Homunculus

by Wintner, Robert;

  “It’s a pay in advance kind of deal,” Cisco says. “Then you pay as you go. Then you run out and ask for an advance. Then you run out again and look down the barrel at your balloon payment.” Cisco arranges his opening lines with generosity and care.

  “How do you know about balloon payments?” Suey asks.

  “Used to be a tycoon,” Cisco says, sucking up a woolly worm through a rolled bill. “Trust account. Escrow. Litigation. Default.”

  “You’re so full of shit,” Suey says. She takes the bill.

  “You still use it?” Kensho asks Tony. Tony blushes, flattered at the recognition for prudence.

  “Yes. I know the price and I pay.”

  “Why?”

  “Like you say, I let go. Sometimes I let go more.”

  “I will try it, please, if you don’t mind.” Kensho has his usual audience for his reappraisal of life, his selfless embrace of the secular. Snorting like a seasoned dope fiend he ponders and asks, “Shall I go again?”

  “First one’s for free, Kenny,” Cisco says. “Then you pay, too.”

  Kensho says yes, he understands. He goes again and smiles again, feeling nothing again, except for a distant voltage. “I only loved meditation after a very long time of forcing it,” he says. “I wanted to move but sat for the clock. Finally it came to me that when I felt the most confined was when the best meditation could begin. I couldn’t release my restlessness until I had restlessness to release.” He stares back at everyone staring at him. “It’s a blessing. See? Restlessness is a place to start from. An abundance to let go of. Does that make sense?”

  “Just like the man said,” Cisco says, taking the bill and honking enough drug to make a lesser man nervous.

  “What man?” Kensho asks, not yet realizing that words on drugs are not bound to meaning.

  “It’s the most he’s ever said at one time,” Heidi says. She deals glasses and pours rum over ice.

  “But it doesn’t mean I should generate the restlessness,” Kensho says. “This is confinement to something else.” He sips his rum. “All the monkeys swing at once.” He looks around. “Here I am talking bullshit. I don’t know about this.”

  “But it’s fun, ain’t it?” Cisco asks. “Besides, that’s how you always talk.”

  Kensho smiles. “Fun?”

  “Yeah, fun. You know, yip yip yip motherfucker.”

  “What a cowboy,” Suey says.

  “I do?” Kensho asks, earning nods all around. Thoughts stack up on his brow and he asks, “Can I try it again?” All howl at Kensho’s witless joke, and the party officially begins. It comes to nothing and takes until daylight to arrive, when the drug can no longer confine weariness. In the meantime, Suey seeks affection from Whippet, or maybe Cisco. Whippet wants Tony, or possibly Kensho. Tony visualizes peace with anonymity, and Heidi is simply restless. Cisco sees it on her and glares like a torn on a chickadee. She stares back in self-defense, Tony thinks.

  Then Whippet clearly wants Kensho, and so does Suey; ménage would be acceptable if not for Whippet, who fears confusing the issue. Tony raises a toast to Kensho, who is unlike the rest. Whippet wags her head and doubts she can use a man who needs so much instruction.

  Cisco says he’ll, uh, you know.

  “You’ll what?” Tony asks.

  “Or explanation,” Whippet says.

  “You know,” Cisco shrugs. A lull settles for a minute, then gets blown away.

  Sometime late, down to bare metal, Tony shows jokers and spades. He announces against the easy grain of inebriate good cheer that he has trouble. Heavy heads loll south for more. He confesses hostility. A mumble rounds the table in a single slur, a shared commiseration over life and hell. Kensho asks why. Tony shrugs, “I could say I don’t know why, but I do. It seems so obvious. I can sit with friends and talk like a normal person, but I’m not normal, not that I want to be normal, but I’m not stable. I’m not in control. I could be cracking up. I am. It’s the repetition. And I suppose it’s something else. It’s making me crazy. I mean … crazy.”

  Kensho nods at the big, crazy picture, and he smiles, fitting in with a secular crowd at last. “Every morning I got up at four,” he says. “I sat for one hour, just sat. Then breathing exercise, one hour, then stretching exercise, thirty minutes, then development exercise for ten minutes, then chores for thirty minutes, then self-massage for ten minutes, then two cups of tea, one biscuit, brush teeth, comb hair, bathe, prepare for training …”

  “So what? You were in a rut.”

  “Not a rut. A … A …” Kensho stares off at a sparrow winging for the horizon.

  “Hey.” Cisco brings him back.

  He slowly scans the table. “I forgot where I was.”

  “You are here,” Cisco says.

  “No, I mean, where I was.”

  “Oh, you mean about brushing your hair and combing your teeth?”

  “Oh. Yeah. I hated that. The more I did it, the more I hated it. Maybe I thought it was a good meditation. Maybe I needed it. Then I needed a change.” Kensho watches the bird circle the kitchen. “I changed. I accepted what I knew for a long time. I hated my life. I couldn’t believe that. But I did hate it. Acceptance felt good. I still hate it, those things I did for too long. I can’t stop some of them. I love them, too, some of them. But they’re poison without change. Change everything. I spent years getting strong. But I got weak. I’m weak now, but stronger.” Kensho is done.

  Heidi asks where would be good to try, as if the where can cure the what. “Maybe Vera Cruz,” she says. “It’s big, but it’s funky.”

  “Too funky,” Cisco says. “It ain’t groovy. It ain’t what you think.” Suey says she misses the ocean. Cisco says he can’t swim. Kensho asks what’s wrong with this, right here. Heidi says nothing is wrong with this, right here, except for riding conditions. Whippet says she misses the city. Tony says he misses the city too and its chance encounter with something to make your brain tickle instead of ache. But then it can make you ache often as not, the city, like everywhere.

  Another silence stretches another minute, and it’s time for more refreshment, into the heart of the night.

  Heidi moans, Whippet watches, Kensho ponders, Suey snorts, Tony stews, Cisco gets down to where he lives, holding the bottle bottoms up like a liquid-filled Christmas bulb, lighting the cozy little room with brightly colored bubbles. Soft glows capture the spirit of the season. Then he turns red and has a hard time breathing. He looks both ways like before crossing. His friends wait, amused, expecting him to keel over dead. What an event that would be, a certain part of history. But the crisis passes. He only gasps the humorless laugh, fuckinay. Besides, Cisco dropping dead on overdose would be soon forgotten, it’s so predictable and he’s so unknown.

  “So what?” Tony says. “That’s the trouble. Let’s take a poll. Let’s figure out what time we’ll turn in, if we don’t die first. Anybody dies, bets are off. Let’s take a poll. What time will we turn in, what time do we wake up, what time will we have a few drinks?”

  “You got a problem,” Suey says.

  Kensho says, “We will sit.”

  “You sit,” Tony says. “Sit for me. I got a problem. Don’t worry about Suey. She’s got it wired.”

  “Yes.” Kensho scoots out and staggers to his plank.

  “Sit,” Cisco says, head wobbling. “Sit, Kenny, sit. Now stay. Ha.” Cisco can’t lay down or fall down, but he’s done.

  Kensho sits, eyes closed. Tony scoots out but holds on until his legs go straight and the body stacks properly above them. “Still life,” he says. “Fruit with no bowl.”

  Suey moves, lining out a little booster so she can begin again and get a load off her chest, because she doesn’t have it wired and resents the innuendo. She has problems too but chooses to spare her friends the major dump when they’re having fun. Tony laughs in scorn. Suey doesn’t care. Her diatribe articulates a matrix of personal complexity; she’s been thinking about shit. Fecal matter, that is, like turds a
re flowers and this is the Orchid Club. She says she had the toothpaste shits all day and had to squeeze the shit out like toothpaste but she could never get the tube empty, not really empty. Then came a record twenty-three incher that hit the back wall and broke. Nobody can avoid a break unless you maybe pad the seat so you start out higher up. The record is hollow, she feels, since she broke off and laid out another nine-incher easy as pie.

  “Was it twenty-three on the nose or like twenty-two and five-eighths?” Cisco asks. “I mean, did you actually get your tape measure wet?”

  “I don’t know.” She snoots another snoot as the ring of souls for the wax museum melts around her. “I’m going outside next time.” She says the record should be broken, not the record breaker. She swigs more sauce and laughs to a new head of steam, third wind, way past complexity. She says she doesn’t know why, but she loves a good shit story. “You know how you get weak in the knees after about a four, four-and-a-half pounder? I got on this carrot-juice thing once, turned everything yellow, me, my eyeballs, my shit. I laid out about a six-pounder, talk about altering your consciousness. It felt like surgery or something, everything rearranged. I had to lay down and I’m thinking, ‘Jesus, I was full of shit,’ and I had to take another shit, about a eight-pounder! Jesus. Did I feel strange or what?” Another bolt from the bottle gets her farther out on the shitty limb.

  Cisco turns slow as a poker player. “You know how hard it is to imagine you squeezing off a giant turd?”

  “That’s why I’m painting you a picture—like today, I got so hot and tired, having my period and all that. I didn’t have to shit but I dump about a three-pounder. That’s some shit, you think about it …”

  “Wait.” Cisco sits back, rolls his eyes and says, “Let me think about it.”

  “I mean you watch the guy weigh out a pound of top sirloin, that’s a slab. You go three, three and a half pounds, that’s like …” She cups her hands over her stomach. “I think it changed my outlook. I had this dog, used to take a dump next door then run home and jump around and bark, he was so happy. That’s how I felt …”

  “You wanted to jump around and bark?” Tony asks.

  “Shut up. I’m getting to the good part.”

  “How good can it get?”

  “I felt so good, I got so relaxed I went in and took a nap and woke up feeling so good, I went in and took another crap, three, four pounds. It really made me wonder. Just how full of shit can you get?” She pours another slug. She’s gone too far, out to where the trouble brews, where problems hide like goblins under the bridge.

  “A good shit, a good nap, another good shit. It couldn’t get much better,” Tony says, laying his head down.

  She sways and moans. “It’s like … You can’t know when you’re not full of shit anymore. It’s always …” She pushes on with another swill, like she hasn’t reached the point. “Why is it you can change things, but they change back? It gets bad. Why can’t you not do anything and it gets good?” She aims for the back wall.

  Tony says, “It gets good after you croak, and you don’t have to do anything. Just gets more perfect all the time.”

  She breaks, turns to shit and becomes someone else, then something else. She sobs and trembles. “I can’t … I …” She covers her eyes and weeps. Heidi snores. Whippet moans. Cisco rolls to the floor. Kensho sits. “What I been trying to tell you,” Tony says.

  The sun rises.

  IX

  Out of the Land of Bondage

  Another family recipe: take one chronic drunk tangled in sheets, funked in stale smoke, spiked on a hangover, rolled in grit, drenched in daylight and dipped in pain. Add a dash of consciousness and fry live.

  Tony Drury dreams he moved to Mexico and changed his name to Jimmy Chonga and got deep-fried and everyone wants to eat him with salsa and frijoles.

  One eye opens. A cat toys with a mouse in the corner, waiting for a twitch, a stretch, a run for it. The mouse moves. The cat stomps. The mouse squeals. The kill is quick. The cat works the head back into the molars and crunches. Then she chews.

  “Oh,” says someone old, someone beat, someone who once loved but now suffers the action. The legs go first, then the rest, over the falls. From the floor he gasps like a fish out of water. It sounds like a laugh but isn’t. He begins the journey on instinct, beseeching the mighty one—is his name Joe Young? Or is it Lester? Tony Drury has a vision then, that he cheats death daily to gain clarity; prone on the shoals, he can see his needs and failures.

  He feels the presence of others. One wears a hooded robe and casts a sickle shadow. The other stares in disbelief. Tony Drury sheds tears because he’s not ready for the one; to the other he insists, “I’m not dead. I’m not crying. We struggle … upstream … by instinct. It’s our destiny. We cry to keep the sand out of our eyes.” Juanita holds her broom defensively. “That was a joke.” She doesn’t laugh. “What year is it?” One of them trembles. He can’t tell which. She’s scared. He doesn’t want to die, not before a decent piss, a few aspirin and a nap. “No, I mean, I wondered what year I would … you know …” The lamp falls out of nowhere with a crash because some fool grabbed the nightstand. She flees. “I know what year it is,” he mumbles, wondering if she’s the reaper.

  An old man hurries up the hall with a pitchfork like a villager after the monster with the bolted neck and stitched up brain seam. “You shouldn’t judge people on appearance,” Tony says, but neither Juanita nor Pedro saw the movie. “I only grabbed the … you know … table. The lamp fell.” The old guy stares. “What year is this?” Pedro walks away, Dios mio.

  Tony knows the drill: the shower, the piss, rehydration, six aspirin, naps, beer, solid food. But automatic pilot gets stuck on the shower floor, hot to cold. He can’t make the next tier, much less the spawn. He feels too late, like an old cutthroat run aground, good-as-gone, flopping in the shallows. He reaches the handles and pulls himself up.

  He drips awhile, dabs wet spots with the towel awhile and wanders down a corridor, looking for the stairway to heaven. Stale air wafts through the hacienda. Some survived, some died, some waver. Heidi reads on the sofa. Cisco snores on the floor. Whippet sleeps on a love seat. Suey sits in a chair. Kensho brews coffee, shags bottles, washes dishes, his movement crisp and harsh as sunlight.

  Tony sits at Heidi’s feet. Kensho sets cups before those who can nod. He pours. Then he prepares solid food and serves it on the table. The aroma is more inviting than the concept. Those who can, move themselves and eat. In a few minutes, Tony laughs. Some look at him. Cisco grunts when a foot hits him. Tony says, “Imagine an old folks home where you have to be forty to get in and you get shit-ass drunk every night and then you have a nice brunch with your cronies.” He laughs again. “Make it forty-five.”

  Kensho clears and pours more coffee. “I sat. I breathed,” he says.

  “I laid down and kept my heart beating.” Tony says. “I feel like shit.”

  “Heartbeat is automatic. I sat. I controlled my breathing. Slowly, one hour.”

  Tony inhales and coughs. “You mean like that?”

  Kensho watches like a puppy watching trivial movement. “You need practice.”

  The little group adjusts to life after death, hovering in the ether of their own wake.

  “I’m serious,” Suey says. “Charles knew about things going bad. He said it drove him crazy. He said it went away, but it comes back.”

  “You mean depression?” Tony asks.

  “No! I mean the reason for being depressed.”

  “Fecal plaque,” Kensho says. “Three days fasting with chlorophyll concentrate. Then nothing is wrong, because it goes away every morning.”

  “Charles is different,” Heidi says. “He thinks life is great if he gets laid, but it’s not the sex that does it for him. He gets high on the consent. He needs approval.”

  “You mean like he likes the conquest,” Cisco rasps under the table.

  “No, not the conquest,” Heidi says. “The approval. I
f a woman agrees to have sex with him, it’s her way of saying he’s all right. If she says no, he thinks she’s smart, because she knows what’s wrong with him. He wants the smart ones most of all.”

  “That’s funny.” Cisco joins the undead. “I thought he was in it for the pussy.”

  “I don’t think so,” Heidi says. “He measures success by resistance.”

  Cisco looks thoughtful. “Yeah, well, still.”

  “Why are we talking about Charles and pussy and Charles’ approach to pussy and whether Charles is really horny or only mental?” Tony asks.

  “Charles is a failure,” Whippet says.

  “He thinks he’s a failure,” Heidi says.

  “You mean he’s a decent lay?” Tony asks.

  “Better than some,” Heidi says.

  “Damn,” Cisco shakes his head.

  “He compares himself to an ideal instead of to everybody else,” Heidi says. “That’s all I mean. So why shouldn’t we talk about Charles and failure this morning?”

  “Is it still morning?” Tony asks. No one answers. “I like that. Everyone is a failure, but Charles is the only one who knows it. Except for me. I’m catching on.”

  A wave crests and breaks with failure. Suey sobs into her hands. “He only wants to fall in love. Don’t you?”

  Whippet stares. “Did you have sexual intercourse with Charles?”

  “You think I’d fuck these cowboys and say no to Charles?” The cowboys look down. “I like Charles. Yeah, I fucked him—my idea. Men don’t come on to me so much. Shit, these guys don’t count.” The emotional wave passes. “He didn’t mind helping a friend out.” Suey sniffles. Tony plays with his food. Heidi gazes.

  Cisco comes to the cup for a slurp, his wild three minutes down to an iffy thirty seconds. “So?”

  “So that’s what I’m talking about,” Suey says. “No matter what you do. Things get worse.”

  “Worse than what?” Tony asks. He wants the hit, the point, the next step on the road to nowhere. “You think we’re failures?”