by Sean Penn
In these instances, Bob would make himself switch off the television and close his eyes. Insomnia would generally get the better of him. He should never ever compromise a Zen cultivated by lawn mowing. He should never ever again let his brain be flagellated by trifling with the tube. But he’d done it and his powerful peace was gone. Evaporated. To reconcile this, he’d try considering his affliction of sleeplessness as one closer to a familiar fold: daytime made a practical demand upon most working people. But it was de facto in the night’s contentment of consensus isolation where Bob felt most a part of the bigger world’s boastful best. In those wee hours wide awake, a reprieve. He wouldn’t need worry the incoming tremors transmitted by his ex-wife’s ice cream truck and its tedious trickling of cold cunt soup. His mind could clear all angst and echo of emotion and lend itself to conjure a glorious girl. This, even before the onset of an actual Annie in his orbit . . .
This glorious girl would sit before him naked in a chair. She didn’t pose her breasts. It seemed she didn’t pose anything. Her beauty was independent of her lovely face and body, and neither in need of vanity to boost or question its shine. It swam out from her eyes in wonder, whimsy, and depth of quotient jest. Her skepticism of moral convention mightily complex.
On the night in memory, that of late-night lawn-leveling, just as he felt he might drift, he heard the approach of a vehicle outside his bedroom window at 0320 hrs., followed by the reflections of red and blue lights strobing through his blinds. He listened, heard the muted squawk of a police radio. Its pause, its “all quiet,” and its pull-away. Finally, its seceded sounds’ surrender to his beautifully cut lawn’s lingering symphony of silence.
* * *
That had not been a night for sleeping, much like this night’s nocturnal navigation from a burning big cock in the desert, in clothes stinking from silicon soot. By dawn, he’s made it home. Wired in Woodview, one last chore to wind down.
After parking the Pontiac and closing the garage door behind him, he moves to the gun safe. Opens it and counts out a thousand one-dollar bills from a pile stacked high inside. He re-secures the safe and goes back to his bedroom, where amongst the clutter of his bedside drawer, he finds a blank envelope. Wearing latex gloves, he inserts the thousand dollars into the envelope, then moves to the kitchen, where he wipes its glue strip wet with a damp sponge beside his kitchen sink, seals it, stamps it similarly, and addresses it to the Woodview chapter of the ASPCA. He puts his feet into his Wallabees, walks out to his mailbox, puts the post inside, and raises the metal flag for pickup. The sun rises on a new day. Back inside the house, he puts on a CD and collapses into bed. Phil Ochs sings,
I cried when they shot Medgar Evers
Tears ran down my spine
I cried when they shot Mr. Kennedy
as though I’d lost a father of mine
But Malcolm X got what was coming
He got what he asked for this time
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal
* * *
15 g/km: grams per kilometer
16 father of Greek historians nicknamed the Father of Lies
17 Orientalism is the belittling way in which the West considers Easterners, those peoples of Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East.
STATION SIX
A PORTRAIT OF ENTROPY
“I see you’re unshaven, Bob. You look a little tired. A bit black-circled. May I ask what you’ve been doing with yourself?”
Spurley Cultier sits once again in Bob’s living room at the table end chair, with Bob center couch. Bob is becoming dubious of Cultier. Perhaps ol’ Spurley is a spy. Bob often thought how consistently the intelligence community lacked intelligence. They spell “data” with an eight and call it code. It occurs to him that there is nothing covert about a man with a knife collection (they all seem to have exotic knife collections).
Bob inquires, “Knives?”
“Knives??” asks Spurley.
“A knife collection. Do you have one?”
Spurley’s smile goes squirrelly.
“I’m an investigative journalist, Bob.”
“That’s right,” Bob says, “you ask questions. I think if questions are asked of politicians, they should be regarding any acts of cruelty upon animals in their youth. The problem is—”
“They would lie?” Spurley interjects.
“This seems to me the problem,” says Bob as he excuses himself to the kitchen, pours himself a glass of water, and adds a maraschino cherry. From where he stands, he can see that Spurley has put on a pair of cheaters and is scribbling several notes on a pad with a number-two pencil. Bob considers eyeglasses a terrific invention. It’s a wonder one can wear something on one’s face with such negligible discomfort or distraction. Bob takes a brief detour inside his own brain, then calls to Spurley, “Water and a maraschino cherry?” Without turning his head, Spurley nods affirmatively. Bob pours him a glass, popping a cherry into it.
“If it’s all right with you, Bob,” Spurley says, “let’s discuss a few knowns. You know, known knowns. I have been taking a great interest in you of late.”
Bob nods.
“Looks like you spent some time in the Middle East. What was it? A few short weeks before they grabbed Saddam? Helluva time to travel Iraq, Bob.”
“The trip related to septic tanks,” Bob says. “Honey, Inc.”
“Honey, Inc.?” asks Spurley.
“Yes,” says Bob. “With a ‘C.’ Inc.—Incorporated.”
Spurley scribbles a note. “I feel like we’re getting to the meat and potatoes here, Bob.”
“You’re hungry?” asks Bob.
“The meat and potatoes. The meat and potatoes. You’re talking to me about your business.”
“It’s my business.”
“I understand you feel that way, Bob. But with this many complaints . . . do you know Helen Mayo—neighbor of yours?”
“I know the floor plan of her house, and that her fear of USOs18 had her flee a beach community in the sixties.”
“The floor plan of her house?”
“Yes. I take walks and have a talented ear.”
“Do you, Bob? A talented ear, huh?”
“Yes, I think so. I take walks, and on my walks I often pass her home. She has a yapping dog, you know. A Chihuahua. Over the years, I’ve been able to surmise a sense of stairwell connections to corridors connecting rooms front and others back. The measurements of floors to ceiling. The echoes of Chihuahua yaps bouncing off bathroom porcelain. All of these collected echo-placements and levels of sound draw pictures in my head.”
“Fascinating, Bob,” says Spurley.
“It’s just something I find I’m able to do.”
“That’s quite a gift, Bob.”
“Mmm,” mutters Bob.
“Mmm hmm,” mutters Spurley. “And what do you do with those images made from sound?”
“Just stuff I guess. It’s something I could do since I was a boy.”
“Ahh.”
Bob nods and gazes off as Spurley pauses unsurreptitiously scribbling a series of notes. In Bob, the lead on paper of Spurley’s pencil’s scratch stimulates extrastriate sub-cortex synergies in his mammalian brain. His auditory augmentation of reality systems renders words in the rear of his retina with visual vibrations. Scratch by scratch, letter by letter, word by word did Bob’s internal cinema display Spurley’s glib taunts of font:
C-l-a-i-m-s . . . o-t-h-e-r-w-o-r-l-d-l-y n-a-r-c-i-s-s-i-s-t-i-c s-k-i-l-l s-e-t-s. D-o-e-s t-h-i-s f-o-o-l r-e-a-l-l-y b-e-l-i-e-v-e C-h-i-h-u-a- h-u-a-s c-a-n b-a-r-k o-u-t t-h-e f-l-o-o-r p-l-a-n-s o-f h-o-u-s-e-s? D-o-e-s h-e r-e-a-l-l-y t-h-i-n-k h-e-’s f-o-o-l-i-n-g o-l’ S-p-u-r-l? I-S H-E T-R-Y-I-N-G T-O S-E-L-L M-E H-E-’S O-N T-H-E S-P-E-C-T-R-U-M?
Then Spurley speaks. “You know she watches your place quite a bit. She’s got you leaving at all kinds of funny hours and often for long periods of time.”
As lights rise and exit doors open, Bob’s cerebrum sacks its cinema an
d steps back into the world. “Did you say something?” he asks.
“I was asking about Helen Mayo’s observation that you’re often away from home for long periods of time.”
“Hmmm. Mayo . . . Spurley, my house needs airing out. Sometimes a place can get stale harboring the body of a man.”
“The body of a man, Bob? The body of a man? Now we’re cookin’.”
Spurley waits for Bob to break.
But Bob says calmly, “Yes, Spurley. The body of a man. Mine. Sometimes the house wants its space.” Spurley’s disappointment is evident.
After a deep breath he continues his questioning, “Maybe you keep a diary, Bob?”
Bob shakes his head.
“Maybe you keep one somewhere, huh, Bob?”
“Do you write nice things about people, Spurley? Or mean things?”
Spurley seems caught off guard by this question. As he appears to search for a sensible response, Bob interrupts his silence.
“I’m not having fun, Spurley. The house and I need a little space.”
Reluctantly, Spurley recognizes that he has pushed hard enough for one day.
“Understood, Bob. A man should never overstay his welcome.”
“Thank you, Spurley,” Bob says.
“You’re welcome, Bob. I’ll be checking back in with you.”
Spurley chugs his glass of water, leaving the cherry at the bottom.
“I’m gonna leave you the cherry, Bob. You might need it.”
Bob nods. Spurley goes out the door, peruses the Pontiac, and proceeds silently away in his Prius.
Bob’s cell phone suddenly sings out its ringtone.
Raindrops are falling on my head
And just like the guy whose feet are too big for his bed
Nothing seems to fit . . .
He pulls the phone from his back pocket and accepts the call. Three beeps from the other end. Bob responds, entering a three-digit code. Two beeps, followed by a secondary four-digit code. Onto his display: “Thousand Oaks Elderly Care Park, 205 Gallavant Road, Thousand Oaks 96789.”
Bob enters his garage, double-locks its doors from the inside, opens his safe, and removes the mallet from the water can, heavy with moisture. He towel-dries it, holsters it, closes the safe, and re-enters the house. He shits, showers, and shaves, puts on some khaki pants, a laundered shirt, and an old pair of Wallabees. When the Wallabee hits the Pontiac’s accelerator, the Pontiac set its course for the outer reach of Woodview’s extended megalopolis, Thousand Oaks.
* * *
In the common room of the Thousand Oaks Elderly Care Park, the Wonderful Wednesday Aerobics Club is being led by a five-foot-four, seventy-eight-year-old woman in a pink ballet tutu, dark green stockings, and runners. Bob has a clear bead on them from his shaded position under an oak parked between the golf course and the croquet lawn. It is common for Bob during the observation phase to muse on the company’s selection process. In this case, certainly aerobics may itself be a brand, and the tutu individualism of its instructor might as well associate her with said brand. But Bob has spent enough time, in fact, thousands of hours, studying animations of double-rod pendulums,19 and knows that in their aspiration to claim aerobic exercise, they are only cluttering the world further, with chaos physics.
This is the thing about brands and beauty. They cannot be randomly claimed. They demand continuous polish and they rest on a greedy system of valuation that provides those who pursue them a fraudulent sense of comfort. Out there in Thousand Oaks, if there was any pattern to the shared psychology of its residents, it was a random one, waged by an encouragement of their decrepit circulatory systems in an effort to prolong their own useless lives and comforts. Pathetic, Bob thinks. Holdouts to hedonistic procrastination. Awkward and inconvenient.
Red lipstick has no place in exercise. And two full feet above the waistline of the tutu, her crinkled lipsticked lips, her sun-spotted face, her over-joyously little twinkling eyes. He knows how she saw herself. A Pop Granny, he thinks. Have I got a pop for her.
When class breaks, Bob wheels the Pontiac away and finds a local market, where the purveyor makes sandwiches from day-old bread. He asks the bread be toasted, the bacon and lettuce both crisp, one slice of tomato, and plenty of mayo to nullify the tomato’s acidic effect.
Outside the market, Bob sits in a filtered luminescence reflected by the day-end’s fuchsian light as he watches the bloodred sunset from within the capsule of his Pontiac. He hoists himself into the back seat, then slivers into janitor’s overalls, the mallet holstered inside, beneath his armpit. When night falls, the Pontiac’s back door creaks open. Step-by-step he walks the quarter mile back to the elderly home. Along the way, he absentmindedly picks up discarded bottle caps, rolling them like raconteurs, figure flipping them through his fingers before sending them soaring with the nimble snap of his thumb. There are cigarette butts and burned-out blunts. The smoggy smell in the night air’s humidity. It brings him back to those trailer park days of Cowboy and Jemima, and the rollicking reminiscences of riding his red Schwinn after bombing the river. It is a happy feeling—nostalgic.
With the tutu on her nightstand, the aerobics instructor glosses her washed face with Nivea cream. Her failing eyes, unable to note the puddles of that white cream unabsorbed that remains hiding in the troughs and crinkles of sun- and age-ravaged skin. God’s portrait of entropy. She puts on her nightwear, gets into her little childlike bed, and sets off to sleep with dreams of Cuban bar boys.
The janitor pays a visit. POP! goes the weasel.
Returning to the Pontiac, Bob slides in a CD, and the mirror dice return wobbling toward Woodview, Phil Ochs’s voice sings,
“I am the masculine American man. I kill therefore I am.”
* * *
18 Unidentified Submerged Objects
19 a physical system exhibiting rich dynamic behavior and strong insensitivity to initial conditions
STATION SEVEN
SEXUAL DUNGEONS
“Blunt Force Trauma” headlines the newspaper as it slaps the stoop of Bob’s door in the morning. Bob wakes to the sound of its delivery’s clap, and before him, a booger flake flutters in her nostril like a hummingbird’s wing. The stink of her morning breath far too human, flawed, and plaque-ish. In the canine world, only small dogs can mimic such a monster. Small dogs, indeed, are capable of fishy breath. Not so, big dogs, who at their worst may expirate the yeasty odor of stale bread. They are predictable in that way. There is no tragic chaos to them. Bob is particularly moved by, and admiring of, wolves for their gait and monogamy. In his heart, he knows himself to be a hybrid. Not a “dawg,” but, yes a dog. A house pet with wolf blood. It takes a special bitch to elicit his commitment. He’d found and delivered his best to a few, most often to women of chub and red hair. He’s been bitten in the throat each time nonetheless and considers the word “bitch” too flattering for anything without canine creds. These he considers only as ugly, ungenerous souls.20 Women who operated in direct impingement,21 blasting out one’s best bullets, and expelling their casings to the curb. Powder-burned, hollowed, and primer struck. Provisions should be material. I am neither provision nor material, Bob thinks, and thinks back to the chubby fuckin’ redhead whose ghost still whorishly haunts his bed.
The booger continues its hummingbird-wing thing till Bob is nearly nauseated. Though he dreams assassination upon phrases like “me time” and “my truth,” Bob certainly feels no obligation to defile himself in conversation, or indulge continued study of a face only beautiful by the standard of mathematical symmetry. He silently extracts himself from the emotional isothermality of his bed and plods naked to the bathroom. There, sitting on the standard toilet, he lets his imagination drift in its discovery of ancient faces within the patterns of the marble wall. On any given day, perhaps based on the firing of synapses, or the level of reflected light, one could find an infinite materialization of faces in marble. Haunted faces, gargoyles, the wise and the soulful. Marble, like sediment
ary rock, holds greater truths than any man. And man, does Bob know it.
Before taking a morning walk, he makes a brief detour into his garage, where he recalibrates the Pontiac’s odometer less the mileage accumulated to/from Thousand Oaks, round-trip. Completing this task, he steps over the morning paper to take his daily constitutional. As his Wallabees meet the tarmac of Sweet Dog Lane, Bob’s sixth sense for amateur urban hides22 and the distinct bark of a Chihuahua draw his attention to the upstairs window of a neighbor’s home. There he detects Helen Mayo observing him from behind a blind in an upstairs window. He stops in his tracks and stares at the blind for one . . . then two . . . then three full minutes. Eventually the blind is pushed aside. Helen Mayo chooses to skirmish Bob in a stare-down. They glare at one another. He, because the sun bounce is glary. She, with suspicion and bitterness. Both of them oblivious to the sound of a helicopter falling in emergency reverse autorotation. Suddenly, the helicopter falls full force from the sky, crashing through Helen’s roof, obliterating Helen, and bursting into a frightful fireball. Her now-flaming Chihuahua named Nicky runs from the wreckage blind, ablaze, and barking throughout his meteoric dash across the street before crashing headfirst into the curb, where his incineration croaks, crisps, and collapses him curbside with the immediacy of a grand piano’s lid prop’s pull. No more barking. Bob considers his options. A futile rescue effort from a house fire fully involved? Or GET OFF THE X?23
When the fire department arrives, Bob watches from his stoop as aviation investigators tape off the scene around Helen’s house. Local police and media arrive. Even PETA volunteers show to collect the compact canine’s cadaver. Power hoses turn black smoke into white. And Spurley’s little Prius pulls up before Bob’s house. Spurley parks and approaches Bob.