|
|
|
the archive(s):
issue no. 1:
Ben Hur had Less Detail/ Nathaniel G. Moore
Charles was standing naked before work, in front of the mirror and alone; there was a breeze outside though all the windows had been sealed in duct tape. His dick was small and shrivelled up into a dangling shadow. Soon it would cocoon into a larvae and fly away and he didn't give a fuck.
In a dream last night, Charles could read letters right on a picnic basket, he rode a BMX bike, there was sun on her tongue, circling her ass, in her new swimming suit she bought at the Polish discount store in her neighbourhood, a suit she described to him over the phone that he'd never see her in.
"I can't put it on for you, it would be too much, it's too much for you."
She had explained to him their differences, and he couldn't argue, it was impossible, she made it sound like a regulation from a set of board game instructions. Charles knew their physical proximity wouldn't last. "You'll take whatever you can get, right?" she mewed.
She was right. Her exacting insight or, as she would describe them, cold and objective perspective, poured in every other day since activation the option clause in her Charles-free agency. The verdict came in a form letter; the logo on the top of the paper was that of a blender with eyes.
I can't leave my life for you and I don't want to be forced into processing your blocks when you are taking energy away from me and making me feel I am making a mistake in loving you... and feeling that perhaps it is more security than love. So unfortunately I have to reject our relationship right now and face my insecurities and see what you can give me... and see if there is still a good love.
"Originally the call came in, I think about six in the morning three nights ago," his left knee told a source. "No one knows what may have caused it," said a finger.
He knew, before he had even deflated the regurgitated words from his organs, lungs, heart and balls, he knew that any union in which he was equated could not sustain life. It was all bullshit and he was inching closer to the final incision. He was ready to sell coconut oil 12 months a year on the boardwalk and never consume another emotional moment with anyone ever again.
He had some leads on the issue.
After the mirror press conference with himself, where the matters would air and the faith in the system and the glorious institution of the self and all will be judged by his actions and the ripple effect will be heard through each carefully dried leg hair.
When he finished his shower and vanity session, he would reach for a towell, and the thread count of the towel will be of the highest quality and all the organ boardrooms drilling each other for answers, upset and with stinging remarks would be shredding documents and rubbing eyes from flashbulbs.
"We're really all quite shocked," his right testicular region said. "What a fuck up -- you mean she won't be back? That's really going to be tough. I know I speak for both lefty and me when I say, she will be missed."
"Speak for yourself," leftie said. "I would prefer a powerful man down there, someone with a career. Someone to take care of us. Enough of these insane girls that jump out of cakes and give us all cavities."
"That's discrimination. You can't honestly prove these girls are rotting him."
"I meant emotionally."
"Still, you are generalizing. Remember what he thought about the work-out video, that even in that medium this sadness or devastation has already been played out. We are still just reacting to the most played-out scenario in Hollywood."
"So, what should we do then?"
"Support Charlie's decision no matter what."
Some parts refused to step down from their tenures. "Members have been supported in the mess but a lot of internal allegations have to be confronted."
* * *
If I can't have her, he thought, no one will. But he knew, taking off his Hawaiian shirt, pants, and the fake dynamite belt he had made for effect out of paper towel rolls, he was ready to totally just get over it; there was just no room in his schedule to be upset about it any longer. He pulled off his fake cop sideburns and took off the three pounds of fake gold that tore out some of his chest hairs.
He had been working at a beach selling a new coconut flavoured drink, or perhaps sun tan lotion. If it was a combination of the two, Charles didn't care, as he squirted drops of the substance into cups and threw it at the convoy of people riding bikes or roller blading along the boardwalk. Some couples he'd have to flag down to try to get them hooked on the juice.
However, lately, the loss of his romantic empire broiled at Charles and he didn't care about routine, nor identifying himself or others throughout said routine and tried, if not succeeded, at flying over the earth with a confident yawn, without a cape, and felt strength for the first time in at least a year and enjoyed letting go of his former self, the pain of his decision, facing reality and allowing the clamp of this pain to set. He would have to experience the pain to its fullest, every last detail.
He understood the world he avoided, and knew that this sort of pain had been addressed by popular forms of media seventy million times over in such genres as film, literature, music and even, though he was probably wrong, the workout video too.
Listening to any song watching any film or participating in any cardiovascular manipulation would not alter the course of his own life; she was going to leave him and fuck someone else, and he was watching his underwear and socks pile up, a breeze of coupons by an open window, and could quite easily memorize any weather schedule for the week, should human contact become a factor in his future routine. This was happening to men and women everywhere in the world, like acne or spaghetti.
She was just doing what she was destined to do, and Charles was just destined to be the wrong person for her, so in fact it was more of a mathematical theme than any sort of personalized stab wound to the post-modern heart thesis jingle. Despite a radical shift in geography (he had moved for the month to Scarborough, or was it Missisauga), it definitely avoided Toronto, wherever he was staying.
* * *
"None of my friends are monogamous," she'd protest, and Charles could see her, on the other end of the phone as she sawed a circle through the floor around her and disappeared, naked.
The more she explained things, the longer he allowed her to speak without hanging up the phone, the clearer her utopia became. Charles was not going to heal, the blood was going to keep flooding unless he sealed up and ran from the saw blade forever. Again he was watching a genre-specific movie, drinking water that fizzed and running around the couch as Tanya talked to it. He was sawing himself, he could feel it now and everything that was wrong inside him was going to be destroyed forever and never grow properly unless he walked out of the chainsaw horror scene right this minute, that is what he convinced himself. He had no choice but to recast himself.
He had the powers; it was his hand on the chainsaw cord, and no one else's. She was not a monster; she was leaving, dumping her stock, altering her portfolio, exchanging her currency, and upgrading her dildo.
"So what, you want to sleep with other boys?"
"No, just him. Charles, the next person I have sex with is going to be him."
"I can't be around you anymore."
"You can hang out with us,"
"Where's he going to sleep?"
"On the couch."
"Where am I going to sleep?"
"You aren't allowed to stay over."
"And he's going to sleep on the couch?"
"Yes."
"Yeah right. You're going to fuck him."
"I wouldn't want to date you even if I didn't know him."
"I don't understand how this happened, or why you are falling for this."
"Charles, I need you. I'm going to need you when this is over."
"What do you mean when this is over?"
"Well, he's only staying for a month." She said.
"It's not like I'm going to wait in a coffee shop all summer for you while this guy fucks you. And it's not like he's going to just leave. He's coming here, he's hunted you down, weaseled your phone number from you. It's like, consensual stalking."
When Charles got home from the boardwalk, smelling of coconut oil, there was a note written out on the back of a flyer for lawn services. She had been over, to visit, but he had been working. Her shadow watered the lawn and rearranged his clothes in his absence.
Hello Charles, I love you! I just got scared of all your jealousy (over the wrong people too.) The way you weren't communicating, the way my sexuality was feeling repressed with you, when you said stuff like "I hope you don't still do drugs when we have children." I am lost and confused... I might go to Holland but not to his place, to Amsterdam.
I might travel and meet him...but I also said the whole thing made me feel weird... that we both had illusions and fears we were trying to escape from...that it couldn't be "love". The level of his intensity has been very high...and I escaped into the fantasy of that. I am coming down now...but I feel sad and lost. Maybe I need to get back to myself.
He started the engine, a Bowing lawnmower, and let the beast ride the heat, chew the green and eat the note, word by word. Charles was now governing as the exterminator of every insane morsel, each deranged particle that shipwrecked its way into his delicate Empire. No, from now on things would be different. He had tightened security and even sketched out some infantry uniforms for some designers.
We're going to beef up security around here, he boasted to an expired carton of milk that watched him from the recycling bin, as if it had eyes. It bore his own face somewhere near the barcode, as if at any moment the action sequence of this horror romance comedy would gear up, and a robotic leopard from the future would crawl out of the sewer grate in front of his house and challenge Charles and his lawnmower to a race. And Charles would be ready.
He knew exactly what was happening. He made some toast and knew this. But what if she hadn't met this guy from Europe on the internet and what if he wasn't planning to pump her and visit and what if then, as a result of this wouldn't he, that is, Charles, have the comfort and solitude of her mouth and eyes and outfits and sexual rage all bottled up under his very own tongue?
Something was happening. Charles knew this, and he could remember, through the fog of shaving, bathing, trying to feed himself that yes, there was a plan, and it was only a matter of time before he could allow himself to parade beyond the parameters of depression and allow these electronic pulses of his daily life to clash. He would have to embrace and accept the death of his former self and move on.
If she was carrying sand bags to internet cafés he would balm the civilians in a thick veneer of coconut and the unsuspecting bodies that peppered the faulty wooden path would not be able to reject these eel-like movements, their hands would reach out, begging for the coconut oil, juice, shake, mist, spray, whatever the product he sold was suppose to do.
He had no time to think, the sewer grate would soon slide open in front of his house and he would have to battle.
It was either the giant robot leopard from the future or this. He chose the robot.
He knew she would not care for the robot, nor come watch the fight, and more importantly, he knew he could win. He would take some magnetic tools from a shed, a paring knife and candelabra and find the robot's weak spot, likely in the neckline.
She would not need him to be anything, not even something to be disappointed in, for she would be fulfilled, filled and pumped. Hers was a sequel, his was a continuation from a series he began to act in several years earlier. He would be loaded into a chamber and fired into his own head. He looked back to the sewer grate, flipping the motor of the lawnmower to the off position. Fragments of official read-outs scuttled about in the air. The robot leopard was nowhere to be found. It wasn't coming.
"He's afraid." Charles said to himself.
I wanted you to be stronger, more real and realistic, to no longer be acting furtively and hiding in glum shame around atmospheres that challenge you emotionally and sexually or spatially.
Charles had known about the man from overseas, she had been hinting at it for a week before the 6 am call. Reminded of it daily, it was impossible for him to know anything else. Whenever he would sleep, a wet tongue would hit him softly as rain but as sincere as his own voice: Chuck, it said to himself, fuck man, she was halfway out the door, you could tell she was ready to check out. Damn, you're fucked. You're fucked if this is what you want. She works for another network now, she has a big contract, you'll never share the pretzel bowl again, you'll never flirt by the catering table, you'll never sneak off to watch the security guard rape himself in the stairwell. Light those dynamite sticks around your waist like birthday candles, better leave no trace of you if you want to make it through the night because the robo-beast is coming. Come on, Chuck, you could see that little bum waddling and whimpering and singing fifty-nine carefully produced love songs and none of them were about you.
"Who the fuck am I kidding. I can't stand her." Charles said climbing out of the bath. He began to vomit, his mouth and fingers prying each other like hooks and a fish mouth, having the creative insight of his own destructive potential. He could see it all; he could smell it. Backtracking, down the stairs, full of Tylenol 3 he sunk into the bathtub and tried to wash her stink from his palms. She was epilepsy and he loved it, the routine, and the nauseous strides.
A year from now he will see her on a dance floor, but he won't see that light, the shade of her dress or scent of her armpits from behind the thousands of ant miles he has yet to overcome. The meals, the showers, the thoughts, bumped knees in the night against end tables. The earth to those thousands of tunnelled miles had yet to be poked through. Her tattooed inmate greeting card semantics formed in the billowing clouds of his suburban sunstroke. "I dreamt all day of wearing a black rubber dress with the nipples cut out while I was serving delicate t-cakes on silver trays. I think I am a masochist."
He tasted his fingers and what he knew was her email address was this tiny piece of thread and this thread was in the mouth of a strange man miles and miles away, and soon he would unravel it until there would be no distance between them, and it would feel like a meteorite was landing in his lap and Charles would look down one day, evening or morning, whenever it hit, and would see nothing but putrid scalded skin, like baked Alaska, a type of ice cream cake the chef ignites prior to being served. There would be no ice cream, or likely there would be ice cream, but organic ice cream because that is the way things seem to work out.
"Look I got your message," the voice said. It was his friend Adam. "Do you want to die? Look, she doesn't like you, she's telling you these things to hurt you, stay away from her. You are making her a monster. You just have to think of it like she isn't the one for you now or ever and quit all this fantasy death. This isn't a video game, she isn't the big boss at the end of a level. Just do something else."
Charles unwrapped the three-day-old taco and visited the library where he used to play dungeons and dragons with two Greek boys from his neighbourhood. He got a wind rush, the clang of a drain pipe, chipped paint and all: watched himself much younger running around with sunny lunch hour fever, looping his spit into the same wind and feeling his heart race within the sleeves of twelve year-old girls' lip gloss. Those hugs. He studied the brick outside the school for his name. Scratched with house keys that open changed locks in a cemetery of hardware in some abandoned factory, or buried in a pawnshop, a front line of brass screws and deadbolts lay beside the keyhole. Elbow grease. There is no way the key that did the name on the brick will ever find the hole it entered thousands of times. But Charles didn't mind, alone with the wind. The taco paper flapped in the wind making wings and as he let it go into the trash, he wiped his hands in the rain and the hot sauce burned the roof of his mouth but he felt it, and he felt okay.
He kept walking, deeper into the neighbourhood whose system he had long ago calculated with its green street signs and green lawns and green paintjobs. He could pace here blindfolded, and in that there was a comfort.
Some of the replacement fences were grey, a steel grey that rivalled the cement, and the garbage bins fastened to every street corner. A neighbourhood with wrinkled grandmothers in every bathtub who seldom took a decent phone message. Who cooked thick sauces without a whisper; with hairs that charged out of uneven moles.
Sensing a personal decay despite regular bathing, he got dressed in clean clothing and brushed his teeth. He flossed until his gums bled. That's right, bleed, he commanded.
He stopped thinking about this and weeded his Uncle's garden. His great Uncle who had been in the war and who never married.
Charles stretched out on the suburban lawn and watched the families do their laundry and unload their groceries while he read some National Geographic magazines that his Uncle had kept in a box. He had to be at the beach at 7 am tomorrow, and wanted a good night's rest. The sun was dropping its jaw, but slowly. There was a hiss of bugs that ricocheted in all the backyards. He read about sharks and looked at victim's scar tissue as the sun set completely. He poked the tea bag with his thumb, letting the sting have its way with his fingerprint. He shook his hand and closed the magazine. He would dive deep that night, into a jagged sleep as loud unfamiliar cars waged themselves in cyclical urban renewal, of which he was prepared to emulate, alone and for better.
Night growled over the Scarborough landscape, and soon, the once calm beer-coloured sky was dark, haunted and manta ray insane. Too many nature facts pawed and suctioned themselves to Charles, who was dosing off by the television in the front room.
Charles would roar his engine in the morning; he would be recharged, partially, if not fully reborn. He would burn new fuel, and conquer all. He would sell coconut surprise to the passersby, and at the end of the day, wouldn't mind so much smelling the way he would smell. Unable to sleep, Charles walked up and down the hallway of his house, until he stopped at the front door. He opened it slightly, just as the adjacent sewer at the end of the driveway slid open.
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
| |
|
