Chameleon On a Kaleidoscope (The Oxygen Thief Diaries)

by AnonYMous

Open on a rainy farmyard somewhere in Ireland. A potato grader juts out of a barn as underage workers try to keep pace with the conveyor belts. Cut inside the barn where a young boy pitchforks potatoes into the funnel of a grader as other boys positioned on either side of the machine busy themselves separating rotten specimens from the healthy. They all wear hooded anoraks against the rain and black potato sacks around their waists like makeshift aprons. In a close-up we see the uncovered cog and chain mechanism that powers the conveyor belt and we realise now as we pull back that the boy with the pitchfork is leaning dangerously close to it as he works. Another small figure scurries along in the rain edging past the others as he makes his way towards the boy on the end. One boy has a shock of ginger hair protruding from his hood and we realise he’s the same boy from the safety-pin commercial, notices something strange about the newcomer. His hood is larger and darker than the others and oddly he carries a scaled-down scythe which appears custom-made for his size. Suddenly the conveyer belt lurches and shudders. Something is jammed in the mechanism. The ginger-haired boy looks in the direction of the upset just in time to see two little legs in swing impossibly into the air and fall away again. The grader continues to lurch and grind until the ginger-haired boy finds the switch. There is no sign of the strange little hooded boy with the scythe. We hear the voiceover say; “Tragedy comes in all sizes so keep protective guards on all moving parts. Issued by the Irish Government for Safety in Agriculture.

  ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  My mother’s technique for coping with the grief of losing her husband of forty three years was to refuse food in the hope that she might join him. On her way up to bed that night as she carefully closed the living room door so as not to disturb my television viewing, I had the strangest sense that I was seeing her alive for the last time. In stark contrast a memory of her whooping with laughter flashed into my mind.What the fuck did I care about the television? I was only sitting there trying to postpone another sleepless night in my freezing damp bed. An urge to save her suddenly rose within me. I’d bring my energy intelligence, and wit to bear on the situation. I won’t let you die ma. Don’t worry I’m here. I‘ll save you. But then I realised I was powerless. I couldn’t make her want to live. It was her decision. The living room door was like a coffin-lid closing over her.

  “You don’t have a vocation, you should start a family.”

  Being sent home from a seminary before you’d taken your final vows was the kind of thing that was whispered about in fifties Ireland where, having a priest in the family was better than a relative in government.

  But for my dad it was not to be.

  The Bishop himself had just ordered my father to go forth and multiply. This was no mere whim it was an ecclesiastical directive. Had he been around today he probably would have signed up for online dating. The speed with which he found the one he wanted seemed to suggest that he might have had his eye on her for some time. Brenda Sullivan was pretty and well-off and promised to another. And it didn’t help that her family were aiming higher than a failed priest. So when he received an invitation to her wedding his faith quaked. Not good enough for the priesthood and certainly not good enough for the Sullivans.

  “God only breaks your heart so he can get in.” he would tell me many years later. The Bishop was God’s representative on earth and my father would do his bidding. In wide-shouldered suits that hung vertically from his thin frame and well-spoken after his six years in the seminary he must surely have cut a dash in the countrified dance-halls of downtown Kilkenny. My mother certainly thought so. She was taken with his manners and poise and of course his looks. The Foley brothers had strong intelligent angular foreheads with brows that sheltered deep-set mostly blue eyes and even in their later years they took turns throwing their heads back in loud uncontrollable guffaws.

  All dead now of course. Except for Frank, the youngest at seventy-nine. My mother couldn’t bear to let him into the house during those first few weeks following the funeral looking as he did, so much like a skinnier paler version of her dead husband.

  He was like a ghost knocking at the door.

  Her nickname for Brian was “Flash” precisely because he wasn’t. She complained constantly that he couldn’t be arsed to find real work and that there fore he was a depressing influence. Divorce seemed like such a glamorous word to use in connection with him because nothing had happened to Brian since well, nothing had ever happened to Brian. He was receiving back-pay from fate. I once walked in on him in the toilet and found him pissing not into the toilet but in the sink. He did this so he could continue watching himself in the mirror. It wasn’t vanity so much as self-surveillance. Directly after his divorce he was so bereft of ideas about what to do he was like a life-size doll between positions. Brian making a cup of tea. Brian sitting. Brian standing. Brian walking. Brian sitting again. Talk about teachable. If my mother hadn’t managed to fuck him up the first time she was getting a second chance. They very quickly became an eccentric modern couple. Her bringing over fifty years of marital experience to the table and Brian bring nothing at all. He didn’t pay rent. Her friends remarked on how closely he resembled my father and how lucky my mother was in effect, to have him back.

  But she didn’t see it this way. When he drove me to the station on a morning so moist it might have been regurgitated, I was so elated at the prospect of leaving that damp rotting ancient island I almost fell out of the car when it stopped. He mock-saluted and drove away eyeing himself in the re-angled mirrors.

  But it wasn’t over yet.

  From the platform I could see the farm where Timmy was killed. Much was made of the fact that I broke into the farmhouse to call the ambulance. Like it was an act of heroism. But I would have done anything to get away from the image of my friend dangling by the throat with the hood of his duffel coat woven obscenely into his pale skin. Breaking a window was the cowardly thing to do. I should have stayed and helped him. But as it turned out there was no escaping the horror of that day. Turning around with the phone still in my hand I was met by an equally disturbing sight. One of the other boys was busy robbing the place.

  As the train pushed the damp empty buildings aside I realised my Christmas had consisted of four freezing days and nights in a damp house with a bitter old woman and a divorced unemployed barman. No wonder I was relieved to get out. I left five hundred Euros on the mantle-piece to ease my guilt. Brian joked that my sister and I should pay him since he was basically running an old folk’s home for one. He can’t have known that if he had insisted I would have been happy to set up a standing order. I looked up and down the train to see if there were others like me who couldn’t wait to leave this wet washed-out, rained-on place. The train was full.

  ERIN

  Erin a pale red-haired beauty looked out at me from the just opened jpg. She was young. Twenty-nine is young when you’re almost forty. I had already fed her email address into Facebook to see if she had a big ass in tow and here she was not as clear-skinned in an un-photoshopped version of the same photo she’d posted on datemedotcom but her body was visible now so that didn’t seem to matter. I leered over profile for a while before calling her. She had been married before she said and now wanted kids. She had a little dog she’d bought from Puppies on Lexington. She was going to a wedding that Saturday and was doing her laundry on Sunday and hiring a car for the weekend. She lived in Nassau and though she loved having sex she was allergic to condoms and so could only do it with a specific condom made from lambskin.

  “They’re expensive and not easy to get” she said

  “How much is expensive?”

  “Twenty-five dollars.”

  “Each?”

  “Yep”

  There was something refreshing about her lack of finesse. She encouraged me to speak so she could hear my accent. She wanted me. Pure and simple. No games. She invited me to go to the wedding with her that Saturday. It would be a two and half hour drive with and a six-month old pupp
y on my lap and three hours being paraded around like a captured American serviceman. I was thankful to be able to truthfully tell her I had to be in Las Vegas for work. This impressed her. She was not quite white trash but getting there. Off-White maybe. Eggshell. She bemoaned the fact that she couldn’t drink at the wedding since she was driving but she would make up for it the following night. She’d recently had a few one-night stands with a Texan who bought drinks for everyone in the bar wherever he went. She said this kind of behaviour embarrassed her but she couldn’t refuse a man who bought her drinks all night.

  And yes, she had sex with him.

  “Did you use a custom-made lambskin condom?”

  “Well no, not that night silly, we were, you know, drunk ”

  “I like the idea of the lambskin condom because as an Irishman it satisfies my desire to shag sheep and women at the same time”

  “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.

  “I‘ll pretend I didn’t say it.”

  Hearing her laugh I imagined her covering our child’s ears in her version of our future. Isn’t daddy awful? I had a headache after forty minutes of listening to her. I had only stayed that long in the hope that I might step into the toilet for some phone sex. But she was obviously thinking further ahead than I was. She wanted to get into my genes. So when she asked if I had the Orish Curse I pretended not to understand.

  “Well yes, I suppose I do. I’m an alcoholic. In fact I’ve been in AA now for fifteen years.“ It seemed like as good a way as any to extricate myself.

  “Good for you” she said, obviously winded, “congratulations” and then after a pause,“Fifteen years? Why, how old are you?

  “Forty-eight” I lied.

  “Your picture looks a lot younger’.

  “Well that’s what happens when you don’t drink”

  Another pause presumably for calculation.

  ”So you’re seventeen years older than me.”

  She was audibly disappointed. She had just lost a house in upstate New York, three children, two rabbits and a dog. All I wanted was a wank and that was still possible without her.

  ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  Open on a shot of a railway tunnel somewhere in the Ireland. Birds chirp, bees buzz as the voice-over begins; “At the age of 16 you are legally entitled to two of life’s greatest pleasures.” Suddenly a high-speed train thrusts itself into the tunnel and continues to disappear into the small snug-fitting opening. The voiceover resumes with a snicker; “The other one is the Young Person’s Railcard.” Cut to a still-life shot of the Young Person’s Railcard with an id-photo of the same ginger-haired boy we saw in the farmyard commercial earlier. He has grown up a little and now sports ginger sideburns to match. Irish Rail, How Far Will You Go?

  ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  I was so tired after my sleepless week in Ireland all I could remember about Air Lingus flight E1090 to Las Vegas was a very unattractive girl on my left saying there might be empty seats up front and a toddler imitating the sounds of someone being brutally killed on my right. And from behind me unseen knees pressed urgently into the small of my back. I must have passed out because at the moment of landing I jolted awake in a stupor of self-hatred and dissatisfaction in Las Vegas McCarren International Airport.

  A small neat Mexican man in small neat suit waited with a sign on which the word Miss preceded my name. When I pointed at it he just smiled like I was joking and continued scanning the incoming hordes for the real me. I stood there waiting for him to understand. He stepped away. I stepped closer. I was too exhausted to do anything else. It took longer than usual but when he realised his mistake he placed the sign in a nearby trash-can and looked for a moment as if he might get in there with it.

  “I’m very sorry, Sir.“

  Having established my identity he took me in his darkened car to a cultural abattoir known as The Venetian Hotel where in room 31014, after enduring forty-five minutes of taped messages and bad ads I was so relieved to hear a live human being, I shouted at him. After a half-hearted, half-heard apology I was thrust back into Tele-purgatory. I slammed the phone down in disgust and picked it right back up again. This led to a conversation with my mother who was at that moment watching re-runs of the A Team and I knew without having to be told that I’d have to call her back. Far from wanting to hear my mother’s voice I wanted to avenge myself on the agency by running up as big a phone bill as possible.

  ”It’s freezing cats and dogs here.” she said when I was at last deemed worthy of an audience. “What’s it like over there?”

  But before I could answer she began telling me how Murdoch in the A-Team reminded her of my brother and the rest of the “conversation” was about how sad it was that he couldn’t get another woman and what did I think about that. Did I think he’d be able to get a woman on that thing that I did on the computer because after all I seemed to be doing alright by it and I let’s face it I was no looker. But again, before I could get a word in she was off again.

  “Do you know Mrs O’Shaughnessy?

  “No, Ma I don’t think so”

  “You do, you met her”

  “Did I?

  “Angela O”Shaughnessy.”

  “No, I don’t know her.”

  “Married to Seamus O Shaughnessy.”

  “I can’t say I know her.”

  “You do, I’m telling you.’

  “Where does she live?’

  “Cuff’s Grange.”

  “I don’t know where that is.”

  “You do, you do, we were there once.”

  “Does she have red hair?

  “No, you bleddy eejet that’s Nuala, you said she had to throw her boobs over her shoulder before she could tee off”

  “Ahh. Yes. Now I have her yes, what about her?”

  “She’s dead.”

  Now I wanted to shout at her too. I actually did a couple of times but my cell phone service provided gaps into which my expletives fell and rendered me civil. Not that she would have noticed, she just kept talking and talking as I paced around the horror that was my room; imitation books fashioned from fibreglass, mass-produced carpets with badly done fleur de lis and marbling even on the air-conditioners.

  I had to get out.

  But the interior was tasteful compared to the outer façade. Standing outside in the blazing sunshine I could see only too clearly now the full-scale formaldehyde replica of St Marks Tower with its digital screen presiding over plastic gondolas ruddered by stocky blonde women in khaki cut-offs. The canals looked like they were filled with blue paint and for all I knew maybe they were.

  On that short unforgettable walk to a desperately needed AA meeting I encountered in this order; a scaled down version of the Eiffel Tower, The Brooklyn Bridge and yes, the Great Pyramids of Egypt. Why visit Paris, New York or Cairo, when you could pose in front of these effigies and save yourself the journey. A digital crawl attached to a skyscraper announced “Paintings By Pablo Picasso….Eduard Manet…Paul Gauguin….and many… many ….more….“

  My old friend Gauguin, here?

  Seeing the names of these artists presented in the same manner as Tony Bennett got me thinking that it would be great to enclose Las Vegas in a glass dome and present the entire city as a post-modern post-ironic work of art. A geosphere of what-not-to-do.

  A metropolitan objet trouve.

  But this wasn’t art. It was life. My life. And I hated my presence in it. I was being swallowed whole by a sort of daylight darkness. This wasn’t just a job any more. It was a condition where affection, friendship, honesty, and kindness were co-opted to lever a purchase. I needed an AA meeting.On the way there I called my sponsor and begged him to let me resign.

  “Go in until lunch-time tomorrow.” he said, “ ..and call me then.”

  ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  Open on a shot of me at work listening to headphones when suddenly we hear a booming voice.

  �
��Sell. Your. Apartment.”

  Maybe I downloaded something weird. It’s probably some creative real-estate commercial aimed at iPod users. I shuffle to the next track.

  “Sell. Your. Apartment.”

  I remove the headphones. Strange. Maybe there’s a virus in my computer. I carry on working until lunch-time and just as I’m about to get into the elevator I hear the voice again.

  “Sell. Your. Apartment.”

  I look at the guy in the elevator beside me.

  “Did you hear that?

  “Hear what?”

  “A voice saying, sell your apartment.”

  He looks like he’s disappointed in me. This continues over the next few days. I hear the voice saying the same thing at the most unexpected times; on the toilet; just before going to sleep. Cut to a SOLD sign being taken down outside my apartment.The voice seems to have stopped until…

  “Put. The. Money. In. A. Bag.”

  By now I’m starting to look pale and underslept. In quick cuts I first enter and then exit a bank with a flight-case full of cash. There must be three hundred thousand dollars in there. In the park I take out a hundred dollar bill from the case to buy a sandwich. I’m looking up now waiting for the voice to say something but nothing happens. Some dodgy-looking characters start eyeing me up. I’m getting nervous. Finally, the voice says one word;“Flight.” I misunderstand this instruction and I get up and run. I am followed by three sketchy guys who can barely keep up. Cut to an airport-departure-screen. “Flight E1090” In a close-up we see I have the matching ticket in my hand. The flight departs for Las Vegas. Clutching the flight case, I fall asleep on the plane. After landing in Las Vegas I step out of the terminal, jump into a cab and wait.

  “Where do you…?”

  I put one finger to my lips.

  The cab driver looks at me in the rear view mirror. We wait.

  “The. Venice. Hotel.” the voice says at last. I relay this to the driver. Arriving outside the hotel I am welcomed by porters and ushered inside. Still clutching the flight case I wander around the hotel lobby sauntering between the roulette tables and slot machines while I wait for instructions. One hugely overweight man in a t-shirt that says In the Zone has fallen asleep in front of a slot machine. I look around desperately. What am I doing here? Maybe I’m losing my mind? I start to cry.