vietnam, despite lack of FDA approval. That was the kind of useless fact his writer's mind loved to store for future reference.
"That's the truth," Anansi said. "The legend was around long before the facts were ever told. That's how history works, in long slow ricochet echoes, like rain falling in a bottomless barrel."
"What's happened to me?" Bobby asked.
"You've been touched by a god," Anansi said. "Treasure it. It is the gift that keeps on giving."
"My wife," Bobby said. "I've got to get her back."
"You never had her in the first place. Did you really think you owned her?" The spider god laughed a wet and sticky kind of laugh. It was like listening to molasses running from a punctured keg. "That's the problem with you people. You think this world was built for you. You think because you see a thing you own it."
"We are at the top of the food chain last I checked."
"That's another problem with you people," he repeated. "You carry too damn many chains. You think that you can hold onto them all. Your wife, your life, your work, it all runs away. Don't you realize how finely the web of your existence has been drawn?"
Bobby didn't know how to answer that.
"You need to take a lesson from the spider. We have learned to live with the reality that our web can be torn by the wind, careless children, random crow flight, and falling branches. Everyday is a new beginning, we learn to start over. We borrow the earth, rather than pretending we own it. Our mates are temporary, our children hatch and run away, birds eat us and we live on."
"What does this have to do with me?"
"You've been chosen by blind fate to lose everything. Call it the Job package. Maybe it will teach you something. Maybe it will teach you nothing."
"Why me?"
"It beats me. Maybe you pissed off somebody in a past life. What goes around comes around, you know? That sort of thing happens a lot. It's a serious side effect of the whole reincarnation strategy. I told the old guy it wouldn't work when he first invented it. Recycling souls is just a plain bad idea, worse than fucking kissing cousins, but do you think He'd listen to me?"
"You talked to God? I mean, the God? You mean he sent you?"
"It's no big deal. He's even more boring than Freud."
Bobby didn't know what to say. The more he tried to figure it out the harder it got. He was dead. His wife had been hijacked by a blue spam monkey and now he was talking to an eight legged god. The world had ceased to make sense a long time ago.
"Actually, divine intervention is a fairly random concept. The gods like to reach out a
nd touch the mortals every now and then. To let them know just who is the boss, you know what I mean?"
"Does this happen often?"
"More often than you might think. The gods have sent you Velcro, electricity, The Beatles, all signs of divine intelligence. You folks just haven't been paying attention."
"Are there that many of you gods out there?"
"There are thousands of us. Some folks say we're just incarnations of the one true god. I prefer to think of myself as a representative. I'm kind of like a door to door contagion salesman. You catch a little faith from me and then you pass it on. Like a sneeze or a handshake, the whole thing works like the world's largest celestial pyramid scheme."
"And you found your way to me?"
"You called me when you prayed. Be honored, boy. I heard your words and I homed in on your need. You should be grateful. You should stand up and bojangle yourself a Mr. Roger's hallelujah happy dance."
"I can't stand. I can barely sit up."
"Get off your ass, boy. You're dead. That's a long way off from any of the thirteen and seventy possible alternatives."
"Dead? I'm talking aren't I?"
"Dead men tell tales, didn't your momma warn you?"
Bobby shook his head in disbelief. "So what about this monkey? What's he done to Maggie?"
"Don't worry about that monkey. He's strictly bush league. A minor arcana demi-urge wantling, birthed as an aftermath of a drunkard's prayer in the midst of a twentieth century Ethiopian famine."
"So he should be easy to beat then?"
"Oh no," Anansi said. "You are in the deepest of shit, my friend. Make no mistake about that. Even a bush league wantling trumps a mortal every time, especially when the mortal in question happens to be a dead one."
"So what are we going to do?"
"What do you mean we, white man?"
I wasn't going to let him get away that easily.
"I prayed for help," I argued. "I prayed and you appeared. That means you have to help me."
"You prayed in an empty room," Anansi said. "You called me out begging to be saved. I came and I saved you. Check the contract. Union rules can't be argued with. My job is done here."