“Don’t say ‘it,’” admonished the child’s father. “There’s a man inside that thing.”
From the living wall of the store emerged a chromium mannequin, model 4M. The re-bodied man wore a brown suit that covered over most of his steely surfaces, yet left his flesh-colored gelware hands and face exposed; tucked underneath his right armpit was a hardback book. His lenses appraised the people watching him.
“Are y’all starin’ ’cause I’ve got a mechanical body or ’cause I bought a book?” asked the re-bodied man, his voice tuned to a syrupy southern accent that was supposed to replicate what he sounded like in his first life. The expression on his rubbery gelware visage was an approximation of a grin.
“What are you reading?” asked an inquisitive young man.
The mannequin held up the novel. “The Gunfighter Who Chewed Bullets,” he said. “A classic I never got ’round to readin’ the first time.”
The re-bodied man waved amicably and turned west; the sun flashed upon his lenses, and the optics retracted into his head until they were shaded from flares. He walked off, his gait a wide swagger.
For the last decade, myriad stories about resurrected people had been featured in the news, yet there were only about sixty thousand such individuals worldwide. This was only the fifth time Champ had seen one in person.
As he watched the chromium Southerner amble down the sidewalk, Champ thought of his own deceased father, whose brain was a cauliflower in a Bronxland cryonics vault. The rumination made him uneasy and a little sad.
“Suck up that twat piss,” prompted Mikek.
Champ attached the straw to the canister and dialed on the garbage truck’s inhaler; while the vehicle ingested soup, he watched the mannequin walk into and disappear behind the living wall of a shop called “Botanist Exotique.”
The crowd dispersed, and the canister gurgled.
* * *
The garbage truck fell atop its sibling, the booming impact resounding throughout the compartment. Soon, the upper vehicle’s axle twisted, locking into the slot in its brother’s roof, and a loud clank reverberated. Mikek flung open his door, grabbed the ladder that led up to ground level and began to climb. Champ then exited the truck, climbed onto the catwalk, connected the garbage truck’s urethra to a valve in the wall and dumped the soup into the sanitation block, where it would be condensed, hypercondensed, frozen, crated and eventually dumped in outer space.
The garbage man climbed up the ladder.
Mikek was waiting for him up there, dressed in jeans and a Hawaiian shirt. “Wanna get a beer?”
“Danke, no.” Champ accepted the driver’s invitations occasionally—about once every other week—so that he would not give offense.
“See you Saturday.”
Champ clenched his right hand and pressed his knuckles to those proffered by Mikek.
* * *
An unfunny comedian who stood upon a buoyed dais told jokes about airplanes and abortions, but few people within the darkbar paid any attention to him. One person laughed, but it was in the middle of a joke and was unrelated to the bald man’s neurotic monologue.
Drunk and alone in the corner of the establishment, Champ recalled his own failed attempts at standup comedy and his busted marriage. The inebriated garbage man then made a decision that sobriety—or the advice of smart companions—would have precluded. He double-tapped his lily and said, “Connect to Candace.” Flutes played in his right ear, and as he listened to his ex-wife’s outgoing music, anxiety sat in his stomach like a water balloon.
“Hello, Champ,” said Candace, her thin voice betraying mild apprehension.
(The two of them had not spoken in three months, and their last conversation had been unpleasant.)
“Hey there,” said the garbage man with forced nonchalance.
“What is it?”
“I just wanted to let you know I found a place. To live. I found a place in the city on Monday.”
“In Nexus Y? You can afford that with your…job?”
“It’s a sublet.” (Champ neglected to inform her that the room was a kitchen acquired in an ongoing intra-building war, and that it was accessed through a trapdoor in a bathroom.)
There was a pause that had no possible positive interpretation.
“Do you have a roommate?” asked Candace. The timbre of her voice told him that the expression on her face was one of mild revulsion.
“Yeah, but he’s okay. We leave each other alone.”
There was another pause, at the end of which the woman inquired, “Is this what you want?”
“It’s a pretty good-sized room.”
“That’s not what I mean. Sucking garbage, getting drunk—I can tell you’re drinking right now—and dealing with roommates? At forty-two? My father says you can still work for him at an executive level—”
“I don’t want to work for Larry.”
“Because of what happened to us?”
“Please don’t describe your adultery like…like a rainstorm or-or some uncontrollable event that ‘occurred’—that ‘happened,’” said Champ, aware that he sounded bitter.
“I didn’t mean it that way, but okay—fine—I’ll rephrase the question: Are you turning down a cushy and lucrative position at my father’s company because I cheated on you and we got divorced?”
“No.”
“Seems like you are.”
“You’ve got it backwards. The only reason I ever worked for Larry was because…because it was an easy way to provide us with the life we wanted—the life you wanted. As far as jobs go, I can’t think of anything worse—anything emptier—than talking to rich people all day about where they should put their large sums of money so that they can get just a little bit richer. I hated it.”
“So being a garbage man’s better? Sucking soup in that bright orange suit is better?”
“The suit doesn’t bother me at all. It’s funny, but-but I never really think about what I look like when I’m working.” (This statement was true, though not something that he had known until the moment that he uttered it aloud.)
There was a long pause.
“Candace?”
“I’m here,” said his ex-wife, somberly.
“I just wanted you to know that I got a place. I felt like I should tell you.”
“Okay.”
Champ heard some muted foreign voices through the lily. “Where are you?”
“Kyoto.”
“With Alan?”
Eventually, Candace replied, “Yes.”
Jealousy lanced Champ, but he kept it from his voice. “Have a good time.”
“Danke. I should be going.”
The moment when they used to say “I love you” had arrived.
“So…uh…good-bye,” proffered the garbage man, fumbling and weak.
“Bye. Take care of yourself.”
“Sayonara.”
The solitary drunk tapped his lily, sank into a fourth thermomug of hops-heavy Belgian ale and tried not to think of Alan and Candace, nude and intertwined, their silhouette a single flailing entity upon a rice-paper screen.
* * *
Impaired but upright, Champ fingered the “Antique Conditions” placard on the front door of the building within which he dwelled. He entered, climbed the stairs and stealthily crept past the fifth floor.
Looking over his shoulder for hostiles, the garbage man fingered his identity and typed in his code. The fleximetal sank into the ground, and he hastened into the apartment, shutting the door behind him.
Safe from foes, the inebriate walked past the animated posters and across the silver rug of the common area until he reached the bathroom. The door did not move, and soon, he noticed th
at toilet icon had its lid down.
“Shit on shit,” Champ grumbled as he slumped upon an inflated recliner.
Architect sluggishly emerged from beneath the sofa, looking as if it were recovering from a night of feline debauchery. The only time that the garbage man had seen the cat behave in this languid manner was when its pompous master was asleep.
Champ returned his attention the fleximetal door, suddenly wondering who was behind it. Had the fifth-floor adversaries reclaimed their former kitchen and annexed the bathroom as well?
Suddenly, he became nervous.
The garbage man looked around the room for a weapon. Although the intra-building war was characterized as “Class II: Nonviolent; Humiliation and General Discomfiting,” he did not know if perhaps the current occupant was the individual who intended to change the bloodless conflict into a bloody one.
Champ rushed into the kitchen, grabbed a fork from the wall dispenser and returned, clutching the four-tined weapon in his right hand.
He waited, listening at the door, but whoever was in the bathroom was very quiet.
Architect looked at him as if he were an idiot.
The toilet icon lid lifted, startling the garbage man. Fleximetal slid into the floor, and a topless woman whose nether region was covered by a green towel emerged from the bathroom. A lifelike tattoo of a snake sat like a gigantic wound upon her skin: Its rattle encircled her navel, its body climbed in between her breasts, its neck wrapped around her own and its head sat just below her chin. The woman’s patina-dyed hair was pulled up in a tight knot, excepting a braid upon which sat two lacquered serpent skulls. It looked like she was about twenty-three years old.
The tattooed woman stopped when she saw Champ and then eyed the utensil that was clutched in his right hand. “¡Oye! Why you have this fork?” Her Spanish accent was heavy, and her tongue had been surgically cleft at least twice. “What you doing with that?”
“I didn’t know…who was in there. In the bathroom.” The garbage man looked at the fork, which was clutched in his right hand like a talisman, and then back at the tattooed stranger. “Are you from the fifth floor?”
“No, no, no.” The woman inspected the inebriate’s face for a moment. “You the new one, si?” She pointed a viridescent fingernail at his bruised nose. “You the one the cat beat up. The garbage man.”
Champ lowered the fork. “That’s me.”
“You are not what I thought.” The tattooed woman clicked the pearls that adorned her tongue tips as she appraised the blonde drunk. After some consideration, she said, “You do not seem pathetic.”
“You’re sweet.”
“It is open for you now,” said the woman, pointing to the bathroom. “You may make mierda or go to sleep.”
“Thanks.” There was an awkward pause, during which time Champ tried not to glance at the woman’s breasts or tattoo or forked tongue. “Are you R.J. the Third’s girlfriend? Something like that?”
The woman cackled. “I am not with him.”
“I would’ve been surprised,” remarked Champ. “I thought he was gay.”
“Only during winter.”
“That makes sense.”
“I rent the hall closet from him. I am saving money to buy my own place in Brooklyn City when I graduate herpetology school.”
“Herpetology?” repeated Champ. “Don’t they already have the cure?”
“It is the science of amphibians and reptiles. I study them.”
“Sounds dangerous.”
“That is a ignorant thing to say.”
“I don’t mean to defame cobras or crocodiles.”
“They are wonderful creatures.”
“A lethal kind of wonderful.”
The woman did not find the garbage man’s remarks amusing.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean to offend you. I’m an irritating drunk. I tried to do some stand-up comedy once, but all I did was annoy people.”
“It is okay. Most peoples do not understand me. My father—in Madrid—he called me bruja.”
“That means bitch, right?”
The student flinched. “No. It means witch.”
“Sorry.”
“When I left Spain, he gave me a broom.”
Champ started giggling, and across from him, the woman frowned. This was a historically awkward conversation, he thought as his eyes (despite his efforts to thwart them) surveyed the student’s serpent tattoo and three-pronged tongue and full high breasts.
“R.J. the Third gives me discount—it is half-price if I never wear shirts.”
“That’s quite an arrangement.”
“Buenas noches,” the woman said, and then walked toward the copper hall, revealing the tattoo of a snake skeleton that ran up her spine. The image was detailed and shaded with such precision that it looked as if it were a real, tangible thing floating outside her skin.
“My name’s Champ.”
The student left the room without responding, the soles of her bare feet squeaking upon the wood in the adjacent hall.
Champ walked toward the toilet icon, and as the fleximetal slid into the floor, he heard the herpetology student cry out.
“Snake girl?”
“¡Ladronas!” the woman shouted into the hall. “¡Hijos de putas! ¡Ladronas! ¡Ladronas!”
“Serpenta?” he inquired, drunkenly giggling.
The herpetology student raced back into the common area. “This is not a funny joke—they steal the closet! ¡Los cincos! Los cincos have took my room!”
The tattoo of hammers driving nails resounded from the copper hallway.
“We need to stop them!” shouted the student. “They making un barricade.”
“Should we get R.J. the Third? I don’t really know the rules.”
“¡Pollo amarillo!”
The woman raced to the homeowner’s door and slapped the chime placard; bells sounded within the bedroom.
“For what reason has my slumber been disturbed?” R.J. the Third ostentatiously inquired.
“They taking hall closet!” cried the student. “The fives!”
The door sank into the floor and R.J. the Third, wearing a silver robe and matching underwear, emerged; his black hair was askew and his bulging eyes were saturnine.
“Flank me!” ordered the popinjay, striding across the common room. The herpetology student, Champ and the spherical cat followed the roused man into the war zone.
“It is set on one skull,” R.J. the Third said as he slapped a migraine pen into Champ’s right hand.
The platoon halted before the closet. Upon the other side of the hinge-door, hammers fell, pounding nails.
“He’s drunk,” the herpetology student said of the garbage man.
R.J. the Third snatched the migraine pen from Champ’s right hand, said, “Crapulous fool!” and gave the weapon to the herpetology student. The garbage man was pleased that he would not have to lance anybody.
From a large pocket in his silver robe, R.J. the Third withdrew a black cylinder adorned with a blue face that had a wavy mouth and mismatched eyes. The popinjay expediently connected a tubule to the can’s spigot and—through the space between the door’s bottom and the floor—slid the nozzle into the closet.
“You have ten seconds to vacate the closet before I gas you!” R.J. the Third said to his enemies.
The hammers hesitated, and Champ heard a muffled discussion.
“One!!!” shouted the popinjay, who thereafter paused dramatically.
The enemies redoubled their efforts, pounding nails, and the herpetology student clutched the migraine pen in her right hand.
“Two!!!” R.J. the Third called out as he pressed th
e can’s ignition. Gas sprayed into the closet, followed a moment later by three heavy thuds. “Once the vapors dissipate,” the popinjay said to his tenants, “we shall need to clear the battlefield.”
“Toss them down to five?” asked Champ.
“Affirmative. We don’t want them to regain consciousness up here—that’s hangover gas and they’re going to be nauseated.”
The herpetology student handed the migraine pen back to the popinjay.
“Comrades, we have won out the day,” announced R.J. the Third. “Tomorrow, libations!” Architect purred at the man’s big feet, the sound like that of boulders rolling down a gorge.
Chapter X
Spoken Intentions
“Unspeakable Intentions recommended it to me,” said Lisanne, sitting down upon the leather sofa, a bulb of red wine cradled in her right hand.
Osa, recumbent on the couch, stretched her robe-draped legs across the blonde woman’s lap and sipped from a cylinder of jasmine tea. “Which one’s he? The bassist?”
Lisanne swallowed the floral wine, savored its ghost and shook her head. “Satan’s Amazing Father is the bassist. Unspeakable Intentions plays counterpoint guitar.”
“Is that the shy one—the one with a crush on you?”
“No. Intestinal Noose, the drummer, has a crush on me. Or more precisely had a crush on me that ended the moment you appeared in that cutaway outfit.” Warmed by the memory, Lisanne tipped a splash of wine into her mouth; spices pricked her palate and the perimeters of her thoughts. “You left seven salivating admirers in your wake.”
“You can keep them,” said Osa, flicking her long fingers dismissively.
“No thank you. It is challenge enough keeping them in tune and on beat.”
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