by Chamber Four
I see this as level one on the grieving scale.
On day ten, I reach level two. Level two includes one drink and one TV news program per day.
On day fifteen, I reach level three. Level three includes two drinks, one TV news program, and one PG rated movie per day.
On day nineteen, I reach level four. Level four includes three drinks, three hours of TV, and light masturbation.
On day twenty-one, I discover a routine. Every morning I have a grilled cheese with Gewurztraminer. I broaden my horizons. I watch TV. People with mustaches appraise the Yankees’ underachieving bullpen. People with mustaches try to sell me a powerful rug cleaner. People with mustaches talk about extinction level meteors pulverizing the rings of Saturn. The rise in mustaches says something important about the inevitability of the universe’s collapse, I think.
“This is proof,” I say, smacking the top of the TV. “Proof that life is meaningless!”
At my kitchen table, I decide to leave civilization. But everything is harder now. People used to live in saloons in the Yukon and eat hard tack and marry sensible women named Clara. Now you lie in bed on Monday afternoon. You think about what heart disease will feel like while criticizing teen nurse porn.
* * * *
I have two dreams.
One is about a beaver that makes a cozy fire inside his dam. In the dream, the beaver sips expensive brandy by the fire and is happy about life in general. The other dream I have is about Wesley. He is outside my cabin door and asking me why I left him to die. I wake up feeling unsure about my decisions in life. I want to feel like the beaver. I want to tell the President how I feel, but the President is probably out on one of his midnight rounds of golf. I try to go back to sleep, but I can’t. I think about Wesley. One minute, eating lunch, the next, blood gushing from his bomb-eaten arm. I’ve eaten a thousand turkey sandwiches and I never got my arm blown off and died in the desert. If you think about your arm possibly getting blown off every time you eat a turkey sandwich you would get summarily fired, or divorced because no one would understand you and you would live under your bed fearfully eating turkey sandwiches, or under an old tree with some talking moles drinking sherry, or move to Islay or somewhere where turkey sandwiches haven’t been invented yet.
* * * *
One night when I was younger, the full moon was out and it made me feel sad and happy at the same time. It was big and white, but also sort of blue like a corpse. The moon is probably more powerful than we know, I thought. I probably thought this because I felt empty inside and was smoking cocaine. I wanted to make love under the volcanoes to German au pairs who would say things like, “Anflug das gemuts unt legen dein schneidel!”
* * * *
Every Christmas, I used to go to Wesley’s Christmas party at his parents apartment on Central Park West, and surrounded by the jet set and original Picassos and Dalis and waiters carrying silver trays piled high with mini-lamb chops and hot buttered rum in pewter mugs I would think it was possible, it was possible in my own future to live like this, to be easy going and to know what chartreuse means, and to say things like Cicero in the normal course of conversation. But then I would go to the bathroom. I would see an original Dali hanging over the toilet and I would feel sick because my toilet back home had some kind of stain running down the sides and an ironic beer calendar and maybe some kind of deodorizer that didn’t even work.
* * * *
Often, I walk to the fake castle in Central Park. Boulders and trees frost-covered. For dinner I mostly eat frozen pizza, but once a week, I copy a fancy recipe from the Sunday paper. I use cheaper, but similar ingredients to recreate it at home such as barley (instead of risotto) and melted mozzarella (instead of stravecchio) wrapped in steamed chard. With that I drink Jura, or pinot gris, or Polish vodka.
* * * *
December. I receive an invitation to Wesley’s parents’ annual Christmas party. “Come celebrate the holidays New Orleans style,” it says. At first, I don’t want to go. Then I decide I will go after all. To show solidarity in that I understand the level of pain Wesley’s parents are going through. Also I have a secret plan.
* * * *
Wesley’s parents have one of those elevators that open right into their apartment. I shake hands with Wesley’s parents and give them a bottle of Jura.
“There you are,” Wesley’s dad says, squeezing my hand tightly.
“How are you doing, dear?” Wesley’s mom asks.
“I’m ok, how are you?” I ask.
She sighs. “Oh, as good as can be expected.”
“I hope you like the wine,” I say.
“Thank you, Hector,” Wesley’s dad says, looking at the wine, but also not really looking at it. “I’m sure we will.”
I go across the foyer to a silver tray. On the silver tray are mint juleps in pewter tumblers. I take one of the mint juleps and walk over to the living room. There is a four-piece New Orleans band playing New Orleans-style music. I can see the jet set gathering by the big windows facing the park. They are talking in low voices, but I don’t pay attention to them. I go to the fireplace. On the mantle is a vase. The vase is filled with Wesley’s ashes. My plan is to steal the vase and take it to the castles of Islay where they belong.
“There’s something wrong with these mint juleps,” one of the jet set says.
“Yeah, too much mint,” another one says.
The New Orleans band plays another New Orleans-sounding song.
I look out the window. The buildings around the park are lit up. They make me feel like I’m in an old movie, or on some kind of movie set.
A waiter comes by. I take another mint julep.
Some investment bankers come over to where I am standing. One of them grins. He asks me if I want any blowcaine. I laugh inadvertently and say no as if I just had maybe too much blowcaine already.
“Good band,” one investment banker says.
“Cheesy outfits, though,” another one says.
There are four investment bankers now. One of them says something about Tuscany and laughs. I drink more of my new mint julep. I pretend to be looking at an original Dali over the fireplace. Another investment banker says he wants some blowcaine, but he can’t because their babysitter has to go home early.
“Is she hot?” one of the investment bankers asks.
“Who, the babysitter?”
“Yeah.”
“No, she’s a dog,” says the investment banker, laughing. “My wife hired her.”
Someone on the other side of the room signals that he wants to speak by clinking his glass. He is an investment banker, who owns a Gulfstream 4. He points at Wesley’s parents and thanks them for the party and saying how we all understand how hard it’s been the last few months. After that he talks about the boarding school they all went to and tells an anecdote about the black janitor they used to make fun of. He says the janitor’s name was Ralph. One of the investment bankers’ wives laughs inadvertently. An investment banker passes a baggie of blowcaine behind his back to another investment banker. No one talks about Tuscany for a few minutes.
“America is fucked,” says one of the investment bankers, who is suddenly standing next to me.
“It’s the new frontier for investment banking,” he says, not looking at me, but at the painting. “If I had to live in America my whole life I’d probably kill myself.” He gulps down his mint julep and grabs another from a passing waiter.
“Our time is over,” he continues. “It’s the Southeast Asians’ time now just like it used to be the Japs and the British and the Dutch. I don’t know who before that. Maybe the Vikings, or the Visigoths. It doesn’t matter now because you can’t get away with anything because America is fucked. The pioneering spirit is dead. Look around. People are bored like they’re going through the motions except maybe in times of national tragedies they are alive. We need more national tragedies. Tragedy is relative to the time you live in. Gettysburg makes 9/11 look like p
eople comparing the cleanliness of tap water to getting repeatedly stabbed in the face by your dead grandmother. Tragedy is what forces people to act human. You can see it on their faces. Overall people’s expectations have lowered. Why have people’s expectations lowered? The deterioration of the service industry for one, but that’s always the first to go. Ask anyone. Every morning our parents had milk delivered to their doorsteps. People pumped their gas while wearing uniforms and singing in unison. Does that mean we’re dying out as a culture? Probably. We cured polio. We can’t cure shit now. What I’m saying is this is a dying culture, but it’s probably not as bad as the French. The French are probably a lot worse. They’re irrelevant and secondly they smell. Who cares about wine and smoking at cafes? Nobody cares. Maybe a few people do, but they’re doing it ironically, or just pretending that they live in those times when those things meant something. My wife likes going to France for the holidays, but I don’t care. It’s a good country to play tennis in, but it’s a dead culture, like Italy or maybe Norway. I went fly-fishing in Norway once, but everyone looked depressed like they knew their time had passed. The whores I fucked were depressed and reluctant to think about the future. Do you know what I’m saying? We need to stop institutions from becoming fake ideas about life that are somehow widely accepted as true. People are dying as we speak. There’s only one time a century to be in the right place where things are going on and people are alive and that place right now is Southeast Asia. I don’t know. People that live here are idiots. I have a mansion picked out in Singapore with servants and a pool and satellite TV. I guess most people aren’t as adventurous as they think they are. Most investment bankers are pretty adventurous, though. Plus, we work our tits off. That’s why I like it.” He pauses to drink more mint julep. “By the way, you try any of that blowcaine?”
Another investment banker comes up to us. He puts his arm around the other investment banker.
“We’re going to that bar underneath the highway,” says the newly arrived investment banker.
As everyone goes to the foyer to say goodbye I take the vase off the mantle. I put it inside my coat and walk to the foyer. I try not to look at Wesley’s parents, but out of the corner of my eye, I can see Wesley’s dad looking at my jacket because it’s bulging.
“Goodbye,” says Wesley’s mom.
“What’s that in your jacket?” says Wesley’s dad, not sure whether to smile or be concerned.
“Nothing,” I say.
Wesley’s dad reaches his hand towards my jacket. “But there’s ... well, there’s something right here.”
I see the elevator closing so I jump into the elevator with two investment bankers about to do blowcaine. I can hear raised voices on the other side of the elevator.
“Why are they yelling?” one of the investment bankers asks.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“It sounds like they said stop,” the other investment banker says.
“I don’t think so,” I say.
“Weird,” the first investment banker says.
“Are you coming to the bar?” the other investment banker asks.
“Probably,” I say.
“Cool.”
The investment bankers do some blowcaine off their pinky nails while I think about the emerald pastures of Islay. We wait for the elevator to go “bing.”
Black Night Ranch
by Roy Giles
from Eclectica Magazine
“Sheep are born to die,” James Carl said, pointing his syringe at Billy. “They think that’s their purpose. We want their wool. They want to die. The trick is to make the stupid son-of-a-bitches think you want them dead.” He vaccinated with authority, tossing sheep aside like wool blankets when he finished with each one.
“They’ll spite you that way and live. Don’t baby them. Make them think you’re stabbing them to death.”
James Carl and Billy had hanging around their necks clear bags of sheep dope with long rubber hoses attached to needles big as framing nails. The sheep were packed tight into the twenty-foot pen, squirming and crawling over one another like maggots. Every time James Carl tossed one, the whole bunch erupted into isolated geysers of sheep. Billy kept losing his balance in the melee, exasperating the beasts. It was the uncertainty of it. Falling. They couldn’t stand it. An old ewe leapt at Billy’s head, dragging the needle in his hand with her. The chisel end of the needle carved a deep line in Billy’s cheek. The ewe’s front hooves clawed his back as she made her way over.
“Fucking sheep!”
“Don’t baby them,” James Carl said, tossing two animals at once. He was in a hurry. A group of Mexican shearers were due at his ranch by noon, and he wanted to be ready for them.
Billy had been looking forward to the shearing ever since waking up. All through breakfast James Carl had talked about it. He said they could shear a sheep in less than two minutes, and if they brought the young one called Miguel with them, then Billy would really get to see fast.
“And quit that cussing. Your parents didn’t let you, and I ain’t either,” James Carl said.
Billy climbed out of the pen.
“Where you going? I see three unmarked backs.”
Though it was more of a bad scratch than a cut, Billy touched a finger to his cheek and tongued it from the inside. He didn’t know much about sheep. Before Bird Creek Bridge gave way three months earlier, taking Billy’s parents forever with it, his family had run a few cows, but never sheep. He’d gotten the job and moved in with his father’s old friend, James Carl, mostly because the rancher was lonely, but the official reason was that Billy knew Spanish. Or rather, he was supposed to know Spanish. James Carl owned the only sheep ranch in Hughes County, Oklahoma, and every spring he hired Mexicans out of South Texas to shear his flock. Lonely as he’d been the ten years since his wife left, he frustrated himself into great depressions when he couldn’t communicate with the only company he ever had. He’d said that very thing to Billy the day of the funeral. Billy’s dad, who’d been proud of how well Billy did in school, had bragged about his son being so smart in one language that he took up another one. That had impressed James Carl. But while Billy recognized words when he saw them on paper, and he did well in class, in truth he understood little spoken Spanish. Nonetheless, he was fresh out of high school and fresh out of parents, and James Carl took him in.
“Don’t worry about the cut. Them’s antibiotics,” James Carl said. He caught up with the last three sheep and had them stuck and marked before Billy could get back across the fence. “Just get the gate.”
James Carl was a big man. Notoriously big. He was so big that when people saw him for the first time, they’d say out loud, “Goddamn, that is a big man.” When he walked his steps were so far apart his gait looked like slow motion to Billy. His fists were as wide as Billy’s head, and he could lift four sheep at once when their wool was thick. And since Dog, the only sheep dog on the Black Night Ranch, couldn’t herd, protect, or do anything else that a sheep dog was supposed to do, that’s how they often had to move them. By hand, five at a time. Billy’s one to James Carl’s four. It took a long time to move the animals like that, but usually, even if Dog was around, he spent more time scattering the sheep than anything else. Billy wasn’t crazy about Dog. Sometimes when James Carl left the front door of the house open, Dog nosed his way into bed with Billy. Billy slept heavy and never noticed until he either woke up with the mutt or else itching from the dirty black hairs, cockleburs, or ticks the animal left behind. Even thinking of Dog made Billy itchy.
Billy opened the gate at the end of the pen furthest from James Carl. To the sheep the opening must have looked like an entrance to hell because the front lines facing the gate were impenetrable. They weren’t going. James Carl kicked and pushed from his end, but the gray mass absorbed him like a pond takes a pebble. Finally, letting out a series of spooky high-pitched yelps, the big man grabbed a lamb and threw him over the top of the horde. It was a half-eared
lamb they called Sonny, who had only been on the ground a little over a month.
James Carl, who called every dog he ever owned Dog, named all his sheep. Few had simple names like Sonny did. Most were called things like That Bitch Ewe Who Almost Killed Me, The Lamb Who Got Tangled in the Fence That Time, or Billy’s favorite, The Ram with One Nut. Sonny was named after James Carl’s father, Sonny, who, a few years before he died, had gotten half an ear kicked off by an emu. Sonny landed beyond the open gate and ran. The rest of the sheep, looking at one another for reassurance and apparently not finding it, dug in after him, emptying the pen into the pasture where the rest waited to be sheared.
After rounding up all but a few dozen stragglers hiding somewhere on the rancher’s three-thousand acres, they were ready for the Mexicans. James Carl told Billy to start plowing the upper three-hundred and twenty acres, the 320 for short, and that he would call him when their company arrived.
Billy had barely climbed in the Big R Versatile tractor when he spotted six or seven wild dogs working the tree line to the north. They were a long way away, but he knew they were dogs. They don’t hunch up all timid-like and prance the way coyotes do. Dogs are worse than coyotes. Braver. Smarter, too, which made them bad news for sheep. These looked especially menacing to Billy the way they slithered in and out of the timber like a snake. About a thousand yards east and upwind of the dogs were a group of thirteen sheep, five ewes and their lambs.
Billy picked up the CB handset and radioed back to James Carl, who was supposed to be preparing a barbecue pit by the shearing barn.
“Found the stragglers. We got dogs on them,” Billy said, but he realized that from where the shearing barn was he was right in the line of fire. In a hurry he added, “The dogs are behind me.” He made a hard right turn so the dogs would progress past him.
Five minutes after radioing and hearing no response from James Carl, Billy saw a ewe go down. She kicked her back legs high in the air before falling. Over the noise of the tractor, he hadn’t heard the rifle report, but he’d often seen deer kick the same way. It meant the ewe was likely heart-shot. It also meant James Carl mistook his sheep for dogs. While Billy fumbled for the CB, he saw another ewe collapse, and he dropped the handset. A lamb then spun to the ground. The dogs were about two-hundred yards from the sheep when the lead dog broke and ran for them, the rest of the pack following. The sheep stood looking in the wrong direction until Billy honked his horn. As the sheep turned toward the tractor, they caught sight of the dogs and fled into the timber out of Billy’s sight. When the dogs were nearly at the spot where the sheep disappeared, the sheep re-emerged and ran straight at the dogs. All but one.