The Unwelcome Guest Plus Nin and Nan

by Eckhard Gerdes

  Mark her. She’s got the ball now. Intercept it when she tries to pass.

  Scootch in between the smooch? Sorry—we may be having problems, but we’re still together. You’d better keep away, or your fingers will get burned, even on the moon. Get in the way, I’ll push you aside. Sorry. I’m okay now. All is well in paradise.

  Other pressing issues abound.

  The fish tank is filled with shrimp. One fish is jealous of them. The other systematically spits them out of the tank. The apartment is hot. The box fans are no better than the oscillating ones. A/C? Don’t make me laugh. In those days I was lucky to have shoes.

  When I walk barefoot through the apartment, shrimp squish between my toes. The smell is a little strong, but I just smoked more to cover it and went about my business as if nothing were wrong. I figured I could psych out the fish this way so that they’d stop spitting. That didn’t work.

  I’m losing tenseness.

  No one really believes this is happening now, does hir?

  We’re afraid to go outside. Strangers are out there. They could fuck us over. So we figure out how to fuck ’em over first.

  Put ’em on a starship blaster space, flang ’em toward the straysystem out alone on the edge of time: blast ’em through onto an exploding A. They grab at the cross-bar. Hold on. Implosion follows explosion. Come back out looking at the poster on the wall.

  Yeah, I remember all that. City-dwelling at its alonest. Very educational, though.

  Oh, the B is ’bout to go. Hold on. Oh, well. Still 24 left. The knocking on my door is getting to me. C just went. Now D. Everything’s still fine. From now it’s not. Go E. Go F. Go G. How will I try to...

  III. Something New

  She’s sleeping next to me in bed. She’s going to wake up worrying that she disappointed me by just going to sleep. She hasn’t. Just being next to her is a privilege.

  I’ll be your reptile tonight

  while we freeze the food.

  I’m not dressing for the fashion show.

  The red queen points at me

  and yells, "Off with his head!" Decapitated, I have only moments to defend myself against lies, before my body collapses

  on the killing floor and spasms. I voice the word, "I,"

  and realize I sound pathetic, selfish, solipsistic, narcissistic. "Am" next, sounding Cartesian, pseudointellectual, unemotional, cold, uncaring, doubting.

  I could stop there, but I

  continue into futility, breathing a final tri-syllabic death-rattle: "innocent." By then, all have gone. No one hears the last word.

  I can’t move. I’m in Earth-sha. This telepathic message will be years old before you hear it. Do not respond. I will be gone. I need to warn you. You are in danger. Don’t look behind yourself. You don’t have time. Here—this way. Maybe I can help this way. But whatever you do, don’t come looking for me. You will not be welcomed. Just listen. I’m no threat. I can’t move. I am not asking for help. I am not asking you to cure my immobility. My immobility is necessary. Forget about me, but hear me out. You also have the mark of being in Earth-sha. You are being sedentary right now.

  A watched pot never grows. It’s paint-by-numbers in book form: conventional fiction. Vines are lazy plants.

  Touchdown. Extra point. Kick off. Fumble. Touchdown. Extra point. Kick off. Fumble. That’s the way to win 222-0. The dog’s off chasing rabbits. Its barking awakens her. The furniture goes in the garbage. The bag of garbage

  goes in the truck: I still have to sort through that garbage.

  Orange juice without breakfast is like sunshine without a day. Marketeers ripped our flesh. Yeah—we’ll share time with you in hell before we buy your time share. Model airplanes were kamikaziing into alligators. Salesmen using submission holds on the elderly and on foreigners; charlatans whipping children with the children’s own eyebrows; sexist suits making jokes about menses and Mensa: you should be ashamed of the predatory nature of your occupation!

  We withstood the attack. Blackened grouper helped. We held each other.

  Now, she is sleeping next to me in bed. Beautiful, peaceful. I wish for her an easy day tomorrow.

  We are in our state room cabin now. I hear her breathing as I write. I think that her breaths are mine also. Without her breath, I could not breathe. Without her smile, I have no interest in smiling. Without her touch, nothing touches me.

  Seven-foot swells keep me on my back for some two or three hours. Nausea threatens my filet mignon dinner and my rum punch happy hour cocktails. This ship holds thousands of twisted tourists—I would never have thought it small enough to be batted about so easily by waves and wind.

  This is the worst nausea I’ve felt since before my marriage. A long time ago, I darted a fertilizer saleswoman. If ever a profession was a metaphor for a life, hers was.

  The nausea was as bad as that disgust I felt at the Peanut-Brained Writing Awards Ceremony, where the category winners comprised former judges, employees and even chefs working inside the organization—the most obvious award-fixing since Charles You-Know-Who’s resignation from the National Book Award committee was rewarded with the award itself. Or the university writing department that groomed student stories for the state’s largest daily newspaper’s annual creative writing contest, which was "coincidentally" judged by the same faculty. What a surprise that only that university’s students ever won the awards. The general public had no chance. Thus in my writing the via college gave way to the via collage.

  The nausea reminded me of sitting in the back seat of my parents’ station wagon as my father sped along twisted mountain roads when we visited our vacation home, an Aframe near Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Blackie, our German shepherd, locked in a cage in the back, lying atop a pile of old burlap potato sacks, competed with me to see who would hurl first.

  Javelins fly over bridges; shots are put into arms; discs are slipped through bars; pies are chipped onto farms.

  In Earth-sha we all smoke. It drains our energy so that we sit still and notice before acting. Of course, normally we fall asleep before we do anything. Smoking is isolating: the individual can maintain her or his distance by putting up a wall of smoke. Of course, even where you are, one could find people holding smoking up as a defense against normalization. The more it is outlawed, the greater its appeal. That is why the tobacco companies are funding the anti-tobacco advertising. It’s like that here, too.

  Let’s put our differences aside for the Olympics.

  The Mexicans won the jumping bean contest. The Peruvians fared poorly. Or course, they were using Lima beans.

  I can’t wait to see the swimmers submerged in Greece.

  The Central Asian middleweight boxers were impressive. Uzbekhistan, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan were represented well.

  I had pork chops for dinner. Martina Navratilova is playing doubles for the US versus the Ukraine. That’s lady’s an amazing tennis player. A southpaw. The court has "windy conditions"? It looks indoor, but can’t be.

  The world is becoming uncultured, but that’s what it wants—not for the Olympics, but for the lack of equal celebration for the arts down to equal subcategories equivalent to synchronized diving. Experimental fiction would contain dozens of subcategories. Ah, pipe dreams, as O’Neill would say.

  Our world is aggressively shedding its mantel of art. Or is America alone in this as well? Should it hang its head and look aside while its artists are silenced? The marketplace silences them. Commodification silences them. Competition silences them.

  We’re not writing for baubles or trinkets, are we? Respectability means something. No?

  We’re not a carny sideshow of solipsists on ice. And we’re not all heathens.

  We’re civilized and shovelized and randomized until the order looks like chaos.

  We’re winterized and Simonized and Martinized until we’re purple.

  We’re Dewey-decimated, baseball-captivated, digitally calibrated poor s.o.b.’s who despise forming plurals with apostrophes.

/>   I’m tired of bringing English to the nonbelievers. I am working out here on the backwoods mission, Green Acres Community College, and am forced into reading yet another batch of freshman composition essays. We English teachers must, on a very deep level, be coprophiliacs. Why else would we subject ourselves to such misery?

  They stare at me with stupid bovine faces and tell me that they just hate English.

  I tell them to learn another damn language, then. French is easier—only a tenth of the vocabulary. Spanish is pretty easy, I’ve heard. If they don’t want to learn their mother tongue, they have plenty of other languages to choose from.

  But instead of giving up, like a carpenter who only knows how to use a hammer, they give me their "in today’s society" and their "needless to say" and their lame "in conclusion" and stupefy me—they bash in my brains with their misplaced modifiers, random punctuation, and ignorant disagreements.

  I’ve been dreaming about another school—a huge urban research university, with buildings the size of cathedrals and castles. I am called to the central cathedral for faculty orientation. The cathedral has dozens of entrances and exits that lead to stairwells and passageways that criss cross like in some MC Escher drawing. People are filing in from all of them. We assemble haphazardly, still milling and babbling, and are told where our classes are and when. My first class is to meet in a half hour. I have never heard of the building I am to teach in. I head towards a stairwell and walk down it to an exit, open the large exterior door, only to discover a narrow field that stretches off to the left. People are filing that way, but a few hundred yards down, marauders appear out of the woods and begin slaughtering everyone. I escape back into the building and try to find another exit. Instead, I am back in the cathedral. I see a colleague I recognize from last year, which had been my first. He begins heading down another stairwell. I ask him if that’s the way out. He says that he’s convinced that each leads down into some sublevel of one’s own consciousness. He’s gone. I return to the cathedral to get my bearings, but then decide to follow him. When I retrace my steps, I find that the one stairwell is now four. I descend one, but end up at a train station. I get on the train, thinking that at least once I get downtown, I’ll be able to get my bearings. The train descends, and its tracks lead us over and along a slime-green river. We descend into the river, and I realize I am not on a train anymore. I hear a voice saying that that had been a difficult shot to get—that he’d had to suspend the camera from a helicopter by wires and then lower it into the river as it was moving. The view comes up out of the river, and I am deposited in the shopping district. Here I find the underground mall, which leads me to an exit near the school. I need to climb up terraced slumyards unnoticed to approach one of the school’s peripheral buildings, which happens to be the faculty dorm to which I’ve been assigned. My colleagues are inside smoking and eating silver hot dogs. One, an older man, is surprised to see me. "Aren’t you supposed to be teaching tonight?" he asks.

  I am decommissioned now.

  Worms of Wisdom

  Edwin Lubjec Thoth reported my existence as a government operative to the school newspaper, a psilocybin-run experiment called My Colle’ Tree. Being whacked-out kids, they bought the conspiracy theory wholesale. I quickly fabricated a family emergency and resigned.

  The G-men said, "Move away from there." They said, "California is the place you ought to be, so load up your truck and move to Menifee." They figured Thoth’s arms didn’t reach this far west. Just to be safe, though, they kept me far away from L.A. and San Diego. I was moved into a new subdivision in what once had been wine country. Of course, with me there, it was still wine country, but that’s irrelevant.

  I was given a Stewart tartan tie, but I wasn’t sure if I should tie it in a Windsor knot or not, and the only knot I know is the double Windsor, so I was dubiously dumbfounded.

  Thoth, I was told, tied his in a Gordian knot, which was a clue that would allow me to see through his Protean projections.

  The question was raised by some asking whether or not Thoth was the Projectionist. No, the reply came—he was merely a projectionist. However, from what I was told, I surmised that tangelo was one of his preferred colors for his ties. I knew what to look for, but I wasn’t sure whom to trust. I wasn’t sure how Lubjec had escaped the police shooting that had allegedly killed him. Perhaps he’d gone on some Möbius trip and survived his sundering by becoming twice as large. Of course, if he’d become stronger in some ways, he must have correspondingly become weaker in others. I had to find those weaknesses.

  Thoth had a habit of showing up where I’d least suspect him, so I decided to "cut him off at the pass," as they say in Westerns. I decided to first look where I’d least suspect. Remembering Poe’s "Purloined Letter," I decided I should first look in my home.

  I found crumbs on my kitchen counter. The shoes in my closet were mismatched. One of my t-shirts was hung up inside out. I couldn’t find my paperback atlas of the world. And a match was missing from the matchbook in my bathroom cabinet drawer. I became suspicious that Thoth was somehow coming into my home when I was asleep or gone, so I changed my locks.

  I had heard from an investigator once that he’d remembered that Thoth was in Mansfield Penitentiary. "You can get ahead at the Mansfield Pen," he said. "A decapitated head."

  I wondered if that was how Thoth had escaped. Like the obscure version of Captain Marvel, he’d just say, "Split!" and his body would separate into five parts: limbs, head and torso. Each could find its own way out of the pen. Like Cistern Tawdry. Like a rolling stone. Like effluvium. Like a siamang. Like bebeeru. Daffy Dean. Matt Helm. And Bozo. Dig it. No weed like you do with angels coming. Your finer self is full of crap, and Mothra comes to exterminate you, grubs spraying, worms of wisdom—shut up, you! Shut up, you! Shut up, you! Shut up, you! Shut up, you! Grubs spraying, worms of wisdom. Shut up, you! They were just crumbs in my kitchen, crumbs in my kitchen. Open my vein! I’ll bet you’ll think I’m betting against you. Won’t you? Won’t you? Mothra went up to the Mansfield Pen to see the total éclair of the shunned. I had whipped cream for their coffee, but they were just crumbs in my kitchen, crumbs in my kitchen.

  "All right! Out, you crumbs! You heard the lady! And Mothra, don’t forget this grub of yours. Where’s the other one? Hey, anyone? Has anyone seen Mothra’s other grub? Ah—there it is, snackin’ off the kitchen floor. No surprise there—there’s a week’s worth of food spilled all over the floor. It cost over a thousand bucks. Why should mere mortals consume it? Oh, no—let’s give the good stuff to the grubs!"

  Like the leeches in the hospital whom we feed precious human blood all in the name of the reduction of swelling, we don’t care about the reduction of swelling. We just want to feed the leeches. I found that out as a young orderly. I had no where to go—I was homeless, but the hospital staff did not know that, so I would find odd rooms to hide in and sleep or shower in when I was off duty. I was able to find a forgotten engineering room behind a false wall. I brought a perfectly okay TV up from the repair shop and was able to stay there undetected for a long time. During that time, on a nocturnal scouting mission, I found the leeches. They looked like they’d been placed in tanks with amputated limbs and freshly removed internal organs. I would have done more to investigate, but that night a medical delivery came to the hospital—an enormous truckload of drugs and supplies. An intern went from department to department, cleaned out all the tills, and paid the trucker for the delivery. Cash. Almost a quarter of a million dollars. Can you believe that? So the clamps came down. Security swarmed the building and found my nook but never connected me to it. But I could no longer sleep there, so I also lost interest in working there. I just stopped showing up. I knew of easier places to live.

  The library, for example. Except my son could be a problem. One time I was in a hurry to get to the main floor and leave, so I took escalator after escalator from the living quarters on the top floors past the restaurants and stores on the middle floors to
the second floor exit in the library, which one would walk through to get to the final escalator down to the street. My son, by going slow, got lost behind me twice. The second time, I went back to look for him, without success. He could have been outside alone for an hour and I wouldn’t have noticed. I’m not always observant when I’m in a hurry. He finally came back, but I was scared. So scared that I had to find a secluded spot in the upper floors of the library to have a beer to calm myself. No sooner had I found that spot, in a corner of never-read antiquarian phonetic texts, then someone remarked, "Look! They’re fighting!" and pushed past me to look out the window in that corner. On the adjacent rooftop, a couple of stories below, five or six women were arguing. One, with enormous sores on her face, yelled at another about "stealing" her "man." The yelled-at one was the flabbiest of the women and reached over one of her two defenders, who were also yelling, and landed a fist in the face of the one with sores, who dropped to the roof tar like a bundle of shingles. A crowd had gathered by the window. I wouldn’t be able to drink my beer there. Damn! Come on, I said to my son, and we went to the literary criticism collections to see if I could drink my beer unnoticed there.

  Then I wondered if Thoth might not be that shared man the women were arguing over. I smiled. That’d mean that he was diseased and dying already. That he had a penchant for gummatous women was interesting. A weakness I could maybe exploit sometime.

  Driving down the street, I saw his name on a marquee: "Lubjec Live!" He was singing pop songs and playing guitar in a seedy redneck bar in Macon, Georgia. He covered his balding head with an oil-stained seed company baseball cap, wore rubber flipflops, and stomped his flipflops as he sang lovely country and pop standards like "Either a Redneck or a Deadneck," "I’ll Push you Down into Low Places," "Oh Why Oh Why Ohio?" and the sure-to-get-’em hootin’ crowdpleaser "My Baby’s Been Knocked Up, So I’m Gonna Steal Me 800 Bucks."