by David Nutt
“I thought I heard the mailman screaming for help,” Shaker says.
With his pajama strings clutched in a fist, he shoots back up the stairs.
*
The backyard, at least, offers a small oasis of calm. She looks pensive beside the bonfire, her head tilted, the smoke draining up to the night sky. She holds a garden trowel and stabs the air without rhythm. If there is some secret cadence hidden inside the bonfire’s crackles and sizzles and snaps, Shaker cannot hear it. Inside the burning barrel are unspooled reels, tapes, vivisectioned instruments, amplifier parts. All of it crumpled and wilting under the expanding flames. A lone tentacle, black-charred, hangs over the side in a half-swoop. Shaker steps back and fans the smoke fumes from his face, tuning into the monologue already in progress.
“Everyone laughs at her now. Once she started making songs with animal sounds, air raid sirens, Cuisinarts. Once she started hiring body doubles to make unsanctioned appearances at children’s birthday parties and wedding anniversaries and job fairs, a hundred pale imitations of her haunting public spaces and city parks. Everyone is so bloody literal these days. No imagination, no gusto or verve. Humans are conditions. They molt like conditions. Transmogrify. How else to capture the whole burly tantrum of existence?”
Shaker shrugs.
“You pretend not to care,” she tells him.
“Doesn’t interest me.”
“Liar.”
“That doesn’t interest me, either,” Shaker says.
“You look back, you dwell. You’re just as much a stooge for nostalgia as everyone else. The problem with most people is they can’t bear the bizarre and new, and they can’t bear the final pangs of anything. So nostalgia is that sweet spot, a way of hiding in the cozy past. An eternal return.”
“You’re really not gonna use any of this junk? Because if you’re not—”
“She’s becoming more obscure, more of a joke, a ghost of a ghost.” The woman drops the trowel into the fire, removes the goggles, and stares egg-eyed at Shaker. “She is becoming more and more like me.”
“You’re missing the appendectomy scar,” he says. “The chicken pox blemishes. A bong burn on her inner thigh.”
“Superficialities. She and I are standing on opposite sides of the same void. She moved forward into noise, strangeness, the future, the unknown? I’m retreating backwards into the long, gray dark of history, where nostalgia can’t reach. And maybe we’ll meet somewhere in the middle.”
Shaker has so far successfully avoided rubbernecking at her nudeness. But as she narrows her eyes on him, he looks away, looks down, sees the flesh, and settles upon it. He ogles until his vision burns against the smoke.
“It’s only sausage casing,” she says. “No different than yours, hers, anyone’s.”
Shaker sleeves the sweat from his forehead, the heat on his face, the tingles of hellfire under and outside and within.
“You’d like to devour me right here,” she says. “Lay me down and ball me in the twilight of our pot greenhouse. Or maybe ravish me in the backseat of that hideous SUV atop Royce’s hemorrhoid cushion. Is that it? Is that all? Some lame bourgeois sex fantasy from the softcore channel?”
“There’s a whole channel for that?”
“Fantasies are just nightmares that have yet to curdle.”
“I need…ice,” he stutters. “Frozen ice.”
“How many times?”
“Wha?”
“Before the fantasy gets dull, disappears. How long until we wear the whole lust out? Stop counting on your fingers!”
Shaker makes an arrogant scoffing sound, then tries to inconspicuously hide the hand behind his back. She steps closer, still engrossed.
“But a thing that never happens? That not-happening is forever,” she says, dropping her goggles in the fire. “You can’t kill that. It never dies. Isn’t that beautiful?”
“It already happened. The garters, the couch.”
“I remember no such thing,” she replies. “I am a happily married woman who respects the sanctity of her marriage bed and has hydrochloric acid oozing from her slot.”
Shaker returns his concentration to the pyre, the magnetic tape and instrument pieces and strings twisting up in the blaze, like flora in time-lapse photography, a rapid magic. It makes him breathless with exhilaration and dread as all that viney material blackens and shrinks and is gone.
*
The vantage is not great. Shaker was able to glean more information from the morning newspaper, a front-page article that detailed a local father’s struggle to redeem his dead son’s reputation with a little-understood art project and the corporate sponsorship that is aiding his cause. Mother Clucker’s Fried Chicken & Sandwich Takeout is collecting donated cat food cans from three separate counties. There are daily autograph hounds, an audience of spectators. A TV truck parked behind the dome has sprouted an impressive assortment of radar dishes like fungi. From where he is crouched in a ditch across the road, Shaker cannot decipher the restaurant banner sagging like an empty turtleneck between fence posts. He inches forward, but an overcrowded sedan has slowed on the road. They honk their horn until Darb pauses his welding and gives them a distracted wave. The car drives off. Darb, way up in the sky and precariously tottering on his forty-foot stepladder, shakes his head with annoyance and re-lights his torch.
15.
The Howitzer positions himself a polite distance upwind, arms folded, face blank, tipping the tremendous architecture of his bald head. This seems an endorsement of sorts, although Shaker isn’t reassured. Behind the men, Royce has his nose dappled with lotion like a beach lifeguard while he gets sunbaked into his chair. The Howitzer shifts his gaze from monument to invalid to monument again. Shaker does not seem to factor much into the panorama. He has measured the monument at thirty-three feet, although that number doesn’t account for wind erosion or the temperature swells and shrinkage that are beyond Shaker’s management. Thirty-three feet: one for every year of Christ’s life. That detail feels significant, even to a godless trash-hugger like Shaker. He knows how easily it could happen. Hammering in the dark one night, a quick sneeze, a missed swing, the nail driven through his palm. Shaker isn’t sure what’s more appalling, the pretention of self-crucifixion or the homeless men poaching his shoes. The homeless men are scarce today. Shaker sidles up against the Howitzer, trying to hold himself in league, smelling only his own mildew, none from the trash.
“Apples to oranges,” the Howitzer says.
“The Patriot-Tribune told me they’d send a reporter over. That was a week ago. Then today, they put another picture of him on the front page. Some yokel wrote a letter to the editor suggesting they enter the damn thing into the National Register of Historic Places. Declare it a landmark. An art critic from Toledo said it looks like an explosion of flamingo legs in a lawn ornament factory. That was a compliment. I’m nowhere near finished, and he’s just tinkering for kicks. I fear I’m being routed.”
“Who’s the vegetable?”
“My lucky rabbit’s foot, Royce.”
“I think Royce is getting too much sun.”
“He’s from California. They all look summer-stunned on the western coast. I had some patio umbrellas for him, but I had to repurpose them.”
“Shaker,” says the Howitzer, “I don’t know what I’m doing out here.”
“Me neither,” Shaker replies, resting a foot on Royce’s wicker chair. “I’m being routed, aren’t I?”
“Yes,” the Howitzer says.
“It’s a round world. People like round things.”
“And they don’t like traipsing around garbage dumps, either.”
“An oversight,” Shaker agrees.
“Plus, he’s got the better arc. Failure, exile, redemption. Total package.”
“You see yesterday’s editorial?”
“Stop reading the newspaper, Shaker.”
“There’s talk of a ribbon-cutting ceremony, a posthumous pardon.” Shaker shakes his he
ad.
“The one thing that baffles me,” the Howitzer says, “is why he painted the whole thing pink. Crazy fucker.”
“The pardon part I’m okay with.”
“Sure.”
“I’m being routed to hell.”
“What I see is an issue of stability.”
Shaker points to the top of the monument, far up there, thirty-three feet of wavering stack. “It used to have a topper.”
“Not what I mean.”
“I know what you mean,” Shaker mutters.
“The people I sometimes work for. My odd soldier-of-fortune jobs. They have not forgotten you.”
Shaker cracks a knuckle. “Tell them I already got someone busting apart my kitchen. Although I guess it’s not my kitchen.”
“The Tullys owe them, too. It’s all one big shadiness.”
“Guessing these people also got you for some pointless debt.”
The Howitzer is absently fingering the lanyard of keys around his stallion neck and is about to speak when Shaker cuts him off:
“The explosion at his house. Maybe it wasn’t a freak accident. Maybe the blowfish lab didn’t blow up. Maybe it was arson. An insurance scam. Maybe he just wanted some sympathy, some attention.”
“You think your cousin exploded his own house on purpose, killed his own boy.”
“Some people can’t help themselves,” Shaker replies. “They find a decent thing to love and it loves them back, and they aren’t satisfied until they scuttle it.”
The Howitzer has approached the monument and pried free a small piece. He holds it up and hikes an eyebrow. An empty can of spray paint. Flamingo pink. Shaker’s face burns a similar hot shade, and he tries to look away.
The Howitzer takes him gently by the chin and trains Shaker’s head on the peak of the monument, the middle, the base.
“Bulldoze it,” says the Howitzer.
Then, just as gently, he releases Shaker and turns his attentions to Royce, reapplying the suntan lotion in even streaks until the cream is invisible and Royce’s face is a cheerful, gleaming slice of gray meat.
“Let’s go for a drive,” the Howitzer says.
*
The truck cab is at capacity. Shaker had earlier filled the backseat with a trove of malevolent tools—hacksaws, chainsaws, table saws, etc.—that he now refuses to explain or condone. Instead, he rides shotgun, ruefully watching the rearview. Royce is secured on the truck bed with forty feet of bungee and two rolls of gaffer tape, solidly affixed, and still the Howitzer insists on driving half the speed limit. Royce seems enthralled with his roofless journey. His tastefully manicured haircut explodes in a frizzy corona. A nascent sunburn is starting to pinken his cheeks. The Howitzer drives so slow their twenty-mile trek across town takes more than an hour to complete.
They eventually arrive at an old garbage dump that has not seen consistent use in years, maybe decades.
“I had no idea this place existed,” Shaker says.
“You sure about that, chief?”
Shaker makes a noncommittal throat noise. He fusses with a broken latch on the glovebox, not removing his seatbelt yet.
“Should we, uh, untape and unbungee our human payload?” he asks.
“Don’t worry about Mr. Royce,” the Howitzer replies, reaching over and unbuckling Shaker’s seatbelt for him. “This won’t take long.”
They step out of the truck and stride up and over the first hill, and that’s when Shaker sees them, all of them.
“Oh, come on,” he mumbles.
Before him is a wide, gray field full of half-built trash stumps, several dozen, all moldering and atilt, long abandoned. Shaker cautiously descends the slope and tiptoes among the rows. He studies and prods with a gnarled TV aerial he has found on the ground. The Howitzer follows behind him, mirthlessly sucking a lollipop. He stops when Shaker stops. He sighs when Shaker sighs.
The tallest stump barely reaches Shaker’s chest, and he stabs it with the aerial repeatedly, unproductively.
“You don’t remember building them, do you.”
Shaker shakes his head, too dumbstruck to speak.
“Two or three years ago,” the Howitzer says. “It was quite the crime spree. You ransacked people’s cars, stole their furniture, knocked parts off their houses. I guess the regular garbage here wasn’t good enough material. Sound familiar?”
“None of it.”
“Now do you understand why so many folks in our lovely community loathe you? Why a certain select group of citizens would so gleefully fuck with your life?”
Shaker faces the Howitzer with a wounded look, innocent and pale.
“Not really,” he says and walks back to the truck, the aerial tucked under his arm, nabbing a few additional trash items along the way.
*
The usual smorgasbord mess on the kitchen table—decimated foodstuffs and cannibalized musical equipment—has been replaced. The LP sleeve is stark black. There are no names or song titles or production credits, no identifiable features of any kind. Shaker flips the LP over, peers inside the cracked shrink-wrap, grimacing.
“Is this it?” he asks.
“You know it is.”
“Welp, I guess your big payday has arrived.”
“Turns out the whole record label lawsuit thing was a publicity stunt. That rich husband of hers owns the company. They were just trying to drum up interest. Doesn’t matter. It was worth the wait.”
“What’s this one? Banshee wails? Undersea implosions? Pet sounds?”
“There’s no sound at all. Total silence.”
“Silence,” Shaker nods.
“It’s 87 minutes long. Three movements. 19 tracks. It’s a double album. And not a single note of music anywhere on it. I’ve already listened to it twice. It’s her rawest, most honest creation yet.”
“So it’s another publicity stunt.”
“I think it’s genius.”
There is an overfull accordion file on the floor. Hundreds of Post-it notes, index cards, random scraps are tacked around the room, months of meticulous scribblings. Shaker is more interested in her solder gun. He picks it up and swings it by its cord. He twirls it on his finger, sharpshooter style, while sucking his under lip in concentration. He’s wondering how in all his blundering, sticky addictions he never once managed to glue his nostrils shut.
“You’re not listening,” she says.
“Nope.”
“She’s moved beyond songs, beyond sound. Not noise, but white noise. Layers and layers of holy reverential quiet. The Final American Pause.” Her face glazes together, a sheen of panic. “How am I ever going to recreate that?”
The woman snatches back the tool before he can accidentally set his garments aflame and tosses it in the trash. Shaker sulks off. Passing through the foyer, he catches sight of his own face in the windowpane. Loose jawed, hooded eyes. Classic mouthbreather in repose. Then Shaker seizes up, realizing he’s not the mouth-breather.
Darb is on the front stoop with his face crushed against the frosted glass. He has a bouquet of plastic bags—all empty—puckered in his armpit. Seeing Shaker, he blinks a few times and begins to jam on the doorbell, frowning bleakly. Shaker cautiously opens the door to the width of his head. Darb gives the bell a final stab, still peering into the window’s opaqueness. Shaker coughs, taps the glass, and gets a glimpse of his cousin’s unfrosted eyes. Small balls marbled with bloodshot.
“Cousin,” Darb says. “The glass in this house don’t even look like glass.”
“Strange, that.”
“I’m out here getting stalked by paparazzo.”
Shaker is nodding. He contracts his jowls, reshapes his face. Into what, precisely, he has no idea. “Good for you.”
Darb gives the doorbell another ring.
“Stop that,” Shaker says.
“I always wanted to live an awe- and grandeur-filled life, but these days I’m just happy to wake up without my sex organ in a sling. One nut always hangs a little lower than
the other. Just splenetic, I guess. I’m a whole glossary of hinky vibes. My gum lines hurt. Somebody cheer me up.”
“You need a carnival.”
“I do,” Darb says, forcing a grin. The corrugated wrinkles of his forehead are limned with sweat. “And groceries.”
“All that donated cat food is gone?”
Darb looks off down the cul-de-sac. “These den moms and snide Eagle Scouts and town council douches are still bringing me supplies for the dome. Tools and light setups and endorsement deals. All the tins are empty. I haven’t eaten anything for days.” He puts away the hand and shrugs. “I got nobody to drive me for my groceries.”
*
The road paver is a one-seat machine with a spindly woman riding atop in an orange hardhat and vest, rolling along slowly, straightening the parking lot’s fresh tar while Shaker watches, rapt, from the condiment aisle. All that stretched open surface. He doesn’t know why, but the sight depresses him. Darb snaps his fingers, and the reverie is broken. He is asking for the basket. Shaker trots over with the basket raised. His cousin pitches in the mesquite sauce and cayenne pepper and two spatulas, then moves into the taco department. Shaker follows, occasionally glancing outside at the empty lot and the paver slugging its black path to nowhere.
Darb finds his guacamole and hot sauce, his fruit preserves and instant frosting, and he passes a whipped cream display without a second look, instead pillaging a nearby shelf of all its peanut butter and maple syrup. The basket is full, so Shaker grabs another. Darb fills this with a dozen different kinds of pasta sauce. Extra Chunky. Thousand Vegetable. International Cheese. Every variety but the creamy vodka brand. Darb doubles back and does a second pass of the salad dressings and oils, and he guides Shaker to the checkout station. The men are waiting in their short line, pretending not to notice the tabloid racks, when Shaker says, “Any food?”
“Huh?”
“Food.” Shaker pats the condiments rolling towards the barcode reader. The cashier is a sunny retiree, swiping each item under the red laser like a piece of flypaper he’s trying to shake off his hand. “These are only garnishes.”
“So?” Darb asks.