by Hugh Fox
“That’s not what I see here in Chicago, the older you get the....I was going to say ‘crazier,’ but that’s not it...the older you get the more social / society-hungry you get...that’s what I see all the time at the Margot Bistro, Berghoff’s, Charlie Trotter’s, the Yummy Gourmet in Arlington Heights, all these rolling-in-gold retirees talkety, talkety, talkety, talkety.....”
“Those names don’t ring any bells for me....”
“You’re like Julius Caesar going into downtown Rome...”
Laughing deliciously, at least she obviously felt it was delicious, but he didn’t.
“So where’s Jean Anne?”
“So where do you live?”
Getting suddenly Nazi-bayonet wild.
“I ASKED WHERE SHE IS!!!”
“WAS!”
And a sudden hangup.
Almost wanted to just let it go, wait until winter and drive up to the Upper Peninsula and go for a long, nowhere walk, out into the real forests. They were all over mid-Michigan too, but never that-that-that-that endless, you’d always end up next to some farmhouse or....
Phone ringing again. Almost didn’t answer it, thinking about how painless fun it must be to do freezing to death, the best sleep he would ever have, no more Melatonin and Xanax or Passiflor, just dreamless, joint-painless, crotch-painless, anxiety-less, boredom-less zeroness, the best way to pass eternity, how did they ever-ever-ever believe in eternal heavenliness,total, unadulterated JOY!?
“Hello...,” as soft as a baby-cat meow. Frank?
And on the other end of the line total repentance.
“I’m sorry. We’re both so tired of the U.S. backwarding it into zeroness....so where do you live?”
“Mid-Michigan. East Lansing.”
“I’ve been there, when Illinois fought the Grecos...”
“Not Grecos, for god’s sake, SPARTANS! The Spartans weren’t Greeks, but enemies of the Greeks.”
“So what do you do there?”
“Suffer. I taught art here for forty years, now I’m an atheistic widower turning the walls of my misery into Picassoish murals.”
“I’d like to have you come up...I mean DOWN to Chicago, for a visit. Meet the family, a least some of us.”
“When?”
“This weekend. A quick half hour flight.”
“Twenty minutes...but I’d rather drive down, I love the drive along the lake in Indiana. Give me an address. Today’s Wednesday, I could come down on Thursday afternoon...”
“OK. It’s 444 Kingston Place in Chicago Heights. Easy to find.. You’ve got an E-map, right?”
“I’m Señor High Tech, no problem. See you tomorrow. And a thousand...you know...”
“Likewise.”
And that was it.
2.
He couldn’t get the names and relationships straight. Such a gang. Counted them. Out in the backyard of this gigantic old (1855?) house that had been all redone, fixed up, repainted, immense elms and the weeping willows he always loved, loved, loved....they were weeping, weren’t they, and inside he was weeping too, realizing that this could have all been his family. Mr. Only Child, his tubal pregnancy mother who had her other tube severed after the one tube was gone, luckily her tubes working when he was en route into the real world in real time....
A magnifique barbecue, all the kids and wives and brothers and....
“There’s one person missing,” half-whispered Tom, Frank’s brother, sitting down next to him after he had just finished a tummy-killer plate of barbecue and was munching on a gigantic slice of watermelon, the largest he’d ever seen, a huge, very fancy napkin hanging over his shirt front.
“Missing?”
“Jean Anne’s oldest daughter, Raquel. She’s thirty-nine, only she’s not here because....,” pausing, to tell or not to tell, that is the question, “I want to take you over there in a few minutes, we can just disappear, like we’re going to the local drug store for more goodies or something....”
Putting down his watermelon. That was enough. All his piss-problems, he’d be up half the night as it was, with all the beer and everything else, like the old Chicago days when he was growing up and holidays were Romanesque, Irlandesque, fetes of the ancient Dionysian, Zeusian gods...
“Let’s just go now....”
“OK.”
Tom, the lawyer, he looked like a lawyer even without a fancy shirt-tie uniform on, something circumstantial, bibliographic about everything he did or said, or even the way he so carefully walked, as if the grass were filled with slipable-on ice.
“Where are you going Tom?”
His wife? It must have been his wife. Her name already erased. The best legs in town, the best super-made-up-eyes and obviously weekly-dyed hair.
“Need a few more....”
“I can come along, a little talk-time...”
“No, that’s OK...just enjoy, enjoy, enjoy....”
A smile that yessed into total joyfulness. Whatever Mr. Big Lawyer (on the edge of becoming a judge) said.
Out to his new Ford focus parked down the block a little. Air-conditioning on.
“She’s not far away. I, I mean my wife and I, support her. All kinds of diagnoses, but....you’ll see....”
Just a few blocks down, the trees already beginning, just beginning to change, turning the whole world her into a technicolor dream-nightmare, thinking before you know it it’ll all be leafless branches and seven months of big freeze....moving out of mansion-world into middle middle-classness, then lower middle-classness, pulling into the driveway of this stone-house that almost looked barnish, all the windows boarded up....
“What’s this? Deserted?”
“Nah, there’s a couple of open windows in back, as long as the weather allows it, at night she’s got some board-shutters that make it look deserted, so no one tries to...you know....”
Uncut grass,weeds all over the place,leaves from last fall....
Pulling into the driveway, getting out, going into his shirt pocket, pulling out a cell-phone, eins, zwei, drei....
“We’re here.”
The front door opens and out steps.....he can’t believe it, Jean Anne reincarnated, the same long slippery frog legs and Hedy Lamarr eyes and hair. She steps down the leaf-strewn front steps and reaches out for him.
“Finally! I always heard so much about you....., come on in, I’ve got some green tea and guava cookies waiting for you.
“OK,” Tom mini-smiling, obviously all kinds of plans coming to their fruition in his head, “I’ll be back in...let’s say half an hour,” turning to her, “You call me if you want...you’re Ms. Cell-Phone...”
“Ms. cyber-world,” she smiles, Jean Anne’s glorious smile reincarnated, and in they go....
He can’t believe the inside, perfect wood floor and rich carpets, paintings all over the walls, much like his own, a huge TV in front of an equally huge plush sofa, nice and cool and fresh, obviously some nicely concealed heating-cooling system, down a perfect hall, past a perfect bathroom right out of 1902, perfect curtains on the perfect windows, the wood window cover-boards painted a dull beige so you hardly noticed them, lights on everywhere, a kitchen with all the latest-latest stoves and microwaves and hand-carved wood chairs and table.
He picked one chair with a nice maple-leaf painted plush seat-cover on it, sat down, stretched back, the table already full of full tea cups and cookies.
“You can stay overnight if you want....move in.....”
Starting to get up, time to leave, what was the word, when you molest kiddies...pedophiles...she wasn’t quite a ped, but there was something sacred about Jean Anne’s memory, Saint Jean, Bless me, Saint Jean for I have....why did he ever follow this line into hallucinatory madness? Edge of senile decadence....
“You leave and you die!” she suddenly jaguars at him, standing up and moving over behind him, her hands around his neck.
He pulls away...violently...runs to the door.
“So you’re a paranoid schizophrenic! Now
I get it. Full of smoldering ruins....”
“Talk about smoldering ruins!,” she smiles, suddenly turning back into a water lily, sitting back down, waving him delicately to sit back down too, a little touch of Debussyian ballet.
“L’apres-midi d’un faune...,” and he sits down, she comes back and sits opposite him, starts delicately sucking on her tea, “I should explain to you that I underwent an orchiectomy five years ago....prostate cancer....I’m as neuter as a cattail...ooops....no, that’s not the right image...as neuter as a water lily....”
“I love water lilies, rivers, here, out in the hinterlands, in Scotland, Ireland, northern France...I want to go back to origins. I know you have lots of retirement money, and my mother used to talk about you full-time, ‘He’s so educated, soaked in music, opera, ballet, languages, literature, painting...he sees everything in multi-dimensional dimensions....I don’t know why he ever left town, went to Madrid and Paris to study art, lost contact with me. I guess I was pretty much a hick-split compared to the dolly-wollys he met abroad...broads abroad rather than local Chicago yokels....he was so ‘european,’ and I was so middle-nothing....I’ve spent my whole life yearning-burning for him. If we’d gotten married I would have ended up a violinist instead of a guitarist, a ballet dancer instead of dog-walk-around-the-blocker....I hope some day you get a chance to meet him and....’”
“And what?”
“I don’t need sex, youth, boredom, I need.....”
Up again, her arms around his neck, afraid she would strangle him, a diabolique inside her just waiting to be (possessed) activated, but she stayed soft, went over to her huge sofa and stretched out and it was the first time he felt sexually activated for years, at least in his brain, nothing moving down past his neck. What would be the sin-crime to marry her.....?
“I’ll give it to you straight,” purring now, undercurrents of pet me, pet me, pet me, he’d always hated (was allergic to) cats, but...,”straight....I’m not Jean Anne’s progeny, I’m her REINCARNATED, and not just carnis-flesh but soul-spirit-mind-feelings....you believe in reincarnation, don’t you?”
Feeling he ought to just leave, what was Tom’s phone-number, soul-number....was it all some sort of conspiracy to get rid of her, get rid of supporting her, some kind of madwoman whore-splice, escape....?
He could just hitch a ride, find a bus, do some walking, call a taxi, find a drugstore and work from there, getting up, not getting up, getting back down, leaving and staying....maybe mental disease was something else that they (sexless, fleshless but not obsessionless) shared.
CREDITS
“Through a Glass Darkly,” Mind in Motion, Issue 32, Winter, 1994.
“Saint Martin and the Beggar,” City Primeval: Narratives of Urban Reality, Vol.1, Number 3, April, 1996.
“Ghouls,” Northeast, Series IV, Number 4, January, 2000.
“Looking For,” City Primeval: Narratives of Urban Reality, Vol.2, Number 3, April, 1996.
“Spring Wind,” Writers of the Desert Sage, December, 1997, Vol.5, #7.
“April and January,” Paper Radio, #14, April, 1996.
“St. Julie and the Bullet,” Minotaur, Vol.1, #2, 1976.
“Aunt Fern’s Diary,” Wordplay, Vol.II, #1, Winter, 1996.
“Ça Sufit,” Plume, Brighouse, England, Millennium Issue, 2000.
“Chips,” Grey Sparrow (on line), Fall, 2009..
“Survival,” Askew Reviews, #14, Fall, 2009.
“Vishnu’s Dream” and “Lautremontlight,” Printed Matter (Tokyo), Vol.XIX, #’s 1 and 2, 1995.
“Else,” on line publication on site of WorldAudience.org. Winter, 2010.
“Was,” Ronin Press, ebook, also some printed copies, Sping, 2010. Also published by Liebamour Magazine, Vol.1 #1, Spring, 2001.
“Who?,” The Horror Zine, February, 2010. (on-line). Also in Horror Zine, Book, Vol. II.
“The Gates of Satori,” “Rebirthing Without Having to Die,” and “Survival,”Jelly Roll Magazine, March , 2010. (on line) “The Gates of Satori” also in Windmills, Fourth Editio, Summer, 2010.
“Through the Wall,” Loquacious Placemat, #3, March, 2010 (on line).
“Hope,” Cyclamens and Swords, April, 2010 issue (on line).
“In Excelsius,” The Toucan, Issue #7, July, 2010. (on line)
“Ice cream/I Scream,” Sparrow website, July-September, 2010 (on line).
“Jean Anne,” The Legendary, July, 2010 (on line).
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[*] Bricoleur -- Improvisor; an inspired experimental handyman.
[*] Magdalena is Spanish for Mary Magdalene who is often referred to as “The Weeper,” La Llorona.