Tuesday the 27th of July, 2010
Super Friends
Aquaman is living with my parents. They advertised their spare room (formerly my bedroom) on Craigslist, and a day later he just turned up. Didn’t call beforehand, didn’t even have any references. He just introduced himself, and moved in.
They like him just fine. He keeps himself to himself, and always pays his rent (usually in doubloons.) A couple of times, they’ve taken him to Seaworld. He seemed to really enjoy that.
I’ve talked to him, or tried to, about his plans for the future. I told him that my parents aren’t getting any younger, and that one day he’ll need to find somewhere else to live. He smiled, and said that he has an entire kingdom to call his home. And I asked him why he wasn’t there already.
He didn’t say anything for a really long time, after that, not even to my parents. And he was so sad.
He’s a nice guy. But he smells of fish.
Tuesday the 27th of July, 2010
A Fragile Illusion
Congratulations on your purchase of a JenTek Holographic Girlfriend!
Do not ask it if it loves you.
Tuesday the 27th of July, 2010
My hobby.
There’s this old Simpsons episode that has a joke about bowling pins. Homer asks how they get picked up after they’re knocked over, and the camera pulls back and shows us an individual pin being grabbed by a mechanical arm and thrown out a window onto an enormous pile of other pins.
Then we see a felled and cut tree delivered to the alley, its sides shaved down even more until it is just a tiny pin. It gets painted, picked up, and stacked, ready for the next frame.
I know that that’s not actually how it works. I know that the same pins just get tumbled, and sorted, and replaced on the lane. I know that they don’t get thrown out after one use.
But still. I have to change alleys every few months, because whenever I bowl, I see the place fill up with ghosts.
The Entertainment Business.
Jones was a puppet. Literally. Negotiations with the Ventriloquist’s Union always went through a two-foot tall, solid wood middle-man, and Barnaby Jones was my dummy of the day.
“All we’re asking for is decent pay, capped hours, and a full genefits package.” The clacking of his mouth gave his speech percussive accompaniment.
“I’m sorry, Barney, what was that last one?” I looked at his hand-man, a 40-something with a receding hairline (whose name I didn’t even know), as I asked the question. There was a smirk on my face, and a scowl on his.
“You heard what I said. And don’t call me Garney.”
Barnaby’s balding buddy sneezed, and I guess accidentally flipped some switch as he lurched forward. The dummy’s bow tie spun around and his eyes rolled back in his head.
“You ought to see a doctor about that.” I said, as both men recovered themselves.
“C’mon man, quit pulling my leg.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, Barney. The damn thing might come off.”
The Big Bang.
Years ago, during my residency, I had a patient who was very old, and very sick. I spoke to him about his treatment options, and he waved them all away, and smiled.
“I think that it is time for me to go, Doctor. But thank you for your help.”
I had heard responses like his before, but usually they were uncertain, more a question that a statement. A patient could often be swayed with talk of how many years they could have left, how much time they could spend with their family. But this old man spoke his words with utter certainty.
I asked him how he could be so sure in choosing death, and he replied by asking me to go on a short trip with him. I agreed, thinking that I was doing a kindness to a dying man.
We walked for hours, him stumbling every so often but quickly finding his feet again and leading me forward. We came to a hole in the ground. I squinted, and saw stairs. The air smelled like fireworks.
We descended, and the old man gestured for me to move forward alone. He assured me that he would be with me in good time, and that I should explore.
I walked into the largest room I have ever seen, some kind of chamber beneath the ground, hundreds of square miles across. From the ceiling hung what I thought were ropes, of various lengths. I examined them, and saw that they were burning, all of them, very slowly.
I wandered the room and investigated them, trying to determine their purpose, or origin. The old man came to my side and spoke.
“From the moment you are born, one of these fuses is yours. It burns, all your life, getting closer and closer to its end. When you die, it stops.”
“What are the fuses connected to?”
“This cavern stretches around the entire globe, and above it is a stockpile. If any one person lives too long… there will be a very big bang. That, Doctor, is how I know it is my time. I do not want to push my years. I do not want to be the one who sets the world on fire.”
We went back to the hospital, and I made the man comfortable, and he died. I told nobody about what had happened, what I’d seen. I wrote it all off as the ramblings of an old mind.
Over my career, I have seen great medical advances. I have been able to save lives that — even five years ago — would have been lost. I have helped the human race survive. I have tried not to think about the cavern, and the fuses.
Everywhere I go, I smell gunpowder.
On camera.
I found a stack of photos on the day of your funeral. They were poorly shot, and looked like they had come from a disposable camera, but that was okay because it just gave them that nostalgic glow. You know what I mean? That faint over-exposure that looks like forgotten memories.
The pictures were all of you, and they were all of one place — our kitchen. It was before the redecoration, so those puke-colored green tiles were still behind the sink, and the wallpaper was beige, and illustrated with cockerels. In every picture you’re standing behind the Formica counter-top, and you’re baking a cake. It is chocolate, like your hair.
I couldn’t remember taking the pictures, when I first was looking through them. And as I got further into the pile, as time passed in the stills, I began to worry that I hadn’t taken a shot of the finished product: the cake itself. It was a silly thing to panic about, especially with the cake long gone and you so recently departed, but I panicked nonetheless.
I flipped through the mini-album. Some of the shots were taken in quick enough succession that I could make you move again. Your smile… there is enough of it in these images to tide me over, I think. The gap in your front teeth still makes me feel warm.
I needn’t have worried: the final photo was of you — so proud — displaying the cake to me. And oh, it was
Patterns.
I used to have an inbred cat. His name was Marmajeke, and his mother and father were siblings, and so he wasn’t quite right in the head. He would spend hours, every day, staring at the carpet, captivated by the patterns. He would be completely absorbed, wouldn’t even notice if you put a bowl of food right next to his head.
That’s why I imagine that he never saw the car that killed him. Probably he was out there on the asphalt, looking at something only he could see, some weird mix of colors or shapes, and he didn’t pay attention to anything else, and he didn’t move out of the way.
Sometimes, when I miss him, I like to stare at the carpet too. I crouch down, and I tilt my head like he used to, and I look. And I think about how, in that moment, he and I are pretty much the same thing: an object occupying space on my floor, looking at the patterns. We are separated, but only by time.
So I think I’ll have the house red. And some fish.
Espionage.
When David found the memory bomb, he didn’t attempt to disarm it, because that hadn’t been included in his training. Instead he searched — as taught — for something sentimental to hide behind, to limit the bomb’s effects.
He moved through the house quickly, dismissing the couch in the living room because — although they’d spent many nights there, watching television, tickling each other’s feet — he’d too recently used it as part of a drill on some students of his own, and now their thoughts infected it too. Those romantic recollections were newly tinged with some co-ed’s keg stand, the late-night kisses embedded in the fabric now frothy, and bitter-tasting.
He sprinted up the stairs, ignoring the photos of them skiing. Something like that would actually work pretty well — a strong memory, a perfect time, captured in an image — but the pictures were too small, and they’d just be torn apart by the wave of forget.
In their bedroom, in their closet, was her wedding dress, saved for all these years, never worn again, because what would be the point? There’s no question that it was steeped in love, and significance, and sentimentality, and it would protect him from the memory bomb.
But he didn’t get there in time. He didn’t wrap himself in the aura of the dress. The bomb exploded, and David fell asleep.
When he woke, he found himself on a bedroom floor, a white dress by his side. He stumbled down some stairs, past snapshots of strangers in snow, and found himself in a living room. And he did not see the memory bomb, because that is not what it was, anymore. Now, it was just an urn.
In camera.
After a couple of years, all that tilt-shift photography really got to some people. There would be posts on Flickr and Tumblr from users who had stared at too many of the images, and now couldn’t see the world as anything other than a toy landscape; the people around them reduced to needle-thin bodies with blurred heads and lives of little consequence.
The rush these self-styled giants seemed to feel just encouraged more of us to gorge ourselves on the cheap Photoshop trick, to smudge the world, and shrink it down, and make ourselves its kings and queens. Society, it turns out, can’t take millions of inhabitants suddenly sure of their godhood, and when people put Lego laws into practice, when they treat life like nothing more than a child’s game, things get ugly.
After the third week of riots, of citizens beating each other senseless in the streets, the government stepped in, and locked them all up. Gave them therapy. Special funhouse mirrors, inverted according to some painstaking formula, turned the tilt-shift effect on anyone who looked into them.
All the people who saw the world as tiny now found that they, too, were matchstick men. Former friends now towered above them, and sidewalks were immense platforms up in the sky. For a while, they were broken men, fractured women, but they found their way back into regular life, and things returned to normal.
You can still pick them out, though. When they talk to you they do so in hushed tones, scared stiff by your presence. And you try to tell that you’re not a giant, that the world is only as big as they are. And they look at you with tears in their eyes and they say something that tears their soul in two. All that comes out is a whisper.
47 minutes.
1:43pm
This interview is going to be different. This time, when he asks me about my references, I’m not just going to say “I can’t hear you, I’m going through a tunnel. No, I’m… Look, I’ll have to call you back.” I am not going to poke him in the eyes and then leave the room, pausing to pee on the potted plant by the office door. I am not going to take his printer, and throw it down the stairs, and yell back “I think it’s jammed!”
No, when he asks about my references, I’m going to start talking about Wittgenstein, and I’m going to make an allusion to Shakespeare, a nod to Proust. I will pepper the conversation with mentions of Monty Python, and the prophecies of Nostradamus. He’ll get what I’m doing, he’ll laugh at my joke, and I’ll say “I like to think of myself as a post-modern candidate” and he’ll laugh some more and probably he’ll pull a bottle of whisky from his desk drawer and we’ll drink together and be old chums, and I’ll get hired. I’ll get hired, and I’ll be able to pay you back that bail money, and I’ll be able to get a place of my own, and maybe I’ll even be able to afford some of those medications the doctor prescribed. Everything’s going to come up roses. You’ll see.
2:30pm
The job-hunt continues.
