by Jesse Miller
–I still don’t want it.
–Well, you may down the line.
Eelskin sliding on eelskin, the wild game of her flesh and boots, her flash and blood, continued as Samantha returned to the table.
–Can I get you gentlemen anything else? More—another Guinness?
Thom dropped his eyes, inventoried the greasechoked ruins on the table.
–I think we’re all set for now.
She handed over the check.
*
The flimsy, brass-colored hinges rattled along the doorframe, but it didn’t give way to the impatient patron outside.
–Occupied.
Thom turned back from the door to the mirror. He’d been in there too long. He’d walked his father to his car then back, ran back really, to the bar and tried to conjure some useful excuse for doing so. Class was going to start soon. He’d even done the reading on Festinger’s Congestive Disconnects, was it? What’s a Wednesday night class, really? In college you’re expected to dissolve once-a-week classes now and then. He unlocked the door and walked toward the bar.
Samantha lifted the tapkissed Guinness from the bar and Statue-of-Libertyed through the crowd. He followed her movements from across the room and struggled to push his gaze toward his shoes as she approached. It was like holding someone’s head under water. Cutting the crowd open with each stride, she snipped and sliced through the bar, stretching pint after pint from the stalwart taps, upstretched golden levers, rigid spitting spindles behind the bar; each step was a narrow, triangular sin, coiled and obscured only by the long glossy boots sheathing each leg.
He could move, it felt possible. But to be ensnared in the rippling wave that surged from her with each step then sucked into the riptide between strides and smothered by her bloomsy perfume as it spread, mouth to floor, to just sit there and take it, be hauled in for once, necksnapped from the tug, taken in and consumed, plucked from the earth, sucked down to the marrow…
Thom ordered another and watched her move through the rest of her shift. The line of her lipstick was still sharp, reapplied perhaps, and that attention to detail was irresistible. She disappeared behind the swinging door to the kitchen. In her albescence, Thom’s body slackened, and he sunk into his stool.
When she returned moments later without an apron, Thom was shifting in his seat, head spun to apprise the crowd, and he didn’t see her approach. She took the open seat next to his; she was hard angles mostly, that could carve into the wooden stool like a carefully arranged collection of planes. She had practice, of course, but when she sliced her legs into a cross and snapped her lighter ablaze in unison, he almost exploded. Before her fingers tapped the charred traces of tobacco from her cigarette, a glass of Guinness appeared under her chin as if it had sprung from the well-lacquered wooden bar she leaned on.
–Don’t worry…
She leaned in and patted his arm. Thom froze.
–I don’t think it’s that terribly creepy that you’re still here.
She inhaled. She exhaled. She turned back to Thom, who remained silent and could have stayed suspended in a block of ice for the rest of human history.
–You look familiar. You’re in my psych class, no?
He nodded. She talked. She lit another. They skipped class. Her tongue was an icepick that opened up the evening.
* * *
Section II
Night Shifts
Christ, maybe three or four o’clock in the afternoon- The darkness of food service, the darkness of reunion, the darkness of daylight, the repetition of darkness, the darkness of repetition.
Evening out his coaster, he lowered the glass from his lips, and it fit underneath exactly. Lingering froth, the vestiges of fallen stars, was unacceptable, needed to be taken care of at once. Shot glasses, fallen shell casings, guarded his pint like chessboard rooks. Thom stared across the room at the booth he’d sat in the first time he’d been in this bar. An old Rudolph ate a burger alone, dripped mustard on his shirt, ordered another round. The giant black pint and clover caboodle had been replaced by blue neon lettering:
CURLY’S PLACE
Unaware, his fingers tapped at the roses behind his coat.
–Samantha?
He raised his glass, but she swung her eyes away, slippery through the room, and pulled a pen from her apron to recite the specials for another table. The lugubriousness of lubricity. Glass in hand, he shuffled toward the bartender.
–Another?
–Yeah, yeah.
The lever bowed toward Thom, toward the cornermuttering late afternoon bar, and released its allotment of cold black relish into the glass.
Samantha approached and continued to avoid his stare. She leaned over the edge of the bar and rolled along her stomach like a rocking horse, feeding the order to the bartender
–Sloe Comfortable Screw. Gin and Tonic, Bombay. Melon Balls. Two.
–Hey, Sammy.
She stood still, her back to Thom, now whispering to the bartender.
–Sammy, hey; hey Sam. Gotta second?
Disengaged, the bartender threw over a glance, forcing a crumpled smile out of the side of his mouth. He slid a new pint under Thom’s nose as Samantha’s head swept around the room, scanning nothing really at all, only to avoid eye contact. Her brown bangs obscured her eyes. Finally, Samantha locked on Thom.
–Not now. I’m working.
She disappeared into the adjoining dining room. He pulled his glass along the bar, letting the rish pishh coat down his throat as he gulped back toward his table. An odd man with a pair of sooty hands sat in his recently vacated seat.
–How’s it going today, buddy?
Thom traced his eyes along the man’s blackened fingers, thumb, hitched Northbound along the lattice highway of his protuberant veins. He tried to count the sprouts of stubble poking out of his jaws, hoping the landmarks, the map of his face, the flatness of this grey reality, would alight some kind of glowing recognition inside the bog of his brain. His nametag read: MARK.
–I’m fine. Ah, how are you?
–Not too bad.
Mark leaned in.
–By the way, my name’s Mark. Mark Urie.
He pressed a darkened finger against his nametag and extended his hands. Incognizant, Thom hesitated, fanned out his digits to release his glass and managed a lazy shake.
–My name’s Thom.
–Of course it is.
Mark pulled a pack of smokes from the pocket covered by his MARK. From his pants he produced a lighter, flared, and set it on the table. Beretta Bikini’s return. A real skelly thing, could pass her waist through a needle’s eye.
Off to the side of the bar, Samantha was on a break dragging on a cigarette.
–Mark, have we met before?
–Never formally.
–What about informally?
–Yes. Twice.
–Yesterday?
–Yep.
Looking closer, it wasn’t a gun porn pin-up on the lighter at all. Thom pulled the thing closer to his face and traced his eyes over the curl of a long blade back to the haggard fingers and wrist bones of an Angel of Death floating above the ground.
As appeared to be his practice, Mark’s eyes scanned for something, found it, and then sent the words out for distribution.
–You don’t know how you got home last night, do you?
Thom shook his head and eyed Mark’s cigarettes.
–Man, you gotta take it easy on the tit.
Mark floated a short laugh into the air. Thom finished his pint.
–Those guys wanted to peel your skin back, especially that big one.
–Which guys?
–You know.
–Nah. What guys?
–You know, the four guys I just happened to scarecrow off you.
–Oh…
–Where were you last night? Where did you go?
Thom looked confused. He spun his head around; she was pulling in the last silver wisps of her cigarette.
&
nbsp; –Mark, right?
He nodded.
–Can you just hang on one moment here? I just have to…
–Actually, no, I’m on a…lunch.
He swished his glass around.
–But, for what it’s worth, you kept saying: It’s all for you. It’s all for you when I drove you home. But I figured that was a bit of a lie.
–What?
Mark reached into his pocket. Thom watched as a diamond ring fell to its limits, sweeping out along the chain.
–You left this in my car.
The ring swung pendulously as Thom’s heart pumped hell back and forth through all the pinched tubing in his body.
–You should take better care of your shit, man.
–Sure, but…who are you?
–You’re Thomas Evans, of two-thirty-seven High Street, apartment eleven?
–Yes, that’s me.
–Ta da! Turns out I’m your paper boy!
Mark stood up, twisted like a weathervane, and seemed to float along huge quills of smoke toward the door as Thom shook his head side to side. Staring at the sudden familiarity of two olives, Thom spun light off of the ring, round and round, and imagined the stretch until Samantha had another break.
Samantha, a wave or so out in the bar at an empty table, dodged his stares and pried at her teeth with a toothpick. He nimbled through the crowd toward her as she wiped down the table.
–Sam. Can we talk for a second?
Her eyes were screwy, scrolling along, rubbing the ceiling like a tongue tracing and retracing a row of teeth.
–I want, I need to explain something from last night.
Her eyes compressed into two pinheads.
–I can explain the Jurry Wringer thing.
She turned a three-quarters view and then squared up.
–I really don’t care.
–Let me just say something.
He patted her hand oddly, too lightly with his palm, and pulled three roses from his coat.
–I’m sorry.
–You said enough last night. Or…don’t you remember?
Samantha pushed his hand off of hers and lifted a flesh colored bandage that coiled her wrist.
–I know we don’t really make a big deal of the day, but thanks for the…anniverse—
She didn’t finish the word, turned sharply, and drove forward into the kitchen. The door fanned out grandly, sweeping a long cool path, and behind it she vanished.
He reeled in the remainder of his pint and paced back, presenting it to the bartender for more.
–I think we’re all set for now.
–All set, huh?
–Yeah, all set.
He handed Thom the check. He kept shaking his head back and forth.
Thom placed the empty glass on the corner of the bar and thought about threading it with the rosestalk. Daisies in gun barrels. A smile, and his pointer finger extended. The clock was set fifteen minutes fast. Hurry up please, it’s time. Samantha remerged, and Thom dropped the roses on an empty table, but she kept staring up at the ceiling, her faced pinched tight. He put his finger to the glass and pushed it to the lip of the bar until it stopped, balancing on the edge, and walked toward the exit.
Door ajar, Thom yanked all of the air he could pry from the room. There was something familiar that lit up the antsy wicks of memory—maybe the matchbook sulfur spooking through the air, or the aching of the hormones of the drinkers as they weaponized their own guile. It was station after station of hope and grandeur, along the long track of the bar toward the door.
Soon his brain was like a birthday cake glittering with candles of recollection.
Just before he closed the door he heard glass shattering and then silence.
–Pricey Omelet, he thought, too clever for this drunk. But maybe that was the whole trick.
He pulled the crumpled check closer to his face, noticing that the bill seemed a little high.
* * *
Section III
The Necropsy of Memory
Just enough time to get lost- Forty thousand leagues deep in thoughts of his father, Thomas Evans opened his car door. laid into the night. October. soft.
High school is a nightmare from which we’re all trying to awaken. It locks in or locks out the dangers of the world. He drove with care, on too many drinks, trying not to think back, not let it take center stage. Orderly. He rolled under yellow and red lights, holding the steering wheel. Orderly. Orderly. Nothing like a spot on the x-ray. Nothing like snot in the soup. Nothing like a drop of blood baked into the bread. Nothing like a rip in the fabric, a place where things get through…
Nothing like this one night, this way back one, when the moon was a big glistening hormone bubbling up out of the sky, and Thom came home to a house as empty as a pie plate, looking for the pack of cigarettes he’d hidden in his sock drawer. Up. In the thrusting, electric way you move in a suit of young skin that’s made completely out of fists. Stairs. And through the tube of a long hallway and into the suburban vernal bedroom with all of the self-made trophies and catastrophes. In high school, you can fall down a well and people will stand over the opening just to shade the light. The television screen was a kind of martini glass that stretched open hangmouth, quavering in a fevered green glow. There wasn’t anything to do in the house, and Thom sank back inside himself, the way teenagers do when alone, gleefully slipping into shipwrecks.
But the suburbs are so often engorged and baited—what should be a honeypot is really a wasp nest. The suburbs are populated with taxidermized desire and narcotic blue loneliness. And Thom wasn’t alone in the house. Raymond was there as well, and he wasn’t alone. Suppose: everything probably all comes down to loneliness. When people are supposed to be around, they’re not. When they’re supposed be away on business trips, they’re not.
Thom skulked through inches and grew earward, closer to the bedroom door to listen in a little, just a little, open-eared and swallowing at the door, the way you might eavesdrop in on a whispered conversation searching for your name. Not particularly long, but long enough to know that there were three people in the house, and only two of them were related by blood.
Automatic door opened and closed.
–What—Oh fuck, what? Thom?
After the scream cleared and the scatter and piston-stomp of feet, the room smelled like honey, like oak, like pennies. His father slipped into the bathroom and shielded her from view. Thom couldn’t see her face, but in the mirror he could make out the craggy bumps of her spine ranging down her back and dissolving into soft, round flesh.
Under the big candle moon, inside the clammy hush of a soft October night, Thom walked for miles smoking cigarette after cigarette. He cast out wreaths and reaches, looming out lassos of smoke, so much smoke he could wrap a pale blue chain around the moon bouncing in the sky. He imagined with one hard pull, one big drag, he’d pull down the thing like a big cork and the hole would suck up the whole world, the whole of everything into the drain…
Orderly. Orderly. He rolled under yellow and red lights, holding the steering wheel, his fingers splayed.
Chapter Ten
Section I
Plot Holes
No clue. four? five?- What happens to Thomas Evans when, rendered most pernicious from drink, he pays a visit to his father.
Splayed, dusted with light, they nosed up from the ground, above the earth’s parched surf. Half eaten. Half eaters. Petrified moles, molars. Red leaves, dry, brown leaves, potato chips, twinkled and swept along the wind, grooved deeply along tracks of air, along all of the wrinkles of fall. A day late, under a leaning lattice gate rasped bilious by time, Thom’s car trod slowly into the Colonel Tom Parker County Cemetery.
Whitepantsuits pulled potted plants, and roses, all roses wrapped in plastic from the foot of each stone. Hotpotatoed, they gained the air, bounced hand over hand and landed in the C. T. P. C. C. GROUNDS CREW truckbed slowly rolling over the gravel road. Ciggy smoke leaked from the stubbly lips of some real
rough numbers, sweat slicking their brow. Thom watched the undecorating committee plod, drop shit, and recover. Disappear. He navigated his car through the stone rows, craving to nudge just one or two of them with his bumper. Finger‐tip them over the edge.
The lot remained as it had been years ago, though a cleared patch of trees in back suggested the membership had certainly grown. Brake depressed. Motion ceased. Thom dropped two feet onto gravelly ground, rose from his seat and skelped the door closed harder than intended. Deafened, the stony court emptied of all its indolent winged things.
Rockwalking, he rolled foot over foot. Balanced on the path. Equidistant from stonerows. Stonesthrow from the hack and belch of the highway.
He took the path and followed as it slunk around a corner, headed slowly forward, forward toward the edge of the cemetery. A grass carpet lined the path’s edge as a slumberous breeze wafted by bowing each narrow grass blade.
Thom skeltered on. Bone after stone. Sedentary. Sedimentary. See de men tarry.
Vacant plot.
Waiting for spouse.
Waiting for spouse.
Sleeping in stereo.
Gravetone.
Siamese dream.
RAYMOND A. EVANS
Ahhh, and there he was. Rowed. Subterranean shish kabob. Prone. Sleeping alone. Quadrants away, the grounds crew truck skulked under the burning autumnal peacock of tree leaves feathering the air. Forward, but hundreds of years away, positioned precisely on either side of the stone, two lean obelisks raced to the air and helped prop up the sky. Smoky clouds proposed rain. Thom aimed his eyes on the deepcut grooves in the stone ahead of him and caught a cold slab of air as it collided against his chest.
He tried a toothy laugh, but nothing would follow. The crickets in the thickets. The breeze in the tress. An old song drifting inside the imbricated folds of his brain began to rise to the surface. Still standing, he closed his eyes one shutter at a time, halving the world like a cantaloupe and then erasing it completely.