Sunday, November 1, 2009
Away
Sorry that I've been away from this thing for awhile. I just got busy with work, and then, last month, found myself unemployed again. The last thing I wanted to do was get on here and moan about how bad things seemed to be in my life. (Getting laid off twice in one year, etc...). I think I honestly have come to a point where I don't know what to say about myself without seeming to whine and kvetch, if not feel sorry for myself. I am hopeful, however, I will have positive news to post here soon. Been getting a few nibbles at least in my job hunt. So that's a good thing. Other than that, things have been pretty quiet over here. Nothing new to report, really. It'd be nice if things did pick up, though. Here's hoping.
Friday, August 7, 2009
Souvenirs From the New World [The Author's Cut]
Sorry if I haven't really updated this blog in awhile. I've been busy with work and just generally goofing off.
I do have some news, however. I got published twice in Girls With Insurance this week. Both are old stories that were published on a previous iteration of the site.
You can read the stories by clicking on the links below.
Double Income, No Kids
Souvenirs From the New World
But I have a special treat for you readers. I initally wrote Souvenirs as a 9,000 word story, then truncated it to 1,000 words so that it would be more easily publishable. So there's a "director's cut" of the story, which I will post below in all of its unedited glory. As you can see, the longer cut takes a vastly different direction. Hope you enjoy!
Souvenirs From The New World
By Zachary Houle
1.
There are no more places on Earth left to explore. This is a fact. For the last 100 years or so, every inch of the planet has been discovered. Our sights are now on the nearby planets, perhaps someday the stars. But Mel's dad? He always had other ideas.
Every Friday night, he would get into his easy chair in the basement of his house and strap a pair of completely opaque goggles to his head. For the remainder of the evening and the next two days, he would sit utterly still and quiet, as though he were watching the most fascinating, edge-of-your-seat play of the Super Bowl in slow-motion. He barely ever got up, if only to eat and go to the bathroom every once and again. Mel told me that he did this strange behavior because he saw himself as an explorer. According to her, however, he felt the only places anyone could truly explore are the places within.
I thought this had to be the biggest crock of shit I'd ever heard in my life (not that I told her, of course). Still, there had to be a reason for this behaviour, and I naively thought that maybe things would make more sense if I got the real reason directly from the horse's mouth. So I asked him about it one weekday evening when I got some alone time away from Mel. As I recall, Mel's dad had wanted to show me some stuff in his basement. (Mel had been busy upstairs polishing off the last of her math homework.) His answer to me at the time was a little less than direct - a question followed by a question of his own. He always pulled off shit like that though. It was something of an annoying habit of his.
"You know what was great about the 1500s, 1600s?" he said, fumbling around on a shelf full of paperweights and useless knick-knacks that looked as though they came from someone's garage sale.
"No idea," I said with a useless shrug.
"Anyone could be an explorer," he said, running a finger along the dusty armchair where he'd sit every weekend. "There was no fucking government with a monopoly on exploration. Nah. All you had to do was have a ship, a bit of balls, and off you go."
"I thought European royalty financed a lot of those expeditions," I countered.
"Eh?" he said.
"We learned that in, like, Grade 9," I said. "You know, either the King was paying your way, or you had to have friends who were rich or in high - ."
"So what are you and Mel doing this weekend?" he quickly asked overtop my statement, as though I hadn't said a thing.
Fucking cockbiter, I thought.
"Same as we always do," I said, with a shrug. "Maybe go rent a movie. Maybe even take over the world, if we're lucky."
The last bit was a joke, but Mel's dad seemed to either not "get it" or not care, as evident by the vacant look on his face.
"Well, if my expeditions weren't so goddamn important, I'm not sure I'd leave the two of you young rabbits together," he said. "God only knows what the two of you do together when you're alone, eh?"
I sighed, and supposed for a second that I could consider telling him the truth for once. I could have told him that a teenager can only go so far without fucking the person they were dating without losing complete and utter interest, since Mel and I hadn't gone much further than first or second base. I guess she had her reasons for not wanting to go beyond that, despite the fact that I'd almost practically moved into her house and had staked my claim to the territory within. I'd always figured staking a claim to her seemed to be the next logical step. In any event, I kept my mouth shut, which was probably the best thing in retrospect. Who the hell knew what a man who sat for hours on end in his basement doing absolutely nothing was capable of?
Anyway, Mel's dad started laughing at me as I stood there stammering for the most appropriate answer. His laughter was like a stupid little pneumonic cough.
"Ha! I'm kidding, see," he said, poking a stubby finger rather painfully into my arm. "I think you're good for Mel. She sorta could use some looking after, considering her mother ... ."
His laughter turned into a few legitimate coughs, which stopped almost as soon as they started.
Then he looked at me like he'd just finished sucking on a lemon. The guy had worse mood swings sometimes than Mel, who could go from irresistibly happy to a complete sourpuss.
"Does she ever talk about her mother?" I asked.
"Hell, no," he said. "What's the point?"
"I was just curious," I muttered, a half-hearted attempt at apology for broaching the subject. But what I said was true. I was curious. Mel never talked about her to me, which made me wonder if she hadn't gotten over it yet. I mean, the death could explain her dad's weird behaviour, but Mel ... ? She didn't say anything on the topic. Which was another potentially good reason for breaking up. Who knew what kind of hidden baggage she might be carrying around?
Of course, there was a reason why I'd always dragged my heels on the break-up question: that Mel had even agreed to go out with me in the first place pretty much wrote the book on where I stood in that town's teenage dating hierarchy. It wasn't like I was ugly or anything - and neither was Mel, I might add. I just kinda had a habit of fading into the background. Being invisible. Lacking confidence. That lack was what I conversely sought in a girl, so when I discovered Mel in math class, she rightfully took the bait when it came in the form of a passed note from yours truly.
"Hey, remember what I wanted to show ya?" Mel's dad said excitedly, as though any talk of his dead wife was something that'd happened years ago.
"I found it. Come, look here ... ."
When I came to stand beside him, he pulled something that looked like a small piece of paper off a nearby shelf. He held it out on his hand to me, and motioned that I should take it.
"I found that on my last expedition," he said. "Boy, was that a doozy. I found a land with a purple sky and a giant light bulb for a sun. It was really hot."
"I bet," I mumbled.
"Yeah, you should have seen it!" he said excitedly, missing any trace of sarcasm in my voice. "Anyway, you should take a look at this."
I took the object and looked at it. It was a crude drawing of a cowboy with his back turned, hovering over a little chamber pot. There was a cut out square where the cowboy's ass should have been. Suddenly, Mel's dad stuck the crook of his bent thumb into the square, and it now looked like the cowboy had his butt sticking out. Neat trick, I thought woozily, almost not resisting the urge to roll my eyes ceiling-ward.
"This is money in the world I discovered," he said, grabbing the piece of paper from me. "It's a ten dollar bill if the cowboy isn't taking a shit, a twenty dollar bill if he is. What do you think of that, eh? Eh?"
"That's ... um ... neat," I said, now struggling to come up with something decent to say that didn't sound like an automatic insult.
"Yeah, isn't it?" he said, gazing at the paper as though it might be actually worth something. He then placed it back on the shelf, clapped his hand on my shoulder and smiled.
"There some weird lands to discover, I tell ya. Who knows? If I collect enough of this stuff, show it to the museum in town, maybe someday I'll be rich and famous like that Champaign guy."
"You mean Samuel de Champ - ," I tried to correct.
"You're a good kid," he said. "I'm glad my daughter found a decent, upstanding guy like you. Heh!"
I sighed and tried not to flinch too much as he clapped a hand on my shoulder. He smiled that shit-crazy grin of his. And, I had to wonder: What the hell was I doing here? I knew it wouldn't be the last time, either, which had me wondering all over again. What was I doing here? What the hell was I doing?
2.
One Saturday afternoon, the next weekend after the aforementioned quality time with Mel's dad in fact, Mel and I were lounging about her house. The TV in the living room had just issued a tornado warning for the area, and the purple cloud bottoms outside had been shaped into menacing raspberries on the prowl. That, I figured, did not look like a very encouraging sign. And that was notwithstanding the fact that one of these raspberries seemed to be rotating.
"Maybe we should just head for the basement," suggested Mel, with a panicked look on her face.
"But your dad's down there," I countered.
"So?"
"Weeeellllll," I said, "We wouldn't want to disturb him or anything."
Which was true, to a degree. I just didn't like the idea of being in the basement when Mr. Fruit Loops was on one of his chartered trips. God only knows what could happen, and, besides, I'd been searching for an excuse to finally tell Mel that I was no longer interested in her. That I was thinking that maybe it would be better if we just broke up. Problem was, I was chicken shit. I really didn't know how Mel would take it.
"What's the matter?" she sighed. "It's not like you've seen firsthand how messed up he is. C'mon. Let's just go down there. Just in case."
She then grabbed my hand and led me down the narrow, creaky stairwell into the basement, which was a single open room taken up by a furnace in one corner, a ping-pong table in another and figurative mountains of shit and cheap stuff scattered in clusters throughout the rest of the concrete room. Sure enough, there was Mel's dad, hands gripped tightly around the arms of his armchair. He was wearing his blinders, but you could see that he was squinting with intense concentration - the lines around his eyes betrayed that bit of information. What's more, it looked as though he were snarling; his lower lip even twitched at certain points. The guy was clearly out of it. He was off in Inner-space or La La Land or wherever it was that he was.
It was almost comical, looking at Mel's dad like that. I couldn't help but think that he was constipated, that he was trying (and failing) to take the biggest crap of his life. I smirked and just went to one of the shelves with his knick-knacks, keeping an ear peeled to the outside world just in case you could hear that low rumbling sound of a railway freight train barreling down at you.
"C'mon," said Mel, tugging at my arm. "You don't want to look at that boring shit. I'll show you something really interesting."
I let her lead me to a corner of the basement, past her old man's work area full of power tools and handsaws, where there was a pile of moldy boxes stacked up one upon the other.
"Is this the southwest corner of the basement?" I wondered a bit loudly aloud.
"Quiet, you," she said quietly and breathlessly. She ripped open one of the boxes and starting rooting through it, tossing out the odd item here and there. A child's drawing of a pink panda. A small, plastic Lego house complete with window and door. Then, she tossed out a kid's book called POGO LEARNS ABOUT DEATH. It had a cute cartoon penguin on the cover. I picked it up and started to flip through it, only to be interrupted by Mel softly saying, "Here it is."
I looked up. "Here what is?"
"This," she said, thrusting a picture into my hands.
It was an old, fading color picture of a man and a woman, clearly taken on their wedding day. They were standing on a small grassy knoll, with what looked to be the tailfin of a really old car in the background.
"It's my Mom and Dad," she said. "This box is where Dad keeps all the stuff that he can't bare to look at. All the stuff he hasn't destroyed."
"Destroyed?" I said, raising an eyebrow.
"Yeah, at one point, he took most of her stuff, stuff that might remind him of her. He put it in a few boxes and threw it on the barbeque. Someone had to call in the fire department."
She started returning the items she'd already taken out back into it, and added, "I guess this was one of the boxes that he never got around to burning."
"Oh?" I replied, half wanting to start sprinting up the stairs and run out the door to the outside world, regardless if there were tornadoes or not. Instead, I asked another question.
"So he's been doing this for a long time?" I whispered, pointing to her dad in the chair.
"Just about as long as I can remember," she replied. "The thing is, every time he 'goes away' he keeps bringing back all this weird stuff."
When she had said "goes away," Mel had made parenthetical marks with her hands. Just like her old man would do sometimes. Jesus.
"That picture in your hands?" she added. "That was one of the things he brought back. Said it was currency in some other 'land' that he discovered. Stupid, isn't it."
I thought back to that picture of the cowboy, and wondered what it took for him to go from wanting to burn this picture to treating it like money. It made me want to shake my head, bury it in my hands and pull out most of my hair. This was just starting to get too fucked up. In fact, I even found myself asking a familiar question. What was I doing here? I asked myself this question for what felt like the fourteenth million time.
Instead of throwing a shit fit, I gave the photo back to Mel, who happened to touch my fingers as she took the picture. It wasn't an accident. She practically stroked my forefinger as she moved to snatch the photo.
"What happened to your mom anyway," I decided to offer. "You still have yet to tell me."
I should have known better that to ask, but I suppose I was secretly hoping things might be different this time. That maybe she would finally open up. That she would finally tell me. That this could lead to other possibilities involving the horizontal position - not to get too far ahead of myself.
But nothing, and I mean nothing, usually got Mel's back up faster than asking her what happened to her mother. The rumor was around school that Mel's mother had died giving birth to her. I'd yet to confirm with anyone, including my folks, that this was indeed true. No one really knew, and, what's more, hardly anyone seemed to care. Mel and her dad were a family that had somehow slipped beneath the radar of town gossip. Because they barely left their home, had no nearby relatives and took part in none of the town's community events - not even SnowFest, which, I had to admit, was just a few steps above the annual Summer Tractor Pull in banality - it was as though they'd almost disappeared completely from the ebb and flow of small-town life. Now that I knew what Mel's dad was up to, I had to wonder how long it'd take before the two of them would slip off the map completely. Of course, it's completely ironic that I thought this, considering what would happen to me a little later that day.
Before I go any further, perhaps I should mention that I've never determined what had really happened to Mel's mom - a cold case that remains unsolved - since Mel never felt she was in a position where she wanted to tell me anything. In fact, taking a cue from her father, Mel just simply ignored the question, and promptly put the photo back in the box. She turned away from me in the process and gave me the cold shoulder. She said nothing as she sealed up the box by folding two of its corners underneath the others. While her back was turned, I wiped my fingers in my jeans as though I'd come into contact with a deadly flesh-eating virus. I knew I had to tell her I wanted to jet for good, but not then. Not yet. Why? Beat the shit outta me ... as it still does.
It was around this time that I perked up my ears to hear what might be happening back in the outside world. So far, I couldn't really tell other than what appeared to be the sound of the odd wind guest echoing through the upstairs portion of the house, not to mention the soft pitter-patter of rain metallically and occasionally hitting the eves outside. There were a few small windows in the basement, of course, but I couldn't see out them, seeing as though Mel's dad had gotten the bright idea to tint them slightly. I'd assumed it was so nobody could peer in and see him motionlessly looking inside himself lest anyone think he was cuckoo, but who the hell knew why he did it? It's not like the guy ever explained himself well.
Anyway, stupid thoughts began to fly about in my head: for starters, what might happen if there was indeed a twister "imminent or in the area" as the weather reports seemed to indicate? Two: how on earth would I get Mel's dad out of that chair if walls started to collapse around us, if all of the boundaries with the outside world suddenly became obliterated? I very much doubted there'd be any freaking way he'd be getting him out of the basement, unless he snapped out of it briefly as he sometimes did to go on bathroom break or whatever, and there was no damn way I was going to strap that chair to my back and carry him up the stairs. If Mel was expecting that, well, she could find another boyfriend. No problem with me there. Nope. Except ... .
"Is there, like, a radio down here or something?" I asked, trying to distract myself from my thoughts. "You know, just in case something happens we should know about?"
Mel shook her head. "I think the only portable one we have doesn't have batteries."
"What happened to them?"
"What do you think?" she said. "He takes them with him when he goes exploring. Just in case he might need them or something."
"Where does he keep them?" I asked, motioning to Mel's dad.
Mel looked at me like she was personally offended.
"Um, I don't think you want to go rooting through his pockets for a bunch of batteries. You really don't know what else he keeps in there."
She had me there, and that's besides the fact I didn't want to go digging and find something that felt like a shoe but was shaped like a rocket. I shuffled my feet and tried my best to change the subject.
"Yeah. So, um, you wanna play a game or something? You know, until its safe to go out?"
Mel's penetrating gaze suddenly seemed to go up a few notches on her scale of personal contempt.
"What do you want to play? Risk?"
"Jesus, you had to be sarcastic," I snapped.
"What makes you think I was being sarcastic?" she said, now looking wounded.
I threw up my hands and simply said nothing, figuring that was now in my best interest. I, instead, began picking at a smallish, rectangular box on a nearby workhorse. It was a puzzle box, one advertising a 100-piece puzzle of a bunch of poodles sticking their heads out of a flowerbed. Tacky grandma Americana shit. The box was well worn and it looked it like it was manufactured in 1974 or something. Definitely yard sale material, I figured. I wondered why anyone bothered to keep it around. I bet pieces were even probably missing.
I glanced back towards her dad, sitting still there on that plush armchair of his. Still concentrating on the nothingness, the nothing that lay beyond his body. He was on vacation far, far away inside himself. I stood there, trying to figure out what he might be thinking as he went about his own business inside his head ...
... and that's when I heard it. Not something in the outside world, but something inside. It was an unusual sound: a zipper that was in the process of being unzipped. Mel's pants zipper, to be precise. Hearing this sound had the same effect as watching an old movie where a sequence or frames are occasionally missing in the print. You couldn't help but notice.
"Is this it?" Mel said, somewhat tearfully. "Is this what you want?"
I turned to see her fumbling with the button of her jeans. It unfastened, and suddenly I was staring into uncharted territory. No Man's Land, even.
"Jesus!" I yelled softly, mindful of silent partner in this relationship. I pointed to her old man. "Your dad is right there."
"So?"
"He'll wake up!"
"If you hadn't noticed, the guy's completely comatose."
"For now!"
"Well. If that's the way you want it," she said, sighing, starting to undo all that she'd done by tugging at her fly.
"God, no" I croaked, realizing that I perhaps wasn't seizing the moment here by just going with the whole charade - if that's what you could even call it. Everything I was looking for - a hop in the sack - was suddenly and rather strangely being offered on a silver plate. Pointing out the ridiculousness of the whole situation, let alone that it was coming directly after one of her moodier outbursts against me, wasn't going to exactly get me what I wanted.
On the other hand, being struck by lightning would have been a much more honorable way to die than whatever consequences I could dream up about being caught by Mel's dad in the act of fucking his daughter. This naturally assumed Mel's dad was capable of such things like strangulation, though I wasn't exactly aroused by the thought of possibly finding out first hand.
I suppose, looking back, its possible Mel was hoping something along those lines would happen. Maybe she knew I wanted to break up with her, and wanted to be the one doing the breaking up rather than playing dumpee. It's possible that she came to a quick conclusion in the basement about the status of our relationship and knew that there was indeed the possibility that her dad would snap out of his trance. Perhaps she realized that it'd be easier to cry rape and humiliate me. But I guess I'm not the best person to judge the things that go on inside someone else's mind, considering the confusion that still remains in mine about a number of things.
"It's just, well, what if he has to get up or something?" I hissed softly.
"He won't get up."
"How do you know?"
"I just do."
"Whatever." I said, trying now not to laugh at how surreal everything that was unfolding seemed. "This is just, um, a little bit ... well, odd."
She then glared at me with her lips pursed, kind of in a way that reminded me of the times my mom looked whenever she was pissed off with me.
"If you're saying I don't know my father, I'll tell you this," she said tersely but quietly, in what had to be in a tone nothing short of clear frustration. "The guy has got a pattern. He takes maybe three breaks a day, and he's not due for another one in maybe two hours. It's like hibernation. He's right out of it, believe me."
Indeed, Mel's dad was still in his easy chair doing absolutely, positively ...nada. He didn't even blink an eyelash. I worried about this, since it'd seemed that he'd been sitting there for an awfully long time. What if I made a move on Mel, and he had to get up and caught us in the act? Or, even worse yet, what if he wasn't really as unconscious as he looked? What if he knew what was really happening between Mel and I, right then and there?
It was enough to make me shake with pre-performance anxiety. I could only wonder if this was how porn actors feel before being called on set.
"Besides, I thought you wanted to play Risk?" she said, suddenly batting her eyelashes at me rather alluringly.
I could have told her that she was putting words into my mouth. But, then again, I could have marched up the stairs and found my own corner of the house to sit in, too.
The strange thing, though, was that everything seemed kind of wrong - and not because of the freaky-deaky aspect of the whole thing. Truth be told, I was a bundle of wires coursing with strange electricity, unsure if I wanted the whole thing to happen or not. However, I'd realized I'd reached the point of no return. I felt I had no choice but to move in closer.
"Wait," she said, keeping me from assisting her strategically remove items of clothing by holding her palm out. "Close your eyes."
"What?"
"Just do it. Close your eyes."
"But ... !" I began to protest.
"I don't want you to see me," she said, even more quietly than usual. She said it quietly enough for me to wonder if she were getting second thoughts or something.
I sighed and did exactly what she wanted. I took a slight breath, closed my eyes and entered inner-space. I didn't realize this put me in a similar headspace as her old man behind us, but it was just as well. By this point, all logic had gone out the window and over the rainbow anyway. If this was what turned her on, this turned her on. And who was I to complain? In retrospect, I suppose I could have at least mentioned that I was a virgin and probably completely inexperienced at anything she was heading towards. Not only that, but, to quote her an old saw, that slow and steady wins the race. Maybe that would have changed everything? Who the hell knows?
In any event, I was soon in complete utter darkness. I could barely see anything, except for the weird constellation of blood vessels floating on the inside of my eyelids. It felt odd, for I suddenly realized I was entirely removed from what was going on around me. I could hear what I naturally assumed was Mel pulling her pants down, but, without the confirmation that sight provides, I couldn't be accurately, 100 per cent sure. I mean, sure, I doubted it could be anything other than that sound, but I had this newfound understanding that you couldn't just take anything for granted without the benefit of being able to take a peek. And, boy, was ever I tempted to. However, I thought it best to merely play along with Mel's weird little game, and with good reason. Being led in the dark like a blind man was the only way to go to get to the place I wanted to go, naturally. I still wasn't entirely sure that she was the one I wanted to go down there with, but as the saying goes, never look a gift horse in the mouth.
I reached out tentatively, my fingers some kind of probe looking for the surface of her body. Then I hit something. Flesh. Bizarre flesh. I thought about it for a minute and realized it was wrinkled skin, some sort of trench. It ended in a sinkhole that my forefinger suddenly became stuck in.
"What are you doing?" she snorted.
"What the hell is that?" I wondered out loud.
"What do you think it is, you ... ?"
She let her sentence linger like an amputated threat; my finger recoiled as though I'd accidentally stuck it in a wall outlet. I was nervous that I had perhaps given away that I was a fraud at any matters involving the opposite sex. Instead, I wrapped my sweaty hand around her naked waist as a means of keeping itself occupied. That seemed to please her. Not that I really knew too much about these things or anything, but I wasn't entirely ignorant, either. I'd gotten a brief education in these things at an early age, the night I stayed the night at Ms. Berton's house - she had been my Grade 2 teacher. My class was scheduled to go on a field trip to a museum in a nearby city the day after my scheduled "visit." See, rather than have to miss the trip due to the impending birth of my kid sister into the world - hey, it'd be educational! - my dad let me, at the last minute, spend the night with my teacher. It was a cheaper form of babysitting, I guess.
Just after Ms. Berton and I had arrived at her old two-storey brick house, I recall coming up the stairs, looking for the room I'd be staying in. I was a little lost - there was two different ways you could get upstairs because there was a stairwell at the front of the house and a stairwell near the back. I took the wrong stairs, the back stairs, and I made a wrong turn. Thus, I wound up not in my room, but Ms. Berton's. And, at that precise moment, she was naked, her back turned to me. All 50-plus years of her. I recall she looked a little like the Michelin Man, she was all puffy and full of rolls. I couldn't stop staring. I couldn't help myself.
And then she turned ... .
"Do you mind?" Ms. Berton said, looking absolutely startled. She fumbled for whatever she'd just been wearing, which was now on the bed. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a flabby tit, hanging there as though it were a rubber tire in need of inflation.
"Sorry," I mumbled, covering my eyes. I stepped back out of there, closed the door behind me and then hurried down the hall, down the stairs and out the front door. I had to tell all my friends what I'd just saw, report it to the world. It wouldn't be hard. It was a small town, one of those places where everyone lives about five blocks from the teacher's house. Nobody would answer the door, though, wherever I knocked. Everyone was too busy preparing for the next day's field trip. Well, when I finally got back to Ms. Berton's house - I had been gone God knows how long - I was startled to find an ambulance and a cop in front of it. I gulped, and felt utterly woozy to my stomach. I thought I was in shit now, if not for seeing Ms. Berton naked, then for running off on her like that. I tried to calculate in my head how much shit I'd be in based on the time I might have been away.
Except, as it turned out, it wasn't even that. It was something far worse. Ms. Berton had had a heart attack, probably mere moments after I'd burst into her room. Someone had found her by the phone in her bedroom, which had been all tangled around her plump, naked arms. Ms. Berton was dead, and I forever have been the one who has considered myself to be responsible for it.
So, until Mel, this had been just about my only experience with women. It was something I didn't think about a lot, but this was what I'd been precisely thinking about as my hand was on Mel's thigh. I wasn't even sure what she was doing or what I was doing, except that I was back there in Grade 2 in my head. (Probably not a good thing, I'm sure.) At some point, I recall that I was standing there in the basement, eyes shut, with someone's voice sounded muffled from outside my imposed blindness.
" ... like that?" a girl said.
I had to wonder ... . What, like that? Did I like that? Did she like that? What was I even doing anyway? I had been so far pulled into my past, pulled so far down the rabbit hole into my thoughts, I barely even knew. What was I doing? Where was I going? What strange forest or box canyon was I headed into next?
And then, while my hand wavered in its place on Mel's outer thigh, I recall being reeled back to earth by the vague awareness that the ground beneath me was moving. No. That wasn't it. It was that Mel appeared to be moving her legs as though she were stepping out of the bottom half of her second skin. Wait! It was something else ... . Something sounding like a stream whistle started to rise, a noise so awful in its shrillness that I briefly wondered if Mel had left a kettle on upstairs on the stove.
And then ... .
Well, this is where things get really weird.
And then, Mel was jerked away from me violently like a rag doll being lifted off the ground by an unseen, invisible arm. I thought I heard her scream. Suddenly, my world started to break apart. I understood there simply might be no more time left in this world to run, to think, to do anything. The walls were closing in on us, and life was doing things in its own merry way. It seemed that Mel and I were suddenly mere puppets, no longer in control of our own bodies.
I found myself suspended in space, hurtling backwards with objects swirling around me like a solar system. Some kind of interstellar gravitational force pushed me back into something that felt like a brick wall. I don't know what happened; it was as though I'd become so used to having my eyes squeezed shut that I'd merely forgotten how to use them. Thus, I was in the rather uncomfortably position of having to take all of my other senses on faith while I was being pushed around, perhaps punished, by the giant thumb of God.
When I landed, though, I can say with absolute certainty that I felt absolutely nothing. I was entirely, completely 100 per cent numb from my neck down. All I knew of my predicament on this earth was that I could see and feel the glow of a 1,000-watt light bulb, one that appeared to be floating behind the shroud of my vision, turning everything through my eyelids into a bright field of pink. I looked at it until seemed to darken, and then slowly turn into the color most associated with royalty.
3.
When I came to, the first thing I noticed was the completely unbearable heat. This was, and still is, my first memory of life in what I've come to know as life in the New World: the feeling of a million tiny points of light over my head.
Once I'd wiped my brow and blinked open my eyes, I saw a single light bulb casting a yellow-y orange light. The bulb was hanging upside down in a purple sky that stretched as far as the eye could see. It was almost like I was sitting on a field in Big Sky Country with the notable exception of the purple haze.
Upon squinting my eyes, the bulb appeared to be somewhat dull and browning from frequent use. It also appeared to quite dusty, as though it were hanging in a cellar somewhere. Some primordial part of me, the part that was still two-years-old, wanted to reach out and touch the light bulb - if only to get confirmation of my existence in this bizarre worldly place.
"Hey, you don't want to touch that," said what appeared to be the voice of Mel's dad from behind me. "That thing will just about fry you up if you aren't careful. Ha!"
I looked behind me and there he was, looming like a giant over me. Mel's dad was all decked out in combat gear, as though he were fighting in Desert Storm or something like that. What's more, his pants pockets bulged with what I presumed were batteries. You couldn't help but notice. His pockets shifted and clacked as he moved forward towards me.
I was about to ask what he was doing here - though I was quite glad to see something familiar. Before I could ask, however, he quickly handed me a canteen before I could part my lips to speak. Being thirsty, I gladly took it from his hands. I gulped down the liquid inside, which strangely tasted like pine needles. I spat it out and gave it back to him.
"Careful, son," he said. "Ya wouldn't want to waste some of the good stuff, there, eh?"
"What good stuff?" I replied. "Tastes like crap to me."
"What are you doing here?" he asked, suddenly changing the topic as he was wont to do. "I got a very important trading ceremony just down the way."
Just as he said this, the light bulb sun shifted its position in the sky to appear directly above him. As though the sun were, perhaps, illustrating to me that this could be a brilliant idea.
"Hey!" said Mel's dad excitedly. "You wanna come check it out? Could be educational and all."
"Do I have any choice?" I replied with a sigh. I didn't wait for an answer. I knew one wasn't coming. As I got up off the, well, ground - if one could call it that, since it appeared to be nothing but the colour brown reaching up into the purple - I became secretly aware that Mel was nowhere to be found. Surprisingly, this made me happy. I didn't have to explain to Mel's dad why her pants were around her ankles or what I had been doing with his daughter in front of him in the basement. This was assuming, of course, he already didn't know, and was merely playing coy.
"So what's the deal with this, uh, gift ceremony?" I asked, once we'd started walking off into the purple.
"Shhh," said Mel's dad. "You wouldn't want to attract the attention of them Grabens. Got to keep it kind of quiet around here. They're nasty, I tell ya. Ha!"
"Nasty?" I asked.
"Everything in this world is dangerous," he said, shaking his head. He said nothing more on the subject. He shut up like a clam. I shrugged and merely followed him. It was the only thing I could think of doing.
We walked aimlessly for what seemed like hours in utter silence and solitude. I peered into the mist of color hoping I could see something that resembled a, well, Graben, but all I could see was the light bulb sun hanging right above us, shedding a muddy beam of light through the murk of our surroundings. It was following us around like a malingering Eureka moment that marked our passage deeper into uncharted territory.
At one point, Mel's dad pulled out a map from one of the many compartments on his uniform. We stopped and looked as he puzzled over it. From the corner of my eye, I could see the map resembled a pencil sketch of a calf's head. Then, Mel's dad crumpled it up and handed it to me.
"You any good at navigating?" he asked.
"I don't know."
"Good," he said, and began walking again. "I'm sure you can make better heads and tails of that than I can. Ha!"
I was going to ask him if he truly knew where he was taking us, but when I caught up with him while smoothing out the now crinkled map in my hands, I noticed that it was now blank. It contained nothing. Not a single mark. It was as though the map had thought that it would be put to better use by being erased and committed silent suicide on itself. For that reason, I decided it was perhaps best to not say a word, unless, of course, Mel's dad specifically asked for some kind of direction. It just seemed easier, though I must say I was disappointed to see that I was now felt entirely directionless. If Mel's dad asked me where we were, I'd have to merely point off into the distance blindly. We trudged along in silence until, finally, shapes like upside-down teepees began to emerge in the color.
Mel's dad slowed his pace, and the sudden reduction in the speed of our steps combined with my sighting of, well, "settlement" made me realize that Mel's dad and I were perhaps getting closer to something resembling a settlement. He then stopped me by reaching across my chest, creating a physical barrier with his arm. I was stay put while he went into the mist. I shrugged and let him do his thing, and within moments returned. What came out of the fog with him, though, simply astonished and amazed me: two little children colored purple with spiky green hair, dressed in what appeared to be a pineapple suit. It was almost like something out of Dr. Seuss or something. I shook my head and nearly buried my face with my hands. If I'd thought that what Mel had done in the basement had been weird, this was turning out to take the cake.
"K'cid y llem suyo, ol' leh," said one of the things as it approached me. (My "translation" is a rough paraphrase of what this speech sounded like, given what I now know about the language of these Things.)
"Restam k'coc liveay ol' leh, ha ye," said the other, raising his left hand.
I looked at Mel's dad with a blank expression and asked him to translate. This, of course, was again a waste of breath and time given that he waved one of his big hands at me and ushered me to follow him, and sit on the ground, Indian style. Just from his body language, I could tell there was no further explanation necessary. Nor would one be forthcoming.
"Watch," he said, once we were sitting down. "They're going to start doing a silly song and dance routine. Then, after we've watched them, then they'll trade with us. You'll see. Heh!"
And, indeed, that's what they did. The duo stood there for a second, looked at each other like Mel's dad and I were the biggest retards on their planet. Then, they started dancing the Electric Boogaloo around us. I looked on in amazement, wondering if late night cable TV was not a thing restricted to our world. They did this until they'd either grown tired or it was time to move onto the trading part of the ceremony. In any event, when they were done, the duo then went back into the purple - briefly leaving Mel's dad and I alone again, giving us a few moments to live alone in our thoughts. I sat there silently, waiting for the synaptic nerve of my brain to start twitching out of sheer boredom. Meanwhile, Mel's dad scratched his ass, and then sniffed his fingers like a child. I tried not to retch at the sight of his immaturity, and turned my attention inward towards other things. Questions I wanted to pose to myself, mainly. Questions like how was I going to get back? Questions like how I was going to break up with Mel once I did? Questions like whether or not she might be still alive.
Strangely, instead of being depressed about this very real possibility, I started to wonder if I'd get lucky after all. I started to wonder that, if Mel died, maybe I would be rid of having to do the dirty work. Suddenly, I felt like a great weight had lifted from my chest, only to come suddenly crashing down when Mel's dad spoke.
"You have to go to the bathroom yet, son?" he asked after a moment of seemingly quiet contemplation, snapping me out of my morbid thoughts.
I was about to reply, but he was able to talk over me even before I opened my jaw.
"'Cause if you're going to pull your pecker out and take a piss, it's best to do it behind one of them things that looks like tee-pees. I'm not into that faggy stuff, you see."
"Rig - ."
"I don't want to see your pecker," he interrupted. "But that's just me."
"Oh?" I said, now wondering if this might have anything to do with Mel and the basement. I wondered: He had been out of it, right? My stomach briefly seized with fear.
"That's beside the fact that the sun up there will probably zip down and fry it off if you aren't secretive enough," he said. He uncorked his canteen and took a swig. He offered it to me, but I politely declined with a wave of the hand.
"That sun is a nasty bastard," he added. "Always looking, always watching. Even when you think you're back is turned. Bam!"
He pounded his fist into his open palm, accentuating the point. He then eased up and smiled.
"Yep," said Mel's dad. "It just wants to be sure you ain't planting no seed by accident in the ground. Pretty protective that there sun. You'd be best off waiting until you get back to our house until you take a piss, I think. That's what I'd do."
Then, he added a lot quietly, "I had a near miss, you see." He grinned a stupid little grin, and offered his trademark "Ha!" before clapping me on the back. This time, I visibly grimaced. I was almost beginning to really wish that Mel were dead if only, perhaps, to finally me rid of this dingbat. I shook my head, wondering if I had what it took to murder someone, and then caught a glimpse of my other oppressor as I looked up at the light bulb hovering above us. It may have been just me, but it now seemed to be glowing with a much brighter and much hotter intensity than it had before. I don't know why. Some things I have yet to figure about at this New World, and that is one of them. When I looked away from the sun, of course, ghostly afterimages started dancing across my eyes.
That'd teach me to directly look into the sun, I figured, rubbing my eyelids so that I might disperse the effect. I could be such a moron sometimes, I thought, realizing that this might not have been the first time I'd thought this. Anyhow, once my vision had cleared, I now noticed that Things One and Two had indeed nearly returned, but were now holding something behind their backs as they walked towards us. Mel's dad motioned for me to stand back up, which I did. As soon as I was back on my feet, he then immediately slipped something into one of my hands so fast that I barely knew had time to register what had just happened. I felt the weight of a fairly light, yet prickly, substance in my hands, and realized I was now holding something. I looked to see what appeared to be crumpled picture or imagine on old photo paper in my hands, presumably a piece of junk. At Mel's dad's prodding, I unfolded it and noticed it was a fading picture of Mel as a young girl sitting on her father's knee. They were both in pajamas. A Christmas tree stood in one corner of the picture, with all sorts of presents underneath. I wanted to look at it, examine it. See if there were any clues as to why Mel's dad was practically giving this photo, this memory away to me.
"Give this to them," he said, nudging me and nodding at the creatures before this. "They might have a surprise for ya in return."
That's when I suddenly understood what Mel's dad meant for me to do. I can't say I felt entirely happy at the prospect of participating in Mel's dad's sell off of all things related to him and his past. But, at that precise moment, I understood that it was a matter of whatever made him and the creatures happy, not a matter of figuring out why it was this made them that way. So I simply became more laid back about the whole ordeal, and began to watch. Observe. Make mental notes.
Thing One greedily took the photo from my outreached hands before I had a chance to really offer it, and - with lightning speed - a small orange box appeared in its place. It was covered in dust, and appeared hollow and empty. My thumb made a smudge in the dust, and the letters TROJ appeared. I didn't need to see the rest. I already knew what this box had contained. I would have tossed it over my shoulder, had I not wanted to offend our hosts. Of course, I had no need for prophylactics here, let alone an empty box that had formerly contained them. However, there was no need to give Mel's dad any clues as to what I may or may not have been up to with his daughter either. Call me paranoid, but there it was.
Mel's dad, meanwhile, was like a kid at Christmas, hopping up and down in the dirt with anticipation. The other Thing whipped out a tiny framed print of a cheesy painting of dogs playing poker, with one small change. A square hole had been cut in the center of the picture.
"Would you look at that?" asked Mel's dad excitedly, taking the item from the Thing. "That's just like the picture the Jamieson's had next door when I was in school. I always wanted that picture. Ha!"
He clapped me on the shoulder with his free hand. The place where his hand connected with my flesh stung.
"This picture's worth money, I'm sure," he explained. "A lot of money."
"Um, there's a big hole in the middle ... ," I began to pointed out.
Mel's dad looked at the two things and said out of the corner of his mouth, Bugs Bunny-like,
"You'll have to excuse the kid. It's his first time here. Means no harm. Ha!"
The two Things looked at each other and then looked at me. One of them stroked its chin with a feather-like finger. Then, it spoke.
"Ec afkcu f'dip tusa rae y'lla eruo y."
The other Thing nodded in agreement, then said, "On'ht row si e'gdi looc mcyb gnit niap siht hucm ow haedi onev ah uoy?"
"Erom'ht row ti sekam e'loh e'ht," said Thing One.
"S'abmu dat ahw," muttered the other Thing, shaking its head.
I wanted to turn to Mel's dad again, and seek some kind of explanation, but he was clearly preoccupied by the picture, examining its surface, putting his fingers into the picture's hole. Upon closer inspection, I realized the hole extended into one of the dog's bellies. I felt utterly sickened, totally revolted. And then he looked up, completely obvious to me, looking like he was a little boy ready to attack his wrapped presents on Christmas Day.
"Hey, has this thing been appraised yet?" Mel's dad asked the Things.
Rather than listen to their reply, I looked up at the sky - or what constituted one here, I guess - and once again saw the light bulb hovering above me. Another Eureka sign, I thought glumly. And then it became very clear to me what I had to do. I didn't even think twice about it. I merely reacted.
"Well, this is just retarded," I said aloud, to nobody in particular. "I'm leaving."
With that, I started walking back into the purple as fast as I could. I finally tossed the empty condom box over my shoulder, now afraid of offending no one, and resolved to not look back in case I should turn to salt or something. This caused considerable murmuring amongst the two Things. Somewhere close behind me, Mel's dad spoke up to protest my decision.
"Wait!" he said. "Where are you going? Don't you want to get back to the Old World?"
But I didn't answer, exactly just like how he never answered or acknowledged me throughout my time with him. It's funny, now that I look back on it. He yelled my name a few times as I walked away, and mentioned something about not being able to get back without him. Still, I kept moving forward into the "wilderness" of this land - if one can apply the same terms from the Old World to the New World. I just ignored him. And what's more, he never came after me - maybe out of fear of being lost. I don't know, and I'm not sure if I care. I was so relieved to be rid of him, you see. His reluctance to come after me only made my decision to break away that much more easier. I was now, officially, dead to him, just like his wife and possibly his daughter. He obviously now had other shit to take care of, probably his own material needs. I had other fish to fry. My time was better left alone in the purple on a mission of exploration. I can't say it hasn't been uninteresting.
Leaving Mel's dad like that was a ballsy move. I wasn't sure what else I'd find in this new place, what strange creatures I might encounter upon. Whether or not I'd find proper food. Whether or not the sun would allow me to take a simple piss or, God forbid, a bowel movement. Then there was the question of how I was to get back. There was also the question of what I was walking away from. Family, friends, school ... a so-called "normal" life.
I've kept walking and wandering, though. I had my reasons when I started; I still have them. Sure, remaining here means that I have to roam the purple all by myself, while trying to avoid a multitude of potential dangers: the light bulb sun, the warring tribes of strange creatures, the mammoth Grabens (who are a particularly nasty bunch). However, I still wander around this place, following my third eye as a compass, trying to put the jigsaw puzzle pieces together, hoping one day I'll sort through this mess and figure it all out for myself: What it is that I want. What am I doing here?
I realize there's a lot that I'm leaving out in my accounts here, a lot of holes that have yet to be filled. Maybe that makes me an asshole - or maybe just a finger belonging to Mel's dad - but this seems like as good a place to abandon you as any. Sure, maybe I'm no better than Mel's dad in some respects, leaving one world in favor of another of one's own making. But I can't help but wish I'd discovered this place a hell of a lot sooner. Nobody knows how grateful for the solitude I now have, and maybe that's the greatest souvenir the New World will offer in the long run. Maybe that will be the only thing that matters in the end.
I guess we'll see, though. I guess we'll see.
Ha!
I do have some news, however. I got published twice in Girls With Insurance this week. Both are old stories that were published on a previous iteration of the site.
You can read the stories by clicking on the links below.
Double Income, No Kids
Souvenirs From the New World
But I have a special treat for you readers. I initally wrote Souvenirs as a 9,000 word story, then truncated it to 1,000 words so that it would be more easily publishable. So there's a "director's cut" of the story, which I will post below in all of its unedited glory. As you can see, the longer cut takes a vastly different direction. Hope you enjoy!
Souvenirs From The New World
By Zachary Houle
1.
There are no more places on Earth left to explore. This is a fact. For the last 100 years or so, every inch of the planet has been discovered. Our sights are now on the nearby planets, perhaps someday the stars. But Mel's dad? He always had other ideas.
Every Friday night, he would get into his easy chair in the basement of his house and strap a pair of completely opaque goggles to his head. For the remainder of the evening and the next two days, he would sit utterly still and quiet, as though he were watching the most fascinating, edge-of-your-seat play of the Super Bowl in slow-motion. He barely ever got up, if only to eat and go to the bathroom every once and again. Mel told me that he did this strange behavior because he saw himself as an explorer. According to her, however, he felt the only places anyone could truly explore are the places within.
I thought this had to be the biggest crock of shit I'd ever heard in my life (not that I told her, of course). Still, there had to be a reason for this behaviour, and I naively thought that maybe things would make more sense if I got the real reason directly from the horse's mouth. So I asked him about it one weekday evening when I got some alone time away from Mel. As I recall, Mel's dad had wanted to show me some stuff in his basement. (Mel had been busy upstairs polishing off the last of her math homework.) His answer to me at the time was a little less than direct - a question followed by a question of his own. He always pulled off shit like that though. It was something of an annoying habit of his.
"You know what was great about the 1500s, 1600s?" he said, fumbling around on a shelf full of paperweights and useless knick-knacks that looked as though they came from someone's garage sale.
"No idea," I said with a useless shrug.
"Anyone could be an explorer," he said, running a finger along the dusty armchair where he'd sit every weekend. "There was no fucking government with a monopoly on exploration. Nah. All you had to do was have a ship, a bit of balls, and off you go."
"I thought European royalty financed a lot of those expeditions," I countered.
"Eh?" he said.
"We learned that in, like, Grade 9," I said. "You know, either the King was paying your way, or you had to have friends who were rich or in high - ."
"So what are you and Mel doing this weekend?" he quickly asked overtop my statement, as though I hadn't said a thing.
Fucking cockbiter, I thought.
"Same as we always do," I said, with a shrug. "Maybe go rent a movie. Maybe even take over the world, if we're lucky."
The last bit was a joke, but Mel's dad seemed to either not "get it" or not care, as evident by the vacant look on his face.
"Well, if my expeditions weren't so goddamn important, I'm not sure I'd leave the two of you young rabbits together," he said. "God only knows what the two of you do together when you're alone, eh?"
I sighed, and supposed for a second that I could consider telling him the truth for once. I could have told him that a teenager can only go so far without fucking the person they were dating without losing complete and utter interest, since Mel and I hadn't gone much further than first or second base. I guess she had her reasons for not wanting to go beyond that, despite the fact that I'd almost practically moved into her house and had staked my claim to the territory within. I'd always figured staking a claim to her seemed to be the next logical step. In any event, I kept my mouth shut, which was probably the best thing in retrospect. Who the hell knew what a man who sat for hours on end in his basement doing absolutely nothing was capable of?
Anyway, Mel's dad started laughing at me as I stood there stammering for the most appropriate answer. His laughter was like a stupid little pneumonic cough.
"Ha! I'm kidding, see," he said, poking a stubby finger rather painfully into my arm. "I think you're good for Mel. She sorta could use some looking after, considering her mother ... ."
His laughter turned into a few legitimate coughs, which stopped almost as soon as they started.
Then he looked at me like he'd just finished sucking on a lemon. The guy had worse mood swings sometimes than Mel, who could go from irresistibly happy to a complete sourpuss.
"Does she ever talk about her mother?" I asked.
"Hell, no," he said. "What's the point?"
"I was just curious," I muttered, a half-hearted attempt at apology for broaching the subject. But what I said was true. I was curious. Mel never talked about her to me, which made me wonder if she hadn't gotten over it yet. I mean, the death could explain her dad's weird behaviour, but Mel ... ? She didn't say anything on the topic. Which was another potentially good reason for breaking up. Who knew what kind of hidden baggage she might be carrying around?
Of course, there was a reason why I'd always dragged my heels on the break-up question: that Mel had even agreed to go out with me in the first place pretty much wrote the book on where I stood in that town's teenage dating hierarchy. It wasn't like I was ugly or anything - and neither was Mel, I might add. I just kinda had a habit of fading into the background. Being invisible. Lacking confidence. That lack was what I conversely sought in a girl, so when I discovered Mel in math class, she rightfully took the bait when it came in the form of a passed note from yours truly.
"Hey, remember what I wanted to show ya?" Mel's dad said excitedly, as though any talk of his dead wife was something that'd happened years ago.
"I found it. Come, look here ... ."
When I came to stand beside him, he pulled something that looked like a small piece of paper off a nearby shelf. He held it out on his hand to me, and motioned that I should take it.
"I found that on my last expedition," he said. "Boy, was that a doozy. I found a land with a purple sky and a giant light bulb for a sun. It was really hot."
"I bet," I mumbled.
"Yeah, you should have seen it!" he said excitedly, missing any trace of sarcasm in my voice. "Anyway, you should take a look at this."
I took the object and looked at it. It was a crude drawing of a cowboy with his back turned, hovering over a little chamber pot. There was a cut out square where the cowboy's ass should have been. Suddenly, Mel's dad stuck the crook of his bent thumb into the square, and it now looked like the cowboy had his butt sticking out. Neat trick, I thought woozily, almost not resisting the urge to roll my eyes ceiling-ward.
"This is money in the world I discovered," he said, grabbing the piece of paper from me. "It's a ten dollar bill if the cowboy isn't taking a shit, a twenty dollar bill if he is. What do you think of that, eh? Eh?"
"That's ... um ... neat," I said, now struggling to come up with something decent to say that didn't sound like an automatic insult.
"Yeah, isn't it?" he said, gazing at the paper as though it might be actually worth something. He then placed it back on the shelf, clapped his hand on my shoulder and smiled.
"There some weird lands to discover, I tell ya. Who knows? If I collect enough of this stuff, show it to the museum in town, maybe someday I'll be rich and famous like that Champaign guy."
"You mean Samuel de Champ - ," I tried to correct.
"You're a good kid," he said. "I'm glad my daughter found a decent, upstanding guy like you. Heh!"
I sighed and tried not to flinch too much as he clapped a hand on my shoulder. He smiled that shit-crazy grin of his. And, I had to wonder: What the hell was I doing here? I knew it wouldn't be the last time, either, which had me wondering all over again. What was I doing here? What the hell was I doing?
2.
One Saturday afternoon, the next weekend after the aforementioned quality time with Mel's dad in fact, Mel and I were lounging about her house. The TV in the living room had just issued a tornado warning for the area, and the purple cloud bottoms outside had been shaped into menacing raspberries on the prowl. That, I figured, did not look like a very encouraging sign. And that was notwithstanding the fact that one of these raspberries seemed to be rotating.
"Maybe we should just head for the basement," suggested Mel, with a panicked look on her face.
"But your dad's down there," I countered.
"So?"
"Weeeellllll," I said, "We wouldn't want to disturb him or anything."
Which was true, to a degree. I just didn't like the idea of being in the basement when Mr. Fruit Loops was on one of his chartered trips. God only knows what could happen, and, besides, I'd been searching for an excuse to finally tell Mel that I was no longer interested in her. That I was thinking that maybe it would be better if we just broke up. Problem was, I was chicken shit. I really didn't know how Mel would take it.
"What's the matter?" she sighed. "It's not like you've seen firsthand how messed up he is. C'mon. Let's just go down there. Just in case."
She then grabbed my hand and led me down the narrow, creaky stairwell into the basement, which was a single open room taken up by a furnace in one corner, a ping-pong table in another and figurative mountains of shit and cheap stuff scattered in clusters throughout the rest of the concrete room. Sure enough, there was Mel's dad, hands gripped tightly around the arms of his armchair. He was wearing his blinders, but you could see that he was squinting with intense concentration - the lines around his eyes betrayed that bit of information. What's more, it looked as though he were snarling; his lower lip even twitched at certain points. The guy was clearly out of it. He was off in Inner-space or La La Land or wherever it was that he was.
It was almost comical, looking at Mel's dad like that. I couldn't help but think that he was constipated, that he was trying (and failing) to take the biggest crap of his life. I smirked and just went to one of the shelves with his knick-knacks, keeping an ear peeled to the outside world just in case you could hear that low rumbling sound of a railway freight train barreling down at you.
"C'mon," said Mel, tugging at my arm. "You don't want to look at that boring shit. I'll show you something really interesting."
I let her lead me to a corner of the basement, past her old man's work area full of power tools and handsaws, where there was a pile of moldy boxes stacked up one upon the other.
"Is this the southwest corner of the basement?" I wondered a bit loudly aloud.
"Quiet, you," she said quietly and breathlessly. She ripped open one of the boxes and starting rooting through it, tossing out the odd item here and there. A child's drawing of a pink panda. A small, plastic Lego house complete with window and door. Then, she tossed out a kid's book called POGO LEARNS ABOUT DEATH. It had a cute cartoon penguin on the cover. I picked it up and started to flip through it, only to be interrupted by Mel softly saying, "Here it is."
I looked up. "Here what is?"
"This," she said, thrusting a picture into my hands.
It was an old, fading color picture of a man and a woman, clearly taken on their wedding day. They were standing on a small grassy knoll, with what looked to be the tailfin of a really old car in the background.
"It's my Mom and Dad," she said. "This box is where Dad keeps all the stuff that he can't bare to look at. All the stuff he hasn't destroyed."
"Destroyed?" I said, raising an eyebrow.
"Yeah, at one point, he took most of her stuff, stuff that might remind him of her. He put it in a few boxes and threw it on the barbeque. Someone had to call in the fire department."
She started returning the items she'd already taken out back into it, and added, "I guess this was one of the boxes that he never got around to burning."
"Oh?" I replied, half wanting to start sprinting up the stairs and run out the door to the outside world, regardless if there were tornadoes or not. Instead, I asked another question.
"So he's been doing this for a long time?" I whispered, pointing to her dad in the chair.
"Just about as long as I can remember," she replied. "The thing is, every time he 'goes away' he keeps bringing back all this weird stuff."
When she had said "goes away," Mel had made parenthetical marks with her hands. Just like her old man would do sometimes. Jesus.
"That picture in your hands?" she added. "That was one of the things he brought back. Said it was currency in some other 'land' that he discovered. Stupid, isn't it."
I thought back to that picture of the cowboy, and wondered what it took for him to go from wanting to burn this picture to treating it like money. It made me want to shake my head, bury it in my hands and pull out most of my hair. This was just starting to get too fucked up. In fact, I even found myself asking a familiar question. What was I doing here? I asked myself this question for what felt like the fourteenth million time.
Instead of throwing a shit fit, I gave the photo back to Mel, who happened to touch my fingers as she took the picture. It wasn't an accident. She practically stroked my forefinger as she moved to snatch the photo.
"What happened to your mom anyway," I decided to offer. "You still have yet to tell me."
I should have known better that to ask, but I suppose I was secretly hoping things might be different this time. That maybe she would finally open up. That she would finally tell me. That this could lead to other possibilities involving the horizontal position - not to get too far ahead of myself.
But nothing, and I mean nothing, usually got Mel's back up faster than asking her what happened to her mother. The rumor was around school that Mel's mother had died giving birth to her. I'd yet to confirm with anyone, including my folks, that this was indeed true. No one really knew, and, what's more, hardly anyone seemed to care. Mel and her dad were a family that had somehow slipped beneath the radar of town gossip. Because they barely left their home, had no nearby relatives and took part in none of the town's community events - not even SnowFest, which, I had to admit, was just a few steps above the annual Summer Tractor Pull in banality - it was as though they'd almost disappeared completely from the ebb and flow of small-town life. Now that I knew what Mel's dad was up to, I had to wonder how long it'd take before the two of them would slip off the map completely. Of course, it's completely ironic that I thought this, considering what would happen to me a little later that day.
Before I go any further, perhaps I should mention that I've never determined what had really happened to Mel's mom - a cold case that remains unsolved - since Mel never felt she was in a position where she wanted to tell me anything. In fact, taking a cue from her father, Mel just simply ignored the question, and promptly put the photo back in the box. She turned away from me in the process and gave me the cold shoulder. She said nothing as she sealed up the box by folding two of its corners underneath the others. While her back was turned, I wiped my fingers in my jeans as though I'd come into contact with a deadly flesh-eating virus. I knew I had to tell her I wanted to jet for good, but not then. Not yet. Why? Beat the shit outta me ... as it still does.
It was around this time that I perked up my ears to hear what might be happening back in the outside world. So far, I couldn't really tell other than what appeared to be the sound of the odd wind guest echoing through the upstairs portion of the house, not to mention the soft pitter-patter of rain metallically and occasionally hitting the eves outside. There were a few small windows in the basement, of course, but I couldn't see out them, seeing as though Mel's dad had gotten the bright idea to tint them slightly. I'd assumed it was so nobody could peer in and see him motionlessly looking inside himself lest anyone think he was cuckoo, but who the hell knew why he did it? It's not like the guy ever explained himself well.
Anyway, stupid thoughts began to fly about in my head: for starters, what might happen if there was indeed a twister "imminent or in the area" as the weather reports seemed to indicate? Two: how on earth would I get Mel's dad out of that chair if walls started to collapse around us, if all of the boundaries with the outside world suddenly became obliterated? I very much doubted there'd be any freaking way he'd be getting him out of the basement, unless he snapped out of it briefly as he sometimes did to go on bathroom break or whatever, and there was no damn way I was going to strap that chair to my back and carry him up the stairs. If Mel was expecting that, well, she could find another boyfriend. No problem with me there. Nope. Except ... .
"Is there, like, a radio down here or something?" I asked, trying to distract myself from my thoughts. "You know, just in case something happens we should know about?"
Mel shook her head. "I think the only portable one we have doesn't have batteries."
"What happened to them?"
"What do you think?" she said. "He takes them with him when he goes exploring. Just in case he might need them or something."
"Where does he keep them?" I asked, motioning to Mel's dad.
Mel looked at me like she was personally offended.
"Um, I don't think you want to go rooting through his pockets for a bunch of batteries. You really don't know what else he keeps in there."
She had me there, and that's besides the fact I didn't want to go digging and find something that felt like a shoe but was shaped like a rocket. I shuffled my feet and tried my best to change the subject.
"Yeah. So, um, you wanna play a game or something? You know, until its safe to go out?"
Mel's penetrating gaze suddenly seemed to go up a few notches on her scale of personal contempt.
"What do you want to play? Risk?"
"Jesus, you had to be sarcastic," I snapped.
"What makes you think I was being sarcastic?" she said, now looking wounded.
I threw up my hands and simply said nothing, figuring that was now in my best interest. I, instead, began picking at a smallish, rectangular box on a nearby workhorse. It was a puzzle box, one advertising a 100-piece puzzle of a bunch of poodles sticking their heads out of a flowerbed. Tacky grandma Americana shit. The box was well worn and it looked it like it was manufactured in 1974 or something. Definitely yard sale material, I figured. I wondered why anyone bothered to keep it around. I bet pieces were even probably missing.
I glanced back towards her dad, sitting still there on that plush armchair of his. Still concentrating on the nothingness, the nothing that lay beyond his body. He was on vacation far, far away inside himself. I stood there, trying to figure out what he might be thinking as he went about his own business inside his head ...
... and that's when I heard it. Not something in the outside world, but something inside. It was an unusual sound: a zipper that was in the process of being unzipped. Mel's pants zipper, to be precise. Hearing this sound had the same effect as watching an old movie where a sequence or frames are occasionally missing in the print. You couldn't help but notice.
"Is this it?" Mel said, somewhat tearfully. "Is this what you want?"
I turned to see her fumbling with the button of her jeans. It unfastened, and suddenly I was staring into uncharted territory. No Man's Land, even.
"Jesus!" I yelled softly, mindful of silent partner in this relationship. I pointed to her old man. "Your dad is right there."
"So?"
"He'll wake up!"
"If you hadn't noticed, the guy's completely comatose."
"For now!"
"Well. If that's the way you want it," she said, sighing, starting to undo all that she'd done by tugging at her fly.
"God, no" I croaked, realizing that I perhaps wasn't seizing the moment here by just going with the whole charade - if that's what you could even call it. Everything I was looking for - a hop in the sack - was suddenly and rather strangely being offered on a silver plate. Pointing out the ridiculousness of the whole situation, let alone that it was coming directly after one of her moodier outbursts against me, wasn't going to exactly get me what I wanted.
On the other hand, being struck by lightning would have been a much more honorable way to die than whatever consequences I could dream up about being caught by Mel's dad in the act of fucking his daughter. This naturally assumed Mel's dad was capable of such things like strangulation, though I wasn't exactly aroused by the thought of possibly finding out first hand.
I suppose, looking back, its possible Mel was hoping something along those lines would happen. Maybe she knew I wanted to break up with her, and wanted to be the one doing the breaking up rather than playing dumpee. It's possible that she came to a quick conclusion in the basement about the status of our relationship and knew that there was indeed the possibility that her dad would snap out of his trance. Perhaps she realized that it'd be easier to cry rape and humiliate me. But I guess I'm not the best person to judge the things that go on inside someone else's mind, considering the confusion that still remains in mine about a number of things.
"It's just, well, what if he has to get up or something?" I hissed softly.
"He won't get up."
"How do you know?"
"I just do."
"Whatever." I said, trying now not to laugh at how surreal everything that was unfolding seemed. "This is just, um, a little bit ... well, odd."
She then glared at me with her lips pursed, kind of in a way that reminded me of the times my mom looked whenever she was pissed off with me.
"If you're saying I don't know my father, I'll tell you this," she said tersely but quietly, in what had to be in a tone nothing short of clear frustration. "The guy has got a pattern. He takes maybe three breaks a day, and he's not due for another one in maybe two hours. It's like hibernation. He's right out of it, believe me."
Indeed, Mel's dad was still in his easy chair doing absolutely, positively ...nada. He didn't even blink an eyelash. I worried about this, since it'd seemed that he'd been sitting there for an awfully long time. What if I made a move on Mel, and he had to get up and caught us in the act? Or, even worse yet, what if he wasn't really as unconscious as he looked? What if he knew what was really happening between Mel and I, right then and there?
It was enough to make me shake with pre-performance anxiety. I could only wonder if this was how porn actors feel before being called on set.
"Besides, I thought you wanted to play Risk?" she said, suddenly batting her eyelashes at me rather alluringly.
I could have told her that she was putting words into my mouth. But, then again, I could have marched up the stairs and found my own corner of the house to sit in, too.
The strange thing, though, was that everything seemed kind of wrong - and not because of the freaky-deaky aspect of the whole thing. Truth be told, I was a bundle of wires coursing with strange electricity, unsure if I wanted the whole thing to happen or not. However, I'd realized I'd reached the point of no return. I felt I had no choice but to move in closer.
"Wait," she said, keeping me from assisting her strategically remove items of clothing by holding her palm out. "Close your eyes."
"What?"
"Just do it. Close your eyes."
"But ... !" I began to protest.
"I don't want you to see me," she said, even more quietly than usual. She said it quietly enough for me to wonder if she were getting second thoughts or something.
I sighed and did exactly what she wanted. I took a slight breath, closed my eyes and entered inner-space. I didn't realize this put me in a similar headspace as her old man behind us, but it was just as well. By this point, all logic had gone out the window and over the rainbow anyway. If this was what turned her on, this turned her on. And who was I to complain? In retrospect, I suppose I could have at least mentioned that I was a virgin and probably completely inexperienced at anything she was heading towards. Not only that, but, to quote her an old saw, that slow and steady wins the race. Maybe that would have changed everything? Who the hell knows?
In any event, I was soon in complete utter darkness. I could barely see anything, except for the weird constellation of blood vessels floating on the inside of my eyelids. It felt odd, for I suddenly realized I was entirely removed from what was going on around me. I could hear what I naturally assumed was Mel pulling her pants down, but, without the confirmation that sight provides, I couldn't be accurately, 100 per cent sure. I mean, sure, I doubted it could be anything other than that sound, but I had this newfound understanding that you couldn't just take anything for granted without the benefit of being able to take a peek. And, boy, was ever I tempted to. However, I thought it best to merely play along with Mel's weird little game, and with good reason. Being led in the dark like a blind man was the only way to go to get to the place I wanted to go, naturally. I still wasn't entirely sure that she was the one I wanted to go down there with, but as the saying goes, never look a gift horse in the mouth.
I reached out tentatively, my fingers some kind of probe looking for the surface of her body. Then I hit something. Flesh. Bizarre flesh. I thought about it for a minute and realized it was wrinkled skin, some sort of trench. It ended in a sinkhole that my forefinger suddenly became stuck in.
"What are you doing?" she snorted.
"What the hell is that?" I wondered out loud.
"What do you think it is, you ... ?"
She let her sentence linger like an amputated threat; my finger recoiled as though I'd accidentally stuck it in a wall outlet. I was nervous that I had perhaps given away that I was a fraud at any matters involving the opposite sex. Instead, I wrapped my sweaty hand around her naked waist as a means of keeping itself occupied. That seemed to please her. Not that I really knew too much about these things or anything, but I wasn't entirely ignorant, either. I'd gotten a brief education in these things at an early age, the night I stayed the night at Ms. Berton's house - she had been my Grade 2 teacher. My class was scheduled to go on a field trip to a museum in a nearby city the day after my scheduled "visit." See, rather than have to miss the trip due to the impending birth of my kid sister into the world - hey, it'd be educational! - my dad let me, at the last minute, spend the night with my teacher. It was a cheaper form of babysitting, I guess.
Just after Ms. Berton and I had arrived at her old two-storey brick house, I recall coming up the stairs, looking for the room I'd be staying in. I was a little lost - there was two different ways you could get upstairs because there was a stairwell at the front of the house and a stairwell near the back. I took the wrong stairs, the back stairs, and I made a wrong turn. Thus, I wound up not in my room, but Ms. Berton's. And, at that precise moment, she was naked, her back turned to me. All 50-plus years of her. I recall she looked a little like the Michelin Man, she was all puffy and full of rolls. I couldn't stop staring. I couldn't help myself.
And then she turned ... .
"Do you mind?" Ms. Berton said, looking absolutely startled. She fumbled for whatever she'd just been wearing, which was now on the bed. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a flabby tit, hanging there as though it were a rubber tire in need of inflation.
"Sorry," I mumbled, covering my eyes. I stepped back out of there, closed the door behind me and then hurried down the hall, down the stairs and out the front door. I had to tell all my friends what I'd just saw, report it to the world. It wouldn't be hard. It was a small town, one of those places where everyone lives about five blocks from the teacher's house. Nobody would answer the door, though, wherever I knocked. Everyone was too busy preparing for the next day's field trip. Well, when I finally got back to Ms. Berton's house - I had been gone God knows how long - I was startled to find an ambulance and a cop in front of it. I gulped, and felt utterly woozy to my stomach. I thought I was in shit now, if not for seeing Ms. Berton naked, then for running off on her like that. I tried to calculate in my head how much shit I'd be in based on the time I might have been away.
Except, as it turned out, it wasn't even that. It was something far worse. Ms. Berton had had a heart attack, probably mere moments after I'd burst into her room. Someone had found her by the phone in her bedroom, which had been all tangled around her plump, naked arms. Ms. Berton was dead, and I forever have been the one who has considered myself to be responsible for it.
So, until Mel, this had been just about my only experience with women. It was something I didn't think about a lot, but this was what I'd been precisely thinking about as my hand was on Mel's thigh. I wasn't even sure what she was doing or what I was doing, except that I was back there in Grade 2 in my head. (Probably not a good thing, I'm sure.) At some point, I recall that I was standing there in the basement, eyes shut, with someone's voice sounded muffled from outside my imposed blindness.
" ... like that?" a girl said.
I had to wonder ... . What, like that? Did I like that? Did she like that? What was I even doing anyway? I had been so far pulled into my past, pulled so far down the rabbit hole into my thoughts, I barely even knew. What was I doing? Where was I going? What strange forest or box canyon was I headed into next?
And then, while my hand wavered in its place on Mel's outer thigh, I recall being reeled back to earth by the vague awareness that the ground beneath me was moving. No. That wasn't it. It was that Mel appeared to be moving her legs as though she were stepping out of the bottom half of her second skin. Wait! It was something else ... . Something sounding like a stream whistle started to rise, a noise so awful in its shrillness that I briefly wondered if Mel had left a kettle on upstairs on the stove.
And then ... .
Well, this is where things get really weird.
And then, Mel was jerked away from me violently like a rag doll being lifted off the ground by an unseen, invisible arm. I thought I heard her scream. Suddenly, my world started to break apart. I understood there simply might be no more time left in this world to run, to think, to do anything. The walls were closing in on us, and life was doing things in its own merry way. It seemed that Mel and I were suddenly mere puppets, no longer in control of our own bodies.
I found myself suspended in space, hurtling backwards with objects swirling around me like a solar system. Some kind of interstellar gravitational force pushed me back into something that felt like a brick wall. I don't know what happened; it was as though I'd become so used to having my eyes squeezed shut that I'd merely forgotten how to use them. Thus, I was in the rather uncomfortably position of having to take all of my other senses on faith while I was being pushed around, perhaps punished, by the giant thumb of God.
When I landed, though, I can say with absolute certainty that I felt absolutely nothing. I was entirely, completely 100 per cent numb from my neck down. All I knew of my predicament on this earth was that I could see and feel the glow of a 1,000-watt light bulb, one that appeared to be floating behind the shroud of my vision, turning everything through my eyelids into a bright field of pink. I looked at it until seemed to darken, and then slowly turn into the color most associated with royalty.
3.
When I came to, the first thing I noticed was the completely unbearable heat. This was, and still is, my first memory of life in what I've come to know as life in the New World: the feeling of a million tiny points of light over my head.
Once I'd wiped my brow and blinked open my eyes, I saw a single light bulb casting a yellow-y orange light. The bulb was hanging upside down in a purple sky that stretched as far as the eye could see. It was almost like I was sitting on a field in Big Sky Country with the notable exception of the purple haze.
Upon squinting my eyes, the bulb appeared to be somewhat dull and browning from frequent use. It also appeared to quite dusty, as though it were hanging in a cellar somewhere. Some primordial part of me, the part that was still two-years-old, wanted to reach out and touch the light bulb - if only to get confirmation of my existence in this bizarre worldly place.
"Hey, you don't want to touch that," said what appeared to be the voice of Mel's dad from behind me. "That thing will just about fry you up if you aren't careful. Ha!"
I looked behind me and there he was, looming like a giant over me. Mel's dad was all decked out in combat gear, as though he were fighting in Desert Storm or something like that. What's more, his pants pockets bulged with what I presumed were batteries. You couldn't help but notice. His pockets shifted and clacked as he moved forward towards me.
I was about to ask what he was doing here - though I was quite glad to see something familiar. Before I could ask, however, he quickly handed me a canteen before I could part my lips to speak. Being thirsty, I gladly took it from his hands. I gulped down the liquid inside, which strangely tasted like pine needles. I spat it out and gave it back to him.
"Careful, son," he said. "Ya wouldn't want to waste some of the good stuff, there, eh?"
"What good stuff?" I replied. "Tastes like crap to me."
"What are you doing here?" he asked, suddenly changing the topic as he was wont to do. "I got a very important trading ceremony just down the way."
Just as he said this, the light bulb sun shifted its position in the sky to appear directly above him. As though the sun were, perhaps, illustrating to me that this could be a brilliant idea.
"Hey!" said Mel's dad excitedly. "You wanna come check it out? Could be educational and all."
"Do I have any choice?" I replied with a sigh. I didn't wait for an answer. I knew one wasn't coming. As I got up off the, well, ground - if one could call it that, since it appeared to be nothing but the colour brown reaching up into the purple - I became secretly aware that Mel was nowhere to be found. Surprisingly, this made me happy. I didn't have to explain to Mel's dad why her pants were around her ankles or what I had been doing with his daughter in front of him in the basement. This was assuming, of course, he already didn't know, and was merely playing coy.
"So what's the deal with this, uh, gift ceremony?" I asked, once we'd started walking off into the purple.
"Shhh," said Mel's dad. "You wouldn't want to attract the attention of them Grabens. Got to keep it kind of quiet around here. They're nasty, I tell ya. Ha!"
"Nasty?" I asked.
"Everything in this world is dangerous," he said, shaking his head. He said nothing more on the subject. He shut up like a clam. I shrugged and merely followed him. It was the only thing I could think of doing.
We walked aimlessly for what seemed like hours in utter silence and solitude. I peered into the mist of color hoping I could see something that resembled a, well, Graben, but all I could see was the light bulb sun hanging right above us, shedding a muddy beam of light through the murk of our surroundings. It was following us around like a malingering Eureka moment that marked our passage deeper into uncharted territory.
At one point, Mel's dad pulled out a map from one of the many compartments on his uniform. We stopped and looked as he puzzled over it. From the corner of my eye, I could see the map resembled a pencil sketch of a calf's head. Then, Mel's dad crumpled it up and handed it to me.
"You any good at navigating?" he asked.
"I don't know."
"Good," he said, and began walking again. "I'm sure you can make better heads and tails of that than I can. Ha!"
I was going to ask him if he truly knew where he was taking us, but when I caught up with him while smoothing out the now crinkled map in my hands, I noticed that it was now blank. It contained nothing. Not a single mark. It was as though the map had thought that it would be put to better use by being erased and committed silent suicide on itself. For that reason, I decided it was perhaps best to not say a word, unless, of course, Mel's dad specifically asked for some kind of direction. It just seemed easier, though I must say I was disappointed to see that I was now felt entirely directionless. If Mel's dad asked me where we were, I'd have to merely point off into the distance blindly. We trudged along in silence until, finally, shapes like upside-down teepees began to emerge in the color.
Mel's dad slowed his pace, and the sudden reduction in the speed of our steps combined with my sighting of, well, "settlement" made me realize that Mel's dad and I were perhaps getting closer to something resembling a settlement. He then stopped me by reaching across my chest, creating a physical barrier with his arm. I was stay put while he went into the mist. I shrugged and let him do his thing, and within moments returned. What came out of the fog with him, though, simply astonished and amazed me: two little children colored purple with spiky green hair, dressed in what appeared to be a pineapple suit. It was almost like something out of Dr. Seuss or something. I shook my head and nearly buried my face with my hands. If I'd thought that what Mel had done in the basement had been weird, this was turning out to take the cake.
"K'cid y llem suyo, ol' leh," said one of the things as it approached me. (My "translation" is a rough paraphrase of what this speech sounded like, given what I now know about the language of these Things.)
"Restam k'coc liveay ol' leh, ha ye," said the other, raising his left hand.
I looked at Mel's dad with a blank expression and asked him to translate. This, of course, was again a waste of breath and time given that he waved one of his big hands at me and ushered me to follow him, and sit on the ground, Indian style. Just from his body language, I could tell there was no further explanation necessary. Nor would one be forthcoming.
"Watch," he said, once we were sitting down. "They're going to start doing a silly song and dance routine. Then, after we've watched them, then they'll trade with us. You'll see. Heh!"
And, indeed, that's what they did. The duo stood there for a second, looked at each other like Mel's dad and I were the biggest retards on their planet. Then, they started dancing the Electric Boogaloo around us. I looked on in amazement, wondering if late night cable TV was not a thing restricted to our world. They did this until they'd either grown tired or it was time to move onto the trading part of the ceremony. In any event, when they were done, the duo then went back into the purple - briefly leaving Mel's dad and I alone again, giving us a few moments to live alone in our thoughts. I sat there silently, waiting for the synaptic nerve of my brain to start twitching out of sheer boredom. Meanwhile, Mel's dad scratched his ass, and then sniffed his fingers like a child. I tried not to retch at the sight of his immaturity, and turned my attention inward towards other things. Questions I wanted to pose to myself, mainly. Questions like how was I going to get back? Questions like how I was going to break up with Mel once I did? Questions like whether or not she might be still alive.
Strangely, instead of being depressed about this very real possibility, I started to wonder if I'd get lucky after all. I started to wonder that, if Mel died, maybe I would be rid of having to do the dirty work. Suddenly, I felt like a great weight had lifted from my chest, only to come suddenly crashing down when Mel's dad spoke.
"You have to go to the bathroom yet, son?" he asked after a moment of seemingly quiet contemplation, snapping me out of my morbid thoughts.
I was about to reply, but he was able to talk over me even before I opened my jaw.
"'Cause if you're going to pull your pecker out and take a piss, it's best to do it behind one of them things that looks like tee-pees. I'm not into that faggy stuff, you see."
"Rig - ."
"I don't want to see your pecker," he interrupted. "But that's just me."
"Oh?" I said, now wondering if this might have anything to do with Mel and the basement. I wondered: He had been out of it, right? My stomach briefly seized with fear.
"That's beside the fact that the sun up there will probably zip down and fry it off if you aren't secretive enough," he said. He uncorked his canteen and took a swig. He offered it to me, but I politely declined with a wave of the hand.
"That sun is a nasty bastard," he added. "Always looking, always watching. Even when you think you're back is turned. Bam!"
He pounded his fist into his open palm, accentuating the point. He then eased up and smiled.
"Yep," said Mel's dad. "It just wants to be sure you ain't planting no seed by accident in the ground. Pretty protective that there sun. You'd be best off waiting until you get back to our house until you take a piss, I think. That's what I'd do."
Then, he added a lot quietly, "I had a near miss, you see." He grinned a stupid little grin, and offered his trademark "Ha!" before clapping me on the back. This time, I visibly grimaced. I was almost beginning to really wish that Mel were dead if only, perhaps, to finally me rid of this dingbat. I shook my head, wondering if I had what it took to murder someone, and then caught a glimpse of my other oppressor as I looked up at the light bulb hovering above us. It may have been just me, but it now seemed to be glowing with a much brighter and much hotter intensity than it had before. I don't know why. Some things I have yet to figure about at this New World, and that is one of them. When I looked away from the sun, of course, ghostly afterimages started dancing across my eyes.
That'd teach me to directly look into the sun, I figured, rubbing my eyelids so that I might disperse the effect. I could be such a moron sometimes, I thought, realizing that this might not have been the first time I'd thought this. Anyhow, once my vision had cleared, I now noticed that Things One and Two had indeed nearly returned, but were now holding something behind their backs as they walked towards us. Mel's dad motioned for me to stand back up, which I did. As soon as I was back on my feet, he then immediately slipped something into one of my hands so fast that I barely knew had time to register what had just happened. I felt the weight of a fairly light, yet prickly, substance in my hands, and realized I was now holding something. I looked to see what appeared to be crumpled picture or imagine on old photo paper in my hands, presumably a piece of junk. At Mel's dad's prodding, I unfolded it and noticed it was a fading picture of Mel as a young girl sitting on her father's knee. They were both in pajamas. A Christmas tree stood in one corner of the picture, with all sorts of presents underneath. I wanted to look at it, examine it. See if there were any clues as to why Mel's dad was practically giving this photo, this memory away to me.
"Give this to them," he said, nudging me and nodding at the creatures before this. "They might have a surprise for ya in return."
That's when I suddenly understood what Mel's dad meant for me to do. I can't say I felt entirely happy at the prospect of participating in Mel's dad's sell off of all things related to him and his past. But, at that precise moment, I understood that it was a matter of whatever made him and the creatures happy, not a matter of figuring out why it was this made them that way. So I simply became more laid back about the whole ordeal, and began to watch. Observe. Make mental notes.
Thing One greedily took the photo from my outreached hands before I had a chance to really offer it, and - with lightning speed - a small orange box appeared in its place. It was covered in dust, and appeared hollow and empty. My thumb made a smudge in the dust, and the letters TROJ appeared. I didn't need to see the rest. I already knew what this box had contained. I would have tossed it over my shoulder, had I not wanted to offend our hosts. Of course, I had no need for prophylactics here, let alone an empty box that had formerly contained them. However, there was no need to give Mel's dad any clues as to what I may or may not have been up to with his daughter either. Call me paranoid, but there it was.
Mel's dad, meanwhile, was like a kid at Christmas, hopping up and down in the dirt with anticipation. The other Thing whipped out a tiny framed print of a cheesy painting of dogs playing poker, with one small change. A square hole had been cut in the center of the picture.
"Would you look at that?" asked Mel's dad excitedly, taking the item from the Thing. "That's just like the picture the Jamieson's had next door when I was in school. I always wanted that picture. Ha!"
He clapped me on the shoulder with his free hand. The place where his hand connected with my flesh stung.
"This picture's worth money, I'm sure," he explained. "A lot of money."
"Um, there's a big hole in the middle ... ," I began to pointed out.
Mel's dad looked at the two things and said out of the corner of his mouth, Bugs Bunny-like,
"You'll have to excuse the kid. It's his first time here. Means no harm. Ha!"
The two Things looked at each other and then looked at me. One of them stroked its chin with a feather-like finger. Then, it spoke.
"Ec afkcu f'dip tusa rae y'lla eruo y."
The other Thing nodded in agreement, then said, "On'ht row si e'gdi looc mcyb gnit niap siht hucm ow haedi onev ah uoy?"
"Erom'ht row ti sekam e'loh e'ht," said Thing One.
"S'abmu dat ahw," muttered the other Thing, shaking its head.
I wanted to turn to Mel's dad again, and seek some kind of explanation, but he was clearly preoccupied by the picture, examining its surface, putting his fingers into the picture's hole. Upon closer inspection, I realized the hole extended into one of the dog's bellies. I felt utterly sickened, totally revolted. And then he looked up, completely obvious to me, looking like he was a little boy ready to attack his wrapped presents on Christmas Day.
"Hey, has this thing been appraised yet?" Mel's dad asked the Things.
Rather than listen to their reply, I looked up at the sky - or what constituted one here, I guess - and once again saw the light bulb hovering above me. Another Eureka sign, I thought glumly. And then it became very clear to me what I had to do. I didn't even think twice about it. I merely reacted.
"Well, this is just retarded," I said aloud, to nobody in particular. "I'm leaving."
With that, I started walking back into the purple as fast as I could. I finally tossed the empty condom box over my shoulder, now afraid of offending no one, and resolved to not look back in case I should turn to salt or something. This caused considerable murmuring amongst the two Things. Somewhere close behind me, Mel's dad spoke up to protest my decision.
"Wait!" he said. "Where are you going? Don't you want to get back to the Old World?"
But I didn't answer, exactly just like how he never answered or acknowledged me throughout my time with him. It's funny, now that I look back on it. He yelled my name a few times as I walked away, and mentioned something about not being able to get back without him. Still, I kept moving forward into the "wilderness" of this land - if one can apply the same terms from the Old World to the New World. I just ignored him. And what's more, he never came after me - maybe out of fear of being lost. I don't know, and I'm not sure if I care. I was so relieved to be rid of him, you see. His reluctance to come after me only made my decision to break away that much more easier. I was now, officially, dead to him, just like his wife and possibly his daughter. He obviously now had other shit to take care of, probably his own material needs. I had other fish to fry. My time was better left alone in the purple on a mission of exploration. I can't say it hasn't been uninteresting.
Leaving Mel's dad like that was a ballsy move. I wasn't sure what else I'd find in this new place, what strange creatures I might encounter upon. Whether or not I'd find proper food. Whether or not the sun would allow me to take a simple piss or, God forbid, a bowel movement. Then there was the question of how I was to get back. There was also the question of what I was walking away from. Family, friends, school ... a so-called "normal" life.
I've kept walking and wandering, though. I had my reasons when I started; I still have them. Sure, remaining here means that I have to roam the purple all by myself, while trying to avoid a multitude of potential dangers: the light bulb sun, the warring tribes of strange creatures, the mammoth Grabens (who are a particularly nasty bunch). However, I still wander around this place, following my third eye as a compass, trying to put the jigsaw puzzle pieces together, hoping one day I'll sort through this mess and figure it all out for myself: What it is that I want. What am I doing here?
I realize there's a lot that I'm leaving out in my accounts here, a lot of holes that have yet to be filled. Maybe that makes me an asshole - or maybe just a finger belonging to Mel's dad - but this seems like as good a place to abandon you as any. Sure, maybe I'm no better than Mel's dad in some respects, leaving one world in favor of another of one's own making. But I can't help but wish I'd discovered this place a hell of a lot sooner. Nobody knows how grateful for the solitude I now have, and maybe that's the greatest souvenir the New World will offer in the long run. Maybe that will be the only thing that matters in the end.
I guess we'll see, though. I guess we'll see.
Ha!
Monday, July 20, 2009
Tired and Sore
I'm a bit tired and worn out from biking nearly 25 kilometers yesterday. I went out to the RealDecoy BBQ at Andrew Haydon Park near Bayshore, and it nearly killed me. My legs and ass were sore all over from biking out there, and I had trouble falling asleep last night from the pain in my legs. I had to take a couple of Motrin just to attempt to fall asleep. Needless to say, I was pretty dead tired this morning, and could have used some extra hours of shut eye.
But I did have fun at the event. I even won a $20 gift certificate to Best Buy, which is cool considering I usually never win anything in draws and raffles. It was a good, relaxing time with the coworkers, and while I can't say that I bonded even more closer with anyone, it was good to get out of the house, I guess.
I also have some cool news. My first short story in eons is about to be published in A New Spin, a Web zine put together by a high school acquaintance, Deedee Sanderson. It's actually a piece I wrote maybe about a year and a half ago in Toronto, and has been sitting on the back burner for awhile. I got an e-mail from DeeDee today, and this is what she had to say about the story:
"I read your story, I liked it, it's kinda of twisted, as you probably know. The interesting thing is, is that the story is even better after a few days rattling in your head. (i read it a week ago). I really laughed hard at the 2nd or third paragraph. Howled."
That's probably the nicest thing I've ever heard an editor say anything about my work. Cool!
What's up with the new Blogspot design? I can't do a spell check on this post thanks to the new design. Boo. Hiss.
But I did have fun at the event. I even won a $20 gift certificate to Best Buy, which is cool considering I usually never win anything in draws and raffles. It was a good, relaxing time with the coworkers, and while I can't say that I bonded even more closer with anyone, it was good to get out of the house, I guess.
I also have some cool news. My first short story in eons is about to be published in A New Spin, a Web zine put together by a high school acquaintance, Deedee Sanderson. It's actually a piece I wrote maybe about a year and a half ago in Toronto, and has been sitting on the back burner for awhile. I got an e-mail from DeeDee today, and this is what she had to say about the story:
"I read your story, I liked it, it's kinda of twisted, as you probably know. The interesting thing is, is that the story is even better after a few days rattling in your head. (i read it a week ago). I really laughed hard at the 2nd or third paragraph. Howled."
That's probably the nicest thing I've ever heard an editor say anything about my work. Cool!
What's up with the new Blogspot design? I can't do a spell check on this post thanks to the new design. Boo. Hiss.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
The National
So I went and saw the National last night at Bluesfest. They were very, very good. Well worth the $60 I spent on a ticket. They only played about an hour, and didn't play "Daughters of the Soho Riots" or "All the Wine" but I was generally happy with the show. I could have listened to the lead singer's baritone all night long.
I didn't really stick around for KISS. It was too much of a zoo, and I overheard one woman say upon entering the grounds that "This is like a carnival, but for adults." It was too much of a one for me. I sort of felt like I was back in Toronto with all the crowd of people. I saw KISS take to the stage, and the music immediately felt canned. I felt a little bit ripped off as well, as, if I didn't check the Bluesfest website beforehand, I would have missed that the National got moved back to 7:45 p.m. instead of 8 p.m., to make way for an extra half-hour or so of KISS. I don't know what people see in KISS -- I didn't really recognize the first four or so songs that they played, and it just felt like a mass influx of sheepies being lead to whatever the media feeds them. Is Ottawa this starved for attention whenever a major act comes to town? I wonder.
I didn't really stick around for KISS. It was too much of a zoo, and I overheard one woman say upon entering the grounds that "This is like a carnival, but for adults." It was too much of a one for me. I sort of felt like I was back in Toronto with all the crowd of people. I saw KISS take to the stage, and the music immediately felt canned. I felt a little bit ripped off as well, as, if I didn't check the Bluesfest website beforehand, I would have missed that the National got moved back to 7:45 p.m. instead of 8 p.m., to make way for an extra half-hour or so of KISS. I don't know what people see in KISS -- I didn't really recognize the first four or so songs that they played, and it just felt like a mass influx of sheepies being lead to whatever the media feeds them. Is Ottawa this starved for attention whenever a major act comes to town? I wonder.
Monday, July 13, 2009
My First Day of Work
So, I'm finally home from my first day of work at Real Decoy (or RealDecoy, which I have to get used to spelling). It was a bit of an overwhelming experience, considering all the new faces and names I need to know. It was a pretty good experience, though. I spent much of the day researching case studies, which will be a new thing for me to write. I've never done them before. I've gotten a lot of help, though, from my PWAC colleagues, and the job should prove to be challenging and exciting. I'm feeling a bit wiped out at the moment from my first day on the job, granted. I guess this means no more watching The Price Is Right in the mornings. :-) I'm glad to be working again, though, and it seems like there's a lot of work for me to do over there at Real Decoy. Plus, I have a genuine respect for the people working there. So I guess we'll see how it goes in the long run, but right now I'm feeling quite content and satisfied. I can only hope the feeling lasts ... .
I had also written a bit about Broken Social Scene last night, but lost it in a version edit. Don't feel like typing it in again, so all I'll say is that the show was just OK.
I had also written a bit about Broken Social Scene last night, but lost it in a version edit. Don't feel like typing it in again, so all I'll say is that the show was just OK.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Starting Work Tomorrow
Well, I guess that my six-month "vacation" is about to come to an end. I start work tomorrow as a Writing Practice Lead at Real Decoy tomorrow morning, and I'm not sure how to feel about it. A little elated? Yes. A little nervous? Yes. I honestly don't know what to expect, so I guess I'll just go in there tomorrow and wing it.
I'm going to go see Broken Social Scene play Bluesfest tonight for free. I'd gladly go pay to see them, but they're playing some Bluesfest in the Byward Market kind of deal. I have "Lover's Spit" kind of stuck in my head right now. I wonder how much they'll play from You Forgot It In People, and how much new stuff they're going to play. It's been nearly five years without a new album from them, save solo projects, so it should be an interesting show.
I'm going to go see Broken Social Scene play Bluesfest tonight for free. I'd gladly go pay to see them, but they're playing some Bluesfest in the Byward Market kind of deal. I have "Lover's Spit" kind of stuck in my head right now. I wonder how much they'll play from You Forgot It In People, and how much new stuff they're going to play. It's been nearly five years without a new album from them, save solo projects, so it should be an interesting show.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Another Popmatters Book Review
Hi all. Just a short post to let you know that I have another book review at Popmatters online. You can read it by clicking here.
Monday, July 6, 2009
The Move
Sorry for not being more active here lately. I just finished moving to Ottawa, and, for the most part, things went smoothly. Nothing really new to report there, and I don't want to get into a blow-by-blow account of how things went. I'm happy to see that my cat is finally warming up to the new place. She was one stressed out kitty when we did the move, meowing all the time.
I'm under a little bit of stress, though, as Rogers has bungled my e-mail account. I've been told to wait 24 hours in order to process things, but I wonder if that's really the problem or someone screwed up on Rogers' end. I'm tempted to think it's the latter. So I'm currently without my e-mail account. Grrr.
I'm also trying to get ahold of the folks at EI by phone to get my address changed in their records. You'd think that with so many people on EI, it'd be easier to reach them by phone. But no. I keep getting that same message to try my call again later. Maybe I'll finally reach them by Thursday at this rate. It's stupid. You'd think you'd be able to do this all by the Net, but no. It's a screwed up process.
I'm hungry. Maybe I should get something to eat.
I'm under a little bit of stress, though, as Rogers has bungled my e-mail account. I've been told to wait 24 hours in order to process things, but I wonder if that's really the problem or someone screwed up on Rogers' end. I'm tempted to think it's the latter. So I'm currently without my e-mail account. Grrr.
I'm also trying to get ahold of the folks at EI by phone to get my address changed in their records. You'd think that with so many people on EI, it'd be easier to reach them by phone. But no. I keep getting that same message to try my call again later. Maybe I'll finally reach them by Thursday at this rate. It's stupid. You'd think you'd be able to do this all by the Net, but no. It's a screwed up process.
I'm hungry. Maybe I should get something to eat.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Stressed Out
So here I am in Ottawa. I managed to find an apartment, and it was a little more money than I was expecting to pay. But it is right downtown, and I can walk to work from it. I also think it's big enough for my needs. That will remain to be seen I guess. I have to say, though, that I'm a little bit stressed out about my impending move to Ottawa. I just hope the move and everything associated with it goes well. I'm now out to try and find a family doctor, which I'll need due to the fact that my blood sugar levels are high. Maybe the stress is pushing them into the red, I don't know. I just hope that everything goes well, according to plan, and that I'm able to find peace and relaxation here in Ottawa in a few weeks. I guess there's just no use getting worked up about things.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Ottawa Bound
Hi all. Just a short note here to note that I'm going to be away from my desk for the remainder of this week. I'm going to be jumping a train to do a little apartment hunting in Ottawa as I'm now, officially, the Writing Practice Lead over at Real Decoy in Ottawa. I hope the apartment hunt goes well, and that I can get something for July 1 or thereabouts. I'm a wee bit excited about this, and also a little overwhelmed. I'm not looking forward to packing up my stuff and moving again, but I'm happy to have a job in Ottawa. It seems to be a big leap forward for me professionally, and I'll get to show off my writing chops in a professional setting. I guess my first order of business will be to get people in the office to read George Orwell's Politics and the English Language essay, one of my favourites. All you need to know about writing is in that 10 pager.
So it looks like I'll be down until the weekend, unless I find something in O-town, and hop on at an Internet cafe. See ya on the other side.
So it looks like I'll be down until the weekend, unless I find something in O-town, and hop on at an Internet cafe. See ya on the other side.
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