by Dale Peck
This boat was pulling behind itself a tremendous triangular kite on a rope. From the kite, up in the air a hundred feet or so, a woman was suspended, belted in somehow, I would have guessed. She had long red hair. She was delicate and white, and naked except for her beautiful hair. I don’t know what she was thinking as she floated past these ruins.
“What’s she doing?” was all I could say, though we could see that she was flying.
“Now, that is a beautiful sight,” Wayne said.
On the way to town, Wayne asked me to make a long detour onto the Old Highway. He had me pull up to a lopsided farmhouse set on a hill of grass.
“I’m not going in but for two seconds,” he said. “You want to come in?”
“Who’s here?” I said.
“Come and see,” he told me.
It didn’t seem anyone was home when we climbed the porch and he knocked. But he didn’t knock again, and after a full three minutes a woman opened the door, a slender redhead in a dress printed with small blossoms. She didn’t smile. “Hi,” was all she said to us.
“Can we come in?” Wayne asked.
“Let me come onto the porch,” she said, and walked past us to stand looking out over the fields.
I waited at the other end of the porch, leaning against the rail, and didn’t listen. I don’t know what they said to one another. She walked down the steps, and Wayne followed. He stood hugging himself and talking down at the earth. The wind lifted and dropped her long red hair. She was about forty, with a bloodless, waterlogged beauty. I guessed Wayne was the storm that had stranded her here.
In a minute he said to me, “Come on.” He got in the driver’s seat and started the car—you didn’t need a key to start it.
I came down the steps and got in beside him. He looked at her through the windshield. She hadn’t gone back inside yet, or done anything at all.
“That’s my wife,” he told me, as if it wasn’t obvious.
I turned around in the seat and studied Wayne’s wife as we drove off.
What can be said about those fields? She stood in the middle of them as on a high mountain, with her red hair pulled out sideways by the wind, around her the green and grey plains pressed down flat, and all the grasses of Iowa whistling one note.
I knew who she was.
“That was her, wasn’t it?” I said.
Wayne was speechless.
There was no doubt in my mind. She was the woman we’d seen flying over the river. As nearly as I could tell, I’d wandered into some sort of dream that Wayne was having about his wife and his house. But I didn’t say anything more about it.
Because, after all, in small ways, it was turning out to be one of the best days of my life, whether it was somebody else’s dream or not. We turned in the scrap wire for twenty-eight dollars—each—at a salvage yard near the gleaming tracks at the edge of town, and went back to the Vine.
Who should be pouring drinks there but a young woman whose name I can’t remember. But I remember the way she poured. It was like doubling your money. She wasn’t going to make her employers rich. Needless to say, she was revered among us.
“I’m buying,” I said.
“No way in hell,” Wayne said.
“Come on.”
“It is,” Wayne said, “my sacrifice.”
Sacrifice? Where had he gotten a word like sacrifice? Certainly I had never heard of it.
I’d seen Wayne look across the poker table in a bar and accuse—I do not exaggerate—the biggest, blackest man in Iowa of cheating, accuse him for no other reason than that he, Wayne, was a bit irked by the run of the cards. That was my idea of sacrifice, tossing yourself away, discarding your body. The black man stood up and circled the neck of a beer bottle with his fingers. He was taller than anyone who had ever entered that barroom.
“Step outside,” Wayne said.
And the man said, “This ain’t school.”
“What the goddamn fucking piss-hell,” Wayne said, “is that suppose to mean?”
“I ain’t stepping outside, like you do at school. Make your try right here and now.”
“This ain’t a place for our kind of business,” Wayne said, “not inside here with women and children and dogs and cripples.”
“Shit,” the man said. “You’re drunk.”
“I don’t care,” Wayne said. “To me you don’t make no more noise than a fart in a paper bag.”
The huge, murderous man said nothing.
“I’m going to sit down now,” Wayne said, “and I’m going to play my game, and fuck you.”
The man shook his head. He sat down too. This was an amazing thing. By reaching out one hand and taking hold of it for two or three seconds, he could have popped Wayne’s head like an egg.
And then came one of those moments. I remember living through one when I was eighteen and spending the afternoon in bed with my first wife, before we were married. Our naked bodies started glowing, and the air turned such a strange color I thought my life must be leaving me, and with every young fiber and cell I wanted to hold on to it for another breath. A clattering sound was tearing up my head as I staggered upright and opened the door on a vision I will never see again: Where are my women now, with their sweet, wet words and ways, and the miraculous balls of hail popping in a green translucence in the yards?
We put on our clothes, she and I, and walked out into the town flooded ankle-deep with white, buoyant stones. Birth should have been like that.
That moment in the bar, after the fight was narrowly averted, was like the green silence after the hailstorm. Somebody was buying a round of drinks. The cards were scattered on the table, face up, face down, and they seemed to foretell that whatever we did to one another would be washed away by liquor or explained away by sad songs.
Wayne was a part of all that.
The Vine was like a railroad club car that had somehow run itself off the tracks into a swamp of time where it awaited the blows of the wrecking ball. And the blows really were coming. Because of Urban Renewal, they were tearing up and throwing away the whole downtown.
And here we were, this afternoon, with nearly thirty dollars each, and our favorite, our very favorite, person tending bar. I wish I could remember her name, but I remember only her grace and her generosity.
All the really good times happened when Wayne was around. But this afternoon, somehow, was the best of all those times. We had money. We were grimy and tired. Usually we felt guilty and frightened, because there was something wrong with us, and we didn’t know what it was; but today we had the feeling of men who had worked.
The Vine had no jukebox, but a real stereo continually playing tunes of alcoholic self-pity and sentimental divorce. “Nurse,” I sobbed. She poured doubles like an angel, right up to the lip of a cocktail glass, no measuring. “You have a lovely pitching arm.” You had to go down to them like a hummingbird over a blossom. I saw her much later, not too many years ago, and when I smiled she seemed to believe I was making advances. But it was only that I remembered. I’ll never forget you. Your husband will beat you with an extension cord and the bus will pull away leaving you standing there in tears, but you were my mother.
Debbie’s Barium Swallow
by Laurie Weeks
Take pity on meat!
—Gilles Deleuze
Buildings or spinal columns shoot up from the pavement to sway clacking around a girl. Debbie, for this was her name, found herself one day walking like a friendly ghost through this forest of vertebrae. She’s a disoriented T-cell obeying commands from a nervous system driven by a mean brain, and all of Debbie’s instructions more or less consist of the same signal which is DEBBIE GET A JOB. What is happening to me, a girl thinks, walking to her job. No one touches her flesh so her flesh is made of air.
Though she’s wearing an attractive dress patterned with duck
hunters in fur earmuffs, Debbie feels like an exposed tooth nerve throbbing across the sidewalk. Oxygen in the city is composed of chemicals designed to make you feel kind of funny; you walk through the streets bathed and breathing in this corporate substance and suddenly your body’s awash in loss and grief. Only your job can numb this anguish. Thank you jesus, Debbie thinks, for giving me such fast typing skills. Internal sirens signal the uncoupling of her nervous system from her brain: now your mind’s an engine running on the abstract fuel of cash, now your fingertips have fused to the keyboard and the distant mechanism of your body fishtails away into the vacuum between circuits.
This girl Debbie stands sweating and smoking cigarettes in the urine fog of the subway. How would it be to have a girl like Debbie’s arteries dilate around you in a slow red rush of velvet drapes? How would it feel to tune Debbie’s body into a swollen receptacle made of hot corpuscles like a wet fleshy bed where you could screamingly discharge your rage and fear and then relax? I’m a girl but I pretend I’m a guy pushing in and out of you. I watched your body walking down the sidewalk, guys knew who you were. I put my hands on your body you were underneath my hands. Girls never end and that’s their beauty; shoot one down and one even younger pops up in her place.
Flashback: Debbie wading through the frigid air, on her way to Mrs. Seaman’s first-grade class. The vast gray sidewalk a blown beach shooting out electric water from the reservoirs nearby giving off a hum. The rancid smoke of bodies rises from the schoolhouse chimneys far away above the stunted trees. Tenderly a crossing guard like an orderly guides her to the playground.
Debbie joins the other small ghosts in a game of Double Dutch, but her bones and musculature swarm with lead and heavy water and her bewildered frame can’t possibly decipher the whispering equation of twin whips and cement. Disentangling herself, she carries herself across the schoolyard to a corner where Jay Marks sits feverishly against a tree, his pointed face and hairless eyes swivelled toward a line of yellow dogs slathering outside the metal fence. Do you love me, Jay? Debbie whispers and Jay rubs the pebbles with his feet, his knees and eyes closing in a shiver of assent, his tongue swelling out black from the cavern of his teeth, a gentle maggoty fluid pouring from his nose.
A girl like Debbie doesn’t walk out of nowhere to appear before you somnolent in a body she wears around herself like a brace, as mesmerizing as a sugarcube soaked in LSD; she comes at you from an angular black garden of instruments and appliances and mechanical shapes, a neighborhood awash in the radiation from TeeVee. At any given moment Debbie’s tongue will swell into a gag because she finds it impossible to “say what she means,” as if she shelters in her mouth a deadly totem, a lump of evidence secreted by her cells, a byproduct of her saturation in those atmospheric chemicals and metals which crave her flesh as much as you or I.
5:45 a.m. Smoking cigarettes and stoned in the park beneath a moist pink tissue of sky. A little bird is singing in the steamy morn and Debbie he wants to be your friend. Debbie hasn’t slept for days and she doesn’t have any hunger, just some blood and its taste in her mouth. Her body holding the cigarette is invisible to her. She can sense its vast presence like a phantom limb, with its maddening nonspecific itches and low-grade clamour for attention, but when she tries to situate it in the park to calm it down her body is absent and she can’t make it move. Maybe if she picks up a novel she’ll find her own body somewhere deep inside. A slur of drool and cookie oozes from Debbie’s mouth.
I, Debbie, nigger faggot cunt crippled by my sawed-off dick, was once a baby who wanted nothing more than to recount humorous anecdotes to the little bees and dinosaurs inhabiting my crib but I was transformed before the age of one, even, into a truncated dream girl projected on the landscape by the powerful brain of a fitful male sleeper, a captain of industry and finance and medical research obsessed with carving order out of chaos. One morning I, Debbie, woke from my deep lengthy sleep to find myself throwing up into a bowl of Captain Crunch. One morning I, that’s me, Debbie Brown, woke up to find myself a bit of liquid data trickling down from the computer burns inside someone’s thigh.
Every day, walking to the bank or job or doctor, Debbie says just one foot before the other, then there you’ll be. She tries to visualize her body as she walks, but it’s a weak signal fading in and out. Something will happen today, Debbie thinks, this day is waiting just for me. Here is the flourescent hallway and your life throbbing in your eyes, here is the machine glittering with its jewels & light, mocking laughter squealing in from the circuits, and here is the park, a fluttery unsurrounded place where a girl can take her lunch. As she dabbles her feet in the bubbles of a fountain, Debbie hums to herself the hit single “Me and you and a dog named Boo, travelin’ and-a livin’ off the land.” What is pain, she wonders, while her body chatters loosely in its dress or brace like a mouthful of ruined teeth. Windchimes drift on the air like fillings from extracted molars, and language, a black food, fills up your mouth.
Dear Debbie, says the inter-office memo. Security reports that you seem to be making more trips to the lavatory than are absolutely necessary. As you know, federal law prohibits the installation of surveillance cameras in the actual lavatories themselves, so of course we can do nothing but speculate about your activities once you have disappeared from the visual field of the hall cameras into the ladies’ room which as noted earlier you seem to do with a peculiar frequency. Debbie, of course we realize you may have a medical problem but we found no deviant symptomology of this nature in your current medical records. Dr. Joe Gannon the company physician informs us that the average or normal female employee will excrete 2-5 times between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. There are of course only spotty statistics on the frequency of excretion during the noon hour as many female employees perform their eliminative functions elsewhere in venues such as a restaurant, department store, or—perhaps not unlike yourself Debbie—a park. At any rate Debbie, security reports that you make on the average between 16-24 visits per day to the lavatory which is considerably higher than the maximum average, even if we allow for the excessive consumption of fluids which we’ve noted you seem prone to at your work station. Therefore Debbie we’re certain you’ll understand our request that you visit Nurse Georgette Hawkins of Dr. Gannon’s office on the 13th floor no later than 4 p.m. today for a urinalysis. On a happier note Debbie you’re still in the running for Employee Lady of the Month for which you could receive a solid oak plaque with a gold Emblem of Excellence affixed near your name.
A little girl’s pussy is so mild. When you’re six years old it’s just a thing you have, a dolphin’s friendly smile. There came a day for Debbie at the age of seven when she lay with her book “Little Women” in a beam of sunlight on the carpet. Her disposition had the charm and color of a Gummy Bear, she was content as a little frog, burbling along through the book’s merry stream, when she came up short against the sensual buildup of a young girl’s lingering illness, and ultimately the sentence which contained the climax, or death of the girl—a wavery, blurred stem of a girl, Beth, drowning in her sickbed beneath the milky light of dawn. And suddenly in Debbie’s body a new gland activated to flood her limbs with a feverish fluid, and the place between her legs went liquid with heat and fear and pleasure as thick as the circulating streams of blood coiled inside her, looping their lazy way through her arms and legs, their red currents ferrying Debbie’s body toward that final day in the future when her flesh will collapse inward to be extinguished in the gravitational crush of her own black hole. In young Debbie’s cunt a deadly new steam began to gather.
Last night Debbie snorted heroin, Special K, and cocaine, plus she was drunk. Her faggot friends dressed her up in a leisure suit and big red wig and took her to the disco. She stood grooving on the dance floor, loose, relaxed, slave to the rhythm but for mysterious reasons completely paralyzed. Prior to blacking out, she looked up to observe her left eye dangling in a cloud of smoke over by the mirrorball. Around 5 a.m., s
he came to her senses in midair, slamming faster than the speed of sound down a long corridor of utter emptiness from her loft bed to the floor, startling Mimi the cat awake from a nightmare of crafty rodents. That didn’t hurt at all, Debbie thought as she picked herself up and staggered to the bathroom. In the sick red light coming from the mirror she saw her faggot pals had painted her lips in a heart shape and drawn red hearts on her cheeks. She looked like a blow-up doll for men.
In the deserted street outside, a garbage truck rumbling by like a tank triggers for Debbie another neural shift. Remote vacuum of the sleeping neighborhood where young Debbie lay incubating in her girlish bedroom, sleepless at 3 a.m. A vulnerable time for adolescent insomniacs and in the absence of other stimulii the cold military harmonies of a semi truck shifting gears fused itself to the erotic channels of her nervous system. Am I the only girl awake in this town? she would wonder on those cold western nights when she waited for the dad to walk into her room with a shotgun. The truck, with its secret cargo of chemicals designed to produce metastasis once the workers or sheep have outlived their usefulness, accelerated to vaporize beyond the city limits. Tossing on her white sheets Debbie watched the radium stars swing by her suburban window hour after hour; from the stars’ vantage point Debbie in her nightgown appeared no doubt to be a small piece of pork sizzling behind an oven door.
There’s a guy named Benny Lymphoma tracking Debbie from his post with the IRS. Last night Benny woke up like he does every night soaking in a sweat produced by what he thinks of as his “African” dream. A dream where you have the steamy swollen body of a girl, where you’re floating in a state of arousal toward a hot magnetic core. Everything around you is fertile, molten, black and indistinct. Your body has erupted in a febrile slur of rash and slow-moving fluids. You’re Benny Lymphoma but you’re a girl. Around you the black planet steams, loses its definition, melts into uncontrollable hallucination and permeates the moistened barrier of your skin. Your bloodstream slips its channel to flow into the air. When Benny Lymphoma puts his penis in a girl, hot convulsive horror shudders up his spine and emerges from his tongue in a gush of shame that tastes like blood.