Avery Edison's Internet Website

Super Friends

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 20:10:23 -0400

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.

A Fragile Illusion

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 19:30:24 -0400

Congratulations on your purchase of a JenTek Holographic Girlfriend!

Do not ask it if it loves you.

My hobby.

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:02:42 -0400

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.

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 15:23:34 -0400

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.

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 14:09:58 -0400

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.

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 20:04:28 -0400

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.

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 17:43:24 -0400

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.

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 16:43:11 -0400

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.

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 14:01:38 -0400

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.

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 13:23:27 -0400

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.

Security.

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 19:04:40 -0400

Um, okay, so, when you open up my laptop you might see some — how do I put this — some disreputable folders sitting on my desktop. I want to, uh, I want to reassure you, and tell you, Kate, that you really don’t need to look into them. In fact, please don’t, because they contain plans for — um — for your birthday! Yes, many birthday plans, and presents, and yes I know it was only recently your birthday, but I am planning ahead.

So as I say, just please ignore the folders labelled “Porn”, “More Porn”, “Pornography”, “Hentai”, “Pr0n”, “Porno”, and “XXX”. I just used those names because I thought they might work as red herrings, to stop burglars looking in them. Because we… we don’t want any burglars to… to learn your birthday plans.

The file you are looking for will be in the folder marked “Kate’s Dad’s Funeral Arrangements”, which is in the folder “Shit That Isn’t Porn And Is Thus Stuff I Don’t Care About.”

A Single Bound.

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 18:37:13 -0400

You talk to me every day. All of you. When you can hear the entire planet, every single word is part of a larger conversation. The coincidences are intriguing. When you were discussing curtains the other day, a man in India said “Yes Janice, that is a nice fabric.” And your name is Janice. Lots of you are named Janice.

It is distracting, all this chatter. I am fighting someone, and your sentences swarm around my head, hummingbirds that dip into my ears and whisper inconsequential things. Yes, I know you are ironing your husband’s slacks, but I am battling Raxcor, and some errands are more pressing than your pressing errands.

To escape it all, I fly faster than the speed of sound. I feel a few seconds of relief, of silence. And then I hear your voices just behind me, impossibly. The tortoise, catching up to the hare.

The next time you hear a sonic boom, think of me, trying to ignore you. Think of me, trying to get a moment’s peace.

Never worn.

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 12:11:33 -0400

The thing is, Mrs. Wheeler, that that Hemingway dude you talked about had a whole lifetime to get good at telling little stories, and I’ve just had a few English classes. And I can’t come up with anything as short as you want, and the things I do come up with are just rip-offs of what he wrote, of that baby shoes thing.

And I got so stressed out about this assignment, and I could see everyone else being so relaxed, and I could see them doing okay without even trying. And I squeezed my eyes shut tight and probably looked like I was trying to push, but I was thinking really hard and it still didn’t work, I still couldn’t make up a tiny little story.

And when I opened my eyes, there was a smudge on the paper, where I’d sweated, where I’d scrunched my face up and concentrated so hard that my body grew hot, and my skin manufactured dew drops. And I breathed a sigh of relief, and you can disregard everything I’ve written here, because that wet spot on this page is the story, Mrs. Wheeler. My sweat is the story.

Archive.

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 19:39:56 -0400

I’ve been reading through your blog. I started with today, and kept hitting the “back” button, and found myself — hours later — at the twenty-second of December, 2001.

As I read all those pages (well, skimmed, but that’s reading, nowadays, isn’t it?) I wondered if I would discover something new about you. Some essential truth that could be distilled from nine years of links, nine years of quick notes on how your day went, nine years of “sorry it’s been so long, folks” posts that found an audience of none (because, hey, this is the internet, and nobody is reading anything. Nobody will read this.)

As I got farther and farther away from the present, I hoped that I was approaching some grand first post. Some manifesto at the beginning of your blog, some page-long screed declaring yourself, announcing the foundation of your online personhood. Instead, there was just this short entry:

“I wonder what the hell I’ll ever use this thing for.”

Nine years in, and you’re probably still wondering.

This is what I looked like right now.

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 16:30:19 -0400

This is what I looked like right now.

Side-show.

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 16:22:03 -0400

I saw the palm lady over the weekend. She invited me into her tent, and I broke my no-hastily-erected-outdoor-structures rule and went in because I was curious.

She looked at my hands and told me I was mean, and dishonest. She told me that I lied to people about how sick I was so I wouldn’t have to go to their parties. She told me that I was malicious, and destructive, and cruel. She told me that I was right to not believe in God, and also lucky, because if He were real there’d be a place in hell set aside for me.

I pulled my hands away, but she wasn’t even looking at them any more. Her eyes were rolled up, staring at her skull, and she was screaming at me now.

I ran away from the tent, from the carnival. I ran all the way home. I knew that everything she had said was true, and I knew that I could not change any of it.

But I could grab a knife. I could change my hands.

Weather report.

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 13:08:16 -0400

It is raining here. Like, really raining. Pouring it down, God-is-angry-at-us type, batten-down-the-hatches rain. I am using your umbrella.

I keep thinking about how water is supposed to be symbolic, supposed to be all about rebirth, and baptism, and change, and all I can think of, instead, is you drowning.

They say you can die in an inch of water. How many raindrops is that? Did you count them, as you left?

Party.

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 11:44:00 -0400

This is what we are going to do for your birthday. We are going to dress up as your friends, and we are going to act like everything is okay. We are going to talk to you about work, and we are going to excuse ourselves to go to the bathroom and we are going to fix our make-up and we are going to compare notes on you.

We are going to wheel out an ice statue of a swan, and we are going to get our flamethrowers, and we are going to melt her. And you will cry, probably, and we will tell you that it is fine, that she’s just an ugly duckling, really, and you will still cry, and your tears will mix with the water.

We are going to bake you a cake, and put a file inside, and you’ll laugh, and say “but I’m not in prison” and we’ll say “aren’t you?”

We will send you home with presents, and you will open them, and they will be just what you wanted and you will never think about them again. They will sit in the corner of your living room and to look at them will be to become reminded of the time your friends wore their faces badly, the time they murdered a wintry bird, the time they said that you were wearing handcuffs even though your arms felt free.

All of this is going to be a surprise. Please promise us that.

Test subject.

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 11:30:11 -0400

Laura was a college student, and was therefore in that perpetual condition of needing a little extra cash. When she saw an advertisement for a psychological study that would pay her three hundred dollars, she got excited by the possibility of being able to buy those textbooks the professors said were so important.

She was met by a small, thin man, with glasses and a ponytail, and a beard so fine he looked like he was exhaling cigarette smoke. He gestured for her to sit, and she made herself as comfortable as she could whilst simultaneously remaining wary of probes, or hidden cameras, or some kind of lie detector device.

The man asked her if her life was good, and she said it was. Then he asked her how it could be better. Laura told him that things would be great if she could be finished with her degree. He asked her how things could be better than even that, and she spoke of a house, and a partner — maybe some children.

He kept asking her how this hypothetical life could be improved, and she kept coming up with answers. She could have a fast car. She could win the lottery. She could run her own company. She could run a marathon. She could become President of the United States.

After many hours, and many questions, Laura was stumped. She couldn’t figure out how the life she was currently imagining could be any better. Then it occurred to her.

“I guess I could be God.”

The man nodded, and gave her a drink, mumbling something about how she must have been thirsty after such a long conversation. She took a sip, fell asleep.

When Laura woke, she was in a very large room, and snuggled into a plush, expansive bed. She glanced over at the body beside her, and then was startled by two children bursting through the door and jumping onto her. They shouted “Mom! You’re awake!” and smiled and laughed and were real. A man all in black peeked in through the door, smiled, and said “I’m sorry, Mrs. President, but they had security clearance.” He laughed, and went back to his station.

Laura peeled the children off herself. She thought back to the “psychological study” and tried to remember all the things that she’d spoken of, the things that were now — presumably — hers. Then she sighed, and the deserts shivered.

Family business.

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 23:34:00 -0400

There’s always this little kid down at the bowling alley, and whenever I see him he’s usually only four to five minutes away from grabbing his fourteen pound ball and slamming it into his head.

He’s actually a really good bowler, and he gets a lot of strikes, and he picks up a bunch of spares, and he seems to have a really powerful throw considering his age. But every now and then he misses, makes a gutter-ball, and he gets so mad, and he mashes his face with that damn ball, and then the next time it rolls down the lane it hits all the pins, every single one.

One time I followed him out of the alley. I wanted to tell him to calm down, to stop hurting himself, to have fun with the game. But I didn’t get to him in time, and I saw him climb into the car that comes to pick him up. I looked at his family, his mother and father and sister, and caught sight of their lumpy heads. Two of them were bleeding. The father laughed, and his teeth were like moon rocks.

As the car pulled away, I read their bumper sticker. It said “live the dream.”