The Grimscribe's Puppets

by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

  “So where’s Colleen? Work?”

  “Ah. Yeah. Well, basically man, Colleen ain’t here no more. She split. So we’re kind of in the same boat, you know, you and me.”

  “She dumped you?”

  “Just up and left, man. That’s why I’m glad you’re here. You and me can help each other through this.”

  “What the hell? When did all this happen?”

  “Oh, ‘bout a month ago.”

  “A month ago? You made out like she was still here when you asked me to come down. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Yeah, well I was kinda thinkin’ you might not wanna come if you knew. On the other hand, you never liked her much anyway, so I figured you wouldn’t mind when you got here.”

  “So I guess you won’t be hooking me up with her cousin, or sister or whatever? What was that all about?”

  “Sorry, bro. I just really needed some company, you know? But hey, man, if you want chicks, we can go to Pizza Uno. We’ll find some chicks there, guaranteed.”

  Ray stared across the room at his friend. Danny looked ill and definitely needed a bath. It bothered Ray to see the man this way: Danny, who had always been so fastidious; who, even when he was working as a mechanic, kept a special brush handy for scrubbing the black grease and dirty engine oil from under his nails. No way he was gonna be picking up any chicks tonight. None with eyes or a nose, anyway. And Ray wasn’t going to get any action hanging with him. He really shoulda stayed home. Now his car was fucked and he was looking at doubling down on his loneliness. Or worse.

  On the plus side, he at least had someone to drink with, and that was what he and Danny had always done best together. So after finishing their Buds in the parking lot as Danny inspected the damage to Ray’s car, they climbed in the old Challenger and headed to the local mall. It was a relief for Ray just to get out of that reeking apartment.

  “How the hell does this dump support a mall, anyway? From what I saw downtown, the whole place is pretty dead.”

  “Well, people ‘round here say it was the mall killed the downtown. Then again, the mall ain’t exactly hopping, neither. Hey, at least it ain’t Scranton. Remember Schmitty?”

  Schmitty was a grizzled old laryngectomy in Middlebrook, Ray and Danny’s hometown, a local character who walked the neighborhood and periodically wandered into the service station where Danny worked and Ray joined him most evenings to hang out and drink. No matter what the topic, the old man inevitably began reminiscing about his formative years in Scranton, and when he did, he always came to his tag line: “When I was your age, you could get a blowjob for a quarter in Scranton.”

  Neither Ray nor Danny had ever felt the need to test the assertion for themselves, but this and several of Schmitty’s other buzzing pronouncements had entered the long catalog of their personal in-jokes.

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” Ray replied, “Right now I might go for a 25 cent BJ.”

  “Pizza Uno, that’s the place, I’m tellin’ you, man.”

  “We’ll see, man. We’ll see.”

  The drive took less than ten minutes, but they each managed to kill two more beers along the way. The Montgomery County Mall occupied a low rise west of town in an otherwise isolated area. Leafless second growth forest surrounded the hill, the mall, and its broad but almost empty parking lot.

  As Danny wove up the serpentine access road, movement to the right caught Ray’s attention. A high tier of business signs rose from the crusted snow on a single whitewashed pole, and the second sign from the bottom was gliding smoothly to the left: “eyelab.” Six thick sans-serif letters, all lower case, black on a yellow background. This gimmick seemed an extravagant expense for any business in such a depressed area. As Ray watched, the sign reached its apogee halfway out and began sliding back. It passed the halfway mark on the right and continued on until it floated unsuspended in the night. “Whoa, fuck, man...do you see that?” he asked Danny, but at the same moment, he realized the eyelab sign stood on a separate pole behind the others, that the illusion of its motion was the result of its position behind a gap in the first tier of signs and their car’s progress up the mall’s rising, curving entrance drive. Probably also the three beers he’d sucked down so fast. Still, it was trippy—what were the odds against everything being positioned like that? And the confluence of “eyelab” with “EYES EXCHANGE BANK”; of both with Maurice Roche, Poe, and the central focus of his thesis...he did not like that at all. Synchronicity could go fuck itself for all he cared, right now.

  Danny parked near the glass doors of JCPenney’s, which appeared to be this mall’s sole anchor. “Pizza Uno’s down the other end. There’s no parking there. Probably ‘cause it’s the only restaurant and they want people to walk through the whole place to get there.”

  Ray followed his friend inside. They traversed the department store in less than a minute and entered the mall proper. Ray kept his attention on the central corridor and avoided looking closely at the stores to either side. He did not want to see any more shadows; not here, where he had no vehicle to provide even the illusion of a barrier. What he saw instead was too dreary for reassurance: dry fountains, dusty plastic replicas of tropical plants, abandoned kiosks that should have been selling smoked almonds or blown glass art, shit like that.

  They encountered only a handful of shoppers, most headed for the Penney’s exit. The conversation had never really gotten going in the car, and neither of them said a word until they were well into the mall. After several false starts, clearing their throats and grunting, it was Danny who at last managed a legit opener. He asked Ray about his MA thesis, if he still had the same topic. Not that Danny remembered it. The best he could manage was, “That thing about Poe.” Even that much surprised Ray.

  So Ray ran with it. Anything to fill the awkward silence. “Yeah, that’s it. Working title is A Long Shadow: Poe’s Legacy in France. I’m focusing on the way Poe controlled his readers’ perceptions to create optical illusions in print. And how the French picked up on that, starting with Baudelaire and Mallarmé. For Poe, think of ‘The Sphinx’ or ‘The Man of the Crowd.’”

  Danny nodded as if he understood. Ray knew he had no fucking clue.

  “Or take this scene in Pym, for example, Poe’s only novel, where the narrator and his friends are trapped on the hull of a wrecked ship. They’re desperate: no water, no food. Finally they see another ship headed right towards them. There’s a guy on the bow smiling and nodding and waving at them...only when it gets closer, they see the guy is dead and tangled in the ropes, and a big-ass seagull is pecking out his brains, which was why he was moving. That’s classic Poe horror: what’s worse than being trapped in your own skull because your own eyes betrayed you?”

  Danny nodded again. As if.

  Ray turned to his friend: “Aren’t you hot, man? I’m burning up in here.” The mall interior was warm, humid, stuffy. Ray could even swear he caught a whiff of the same musty stink that had all but overwhelmed him at Danny’s apartment, but maybe it was just coming off Danny. He hadn’t smelled it in the car, though.

  Danny shook his head, but then he hadn’t worn a coat. Just a faded Styx concert jersey with holes in the armpits he pulled on before they left: “Grand Illusion Tour.” Ray shrugged off his own coat, a bulky suede Polo number, tucked it under his left arm, muttered: “Damn, man,” shook his head, and continued his thesis filibuster:

  “Mallarmé is really the key; the guy even built an altar to Poe and prayed at it. Fast forward from him to Maurice Roche in ’66, a major Mallarmé disciple, and he picks up on Mallarmé’s idea of creating optical illusions with the text itself. Well, maybe not illusions, but distortions. Like he makes a skull out of letters, calls it ‘Mnenopolis,’ the city of memories. But he mainly uses this trick called anamorphosis: you get to this part in Compact where there’s all these long stretched out lines on the page, but if you tilt the book way over on its edge, the lines are letters that spell ‘EYES EXCHANGE BANK’—in English, which is weird
’cause the book is in French. And my French ain’t that great, so I’m having trouble working through the rest of it.”

  “Anal-what-a-sis?” asked Danny. “Sounds like some kinda porn.”

  “Anamorphosis, dude. It’s an old trick in painting. Luke taught me about it. The most famous example is this painting The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein, where there’s a long gray diagonal blur floating near the floor in front of these two dudes dressed all fancy, like kings on playing cards. But if you get close and look at the blur from just the right angle, it’s a skull.”

  For a moment, Ray imagined Danny and himself as shabbier versions of the figures in Holbein’s painting. Danny already seemed like an ambassador from some foreign land. His best friend since junior high, and Ray hardly recognized him. Living out here in Pennsy had changed him, made him strange.

  “A floating skull? What’s that all about?”

  “It’s a memento mori; it’s there to say, ‘Remember you will die.’ Folks were big on that sort of thing back then.”

  They arrived at the Pizza Uno entrance. Here at least they found signs of life: colored light gleamed out and WMMR played loudly from inside. But when they approached the hostess, a lifeless and dispirited brunette, she told them the wait for a table was twenty minutes.

  Ray challenged her immediately: “What the hell? We can see a buttload of empty tables right from here. How can you have a twenty minute wait?”

  “Because we’ve only got one server on tonight,” she droned. “Unnerstand? So do you wanna make a reservation or not?”

  Danny gripped Ray’s arm, pulled him away from potential confrontation. “C’mon man, let’s check out the rest of the mall for awhile and come back.” Then to the hostess: “It’s cool; we’re cool. Reservation for two, Bevacqua.” He spelled it out, and Ray knew right then who was going to pay for this meal.

  Danny’s hand felt too warm and damp on Ray’s forearm. His gut reaction was to shake it off. But he didn’t dare offend the mechanic he relied on to help him escape from Lansdale, so he was relieved when his friend let go.

  A final section of the mall angled away to the west past Pizza Uno, and they took off down this way. Ray checked his watch and marked 6:18 p.m. Plus twenty minutes = 6:38.

  He saw right away it would be hard to kill twenty minutes in this wing. There weren’t many stores, and even fewer of those were open. A jeweler, a shoe store, a leather goods emporium...nearly all the rest were vacant, their facades sealed with panels of raw plywood. It was worse than downtown. They soon entered a zone where every storefront was empty. Most looked as though they never opened. Plywood covered some, others were sealed with nothing more than hanging sheets of thick, translucent plastic. Construction here had progressed no further than the steel framing. They advanced regardless.

  Altogether, they passed only five open stores in the entire wing, and all those near the east end, close to Pizza Uno. No plastic plants here, just empty fixtures. There were long patches where the tile was out or had never been laid and the bare concrete was exposed; sheets of water-stained plywood covered the floor in other places: subterranean ducts and pipes still under construction. Ray crossed one panel and it echoed hollow and bowed beneath him. He avoided the others after that. This wasn’t a mall. It was an abandoned construction site, a skeleton. And an obstacle course. Before long they confronted the end of the corridor: a blank wall of unpainted cinderblock.

  Ray turned to Danny. “Dude, what’s with this place? It’s totally decrepit.”

  “Yeah, well you know: the economy, man. That fucker Bush...everything went downhill after Reagan.”

  They began their retreat from the dead end, but as they passed the first derelict kiosk, Ray noticed his shoelaces were loose. Again. Both sides. He’d been partial to Sperry Top-Siders since sophomore year, ever since Luke turned him on to them. Luke was from North Jersey, Englewood: not rich but upper middle class. Ray had tried to emulate his friend’s effortless preppy style, looking to recreate his own image and cut the stink of the burbs, projecting himself into the academic future he envisioned: Top-Siders, Bass Weejuns with pennies inserted, argyle, chinos, Bean Boots, buttondown shirts from Land’s End. But his current pair of boat shoes just wouldn’t stay tied.

  Ray stepped over to the kiosk, set his coat lightly on the blank, dusty counter, and bent to grasp the squared leather laces. He had tied only one side when a noise came from inside the kiosk, a kind of exhalation or sigh. He froze, laces drooping through his fingers. What the hell? He listened for a ten-count. Nothing. He let out his breath and was beginning the other side when something thumped the panel in front of him so hard it bulged out in his face.

  He shot to his feet and staggered backward, footsteps echoing off another plywood sheet. Where was Danny? Ray looked wildly for his friend before spotting him about fifty feet back down the corridor, still walking. Ray scrambled over to him, making frequent backward glances at the kiosk. As soon as he was close enough, he stage-whispered, pointing back toward the now-silent structure: “Dude, did you hear that?”

  “Hear what?”

  “There’s something in there. Someone.”

  “Probably a rat.”

  “This was no rat. Whatever it was, it was way bigger than a rat!”

  “Some homeless dude, then, looking for a place to sleep. You woke him up.”

  Ray shuddered. He knew the stats: a million millionaires under Ronnie Raygun—and a million people on the streets, many of them mental patients released when Reagan shut down the state mental hospitals. He’d done some work with the campus solidarity group “RU With the Homeless,” even volunteered in a soup kitchen in Morningside Heights during a visit to a high school girlfriend who’d gone on to Columbia. But this was not the kind of controlled circumstances under which he’d interacted with the homeless before. “C’mon, let’s get out of here,” he said to Danny, who shrugged but turned and continued toward the finished section of the mall as Ray hustled to catch up.

  He forgot to check his watch when they returned to Pizza Uno, but the hostess sat them regardless of the time. “Bevacqua, party of two. Follow me.” Her voice remained empty of intonation. She led them to a gloomy corner booth, lingered for their drink order: two Coronas.

  At first they just stared at each other across the table as they waited for their beers. Ray was still shaken from his experience at the kiosk, and he had no idea what else to say to this pallid drone that replaced his oldest friend.

  The blank-faced hostess returned with a brace of Coronas and lingered to take their order. It appeared she was the one server on duty. Danny immediately ordered a chicken and artichoke heart pizza without consulting either Ray or the menu, “And two more Coronas.” The girl shuffled back to the kitchen.

  And then Danny showed a spark of his old self: “Dude, what if she brings an artichoke and chicken heart pizza? Remember Bill Cosby when we were kids, the chicken heart? ‘Pum-pum. Pum-pum.’ Just like the heart under the floorboards. That’s Poe, isn’t it? You should put that in your thing.”

  Ray mustered a grunt of feigned enthusiasm. Like he really needed thesis advice from a fucking mechanic. But his thoughts turned, anyway, to the familiar tale of the sinister eye and the heart buried beneath floorboards, how Poe controlled the reader’s perceptions through his unreliable narrator. How could he have missed that one? He would have to work it into his thesis somehow. Not that he’d tell Danny, who would probably expect credit for something Ray would have picked up on soon, anyway.

  The waitress/hostess returned with their drinks. Danny raised the dewy bottle before him and said:

  “Remember you will die, huh? Well, we ain’t dyin’ tonight, bro. To the single life!”

  Ray reciprocated, mechanically. He would rather die himself than take any more academic advice from Danny, even if it was good, so he stabbed at another topic. “So, Dude, what’s the deal with Colleen? I thought you two were mated for life.”

  “Yeah, well, she got really bitchy
after I lost my job. Not like she’s got any income, you know—just sponged off her family before I came along, and after that, she started hangin’ with them more even though she was spongin’ off me. They’re a mess, just the mom and the two sisters sittin’ around bitchin’ about men this, men that. It’s a regular estrogen fest, Y-chromosomes beware. But she probably would’ve come back this last time except for that whole thing with her cat.”

  “What whole thing with her cat?”

  “Kitten really. Dude, it was totally justified. She brought this thing home and it was always whinin’ and gettin’ in my shit. And she left it for me to take care of when she got pissed about my job and ran back to her mom’s, like I could really give a shit about some stupid furball. It kept buggin’ me when I was tryin’ to watch TV, climbin’ up on the Barcalounger and meowin’, lookin’ at me all sad. Finally I picked it up by the fuckin’ neck and squeezed it, and it felt good, so I kept squeezin’ till it didn’t move. So then she comes back the next day, and she’s all, ‘Where’s my cat?’ and I told her the fuckin’ thing was dead, and she got all pissed, started screamin’ at me like it was a real pet, a dog or a turtle or somethin’, said she was movin’ back to her mom’s for good. I was too wasted to argue, and that was that. So what about Lisa, your perfect woman? How did that go south?”

  The shift in topic caught Ray unprepared; he wasn’t ready to answer, not after the cat thing. He bought time by mouthing his beer, then stammered out a response. “Man, I, uh, don’t really know. I think she got pissed over my lifestyle, working on my thesis all the time. She just wasn’t ready to be with a serious academic. One day she came home and just started crying. I tried asking her what was wrong, but she locked herself in the bathroom for a whole hour. When she came out, she told me we needed time apart. Just like that. No explanation. Then she packed up her shit and split. That was it. Haven’t heard from her since. She hasn’t been back to her job, either. I don’t know where she went.”