Two people lay on top of the sheets. The man had his shirt off and his arm bent behind his head. A woman: long blonde hair falling over his chest, her leg bent up and over his. Daamodar approached the bed slowly, the machine’s gentle metronome thundering in his ears. He placed a finger under the woman’s nose. Alive. He rolled her off as slowly as he could. She sprawled on her back and moaned. Daamodar’s heart stopped, and he watched her chest rise and fall. Realizing that he was staring at her breasts, he shook his head and set the ticking machine in his backpack.
The man’s skin was turning blue. His hair fell around his eyes. A rubber tube around his bicep, the needle still in his forearm. Daamodar felt like he might have known the man from somewhere, but the thought was fleeting. He pulled a tesseract from his bag and set it on the man’s chest. The center cube disengaged and the connecting angles turned sharp, carving a hole over the man’s heart. The tesseract worked surprisingly quietly until the man’s chest cavity collapsed, flecking the sleeping woman with blood. She wiped it from her mouth and rolled over.
Carefully pulling the dead man’s heart from his chest, the inner-angles of the tesseract stabbed deeply into the meat. It hummed like an air-conditioner, and soon the machine was a bright blue color, and the heart began to pulse. Daamodar set the tesseract back in his bag and turned the light off on the way out.
Daamodar showed up at the Studio at 6:00 and put on a pot of coffee. The puppet had been left sitting on his worktable. Hungover or not, his coworkers had done a beautiful job: the fur, the muscle tone, the eyes, all of it. He set the tesseract into the empty space in its chest and the eyes blinked to life, the green of its fur took on a vibrant hue. He manipulated its skeleton, showed it how to walk. The thing didn’t have much of a brain, but it had life, and as it sat on his work bench, staring into its palms, he felt the satisfaction of a job well done.
He took a coffee break around noon. He had already made progress on the next skeleton. He poured a cup of coffee and turned around and saw Jill sitting at a table in the corner by herself. Her face was red and swollen. Her eyeliner had been running and smudged on her cheek. He took a Motrin out of the cupboard and set it in front of her.
She smiled. “Thanks.”
He sat down and took a sip of coffee. “What’s wrong?”
Jill seemed to think about it. She brushed her hair behind her ear. “Listen. I know that you don’t get to pick who you perform your post-set on. I know you have nothing to do with that. And I know it’s not your fault. But it’s just going to be weird talking to you, now. For a bit. I’ll get over it.”
“What?”
She shook her head. “It’s stupid. You’re sweet.” She patted his hand and picked up her clipboard and walked away. Daamodar sat at the table, the caffeine pulling him out of the groggy mid-day funk brought on by his late night. He searched his mind for what he’d done wrong. He felt a deep pain in his chest, and his throat choked up because he knew that no matter whether he understood it or not, that door was closed. He thought about his mother’s wink. He checked his Facebook and read the thoughts of old friends. He finished his coffee and threw it in the garbage and left the aspirin on the table, untouched.
AND A WAKE UP
Gershwin picked the bumper sticker out of its cage at a Flying J off I-35. The glossy laminate calmed his nerves, shot to hell from Dallas traffic. The clerk placed Gershwin’s purchases in a plastic bag like a nurse dressing an old man.
He set the bag on his trunk and attached the sticker to the right side of his bumper, just above the tailpipe. He used his credit card to smooth the bubbles. From a few feet back, resting his shoulder on a gas pump, Gershwin nursed the two American vindications sixy-nining in his guts: the warm satisfaction that, through his beliefs, he could now separate himself from the herd, and the buttery goodness of a righteous purchase.
An hour later, Gershwin disengaged the cruise control and sank to sixty miles per hour to accommodate the two eighteen wheelers occupying both lanes. He turned down the radio so that God could hear him vent. He finished the last of his drink and threw it into the plastic bag, waving his arms like a conductor.
Nearly undetectable under the rumble of his high speeds, something in his car began to hum.
The trucks separated, the driver in the fast lane claiming a gradual win, and Gershwin slammed his foot the last few inches into the carpet and the car bucked forward and sped on. As he passed the truck drivers, his rage simmered to regret and he promised, next time, he’d stay zen.
That night Gershwin pulled into a motel just south of Oklahoma City. He told the night clerk that he liked her eye makeup. She slid him his key card and receipt. On his way out he held the door for an elderly Hispanic woman. Just before the door closed, he heard the clerk’s voice change decibels to “foreigners and deaf people” volume, and feeling the need to help, walked back into the lobby and helped the clerk explain to the old woman that he had just rented the last room.
He popped his trunk and set his suitcase on the ground and when he slammed it shut he noticed that his bumper sticker, which he had so carefully manicured earlier that day, had once again bubbled. After pressing against the imperfections with his credit card, he realized that the protrusions were not bubbles but rather, and he didn’t believe himself when he thought it, muscles.
A moth flitted in the frail lamplight. He blinked several times, shook his head, and carried his belongings to his room.
Gershwin occupied the handicapped-accessible unit. He took a shower and fought the spell of dizziness brought on by the vast expanse of checkerboard tile. He ordered a John Wayne film on pay-per-view and fell asleep.
When he woke the next morning he changed the channel and watched the heads argue while he brushed his teeth. He turned in his key, ate, and pulled back onto the highway, fumbling with the radio for a news station.
The prairie dipped and bowed into rolling hills and old white men yelled on the radio. They espoused views. They passed judgments. Gershwin could hear the red in their faces; feel the spittle from their invective. He got so riled up that now even he could feel it: something was definitely humming in the back of his car.
He pulled off the side of the road. He checked under the hood. He inspected the tires. He thought back to the last time he got his car detailed. He invented a face, some doe-eyed mechanic, and he hated that face for whatever they missed, whatever they did to fuck up his car, and as he hated his phantom, he heard the humming again.
Coming from the rear.
He tried to rationalize what he saw. At first he thought he had hit an animal, a white snake, but no, it would have to have been a pair of white snakes.
The car hummed.
Clearing his head, Gershwin squatted over the blacktop and squinted at the bumper of his car. The sticker was still there, and it had grown a pair of muscular arms. Attached to the ends of these arms were hands, opening and closing into fists. Gershwin tossed a rock at the bumper. The left arm shot out, with the sound of a whip cracking, and crushed the stone to dust.
Gershwin sat cross-legged on the asphalt. Passing cars blew his hair from its careful part. He stared. The hands flexed.
He stood up carefully, brushing the dirt off of his khakis. He inched his way back around the car. The hands did not follow him. He opened his passenger door and pulled his phone out of the center console.
His first few attempts to call failed. He held his phone up to the sky. The third time he got through. A voice on the other end, impatient. When he answered he could hear his voice echoed back at him through the other end. He could hear himself breaking up. The voice on the other end asked him, What do you mean your car broke down?
The call dropped. Gershwin put the phone back in the center console. He reached into the backseat and held a gift wrapped box in his lap. Shook the thing. Played with the bow. He held the box to his chest with one hand and covered his face with the other.
The car started quietly. He pulled onto the highway and called
the number again. Told her that he got the car running again. Shouldn’t be long.
She said, “He lands in an hour.”
And Gershwin said, “I’m hurrying. I’m on my way.”
He felt the weight of the trip. He saw the blacktop in front of him. He saw silhouettes in the passing cars. He saw wheels. Plane touching down. He saw the door open. Standing next to her, he saw his son lowered from the plane, waving, full uniform. He saw below his boy’s waist and he couldn’t picture how it looked.
His nerves were all shot to hell. He passed a clean blue sedan and he looked over and saw the cab illuminated in a blue glow. The driver: big insectoid sunglasses and full lips, staring down into the light. The sedan lazed over the median, close, until Gershwin could have rolled down his window and touched it.
The car hummed.
The driver of the sedan kept its head down and Gershwin felt his rage build up again. That formless waste tying him like a strait jacket. Teeth grinding until his jaw cracked. The blue light, the blue sedan, all of it wrong, all of it everything that was wrong.
The hands grew. He could see it in his rear-view mirror, giant callused hands, flexing and groping. As big as hot air balloons, reaching towards the sedan with Babylonian intent. The hands blocked out the sun.
They clasped together, as though in prayer.
Even as they crashed into the blue sedan, Gershwin did not have any true understanding of what he was doing. The anger inside of him was temporary, something that would pass. Vague embarrassment, a promise never to do it again, that would be all it would leave in its wake. Peaks and valleys. The climax shuddered through him, the giant hands coming down on the crown of the car, folding it upwards, the hood and the trunk kissing in the sky. Giddy vindication clogged his sinuses. He watched the destruction in the rearview, felt the weight lift off of his chest, and turned his eyes away before he could glimpse the car seat turning end over end into the ditch.
LIKE MOST THINGS EASY
The man pulled the heavy metal door back from the chipped frame and stepped into the smoke and the dark and the bearded cowboys turned and squinted and looked back at the fireworks bursting on the television screen. Having been let go from work early he wandered there, the evening stretched out in front of him and his searching calls going to voicemail. He ordered a cheap beer and studied the graffiti etched in the industrial cable spools converted to tables. Them in the blue played darts by the slots and he leaned back in his chair eyeing posters advertising cheap beer and a picture of Johnny Cash behind the bar with the words “CASH ONLY” written in sharpie. He took out his phone and frowned at it. The door opened again and he looked up and felt his throat go hoarse.
The woman took a seat at the end of the bar, too pretty for the place and herself staring down the section of dark before sleep. The man couldn’t not look at her, the way she turned her can slowly above the wet coaster, and after a few drinks he worked up the nerve to go speak to her and they both found the conversation to be easy like most wrong things. At the end of night he was full of her smile and her laugh ringing in his ears and he paid his tab and the two of them exchanged numbers. When she gave it to him the sequence set his teeth on edge and for a moment he thought he was being played. Told her, that’s my phone number. She said, no, I promise that’s me. He picked up his phone and dialed his own number and sure enough there in her hand lit her phone cast them both in a pale glow. They both laughed and couldn’t stop and at her car she did what she’d never done and kissed him, this stranger.
He went home and showered and couldn’t make sense of it but didn’t care. The universe being made as it is of an infinite number of realities, those two happened to overlap into one. He climbed into bed and couldn’t stop thinking of her aquiline nose and her teeth slightly crooked in her smile. He thought about it and thought maybe he was crazy but on a quantum level everything is as you want it to be. Light acts as a particle or a wave depending on what the viewer wants. And so it was here: all of her friends with her number saved got her on the line when they dialed. His friends got him. Whomsoever they wanted to call, they received.
The next day after he cut trees he gave her a call and she answered on the third ring. They agreed to a beer and met outside and swatted flies from their food and missed not a moment between speaking to catch the others eye and feel that easy deep in their blood. Him perpetually lonely, wondering at the makings of the rocks and leaves below his feet. Her picking up her heart out from the mud and still dusting it off, figuring it out, turning it over. They immediately took up residence in each other’s minds.
At the early end of the night she told him to get in her car and they drove to her place where she picked out a crooked box pregnant with beer and they took it and drove out along highway nine to the lake where they parked and wandered through the dark to the pier stretching out twenty feet over the lake loud with fish cresting the calm waters. He set the soles of his feet right there at the top of lake and they leaned back and looked and he could swear he saw the purple galaxies dusted over the stars. She drove him back and he slept.
The next morning woke him calm with a grey sky coaxing him from his bed. He liked the overcast weather. He went to work and hummed a song. He got off and they met up again and watched television on her couch and fell asleep. The days repeated in this fashion, them waiting for the moment to be with each other, one or the other calling their own number and getting another voice on the other end.
They shared time. They invented names for things and laughed at their luck and when they held hands it felt right, natural. They felt their feelings rise to a point where they could see for miles and the lines became so crossed that each other’s friends began reaching the other when they attempted to call. The man’s best friend would call the woman and ask to go out for beers and feel embarrassed to hear a woman at the other end, asking who is this. The woman’s exes reached the man and demanded to speak to her, thought he was screening her calls. The two universes formed a helix and as they drew closer and closer, the time spent sharing burgers at the neon lit deli and playing videogames against the big boxes shoved against the ski ball machines and laughing wild into the night there in front of them became a pressure existence couldn’t stomach and began to reject like most things easy.
As time moved forward the man began to grow distant from the woman. There wasn’t anything he could put his finger on that did it. There was the time they watched the loud band play in the smoky brick bar on the corner and exchanged not a word, them both buried in the pale blue light of their phones. There was the time they sat in the park on the curved steps of the ampitheater with not a soul around and he felt lonely instead of whole. And there was the time sitting over untouched food she mentioned the past like it might still happen. It became so that separating didn’t ache. It became so that the times when the man only wanted to smell the woman’s day in her hair faded and he remembered those times the way he might remember kissing the girl by the water in the snow when he was three people younger and singularly a part of the knowing world.
One day he awoke from a dream and blinked it away and ran lukewarm tap water over his face and set the coffee to boil. He had work in an hour and the sun peeked over the park by the train tracks just outside his window. He knew he had sweat to give and life to share and he now felt the day after the day stretch on in a way that made him feel like he was inside of something white hot and sharp. He thought about the fish jumping beyond his feet placed delicately upon the surface of the water and called the woman and hoped that he still loved her. When he hit the call button all he heard was his own voicemail speaking back to him.
IMPRINTING
Detective Jack Martell couldn’t remember if he killed Anthony Rodriguez or if he was just really happy that he was dead. He clocked in at the station early, grabbed a cup of coffee, and headed to the briefing room. The chief spat and turned red in the face. Martell shrugged to himself. He was ranting like it was their fault the son of a bitch w
as dead. Which it wasn’t.
Still, Martell clearly recalled plunging a knife deep into the coke dealer’s throat. He ducked under the yellow crime scene tape, the sun at magnifying-glass-height, burning through the palm trees and soaking his suit in sweat. The body was already on its way to the morgue. He walked the alley, interviewed the surrounding grocery, travel agency, barber shop, and dry cleaners. His partner took the other side of the street, and when they met back at the squared-off crime scene, they both had nothing.
“So, no one saw anything,” Martell said.
“Surprise.”
Martell chuckled. Ronald Trejo was slightly older than him and much more cynical. Sometimes it got on his nerves a little bit, his partner being that negative all the time, but today, with that nagging feeling in the back of his mind, he needed an excuse to laugh.
“Personally,” Martell said. “I’m glad someone got the bastard.”
“Me too. You hungry?”
He nodded. “Starving.”
He watched downtown Los Angeles roll by outside his window. Saturday morning: young Latin women pushed strollers, black kids went shopping, big-chested blondes sipped frozen coffee. A group of middle-aged men huffed and sweated on a basketball court. Bums played songs behind open guitar cases. At a stoplight, he rolled down his window and gave his Styrofoam box of leftovers to a pale man in a trenchoat. Already the chorizo he’d eaten was figure-eighting in his guts, and just having the box had made him feel sick.
Trejo parked in the garage by the station. Martell hiked to his desk. Paperwork bored him, but he liked the distraction. He wondered if he should change the details of anything he’d seen or heard. Wondered if it could come back to him in any way. Then he shook his head. You’re not even sure this was you.
He was confused. He didn’t have anything against Rodriguez. The guy sold cocaine. Okay. It was his job to care, sure, but he’d done coke before. It was alright.
Our Blood in Its Blind Circuit Page 6