SIX

The World

[2005]

When I got back to the studio apartment I flopped facedown onto the futon mattress that I used for a bed. The heat was stupid, the light was stupid, nothing moved. I was thankful for that, the lack of movement, the lack of sound. Within fifteen seconds the telephone rang.

“I’m sorry, Wade,” I said into the handset. “What did I forget?”

“Who is Wade?” said the voice at the other end, blurring the words together. WhoisWade?

“What did I forget?”

“I’m calling for Proteus.” The voice talked fast. Really fast. I’mcallingforProteus.

“My name is n-nuh…” I started, but couldn’t finish. All the words had abandoned me, and the will to speak. “This… is…” I tried. Again, emptiness. I faced into a void. “Yes,” I finally managed.

“I’m sorry is this a bad time I don’t know who Wade is.” I could hear the lack of punctuation. I’msorryisthisabadtimeIdon’tknowwhoWadeis.

“Yes. No. It’s fine. This is good. Who are…?”

“My name is [something unintelligible – the voice skipping too quickly over familiar syllables] and I got your number from Joe Reading.”

“Joe Reading,” I said.

“Not me,” said the voice, “but he gave me your number I hope you don’t mind that I’m calling you like this I’m not sure if I’m getting through do you understand?”

Joe Reading… at the Market downtown. I remembered. A shape eclipsing the sun. Gave me his card. But I didn’t remember giving him my phone number. I didn’t even have a phone at the time. So how…?

“Joe,” I said, “Reading. Of course. Right.”

“Yes look,” the fast voice said, “I’m with [something again unintelligible] we need some photos taken Joe told me that you’re a photographer he’d worked with you before.”

“I… huh.”

“We’re constructing a website for the state tourism board and need photographs of particular sites these are all sites outside of the city the city has its own tourism board that’s something totally different we have to in fact be very careful not to even mention Seattle let alone photograph it since these locations are all outside the city encompassing the rest of Washington State they would involve you driving to the sites and taking photos of them our next deadline is the section featuring Tacoma in and around and downtown there may be some locations that seem a little confusing also Hood Canal etcetera suchlike etcetera you understand we need to have them by Monday they’re nothing terrifically complicated they just need to look attractive is this something that you can do?”

I’d gone to the blinds drawn over window, pried two plastic slats apart with my fingers and looked outside. The bright sun scattered off the brickwork of the unused courtyard three floors below and the dry concrete fountain at its center. A collapsed plastic wrapper for a package of hotdog buns rested loosely against the base of the fountain. It would have blown away, had there been any wind. “Yes. Of course. I can do that. Sure. Monday?”

“Monday,” the voice said, “I’ll email you a complete list of the locations.” He then told me how much the job would pay.

•

“You’re not working tomorrow night, are you?” Vivianne asked, gathering knitting needles and colored yarn together to pour into her bag; also pens, pencils, and what appeared to be dice with several extra sides.

Proteus watched this whole collection disappear with a careful sweep of her arm across the desk blotter. Like so many lemmings, each object followed the next over the edge. “No,” he said, “I’ve got it off.”

“Good! Then you can come to my show.”

“You have a show.” He set his backpack onto the floor beside the desk, straightened up and looked into her face. She smiled.

“My band. Vinny and me. He plays drums, I’m guitar and vocals.”

“No shit.”

“It’s at The Garage. Here.” She dug into her floppy wreck of a bag and rummaged, flipping quickly through a number of sizable items, then what must have been a stack of loose-leaf pages, until she found what she wanted and forcefully pulled it out: a black-and-white photocopied page with an image of a woman, herself, wearing torn jeans and a t-shirt, her body in a provocative and potentially lethal pose, electric guitar at her waist, black hair spilling off her shoulders and down over the slight swell of her breasts. Behind her, at something just recognizable in the photocopy grit as a drum set, a vaguely manlike shape flailed, his arm and stick a blur of arc swung toward a floorstanding tom. Above the high-contrast photo bold, sans-serif block letters spelled the word FISHKILL, worn and pitted, as if the word itself had seen years of abuse already. At the bottom of the page, the venue and date were added in thick felt pen and again photocopied.

“Wow. Fishkill.”

“That’s our band. Vinny and me. You can’t say no.”

“I wouldn’t. I can’t. No, you’re right. I’ll be there.”

“You have to.”

“I’ll be there.”

“You’d better not not show up.”

“I’ll show up. I’ll be there.”

“Because you have to. This is me threatening you with death if you don’t.”

“I’m going to. I swear it.”

“You’d better.”

“I’m swearing it.”

She grabbed the collar of his shirt and balled it in her hand, then pulled herself up from the chair and kissed him once on the lips.

Stunned, Proteus stared into her large, round eyes.

“You… have… to…”

“I know it.”

“Tomorrow. Friday. Eight pm.”

•

Across the street, the pale-yellow sodium lights of the new grocery store’s parking garage flickered unevenly and hummed. I stood out on the porch with the others in the close night because I’d started smoking again. Willy in the corner turned around and around in counterclockwise rotations. When I looked in his direction, his gaping eyes met mine each time he turned to face me, though I don’t think he was meeting my eye so much as, by chance, fixedly gazing for a moment, for a degree or two of arc, straight at me, because his stare was stuck forward, so that everything at eye-level got that look. Mary stood from her place on the steps, and she did face me. She walked straight up to me and looked at a point on my forehead and said, “It’s a floor brain,” then walked past and inside, the screen door banging shut behind her.

I took a long drag, blew smoke into the air and coughed.

•

Long Davis bent through the doorframe of the office to look in and found that Eugene was already there, in the plastic chair, explaining:

“TWO SODAS I HAD TWO SODAS A FANTA AND A DIET DR. PEPPER DO YOU LIKE DR. PEPPER?”

I said, “I’m not such a fan, although when I was a kid –”

“YOU HATE ME YOU SHOULDN’T SAY THAT YOU HATE ME.” Eugene’s round face was becoming colorful.

“I need for you to calm down, Eugene.”

“I had pancakes with eggs and sausage.”

“Very good.”

“Can I get a cigarette?”

“The waiter was an ASSHOLE I TOLD HIM FUCK YOU ASSHOLE GO FUCK YOURSELF.”

“Eugene…”

“I shouldn’t have left him any tip.”

“That’s better.”

“Can I get a cigarette?”

“Davis, I will give you three…” I waited to see if he was even vaguely curious what the conditions were. He wasn’t. So I said anyhow, “But you have to leave me alone for one hour. That means no more cigarettes. Nothing. Not for one hour. Okay?”

“He looked at me like I was a Nazi so I said fuck you you fucking Nazi.”

“Eugene…”

“M-okay.”

“That was a bad thing to say I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Thangyew.” Rubberbanding Davis bent back through the door, retreating, three cigarettes now cupped in his dirty palm. I would see him again in less than one hour.

“Do you think that I’m a Nazi?”

“Eugene…”

“You shouldn’t say things like that.”

“Eugene, I’ve got paperwork I need to do in here, so I need for you to go now. Go watch TV with the others. Okay?”

“Okay.”

But once he’d left I wondered who the person was who remained, who still sat in the office, this figure at the desk, the man staring into the tattered logbook as though it meant something to him, though both he and I knew perfectly well it did not. The scattered words, the scribbled lines, the notes, the sense of it all evaded him, not because it was itself without sense, but because the man (so called) could not concentrate, could not put the pen-scratched words together into any meaningful order – even the ones he had written himself. Looked at this way, the lines and swoops and curls had a certain beauty, and a certain ugliness too. They were the epiphenomenon of meat, of the mass of gooey brainstuff thinking. Or they were something more perhaps, cogito ergo… but he couldn’t figure out what. Is this, he thought (with his mind slotted into a certain track, sensing some shape, the dimension of some meaning behind the meaning that he couldn’t find in the words themselves), the Golden Body?

•

Out on the porch again, but this time Willy had, miraculously, stopped moving. He now stood there right in front of me. He even looked at me – and not just toward me, but at me, into my eyes. And my eyes in turn shifted from one to the other of his, trying to find the more cogent one, the one that held the attention, the interest. Smoke drifted up from the cigarette between my fingers. Smoke drifted up between us.

“You’ve got it now, don’t you?” Willy said, his voice hushed. “You’re here and you’re there. I can tell. I’ve seen what you’ve seen. I know you’ve been places, man.”

I looked back over my shoulder. From where I stood I could see into the office, to where Proteus sat at the desk, still looking down into the logbook, trying to find the sense in it. “You can tell?” I asked.

“I can always tell. I’m in two places also.”

“Don’t say anything to anyone,” I said. “I might lose my job.”

Sheets of heat lightning shimmered and flashed in the sky over the mountains, distantly. I took a drag from the cigarette in my hand and felt it burn my tongue. Why was I smoking again?

“It wouldn’t matter.”

I looked once more at Proteus, inside at the desk, craning my head back so far around. Like an owl, I thought, I can turn my neck in a half-circle: look at me now, now look at backwards-me, I’m all backwards-me now, la-la. Proteus seemed either oblivious or uninterested. Either way, he would not look up.

“It would matter to me. I might lose my job.”

“No, I mean, it wouldn’t matter what I said. Nobody could hear me. I tell people… I tell them about the future, I tell them things they already…. or things they… I talk, I make the noises, but I think there’s something wrong with my voice, like I’m not making the right noises. So nobody can hear me. It wouldn’t matter what I said. Nobody could hear me.”

“Ah, yes, that may be so.”

“You can hear me. But you’re in two places.”

“I’m here and I’m –”

“The future is just like the past, except it hasn’t happened yet.”

“I know about the future.”

“You do?”

“I don’t like to talk about it.”

“But in the future…”

“Everything, I know, everybody…”

“But in the past, you’re going to make me make the world, the whole world, and I don’t want to do it. I need to tell you something. I need to tell you this because I know that you’ve been places, so maybe you can understand. In the park, there’s a man. He’s never hurt nobody. He lives in the park. Other places too, but in the park when it’s safe? He lives… he lives… I’ve done things to help him. What I do, I try and help the man. It’s not… what… the police… They don’t help the man. The police will try and make me make him do things, but that’s not… he makes me… he does things… sometimes? But he would never hurt nobody.”

“Is this about the future?”

“No!”

“Is this man you?”

“What? No! He…”

“Listen, I think you’re talking about being in two places. I think you’re talking about the future.”

“No! It’s not that. It’s…”

“It’s about being here and being also here. Because I’m here, but I’m also –”

•

“– here?” I looked up from the logbook. In the dim orange light of the office, a small fly buzzed around in sloppy but regular circles. When it hit a certain point in the air, just above my face, it turned a hard, sudden left. I could see past the flying dot of the fly, out through the screen door, to the spot on the porch where Willy also turned in circles, only his circles were precise, widdershins. No, deasil. No, widder… ah, fuck, I can’t remember which is which. He circled counterclockwise, the antithetical direction, wasn’t it? Thesis, antithesis. His was unmaking, unwinding, undoing. His jaw hung open, his eyes stared forward. When he circled behind the doorframe, from my perspective, the man was gone, but then he reappeared a moment later and did it again, and he will never have circled around enough, ever.

There was a man who lived in the park, sometimes.

In me, there was a hole the size of everything.