by Sean Penn
Bob rarely receives callers, though once in a very long while might someone invade Bob’s solitude. Typically, these instances are self-regulated to afternoons in sunny weather. Perhaps Bob’s house, despite its common, single-leveled smallness, presents itself as an oddity or as in some way a fright to anyone who is not diligently disposed to a sunny state of mind. When a knock comes at the door, it almost always comes timidly.
It is late afternoon on just such a day, following just such a knock, when Bob first opens the door to the gruesome burger-meat grind of a face so ravaged by its history of adolescent acne that its pits and protrusions catch sharp shadows where horizontal light sneaks below his hat’s brim. The man appears roughly Bob’s age, if not a few years his senior. The two of them share blank stares for several seconds of silence. Strangers on pause, yet as if awaiting the tines, tuning forks, and violet rays of Tesla’s coil. Might this, their meeting on this day, be that resonant transformer?!12 Then, “Allow me to introduce myself. Spurley Cultier. You’re Bob Honey?”
Bob nods.
“I knew by your address,” Spurley says.
Bob nods again.
“May I come in?” asks Spurley.
Bob nods a third time. Then, in an impulse most alien to his personal history, he allows the portly stranger into his home, shyly gesturing him toward the small living room. Cultier takes up the table-end chair and Bob sits centered on the couch.
“French?” Bob asks.
“American,” says Cultier. “What do you do, Bob?”
Bob ponders, puzzled. Then, “Just . . . stuff. What do you do, Mr. Cult-E-A?”
“I’m an investigative journalist, Bob.”
When Bob chuckles, it is a muted, guttural guffaw. Audible, though never intended so.
Spurley asks, “Do you think that’s funny?”
Bob shakes his head, then, “So, you ask people questions?”
“Yes, Bob.”
“And they give you answers?”
“Sometimes they do, Bob.”
“Do you believe their answers?”
“Sometimes I do, Bob.”
“Not me,” Bob says. “I don’t believe anybody’s answers.”
“Can I believe yours, Bob?”
“No, sir. I don’t know if I ever really tell the truth, much. I wonder sometimes if truth might be more habit than virtue.”
“Yes,” says Spurley. “The practice of honesty has a gray hue.”
“So why do you ask questions, Mr. Cultier?”
“Good question, Bob. It’s a heck of a good question, indeed. I’m glad you asked me that question. I’m gonna go ahead and try to answer it, Bob. Your neighbors, I noticed on the sheriff’s blotter, have made several, how can I say, interesting observations and inquiries of you to the local sheriff’s office over these many years.”
Bob nods almost imperceptibly.
“Are you aware of that?” asks Spurley.
Bob’s toolbox never included feigned puzzlement.
“The optics are suspicious?” he offers. “Hmm, yes. I have noticed department patrols slowing as they pass my home.”
“You got it, Bob!” says Spurley. “That’s what it is. Your word, optics.”
“Mr. Cultier, why do you pronounce your name Cult-E-A if you’re American?”
“How would you have me pronounce it, Bob?”
Blushing, Bob says, “It’s none of my business, sir.”
“Let me ask you, Bob, would you be amenable to my visiting again—and please call me Spurley.”
Bob thinks long and hard. Something seemingly ancient and primal inside him is peeking out and may testify to a turning point in his socially exiled existence. In systems theory, one small thing leads to another. The water, the plants, the photosynthesis, and the eventuality of bloom. In punctuated equilibrium,13 it is like an earthquake, and suddenly everything changes. If one is not adaptable, catastrophic systems failure will occur. Bob begins to recognize the punctuated equilibrium being visited upon him, and will not allow a catastrophic systems failure. Spurley, it seems, might be the right vessel, at the right time, akin to the geological philosophy that one’s search for ores and fuels serves as a means to a practical end. Spurley Cultier may have materialized as a facilitator to Bob’s rebirth of being. Voluntary value-added to algorithms of the new norm. Bob will initially seek to adapt.
“Perhaps we could meet out,” suggests Spurley, “McDonald’s might be a good location, on Hedgepoint Road?”
No arches for Bob. “I’d prefer my home . . . Spurley.”
“Fair enough,” says Spurley, rising from his chair. “Shall we say Wednesday, four p.m.?”
“I’m sometimes not here,” Bob says, in an effort at fair warning.
“Yes, well, we’ll talk about that,” Spurley replies as he moves to the door. “I’ll be by Wednesday at four, and if you’re here, we can talk a bit more.”
Bob nods but never rises from the couch. Spurley lets himself out and Bob watches through the picture window as Spurley takes note of the Pontiac in the driveway, then drives away in a Prius. The silent type. For the next several hours, Bob will not move a muscle. But he can feel an unusual pounding in his heart, and a slight shortening of his breath.
It is on that couch where Bob feels safest, almost embraced. And in his stillness, there, on that day and into the evening, return his visions of Annie. Ah that girl. That shining young face. Bob has always experienced life as an aspiration to dullness with dignity, absent as much deceit as possible. He has no tolerance for advertising. Annie had been that one brief break in the weather where his dullness dazzled a dame. If Annie advertises, Bob thinks, it is without falseness. Or, at least less falseness than others. And after all, Bob is not prone to question himself in that single matter of the heart that Annie reflected, the waking rarity that Annie had become to him.
They’d met on a park bench one day during Bob’s surveillance of elderly lawn bowlers. “ ’Ello,” offered a velvet voice. One look at her standing above him in that park and Bob felt a relaxing of his joints. She may have been young. She may have even been too young. But Bob never bothered himself with those distinctions. Annie had alopecia and wore an astonishing wig. Bob could barely feel it false with his hands and wouldn’t worry it if he could. Simply the fact that her baldness was covered in blonde and not red made him love her head. Effervescence lived in her every cellular expression, and she had spizzerinctum to spare. They sat and talked, or rather, she did. They had a brief love affair, or rather he did. What a magical vagina, Bob thought, after exploring it for hours. Hairless, but magical. Bob had never considered himself an aesthete, but he did look long and hard for things that might disturb him. Though Annie was by any man’s measure an exquisite aquiline Sheila, it was in the absence of disturbance that beauty was defined for Bob. It had begun that very day, after strolling to his house from the park. They sat silently on his comfort couch. A look between them.
Off came the clothing and on came their effortless ease of communication where vagaries landed literally, and silences as voluminous volumes. Never one for psychosexual infantilism or pedophilic fantasy, after their sex he said, “Good vagina. Maybe more Vietnam.” “More Vietnam?” she asked. “Is it a bit urban, sugar? You’re looking for some jungle?” Bob nodded. “Okay,” she said, “I’ll put on my little merkin piece next time.”
“Okay,” said Bob. “As you were.14 Thank you. Thank you very much.”
“Are you into tantric sex, Bob Honey?”
“Too much reading,” said the so slotted sugar.
“Agreed,” Annie said. And so went their discussion and his continued examination of her body. And so went on and off the romance for a brief few months. Until inevitably off she went, and forever away, but not without the occasional text message from her travels, or perhaps one image from a select telephonic photo diary. Fifteen pictures to date. The most recent, an unvarnished snap of a twelve-inch and girthy black dildo, which appeared to have been discarded
on a city sidewalk beside a casino poker chip and some publicly planted greenery. It came with a simple note, “Greetings from Las Vegas! I’m with the girls!”
Bob had found fundamentally foreknowledged form in the way Annie giggled at his apparent brooding and solitude. In her generation’s world, Adderall and advertisers’ chickens had come home to roost. Bob felt from feline millennials the transmissions of Instagrams blitzingly blazing from all directions. The sensation of Roman arrows careening chaotically within his skull. The tracer round ammunition of human selves anonymously exposed. No one spoke to anyone, and when they did, it was more about those anthropomorphic arrows than it was the natural air of organically human traverse. That air, that life, again, so unceremoniously sidelined by a generation bent to uninvent the wheel of love, and so willfully inattentive to control computations or surveillance. An age group so lost to letters and steeped in transactional sex, it seemed of them that they distinguished little between an active orgasm and an acted one. So quickly might Annie cum that he’d try thinking of chocolate bananas, cotton candy, and chugging trains to ward off consciousness of her detachment and perhaps to delay his own ejaculation in hopes of making hers definitively real and defiantly human. Yet, to no avail.
Whenever he felt these collisions of incubus and succubus, he punched his way out of the proletariat with the purposeful inputting of covert codes, thereby drawing distraction through Scottsdale deployments, dodging the ambush of innocents astray, evading the viscount vogue of Viagratic assaults on virtual vaginas, or worse, falling passively into prosaic pastimes. Instead, he would quake the elderly in all corners. POP goes the weasel! Bob’s mallet would speak. He knew his destiny’s turn.
She had taught him well with her smile, cerulean eyes, and the little thoughts she thought of him, when she thought them. Ahh, that girl and the glistening between her legs . . . Schooling him in the forward movement of herself and her contemporaries. A cultural momentum undeniable as gravity. As irrefutable as the generational inversion of human expertise she so embodied. In Bob’s defiance, he had found himself, against advisement, awaiting things that had already passed, leaving him to face that harshest prospect of all: that he must give up on the only thing he really wanted. He’d hungered to tell her all his secrets, but became one of them instead.
He knew a likely pipe-dream better than most; she had never led him on, and sure enough, his maturity of tellurian years alone had given him a huge head-start in his feelings for her, and he never expected her to catch up on her own. With any encouragement, he’d’ve backtracked till he had her hand in his. Had a present hand in his past. He imagined that often, being encouraged, her hand in his . . . as the ever-present image of her knowing deep blues beckoning softly before him.
He had dropped her at departures that last time. Then the aircraft engines revved, wheels left ground, and his world’s atmosphere became host to a new variant of air, absent the sweetness of her breath. Yet mercifully, also absent those arrows of post-adolescents careening through lower altitudes. He takes comfort that her smile, like heaven’s shield, will keep her safe, warm . . . and wild.
* * *
10 old people
11 Janet is a de facto name for a small fleet of government aircraft. Janet is said to be an acronym for Just Another Non-Existent Terminal.
12 Inductor of coupling or magnetic phase synchronous coupling. The most basic resonant inductive coupling consists of one drive coil on the primary side and one resonant circuit on the secondary side (parallel resonant frequency).
13 biological theory proposing that once species appear in fossil record they will become stable with little evolutionary change; stasis
14 standard military command literally meaning, “return to your previous posture”
STATION FIVE
BIG COCK
Several days have passed since Spurley Cultier’s visit. Bob catches himself standing by his posted kitchen calendar, staring at the days with distraction. He sees that this is Tuesday. Sixteen hundred hours. On the following day, Spurley Cultier intended a second visit at about this time. Bob had noted it on the calendar. He steps up to the refrigerator, opens it, pulls out a fresh packet of hot dogs, exits the house, gets into his Pontiac, rocks the mirror dice, and hits the road. This will be a mission of the medicinal sort. One man’s act of absurdity may be another’s substitute for solace. Bob is indeed a man of moral purpose; yet, this does not prevent him from worshiping at the altar of Emerson’s espousal, “foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” So aggressively arrogant, Bob thinks, is the man or woman who lacks the will to adjust or compromise in the service of a greater good. He thinks of things political. Their lefts, rights, and mutual wrongs. The cynical lack of substance to their reciprocal unequivocals. For Bob, one plus one still equals two.
Thems the facts as he feels them.
The leftists, he thinks, see themselves as idealists and intellectuals. Hence they forsake inclusion of a right, be it in gaming, greed, or pragmatism. This forsaking by either side contributes nothing to a result, real or ideal.
“What works” (be that question or solution) is the be-all/end-all for Bob. Tonight, it is Bob’s turn to practice his conscience’s preaching and find a place of value for the contrived sexual objects played with by a party not his own. He will create a ritual around them. Dancing away demons in the defiance of their danger.
Results, Bob thinks, are the religion of an active mind. Like Tesla standing between his coils, he will be a bridge of universal energy. “Moral sh’moral, you kill coral!” he comments to critics unseen. Concern over carbon emissions has played a role in leading Bob to stray from the magnificence of fire to the malevolence of the mallet. Increasingly mindful of his carbon footprint, he has started calculating the g/km15 of his burnings and blowings-up of old persons and other things, putting himself on a socially responsible quota of containment.
* * *
With Annie’s photographic chronicle of Vegas parading in his mind, Bob drives across the Mojave in search of any and all intimacies of inanimacies. From the fifteen stations of love, he’ll start with that large black dildo ditched street-side those many months earlier. Once the information is captured, Bob’s internal after-action brief prompts his provision of personal protocols and the rules of engagement moving forward. He had long doubled as his own compliance officer. Armed with Oscar Mayer wieners, white birthday candles, and an X-Acto knife, he is only three hours on the hunt in Vegas when he sniffs it out from under a hedge, using Annie’s sidewalk photo for reference. He removes one of his socks, uses it as a glove, and picks up the big black unit. He then drives forty klicks into the Moapa Indian Reservation to memorialize his find in ceremony.
At midnight on the reservation, Bob is assaulted by animism in the swirling surround of desert and stars. He claws out a hole in the ground, and sticks the dildo’s base into it. With the X-Acto knife, he slices a small sliver peehole into its tippy top, then inserts the bottom of a white birthday candle into the peehole, lights it, and slightly adjusts its direction toward the North Star. A flash ignition of fumes due to the degradation of the silicone bursts from the dildo’s undershaft, creating hands of flame that seemingly reach to cup Bob’s face and pull him in. The schlong burns fast and hot as he listens for echoes of Emerson granting ozone amnesty. He hasn’t even gotten the first hot dog out of the package, much less cooked it, before the whole cock melts with the wanton “Why me?” of the Wicked Witch, from prick to puddle. New protocols were called for. Defeated, Bob looks toward space, and begins to sing, “Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener, that is what I’d truly like to be . . . cause if I were an Oscar Mayer wiener, everyone would be in love with me . . .”
BRANDING IS BEING!
With desert duty done, a return to house, home, and freshly cut green grass. Bob’s overseas endeavors generally allowed his Woodview lawn the overgrowth of non-volitional neglect. He remembered an incident back in December of 2003, when arriving h
ome around midnight from a trip overseas to a notice from the county clerk threatening penalties. After picking up the poo left by you know who, he’d gone straight to his toolshed and pulled out his 1966 Briggs and Stratton winder-start mower. He flipped the winding hinge and entertained its rotational clicks as he spun it. Then hitting the electric starter, it burped and sputtered into action.
The younger Bob had treasured his chores and none more than the mechanized mission provided by the mower. He was always meticulous to the wheel line. No better groundskeeper anywhere in the San Joaquin Valley. With mowing, Bob could be king of his own domain, and no domain ever had such a fine moment as that when the fragrance of fresh cut grass filled its air. On these occasions, he enjoyed the splendor of its focus facilitated by following the streetlight-shadowed edges as they caught lines luminescencing levels between what he’d mowed and would mow. Later, with the machine back safely in the shed, Bob showered and put himself to bed. He clicked on the TV and watched a whirl of news: American media coverage on the Middle East.
In the battle within Bob’s brain, media sources created a chaos of overload. A marketed, manipulated assault on retention. History books did the same. All heirs to Herodotus.16 The Western developed world, considered so rich in pride and possibility, more often than not kills beautiful things in the human heart. Pride, he believed a pleasure better suited to Orientals and peasants than to those of the West, who’d come to so commonly detach love from infinity, while ubiquitously clinging with cowardice to the fearful fabricated prides and prejudices of yesteryear. How is it possible for a white American to calculate positive or negative impacts on Middle Eastern matters? One could either passively advocate medievalism and intellectual poverty or at best bow to moderate governments that tolerate a measure of both. The only remaining option: intervention. There didn’t seem much room to maneuver in the cradle of civilization, and our senses now so systematically suppose savagery. Hence, Orientalism17 is most probably a topic best observed by Orientals.