I’m tired, not drunk, but you wouldn’t want me behind the wheel of a car all the same. A dog inside a sleeping house a hundred meters away from our house barks and barks as he hears me walk past.
As a boy I was afraid of the dark, afraid of the night, but tonight I don’t give a shit. I’m not worried about… about what? Nothing out there scares me. Still, I decide not to take the path that goes past the cemetery. Mostly because I don’t want to walk that far in the first place.
I can’t sleep because I’m upset. The why I won’t go into here, a fight with your mother where things exploded so fast it scared both of us. I felt an animal burst out of me, unexpectedly, I had been in a good mood when I came home.
She slept on the sofa, I tried to sleep in bed. Then I read. Then I went for this walk.
It is winter, it is cold out, but not that cold. I have gloves on but pockets would do.
I walk far without any effort, without even noticing that I’m walking. At first my head is roaring, my head is more there than the world.
Then I notice the lights of the strip mall reflected in the creek.
They follow me as I walk parallel to the water.
Now and then cars drive past on the distant street.
My footsteps make no sound on the path, I’m wearing running shoes. The ringing in my ears is the only sound I hear except for the cars and the barking dog. My tinitus is getting worse.
I come to a bridge, and that is where I turn around and walk home again.
Maybe I can sleep now.

Doctors, and agricultural horticulturalists.

Meaning we all know how to run the greenhouses. Some of us used to be farmers, and studied medicine when we heard about the program. Others are the other way around.

So we’re set here is what I’m saying. Everyone has a general MD training with one or two specialities – cardiology, psychiatry. Even the engineers, the astronomers, whatever. Double medical training and hydroponics.
The cook, who makes those great au gratin potatoes? She is a brain surgeon and a midwife.

I’m just saying, we’re covered for every eventuality here. Enough food and so on for well past our natural life expectancies. Extra air just in case, you know. Meteorites or something like that.

A lot of us, soon as we got here, spent a lot of time watching the Earth.

Earth-gazing.

That sounds like something some idiot back on Earth would make up.
Most of us got tired of that faster than we expected we would. Although it does look cool, Earth at night, all the lights and the fires from the volcanoes. Earth during the day, you know, blue and white. Coolest is during a total eclipse, when our shadow drags across the planet.

What do they think of that now, I wonder? Do they invest such events with some ominous significance now, or is is the same as always, you know, Gee, eclipse, now get back to work. Don’t look directly at it you moron.

I don’t really pay much attention to it anymore except when it’s night on Earth and there’s a really big eruption. Some of the larger active ones, like Etna or St. Helens, they’re glowing pretty good right now.

It didn’t exactly come as a surprise.

That was what populated the program to begin with, this vague feeling of dread we all had. Walking down the sidewalk, we felt it vibrate. Walking through an intersection, we looked six ways, not just four. We checked for angels falling from the sky and demons bursting up through the crosswalk.

As if the planet had reached its capacity.

Not exactly its capacity to support life. More like its capacity to take any more crap.

The musician, he studied physical therapy and farming. He got drunk recently and fell on his violin, and no one was really all that shook up.

You can get enough of the violin.

There’s none of that vibration here on the moon. Things are quiet here. Now and then a meteorite strikes and you feel something for a minute, but that’s it.

We have lots of board games.

We have tv shows and movies. If you sat and watched them, one after the other, it would take you more than 800 years to watch all of them.

And that’s not counting the pornography some of us snuck. Some think elevated levels of cosmic radiation are to blame for the data rot on our porn. Right now, only two DVDs work: Monkey Dungeon and My Lovely Assistant. One of the engineers (eye-ears-nose and throat) is trying to restore some of the others.

We have no communication with the Earth. That was part of the plan.

Another shuttle, the final one, was supposed to arrive last week with more participants.

It’s a little strange. But we’re safe here.

You actually fucked him, I said. What was up with that, I said.
I forget, she said.
Your mom said to call her, she said.
It’s your dad, my mom said when I called.
You told whatshername about Butterneck and so on, I said.
What is it, a state secret, she said?
What about dad, I said.
I flew out to Portland and rented a car and drove over.
On the drive out, I gave up on finding a good radio station and thought about painting. The problem was, I had sold my very first painting. I started painting with nothing in mind, just for the hell of it, and a friend of a friend sees the pictures, abstract oil paintings, likes them and they are selling and suddenly I’m a painter.
I watch the road but I see my paintings. I see one in particular. Still in the beginning stage, zinc white and prussian blue scribbled over the surface of a fairly big canvas, meter wide and something more than that tall, paint mixed with quartz sand, something I like to do for texture. In fact, I prefer mixing in sawdust, but I was out of sawdust and had this big bag of sand.
The sand gives it an interesting texture too; it’s not… I can’t get the decay look I’m going for, with sand, but in the beginning I thought it would work on a different level, from a different angle. But when I tried to scrape the canvas with the palette knife, it didn’t work like the sawdust had and that frustrated me and then someone came in and watched me work and I tried to explain something to them and suddenly I had this out of body experience, saw myself standing there and had this profound sensation of, who am I trying to kid?
So my dad’s monkey problem actually came at a good time is what I’m saying.
Hey, Butterneck, my mother said.
Your dad’s watching the TV, she said.
You actually really have monkeys? I asked her reflection in the mirror on the ceiling above her head.
Like I said, in the garage. She moved her head a little in that direction, but it was near bedtime and she was already in the iron lung, which restricted her mobility. But he can’t take care of them anymore, she said. He has to have them six more months to qualify for the government apery phaseout subsidy.
He started an apery so the government would pay him to stop, you’re serious.
You hungry? I haven’t been shopping. Check the freezer if you’re hungry, maybe something in there. Out of the way Spooky or we’ll give you a dirt nap, she said to the cat.

Do I have to go in there right away? I said.
I didn’t go in today, since you were coming. Plus I was tired. So they’re hungry. They get cranky. I mean, they’re cranky as is. You’ll want to wear the suit.
So I left her in the living room with her hissing bellows breathing for her and went out to what had been our garage. The shop. The shed, whatever. Ceiling high enough to accomodate the Winnebago they had planned to travel the country in after retiring, until my mother’s health went one way and my father’s another.
Climbed into the suit, this robust biohazard suit hanging there on a rusty nail. They were in locked cages and the windows were barred but the door to the garage had still been reinforced and had additional locks installed and an automatic closing mechanism added up at the top, because these were hardcore monkeys. They could probably go through sheetrock like I don’t know what if they got out of their cages and then what.
I unlocked everything. I waved at the house, sure my mom was watching from one of the mirrors she had set up all over, and went inside.
Four dozen hungry rhesus monkeys. What else can I say? Four dozen deliquent monkeys migrating from apery to apery, cynical, or jaded or whatever monkeys get. Full of hatred, full of new tricks they picked up at each new place they stayed, safecracking, petty robbery, and so on.
You get filthy rich like this: the government is phasing out monkey breeding and pays you to stop raising them. In order to collect that money, you have to establish a history of monkey farming. The government does not, however, track what happens to the monkeys once a farm closes down. So monkey farms are established over and over again with the same monkeys. They are a traveling circus, staying in one place the minimum length of time for a farmer to qualify for the benefits, then moving on.
They seem to know all of this, and resent that they aren’t getting their fair share..
I could hear my mother saying, They can smell fear as I entered the room.
Absolute silence. The silence when a pandemonium stops suddenly.
Four dozen pairs of monkey eyes on me, minus an eye here or there, cause, you know.
I fed them. Food into slits into trays. They threw some at me, fuck you, go hungry then. Most ate it, though. I hosed down the floor as well as I could. I had never smelled anything that bad.

I showered in the suit outside the garage and left it hanging on the wall, then showered in the house three times before I ran over to the supermarket for food.
Need anything else? the cashier asked me.
Thanks Carol, I said. I’m fine.
Yeah, she said.
See you later, I said.
Two weird things there: a woman talking to me and me noticing.

When I got home the ice cream I had bought at the store ended up melting in the sink because I had to go find my father.
My mother said, your father’s wandered off.
You still awake, I said.
The flashlight on the freezer in the garage. That has the best batteries, she said.
I got the flashlight and didn’t think to put the icecream into the freezer.
I had always been afraid in the woods at night. But this time it was easy. Harmless. The woods were harmless. I knew where the scary animals were locked up. I had the key in my pocket.
I listened for a while. First, only the wind in the evergreens. Then, the crack of someone stepping on a dry branch. After a few minutes I found my father in that direction.
Yo, dad.
You can never have too much wood son, he said. He had an armload of firewood.
Let me help you with that, I said. Not even in July can you have too much firewood, I said.
Gather your own goddamned firewood, he said. Who are you anyway. If you’re a government inspector the monkeys are in the monkey barn. The apery.
I’m your son, I said.
He looked at me. Of course you are. Losing your sense of humor? he asked. Oh man, if you want funny, you ought to see those forms I had to fill out for this project. 1040 instructions are nothing compared to that. Compared to those forms, the 1040 is a laundry list.
I gathered wood and we walked back to the house and I waited until he fell asleep before I went to bed. Because, you know. I sat there in the dark looking out at the quiet woods, listening to the bellows of my mother’s iron lung, listening to my father talk himself to sleep.

I’m seventy five years old and I have apnea. You know what apnea is? she said. You know who should get apnea? Premature babies get it. Infants get it. My doctor tried to call it senile apnea. There’s one senile person at my house, I told him. And it ain’t me. I’m tired all the time, she said. I’m sick of being tired all the time.

Two more weeks of this and I would be able to sell the monkeys and my parents could cash their government subsidy check. I’m going to the DVD place, I said.
Monkeys fed?
Monkeys fed, I said.
Hello I’m Tiffany rang up my DVD rentals after I filled out the application form and showed her my license and she dialed the number I gave her to verify it and my father answered and told her some sort of wiggy shit of some kind and I said That’s my father judging from the expression on your face, I’m taking care of him and helping phase out a project he’s working on and she said okay.
And she said, so that explains why I haven’t seen you around here before. Because I would’ve noticed you.

And my mom likes flowers so I got a few pots of azaleas because they grow good in the soil out there and I missed them where I lived and got good service from Heather at the nursery.

Within a week I’m getting my groceries half-price, DVDs for free and tulip and daffodil bulbs are planted up both sides of my parents’ driveway, and it’s a hundred yards from the road to back in the trees where their house is. Meaning, those are a lot of bulbs. Because, you know what? There’s just something about me.

They don’t know what. Just, something. Something mysterious. Charisma.

Don suit. Unlock door. Enter, bar door, relock door, all locks. Pocket keys. Zip pocket. Put water into water containers. Put food through slots into trays. Hose down floor. Examine monkeys for wounds and sores, from a safe distance. Examine the coded nylon bands on their wrists to verify identity.

Don’t give them names, my mother said. Don’t give them names, my father said independently of that. He was in and out. Some days, he knew who we were and what the deal was with the monkeys. It’s easier to part with them when it’s over. I was thinking, I could adopt the fuckers and make them my heirs and name each one after myself and name and it would still be easy to say goodbye.

It turned out to be easier than I expected.

It was the routine that nailed me. Get up, slide mother out of iron lung, feed parents, feed monkeys, hose down apery, hose down suit, shower, fuck Carol before her shift started at the supermarket, shower, run over and fuck Tiffany on her lunch break, run home give everybody lunch, shower again, fuck Heather after she gets off work, run home, feed everyone again.

How much do you know about pheromones? Did you know the pheromones in monkey piss make you irresistable to women? The pheromones in monkey piss make you irresistable to women. And this as well: the pheromones in women drive caged monkeys wild.

You can probably see where this is heading.

The monkeys woke me up at night, screaming. Bedlam. I walked out to the apery, warm thoughts of Carol, Tiffany and Heather mixing in my head with the knowledge that it was not a sustainable situation so enjoy it while it lasts.

The old one, Moses because he looks like the Ben Hur actor, Charleton Heston, white hair, white beard, he was hanging from a hook in the ceiling, hanging by the strap on his wrist. I saw him through the apery window. Everyone else was rattling the bars of his cage. Brutus was using his food tray, raking it back and forth along his bars. Then Clayton picked it up. And Caesar Romero. And Shatner.

So I went in without the suit. And I forgot to relock the door. Moses was limp, you see what I’m saying? And the rest were locked up tight. Except he wasn’t, and they weren’t.

Ten monkeys hit you at once, you fall down. They were out the door in three seconds, all of them. I expected them to vanish forever into the woods, but they ran straight into the house. I had left the front door open, because it locked automatically when you closed it.

I got up in time to see the last monkey disappear into the house.

The door closed behind him. My father started yelling something. Monkeys screeched.

The door wasn’t one of your kick-innable doors. I tried, but it wasn’t. What’s in the garage, I thought. Freezer. Winter tires. Coats. Shoes. Camping chairs. Barbecue. Excellent idea, let’s break the door down with a tank of compressed gas.

Finally found the chainsaw and fired it up. Cut the door out around the lock and swang it in. The refrigerator door was open and five or six monkeys were going through it. They all knew what a chainsaw was though. When you up against monkeys, a chainsaw is not bad to have, remember that.

My father wandered out of the back of the house with a bunch of monkeys on him. He was all bloody. I made them jump off. Rev that sucker up and you have their attention. My idea was to herd them into a room and lock it off and I don’t know, knock-out gas or something.

My ears were ringing from the chainsaw, so it is understandable that it took me a while, a brief but indeterminate length of time, a “while”, brief but too long, to hear the ones inside the iron lung.

Their faces were pressed up against the thick glass portals. They were screeching, you never heard someone screech like that. My mother was dead by then. They fucked up the bellows somehow and they just kept pumping air into the iron lung, increasing the pressure, which for my mother was like one long exhale.

The machine was making a sound like machines make in movies before they explode. I unplugged it and the air slowly leaked out. The monkeys inside were dead or unconscious. I had the rest herded into the back room, and two monkeys here in my mother’s iron lung. I was conflicted, as you would be. I mean, the iron lung, can’t beat it as a place to confine a monkey. Thick steel, armored glass. On the other hand, locking monkeys up with my mother’s body seemed disrespectful.

The ambulance arrived at the same time as the police. I told the police the monkeys were dangerous and just shoot them if they gave any trouble. The ones in the iron lung might be faking it, I warned.

So what happened, sir, exactly? A police officer asked.

You want the long version or the short version, I asked. I’m kind of in shock. Let me take a breath.

Another police officer came over. A woman. Nice black hair. Badge. Gun, radio, all that other shit on her belt. Bullets and so on. Take it easy, Johnson, she said to the other one. Let me talk to him.

Hi, she said. I’m Officer Cook.

One ran off into the woods, my father said. I’ll go find it. He wandered out into the dark with a flashlight.

We should dress those wounds sir, said a medic.

Attend to her first, I’ll be back, he said.

Hi, I said to Officer Cook.

Call me Brenda, she said.

“I don’t know why,” she said. “I just enjoy humiliating people. Is that the word? Humiliate? Insult, whatever. It’s just the way I am.”

I noticed she was wearing a darker shade of foundation, and her makeup seemed different; thicker.

She asked me how I was and I told her and it sounded funny. “I sound like I’ve been seeing a therapist, don’t I?”

The waitress brought our sushi bento lunch special and my friend reminded her in Chinese that she’d ordered extra wasabi.

“How’s that going? You still seeing him?”

“My wife says he’s not good for me because I’m not happy yet. He says one of my issues is I let my wife make all my decisions for me. That is, not exactly; my issue is I base every decision on what my wife would think.”

“Do you?”

I shrugged. “Isn’t that called being considerate? What’s new with you?”

She told me she was stressed out. She and her husband were building a new house and she was starting a new business on the side. “Here.” She handed me three little vials labeled in Chinese. All I could read were the numbers 1, 2 and 3.

“I found the company on the Internet. It’s that collagen treatment I told you about. You said you would test it for me.”

“Yeah, I remember,” I said. “So what’s what? How do you use them?”

“You put number 1 on first. Then number 2. Number 3 goes around your eyes like this.”

“I’ll let you know how it works.”

The next morning, after my wife had left for work and while my daughter was dressing for school, I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and took the lids off the vials. The ends were still sealed and I had to rummage around for a scissors to clip them off. Number 1, a thin liquid, went mostly over my forehead and temples and around the eyes, number 2, creamier, over that. My worry line between my eyebrows was deeper than I remembered, I noticed.

Number three, a thinner creme, I put over my crowsfeet. Then I smiled at myself, and the wrinkles around my eyes deepened. Laugh lines, I told myself.

“What are you doing in there, dad?” my daughter asked through the door.

“Washing my hands,” I said.

My face felt hot on the way into work. Something was happening, at least. I looked at myself in the rear view mirror a few times on the drive in. It wasn’t unbearably hot, although a few little pre-cancerous spots my skin doctor had tried to remove earlier really stung.

The next week we had lunch again. Her makeup was even thicker, I noticed.

“So it cures cancer, is what you’re saying,” she said.

“Pre-cancerous lesions. Or sunspots, I’m not a dermatologist. Whatever. Yeah, they’re gone. But my face looks like a grey sponge,” I said.

“I’ll put that on my website, the cures cancer part. Excellent,” she said.

“So does my skin go back to normal when I stop using this?”

She shrugged. The waitress was walking past and my friend asked for the check. “Just be sure to use up the samples I gave you,” she said. “You have to complete the whole course of treatment.”

“It’s my turn to pay,” I said.

She waved her hand at me dismissively. “It’s the least I can do.”

I’d make it so big you could see it from your bedroom window. The snow is perfect for it: a whole night’s worth of the wet kind.
But in fact, I’m sitting in my car right now, stuck on the freeway, rationing my windshield cleaning fluid so I don’t run out before I get to the office.
You’ll just have to imagine sunlight filtered blue through igloo walls. Imagine, too, the fresh air, the cold snow, your long hair wet from making angels while I packed bricks of snow into arches and walls.
Us smiling instead of you feverish in bed and me wondering why I’m here.
How quiet it would be inside your igloo, if only it wasn’t a workday.

He found other stuff too, change, a tooth on a string once, a kid’s retainer, rat-tail combs. Change and pipes were about all he kept, though.

Once he found a barrette, this plastic hair clip thing. He kept it in the pocket of his army coat. He put his hands in his pockets when he stood around, and he stood around a lot. One hand always played with the barrette, repeating one same pattern of movements.

The girl it was from was miles away, he had seen that when he opened the door of the cage for her, seated her with some other girl, and closed the steel bar and secured it across their nice laps: she just suddenly had that look. It was impossible to say in advance who would have it. Of all the people in the world, some just suddenly had the look when he made eye contact. They couldn’t be described beforehand or classified in any other way.

Logically, you could just take your hand out of your pocket and reach out your hand and touch anybody who was that close, as you helped them into the cage perhaps, or closed the bar across their legs, making sure it was locked. But for the look. Suddenly, they weren’t there; they were in the cage, but they weren’t close.

The door slammed shut and they took off and spun lightly and violently in quick, little circles in their cage, which was itself fastened to a large arm, and the machine rotated the arm in its own large circles, all these various rotations controlled by the man at the throttle so that the patterns described by the people in their cages were sometimes very elaborate.

The barrette clicked open with a springy action, and clicked shut again, unseen in Blake’s coat pocket. It had hundreds of tiny teeth, mow mostly full of lint. She had dozens of them, surely.

in her communist accent she said she’d
suck him off for two hundred schillings
yeah sure he said but later
in the month You still be here then?
If I don’t get the money now there won’t be any
Later in the Month for me she said
a Securitat man will
stab me in the eyes with a knife
he gave her the money and said you
can owe me for the blowjob
the crowd took her back
she’d get stars
in her eyes one
way or another

Concentrated snake bile and tendril – leaved fritillary bulbs oral solution
The medicine is scientifically prepared from the snakebile and the tendril leaved fritillary bulb, etc. This is an efficacious drug for sputum crudum, cough asthma caused by cold, bronchitis and bronchitis chronic, etc. The effective rate that treats these diseases is 96.8 percent and the apparent effective rate is more than 76,8 percent.
Because it is sweet and convenient for taking, therefore it is very welcomed by diseases at home and abroad.

He put down the box and sat perfectly still. He looked out his window. Outside, the mercury street lights were coming on. He watched that. Dusk had reached the point where some of the lamps had come on but not all. Twilight falls unevenly. If it fell evenly, the lamps would come on all at once, when the uniform dusk sky reached the threshhold of darkness that triggered them.

Or those lights furthest from the darkening horizon would come on first, a wave of streetlights breaking toward the west as the sunset faded.

Outside his window lights came on in no even pattern. They burned at either end of the block, while those in the middle were just beginning to glow orange. The dusk had dark spots he couldn’t see, just deduct from watching the lamps.

Once all the lights had come on there was a small earthquake and the electrical wires and telephone lines and strings of bulbs swayed for a while. When the swaying subsided he ate something.

I looked across the street for Ingrid. She was out of sight on the other side of my yellow car by an adult bookstore. She was trying to coax someone’s kitten out from under the car.

I took a step toward Luiz, but he clicked the hammer back and I stopped. “Okay, fine,” I said softly.

He squeezed his eyes shut and stood there. He held the revolver to his ear. “I can hear the gun factory,” he said.

“Please put that away. If Ingrid sees you, her birthday is spoiled.”

Down on her hands and knees now, Ingrid called over to me in a whisper, “Poppy, he keeps getting away.”

“Don’t go away, Luiz,” I told him. I crossed the street and got down and looked under the car. A dim glow came from a streetlight up the block. The kitten kept crawling under whichever tire was furthest from Ingrid.

“It’s hungry,” she cooed. She made kissing sounds at the kitten. “You’re hungry, aren’t you, little guy?”

It wandered over towards me and I got it by the scruff of the neck. “Ow, here, happy birthday.” I gave it to Ingrid. She cradled it in her arms and it purred and fell asleep. Fine droplets of blood welled up from the scratches on my hands. I thought of infection and they instantly started to itch.

A window squeaked open in the apartment above the adult bookstore and a young couple, college kids, stuck their heads out. “What’s going on down there?”

“Is this your cat?” Ingrid asked them. It wasn’t, but they came down to look at it.

“He’s so cute,” the girl said. “Can I hold him.”

There was a dull hammering across the street. The bartender from Buck’s was kicking the door of his Bronco and swearing. A pretty blonde girl with thick ankles he’d been dancing with in the tavern came across the street to us and asked if we’d seen anyone hanging around his truck, because the stereo had been stolen. I noticed Luiz was gone.

“Look, he’s sleeping,” Ingrid said to the girl holding the kitten. “He likes you.”

In that manner, we got rid of the kitten.

***

Ingrid is not as pretty as my wife but she’s four years younger and her body is muscular and powerful and graceful, because she is serious about sprinting. Her greatest regret, I have learned in the three summers I have been meeting her, is that she started training too late to make it onto the U.S. Olympic team.

She teaches German at a high school in Eugene, Oregon. I teach French at one in Renton, south of Seattle. Once a year, in the summer, I see her at a week-long language teaching seminar at Western Washington University in Bellingham.

Earlier that day a professor from BYU had spoken for two hours about how he could teach anyone Hokkien dialect in a single day using his “Mnemotic Method”. It was hot in the room and I fell asleep. Afterwards we still had a few hours of August sun left so Ingrid and I went to the beach.

We spread our towels by a big, bleached cedar log where we were out of the wind. Ingrid lay on her stomach and I looked at her perfect body undisturbed for a minute or two. I have never touched her skin.

“You’re such a good listener,” she said from her towel, calling me back to reality. Little muscles danced at the base of her spine when she spoke. “I really like that about you.”

“Same here,” I said. I am careful how I act around Ingrid. I am letting things develop organically. I don’t just want to fuck her. I want her to love me afterwards.

Some people were riding horses on the beach, far away, but trotting in our direction.

“Ingrid, promise me something,” I said.

“Mm-hmm.”

“If aliens should abduct my family, and perhaps the rest of the population of Earth, would you marry me and help me repopulate the planet?”

She rolled over onto her side and looked up at me. “I’d be honored, Poppy.”

The horses came closer. They were a couple of big chestnut brown quarterhorses, with a frisky little foal on a rope behind them. The young horse was afraid of the waves, and shied up onto the dry sand every time foam shot up around its hooves. It seemed to be the first time it had ever seen the ocean.

“We’ll have horses,” I said. “Just like those, only more. We’ll have a barn and stables and a big corral and a pasture with a clear stream where they can drink. A few acres of alfalfa. A county farm house with a big kitchen and wood floors. We’ll train the horses and go on round-ups and teach the kids to barrel race.”

“I would bake pies while you chopped wood outside,” Ingrid said.

***

Luiz told me the other half of his duplex was vacant, but a terrible stench came from it. He had no car but parts were strewn through his half. Grey, stony pit-bull turds lay here and there in house and yard, even though his dog had been destroyed the summer before for biting a child. The whole place smelled like pee because his plumbing didn’t work right. We were prisoners of friendship and I always stayed with him when I was in Bellingham.

I had known him since we were twelve or thirteen, and he hadn’t changed since then — he hadn’t grown physically or emotionally. He had looked like a little old man for as long as I’d known him. He was the crazy kid at school and we all persecuted him. We called him Louise. We pantsed him and gave him brownies. Girls said, Ew, ick, when he walked by.

He has always smelled like pee.

Stories were told about him screwing animals or jacking off in the bleachers and after a certain point was reached, life began imitating legend. People caught him in their garages, sniffing airplane glue and jacking off into their family albums. He began getting arrested for climbing people’s trees at night and looking in their windows.

And I was the kid who didn’t blow up birds’ heads with M-80s or cover live grasshoppers with lugies and sand and leave them to bake into mummies in the sun. Stray dogs followed me and Luiz seemed to think, if twelve people kick you ten times and the thirteenth only kicks you nine times, he must be your friend.

We played in the fields, always, never in our houses. His parents were always drinking and kicking each other out and my mom didn’t like having Luiz around because he was a klepto.

We never did anything that required something like intelligence. We built forts, and Luiz gave me cigarettes or showed me stroke books he stole. He made me dare him to do things, which he always then did. Once he rolled snow tires down the freeway embankment into the northbound lanes and a semi jackknifed. The trailer crushed a passenger car and a lady died. We ran and ran and hid in a hazelnut orchard. We crouched in old snow and Luiz held his nut-brown face up to my ear like he was going to kiss me. His hot breath made clouds around my head in the cold.

“You’re responsible,” he whispered.

The accident was in all the papers.

***

Ingrid was saving a fawn with a broken leg when I first met her. We hiked eight miles with it, uphill, in the sun. I thought it was a sweet trait at first, but she did it every time I was with her: a bloody collie dog crawled to the shoulder of the freeway to die just as we drove past, baby birds fell out of their nests as she walked beneath them. You couldn’t plan anything.

After the scene at the bar, Ingrid and I drove around for a few minutes looking for Luiz. Then I said I’d had enough.

“But how will he get home?”

“On foot.” I put a cassette in my car stereo, something loud. “He’s never had a car, he always walks. I’ve known him since puberty, he’s indestructible.”

“He’s poor. He’s lucky to have you as a friend.”

In the street behind the dorm where she was staying for the seminar I got out of the car and gave her a hug. I held her and kissed her hair quietly so she wouldn’t hear. I told her I’d look for Luiz along the way to his duplex, but when I left I just took a drive along the old highway, over along the water.

It was pitch dark and I was the only car on the road except for a black Camaro parked in the entrance to a State Park with what looked like two people kissing. After an hour of driving I was so tired I parked at a wide spot in the road and slept.

I woke up at six in the morning when a convoy of logging trucks went past. I’d had nearly three hours of sleep. I sat there yawning and rubbing sleep from my eyes and looking out at the young grey water of Bellingham Bay, and Lummi Island. Color crept into things and the mist rose soundlessly as the sun came up behind me. There was a find greyish-blue film of dew on the grass, that had darker spots in the dew where it had been disturbed: footprints where someone had come out of the woods, circled my car closely while I slept, and then gone back into the brush.

***

Before bed, Luiz asked me between bong hits if I had ever tried crack.

“No.”

“There’s a crack house not far away. Dare me to get some? It’s close.”

I shook my head.

“Just say No,” he laughed. “You know what I really like to do?”

“What?”

“Rearrange people’s furnitiure while they’re asleep. Leave a kitchen knife in their baby’s bed, that kind of thing.”

“It’s been done.”

“Helter skelter,” he said in a puff of bong smoke. “You know that smell next door?”

“Was that a real gun you had yesterday at the tavern?”

“You know that smell?”

“Was it loaded?”

“Do you know that smell?”

“What about it?”

“You know what it is? The old lady who lived there died, and no one knows yet. I’ve been taking her mail. Her kids never call. Probably no one will find out until Mother’s Day.”

“Bull.”

“She’s in the bathtub. Naked, only all green. Well, greenish. The water looks like jello, bug jello. Soft bugs. They’re really booking.”

“You lie.” I took another bong hit.

“Whose menthols do you think you’ve been smoking?”

***

The seminar ended the next day and when I got back to my house and pulled into the driveway behind the horse trailer, my two kids ran out and hugged me. Our collie limped over and shook my hand.

For my wife Karen, the horse trailer is just a joke, the visible tipo of my horse dream iceberg. I’d like to get stables somewhere up in Woodinville or Carnation and forget about questions like, “Do they play pool in France, Mr. Barner?” or “Why do they have to say it like that?”. Karen figures a trailer is cheaper than a sports car and safer than a hunting rifle, but she says she is happy with our current house and our current two kids and the current dog.

“How’d it go?” she asked.

“Okay. A really boring old guy from BYU was there this year.”

“Wasn’t he there last year too?”

I didn’t think so. Outside, the kids were throwing rocks for Lassie to fetch.

“Was whatshername there again?”

“What, Luiz? Luiz is a guy.”

“No, your Aryan, Eva Braun.”

“Can I unpack first?” I carried my stuff into our bedroom.

Ingrid’s name had come up too often in conversation at home after the first workshop three years before, and it ended up being easier to let Karen think that I really had something going with Ingrid and let her forgive me, than to try and explain how it really was.

Dinner was pork chops, lima beans, apple sauce and milk.

***

School resumed. Class went badly, neither I nor the kids were interested. At home, my oldest child brought home a dinosaur collage from kindergarten. It was stuck to the refrigerator door with Smurf-shaped magnets. Karen came out of the bedroom and handed me a carton of menthols. “Change your brand?” she asked.

“Huh?”

“A little guy was here today, he said these were yours.”

“Creepy little guy? He didn’t come into the house, did he?”

“No,” Karen said. “What’s wrong?”

I hefted the carton.

“Is everything okay?”

That night, i dreamed I was sleeping in my car with my family. A man stood near the car, smoking and watching us. I tried to open the seatbelt so I could protect my family, but it was a new French design and I couldn’t figure it out. His cigarette smoke covered everything like dew, and glistened. It came in the window.

I woke up covered with sweat, my heart beating fast.

***

I once sat in on a linguistics course with Ingrid. A man from the Goethe Institute spoke of how languages can be dated. Historically, English is a dialect of German, and there are many cognates, words shared by the common language when the split occurred. If two related languages have similar words for copper, then you know the peple who spoke the mother language had discovered copper before the two languages split. In German, copper is Kupfer, and so we know the language split after copper was discovered.

In German, cat is Katze, summer is Sommer, and friend is Freund. Love is Liebe, fucking is Ficken, dream is Traum, foal is Fohle and dew is Tau.

***

I was in the teacher’s lounge a week after Luiz had paid his visit to my house. I was drinking coffee and trying hard not to smoke in the smoke-filled air. An aide came in to tell me I had a call in the office.

“Hi, Poppy.”

“Luiz, what’s your goddamned problem?” The aide glanced up at me from her typewriter.

“Nice house you have, you insured? Too bad about the dog, what’s it’s name, Lassie? Shit.”

“What do you want?”

“Want to talk to your wife? Well sorry, she’s all tied up at the moment.”

I was on the freeway in two minutes, pounding the dash wishing my car would go faster than sixty for once. I cut off a milk truck at my exit and he gave me a blast of his air horn, but I could barely hear it because the blood was pounding so loud in my ears. I pulled into my driveway and ran up to the house with my car door still open.

The collie limped out to meet me and Karen came out of the kitchen wiping her hands on a towel. The baby was in her highchair at the table, playing Jackson Pollack with her lunch.

Karen looked at me with concern. “Is everything all right?”

I sent Karen and the kids to her mother’s for the weekend and tried to track down Luiz. I called his family for the first time since junior high school and all I got after about an hour of trying was the Bellingham address I already had. so I threw a baseball bat into the back seat of my car and drove back up there.

He wasn’t in his duplex, and none of his neighbors knew anything. I ended up at Buck’s, where some guy at the bar said, “Ask the bartender.”

“In the hospital,” the bartender said. He was the same kid from before.

“How long?”

“About a week. He’ll live. Bad accident, though.”

“What happened?”

“Car accident. It would appear he took a stereo out of a guy’s truck and then accidentally proceeded to get the shit kicked out of himself.”

Luiz was in the ICU at the local hospital. A nurse with white hair and ruddy cheeks led me to his room.

His face was purple and stitched up, tubes ran up his nose, some draining a bloody liquor, and a respirator tube went into a hole in his throat.

“Shouldn’t I be wearing a mask?” I asked the nurse.

“He’s beyond that,” she said.

He was so tiny, strapped down on bleached white sheets.

“He’s dying. He was okay until today, then he fell into a coma. Pressure is building in his brain, and the doctors can’t drain it.” The respirator clicked and rasped. “He’ll be brain-dead in a few days.”

After that it would be just a question of pulling the plug and parting him out. “Can I be alone with him?” She nodded and left without saying anything more.

I stroked his forehead. All his hair had been shaved, eyebrows, everything. “I never knew you were so tiny,” I said. There were big yellow and purple bruises on his arms where needles and tubes were taped. I sat on the edge of his bed and listened to the machines click and hum and peep. I pulled back the covers and got in beside him and held his tiny hand. I ran my fingertips over the bandages where his broken ribs had been taped. I cradled him in my arms and he felt hot. It wasn’t until I saw tears falling on my skin that I realized I was crying.

His little ear was all mashed up. “Luiz,” I whispered. “I’m getting you out of here today, Luiz. We’ll fix you up a spot in the bunkhouse, with your own IV drip and the best respirator money can buy. Close to the creek so its trickling can soothe you, and you can hear the ponies nicker when they come to drink.”

I was so close to him that I could feel my own hot breath bouncing back when I whispered. I smelled acrid medicine on his skin. I held him close. He was so light in my arms, like a single breath.

From far away down the hospital corridor came the sound of an awkward young colt’s hooves on the tile floor, and a child laughing.

“The house is big, with cedar shakes on the roof,” I whispered. “I can see Ingrid now, in the soft light of the fireplace. She’s kneading dough at the long kitchen counter. She has white marks on her face from the flour, where she has touched herself.”

The sound of the foal came closer. I looked over towards the door. Ingrid came in and tied the foal to the foot of the bed. She came over and climbed in the other side of the bed. She put her face close and she really did smell like flour. We lay like that for the longest time, holding each other close and Luiz between us.

Blood like a sunset after a sandstorm.

It’s not the bleeding out it doesn’t feed on death it’s the bleeding it eats fear.

When there’s no fear it waits if it gets hungry it makes sounds in the wall and the people living there get scared and it eats a little. His father is out a little boy wraps himself tighter in a leather jacket squeezes his eyes shut tries not to hear the sounds. It feeds.

It was born yesterday it’s five thousand years old it’s Mesopotamian it’s older than mankind it’s the original predator.

A man drives around the city picks out a girl and she has to get in he has sex with her he has pills for it she is dumped out past the railroad tracks beyond the chemical plant or she resists and her body is. Either way she’s scared and it feeds. It lives in the car the police can’t do anything about the man because he’s connected.

There is a concrete building where frightened men are stored in individual cells it feeds there sometimes. Sometimes it runs low in the streets and alleys in the air raids it looks like a shadow until it finds someone huddled taking shelter underground a whole group in the dark waiting for the sirens to end. A little girl asks her mother, What time is it what number is the big hand on how long until we go home? Her mother feels she is being watched.

One place there are five stories concrete-slab construction bullet holes mostly pock the ground floor and around one window on the third floor six families used to live on each floor until others came gave them money moved them further out to a safe compound on the city’s edge. Now two men live in each unit most have guns and other equipment and aren’t so scared but some still are but feeding is not so good. Some hear the sounds in the walls see the shadows in the alleys and say Chupacabra which is wrong but when they say it feeding is better for a while.

Out on the balcony one stands he has no guns he talks to a satellite he needs a clear line of sight to point his antenna at the stars. He dictates something into the receiver speaking slowly he transfers data he uploads images he has a camera.

He has less fear when the one with the guns is with him feeding is good when he is alone it doesn’t even need to make sounds in the walls. He is different and worth watching.

It is very quiet observes some time passes the man packs goes somewhere washes rides a plane somewhere else a military transporter he takes a pill to relax another pill to sleep because the seat is hard his luggage is piled by his feet and it is in his luggage going with him. It is very quiet going where it senses endless fear the feeding the feeding there will be.

After 44 years, he discovered something when his wife asked him which suits he needed cleaned at the cleaners and he said how should I know none of them are very wrinkled and she said smell them, which ones smell like they need to be cleaned and so he smelled them and you know what he did he fell in love with the smell of his suits.

None of the suits stank. He had to pick out a couple so his wife wouldn’t find him odd, but none of them smelled bad. They all smelled great. They smelled the way his father’s plaid Pendelton wool shirts smelled when our man was a small boy and his dad got home from work driving the lumberyard delivery truck or the logging truck or the other truck. His small wiry dad with arms so big women he had never seen bought him beers at bars, sending them over to him at his table, saying, I’ve always liked men with big arms.

A smell of wool, and man, with a little tobacco smoke – less than his dad’s maybe, but still there, alas. He had never expected this. A dozen dark suits lined up there on their hangers, all smelling this great. It was like a door he had never noticed opening onto a big room in his life full of something he liked.

2. Put harp out where you think tortoises might be
3. Play
4. Tortoises will crawl out of their hiding places and come in close to listen
5. Catch as many as you need before they can run away

Paul Gaugin: All the same, eh. [Drains glass] It’s like… how should I say it. It’s as if in an alternate universe there were a small boy, about five, with a pig shave and a shit-eating grin, with a hose in his hands. And he’s kinking the hose so nothing can get through. And this hose is the hose through which the cosmic energy flows to my brain. Or my soul or something. You know? [Refills glasses]
Vincent van Gogh: Sigh.
Paul Gaugin: I dunno. It’s a feeling like being constipated and entirely shat out at the same time.
Vincent van Gogh: [Takes drink, stares at so-so-looking waitress] Mmm.
Paul Gaugin: As if it were late spring, after a long debilitating winter and the tulips are finally budding, only their buds are like, tiny, because the garden hasn’t been fertilized in ages, and the bulbs are withering, so you wonder if they’ll even blossom this year.
Vincent van Gogh: …
Paul Gaugin: Vincent? More absinthe?
Vincent van Gogh: I beg your pardon?