Nocturnal Emissions

by Jeffrey Thomas

  #2: The Chained Man

  There’s this glass tube that runs along the bottom of the china cabinet above the work counter of my tiny kitchen a cabinet so tall I need to climb on a chair and then on the counter itself to reach the top shelves the kitchen seeming to be taller than it is wide and this glass tube affixed to the bottom of the china cabinet is a power conduit with blue electricity coursing through it so it glows blue like neon but I can dim the flow with a brass knob though I can never shut it off completely and I found that if I carefully remove the glass tube to expose the electricity as it runs freely from one hole in the wall to another I can poke a long fork into it with a hotdog on the tines and cook that hotdog just right but one night when I did this I was impatient for the hotdog to cook so I turned the knob all the way up and suddenly the electric stream was gone and the whole house blacked out so that I was thrust into darkness absolute except for the blue glow around the edges of the curtains it being one of those nights the ghost factory sent out its polluted river and behind the walls or beyond the ceiling I heard a long chain rattling as if it were shooting through a metal pipe and let me tell you that I’ve never heard my landlady’s voice before while I was in my apartment or that of the divorced woman with her daughter in the attic for that matter but this night I did hear my landlady behind the wall or beyond the ceiling when she cried out muffled but shrill

  “Oh no oh no oh no” and I heard the chain rattling outside now so I peeled back a curtain to see that a man was scampering headfirst down the side of the enormous house with no clothes on and no hair and no eyes and a chain was secured to a harness that looked almost like it was stitched or bolted into his skeletal frame now bear in mind the woman told me she and her husband never had any children so either she has been lying or doesn’t count this off-spring as a legitimate human being or else it might even be another tenant of hers whose presence she has denied for one reason or another I have suspected that there may be more apartments and tenants after all not just me and the woman in the attic maybe even tenants that the landlady has forgotten the existence of since this house is so vast that I wonder if she can remember her way around it in any case this man reached the lawn and started running away on all fours like a dog but through the walls or beyond the ceiling I heard that sound of a chain rattling through a pipe again and piercing squeals like a great wheel was turning and the chain went taut and started dragging the naked eyeless man backward again as he dug at the lawn to resist and he grimaced but made no sound as his body was pulled squirming and kicking up and up the side of the house in jerks of the chain out of my range of sight and then the squealing wheel sound was gone so I let the shade fall back into place and I felt my way back to my miniature kitchen back to the kitchen counter and guiltily fitted the glass tube into place and turned the knob down low until after a while the power kicked in again and electricity flowed calmly through the tube as it had before glowing serenely in my kitchen like a neon tube and after that night you can bet I stuck to sticking my hotdogs into the gas flames of my greasy little stove instead

  #3: The Tenants

  I had spoken briefly with the woman who rented the attic apartment when I first came to look into renting my smaller studio apartment at the rear of the house she being a very short and plump Oriental woman with a pleasant round face that when she smiles narrows eyes that look taut from cosmetic surgery to give her double lids and a longer nose but she has deeply sour breath that made me hold my own breath when we conversed and rolls of fat at the back of her neck that I noticed were red and chafed in their creases but until this morning I had never seen her daughter whom she had referred to as Hee a girl in her late teens I guessed who looks tall and slim and thus doesn’t resemble her mother at all though she is still much shorter than me maybe only 5 feet 4

  the illusion of height being partly that her face is small and her body well proportioned with a long torso and long slender legs and hair to her shoulder blades made both artificially auburn and wavy and since it was a muggy afternoon today she wore a white tube top and a miniskirt with thin colorful horizontal stripes like static on a TV that showed off expanses of skin which despite her modest size seemed to me like landscapes of flesh like smooth brown oceans of skin one could drift upon and explore for hours or months at a time a skin so perfect it seemed plastic so that I was quite beguiled as I peeked out at her from around a shade as she paced in the driveway apparently waiting for someone maybe a friend or her mother to come down and drive her somewhere but she wasn’t irritated instead passed the time by brightly singing a song that went “Silicone Swirl you make me feel like a girl…oh Silicooone… Silicone Swirl” over and over as if this were all she could remember of this song as again and again she paced and occasionally pirouetted on a heel with a sudden flourish singing “Silicone Swiiiiiirl…Silicone Swirl” and upon completing one of these pirouettes she was left facing my window directly and maybe the suddenness of her halt made her notice my shade where it was indented because she cast a bright smile up at me I hoped not a mocking smile I hoped as sincere a smile as it looked and she waved the fingers of one hand cutely before spinning into her pacing stride again and resuming her song and this time maybe even for my benefit she twirled the index finger of both hands in front of her tube top over where the nipples of her tiny breasts would be as she sang “Silicone Swirl you make me feel like a girl…oh Silicooone…Silicone Swirl”

  #4: Surprisingly, a Gift!

  When you’re lonely as most of us are you tend to watch too much TV and maybe for a sense of soothing nostalgia for a time when I was also lonely but at least young enough to believe I could resolve that in the future I had taken lately to watching a show I used to enjoy in the 70s called Detective/Psychiatrist Jabronski the character being a detective who was also a psychiatrist not only for his fellow officers but dispensing his therapy and advice to anyone he might come into contact with on the tough city streets and he was raised on those streets so he knew what he was talking about this slight little man always in the same somewhat too small charcoal gray suit and narrow tie with his hair receding from his dome and a squinty little face always carrying a tiny black revolver like a toy but he was a mean shot when it came to picking the bad guys off fire escapes and rooftops though he was all compassion when counseling troubled officers well I was ready to lose myself in another rerun episode and bobbing my head to the exciting opening song called Let it Burn sung by sassy black women when I heard the screen door of the miniature enclosed porch outside my apartment slam shut so I got up and walked to my door and peeked out and there just inside my tiny porch was a cardboard box which I found was addressed to me but which bore no return address so I carried the box which wasn’t heavy to my kitchen table and sliced it open and rummaged through the wadded up newspapers inside and when I withdrew my hands I found that a confetti of tiny bits of paper came sprinkling out and as they fell on the table I noticed that each carefully snipped tiny scrap bore a bit of punctuation whether a comma or period or question mark or exclamation point which struck me as coincidental because the computer on which I am writing these thoughts for you has been malfunctioning for several months it’s an older model as you can see from the condition of the glass parts of which it is almost entirely made except for the black rubber keys and knobs and valves and toggle switches of tarnished brass worked in here and there the glass being scuffed and scratched and in one area the blue electricity that flows through the tubes at the back of the machine behind the circular glass screen leaked out a crack one time and blackened the glass opaque there after which a series of my punctuation keys no longer functioned these including the period, comma, semicolon, dash, parentheses, question mark, and exclamation point keys; though I had still retained the apostrophe, hyphen, ellipsis, colon, slash, etc. Now, as I took in this spill of disjoined punctuation, I noticed that the wadded up newspapers I had pulled out were riddled with tiny holes as if bugs had been nibbling through them, though I realized at once that these
were the spots where someone had patiently cut out every bit of punctuation—at least, the punctuation that corresponded to my malfunctioning keys—from their pages. Furthermore, at the bottom of the box I found handfuls of colorful plastic magnets of the type children use to spell out the alphabet and words on their parents’ refrigerators, though in my case the magnets solely consisted of periods, commas, and more of the punctuation marks I had been so long denied. So as Detective/Psychiatrist Jabronski played in the background, reassuring me with its nostalgia and its reassuring hero, I sat before the door to my fridge and placed all those magnets upon it, spacing them out in such a way that one would expect words to settle themselves into those gaps later, when I had decided what those words should be.

  I was grateful for whoever had left this thoughtful gift; it reassured me that what is broken or lacking or scarred can be patched up later on. Maybe not in a way that is, strictly speaking, ideal, of course, but in such a way, I think, that we can find, oh, at least some modicum of balance, if that is the right word, or order; a sense of perseverance in spite of our handicaps and encumbrances!

  #5: Detective/Psychiatrist Jabronski

  Let me begin again, now that I am no longer encumbered.

  When you’re lonely, as most of us are, you tend to watch too much TV—and maybe for a sense of soothing nostalgia for a time when I was also lonely (but, at least, young enough to believe I could resolve that in the future), I had taken lately to watching a show I used to enjoy in the 70s, called Detective/Psychiatrist Jabronski. The character was a detective who was also a psychiatrist, not only for his fellow officers but dispensing his therapy and advice to anyone he might come into contact with on the tough city streets—and he was raised on those streets, so he knew what he was talking about. Jabronski was this slight little man, always in the same somewhat too small charcoal gray suit and narrow tie, with his hair receding from his dome and a squinty little face. He always carried a black revolver, which was tiny as a toy, but he was a mean shot when it came to picking the bad guys off fire escapes and rooftops.

  He was all compassion when counseling troubled officers, though.

  The show opened with the theme song, Let it Burn, sung by sassy black women accompanied by a snazzy electric guitar, and Jabronski was seen sitting on tenement steps with his arm around the shoulders of a sobbing uniformed patrolman, Jabronski jumping on the hood of a parked car and sliding on his rear off the other side with his little gun thrust out to the left and then right, Jabronski with his arm around the shoulders of a sobbing elderly woman, Jabronski slamming a thug twice his size up against a brick wall with his little face and little gun thrust in the bad guy’s face, and so on. When the opening credits ended, the program switched to a commercial. Commercials made me restless, so I thought I would idle through a few other stations and come back in a couple of minutes. I took up my tarnished brass remote, and thumbed its black rubber keys repeatedly like a gun firing on empty cylinders until finally the channel changed. My TV, all composed of glass like my computer, had been performing erratically since the night I had accidentally, tem-porarily cast the house into darkness. Sometimes the blue electricity coursing through the tubes in back of the screen would brighten and throw a fluttering light show across the wall, and other times the current would dim to such a meager trickle I thought it would extinguish itself. When the channel changed, there was an initial burst of jarring static and the broadcast was grainy and wavered for several seconds until it cleared. I wasn’t even sure what number I had thumbed, and was about to enter a channel number I was familiar with when the program that was playing arrested me. Actually, it was the song that was playing that arrested me.

  A man was singing and dancing on the screen, while animated flowers of psychedelic colors floated in the background, along with a few silent dancers who followed the singer’s movements. They were maybe women or maybe slim men or a combination of both, in tight white body suits, white boots with platform heels, their faces white with greasepaint, or were those masks? Did their costumes encase their skulls or were they without hair and ears?

  The singer himself wore white greasepaint, but also red dots on his cheeks and red lipstick, his eyes ringed in black kohl. His hair was maybe a wig or maybe not, all curly crimson red and bushing out from beneath a black top hat drooping to one side like a crushed stovepipe, ringed with a lime green satin ribbon. He wore a long, black velvet coat, and under that a black body suit blending into black platform shoes. The man was smiling glassy-eyed into the camera, singing, “Silicone Swirl you make me feel like a girl…oh Silicooone…Silicone Swirl” over and over as he did his little soft-shoe dance, twirling around and opening his coat at the lyric, “You make me feel like a girl,” to reveal two swirling designs—more animation?—that spun around and around over his breasts like twin hypnotic vortexes. “Silicone Swiiiiiirl…Silicone Swirl,” he sang, dancing backward away from the camera then forward, closer, again. Sashaying lightly, nimbly from side-to-side across the screen, his mime-like dancers following along, and when he again sang,

  “Silicone Swirl you make me feel like a girl,” this time he twirled the index finger of both hands in front of his body suit where those hypnotic designs spun around. And he continued singing, “Oh Silicooone…Silicone Swirl.”

  I recognized this as the song my fellow tenant’s daughter Hee had been singing that morning when I’d spied on her from my window, twirling around and stirring her fingers in front of her tube top in what I now realized was an imitation of this prancing entertainer. I felt an odd tingle throughout my body at the memory of that lovely child, like a surge of the blue electricity that coursed through my TV.

  I watched the performer sing and dance for an unknown amount of time, as if mesmerized by the spiraling whirlpools on his chest or the repetition of his lyrics—“Silicone Swirl you make me feel like a girl…oh Silicooone…Silicone Swirl…Silicone Swiiiiiirl…Silicone Swirl…Silicone Swirl you make me feel like a girl…oh Silicooone…Silicone Swirl”—until, with a start, I realized I had been away from Detective/Psychiatrist Jabronski for far too long. Cursing myself and sitting up a little taller in my chair, I returned to the channel I had tuned to earlier and cursed again to see that the program was well underway.

  Jabronski sat on a curb beside a fellow plainclothes officer, whose face was cupped in his hands. This cop was moaning, “I don’t think I can take much more of this, Jabronski. I don’t know how you’ve been able to do it as long as you have. Babies born drug addicts, man— born drug addicts! Drug-addicted babies needing a goddamn fix!”

  The small, balding Jabronski always spoke in a high-pitched, city-tough accent, and snapped out his words with hard-eyed confidence. He slipped an arm around the bigger cop’s shoulders and said, “Jimmy, it’s like this. You gotta

  –” and Jabronski paused to look off into space thoughtfully, as if searching for just the right analogy “– you gotta build a fire. “(In his city accent, he said it fi-ah.) Nodding with satisfaction at this choice of advice, he looked back to the man and continued with whispered emphasis, “You gotta let it… burn.”