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By David Kingsley
Across the street from our white, paint-shedding menagerie, a telephone pole was smashed some time ago. Concerned parties put a new pole next to the damaged one, and lashed them together with a ratchet strap and a quarter-inch piece of nylon rope. Then, a third pole was bolted to the top of the second, at an angle, to form a stable tripod. Unfortunately, the hasty configuration has pulled the incoming wires as taught as violin strings and the facial boards have been slowly bowing out toward the street, giving the wildlife unrestricted axis. Of course, the gaps, wide as they are, couldn't accommodate something the size of a raccoon. Those must have simply walked into the garage, (it has no door). Some nights Madison and I drink whiskey and make forays into their lair with an air rifle (a game we play - not a serious threat.)
A colony of mice was driven in by the cold this past fall. They are stupid and have no fear, and thus, no respect for personal space. The thing that troubles me is that all of the D-Con has all been consumed, and yet the numbers of mice and other species at Olive Street, in Bangor, Maine are still multiplying. Our provincial home has grown wild.
I have taken this as one of many signs for me to leave. A great mound of dirty clothes; a disorderly stack of books on travel and history; a stained twenty-five dollar king sized mattress with no sheets; and a structurally unsound chest which never worked to begin with - What sort of life is this?
The Port Authority seemed to be the center of the world, a nucleus of polished tile and solid security antithetical to New York City at large. Daniel passed time beside an escalator while he waited for the bus to Edgewater, New Jersey, where he worked. His steel toed work boots and ragged jeans made him stick out. He was carrying a cheap backpack and a tool-belt that cemented his image and station beyond doubt.
Producing a notebook from the shapeless black canvas he began to sketch out the profiles of passersby, not as they were, but as he absorbed them in a split second. They were then superimposed on a variety of other shaded geometries of urban life: A Russian woman with heavy makeup became the new face of an Italian deli sign, like a skull and crossbones with two long, intersecting loafs of bread joining at her scarf knot. Two sharply dressed businessmen were stranded by ballpoint atop a statue of Christopher Columbus, their expressions unsurprised. Badly drawn, they still communicated something of his disillusionment with a new habitat, not to mention the boredom that inevitably accompanies public transportation.
Daniel did not really mind the commute, though. His affection for the Port Authority flowed from the same source as the strict and sadly clichιd regimen of cigarettes he observed: Time snatched from the day and the fulfillment of a simple task. It grounded his subconscious, providing a sense of stability every bit as important as that afforded by his inner ear.
"Don't worry Dan," a friend from college had said on the telephone the week before, "You'll find something. You're doing carpentry still, aren't you?"
"Yeah, but what the hell did I go to college for? Everything is so expensive here."
"Well at least you're out of Maine."
You have no idea what you are talking about, he had thought. Still, she was right. Fresh from the university, Daniel liked to think of himself as having graduated to a larger pond. "A big, mean one," as his friend Ray put it, and he immersed himself in it with the pride of a Polar Bear Club member. "Momentum is important," he told Ray.
Tearing free the illustrations, Daniel crumpled them and scored four points into a nearby trash can before picking up his pen once more:
"The 'North Jersey Atlas' is not a title often gracing the shelves of the travel smitten. I would have been content to disparage the entire state on a hunch had fate not intervened, escorting me to jail, court and, worse, Jersey. Here - stripped of my license, full of tirades on the influence of interest groups on American law, wishing that I had either remembered to register my car or skipped that last Guinness -"
He stopped, scratching out the previous sentence. "Here I find that I have been shoved into a new reality more alien than the one I found when I traveled in the Pacific. Maybe it is harder when you have to carve out a niche somewhere because you lack the usual flexibility of an adventurer (not to mention the funds of a vacationer). You can't enjoy the experience because you're too concerned with where you'll end up."
In the terminal, from his stainless steel-sheathed vantage, Daniel watched the passengers making their way up, shoulders and hands steadily morphing into feet while the yellow side strips of each stair joined and glided under the floor, one after another.
Daniel woke up mildly disoriented. It was as if the tousled hair and puffy-eyed downside of dawn had bled through his pores to contaminate his brain.
In keeping with his routine, he remembered New Zealand, where he had studied for a semester, and a girl: two consuming eyes with delicate brows, and pigtails jutting out from under a white, wool hat. It had been much more than the five months he was with her since he had seen or even talked to her, and in that time he had acquired the peculiar sensation that he had lost his way in the proverbial woods. Migrating had not helped to ease the recollection.
Daniel left the flood of emotions unchecked as he surveyed the tall ceiling of the guest bedroom where he lay. He was fond of his sister Elizabeth's apartment. Every yard of walnut trim, every structural accessory, was tastefully routed and securely fastened. It was both modest and charming - two qualities he hoped would rub off on its new inhabitant - and the carpenter in him appreciated the hard work indispensable to forty-five degree joints and flush trim. As he examined the door he heard the familiar thumps that meant Elizabeth was getting ready for work on the other side. He reached out for a pair of thrice-worn jeans and a t-shirt proclaiming, "You Better Belize It!" and made his way past a pair of inlaid, sliding doors in search of coffee.
"Morning D"
"Mornin'. Vance already leave?" Her boyfriend's work habits had been humbling his own since he had claimed the air mattress in the spare bedroom.
"Yeah. Here you go." She handed him a steaming cup. "What about you? Working today?"
"Got it off." He pondered his sister as she soft shoed toward the bread drawer. "You're not going to wear that, are you?"
She glowered back and stuck her tongue out.
After the judge reprimanded him and revoked his driver's license, Daniel had been surprised and grateful to receive his sister's invitation to stay in Hoboken. Things had not always been warm between them. Throughout the past four years, in an odd counterpoint to his success at college, Daniel had heard those who loved him describe his teenage years as "troubled." Elizabe th knew better, and let him know it, too: "You were the trouble." When he was distanced enough he conceded that she was right, and their more recent affection for one another was born of that difficult understanding.
Still, Daniel maintained a series of qualifications about his adolescence to keep regret's machete from hamstringing his hopes for the future. When he had finally noticed the erosion of his character, he had been genuinely startled. Big decisions in life were nowhere near as recognizable without the cues of a laughbox, or the welling violins of a movie soundtrack, and this was certainly true of his more recent arrest, all the more embarrassing for its freshness. It seemed to have spilled over from a stubborn past.
He thought about a phrase he had seen on his way to work the day before, on the side of a bus: "La Vida Sin Futbol No Es Vida."
"Hey Liza, you know what "sin" means in Spanish?"
"Hiyah!" She chucked an English muffin at his head. "No, what does it mean?"
"Without. I think they're onto something." He picked the crumbs from his short mop of sleep-arranged hair. "I mean, what's sin if not an attempt to fill a void? Lust without love, greed without cash..."
"Sloth without work? You want butter?"
"Yes please - Exactly!"
"So what's the Spanish word for sin?"
"I can't remember." He swallowed, "Just semantics anyway."
"Not if it means something to you. What's your big plan for the day?"
"Job hunt. Maybe shower. I think I'm going over to Ray's tonight. I haven't gotten a chance to seem him since I moved down."
"Good plan." She backed away holding her nose. "I'll see you later."
"Salam Alaikum buddy!"
"Peace be upon you my brother!"
Ray was not a Muslim. If anything he was five and a half feet of glaring contradiction. Compassionate chauvinist and one-time gay minister, he was as sharp as a compass needle, but his sense of direction was so finicky that he dwelled in the land of the undergraduate for nine years. He had at last escaped the harassment and comedy of extreme minority status in Maine only to be mistaken for a Dominican in the Bronx. Unperturbed, he used his ethnic mysticism to advantage by teaching high school math to a pack of fearful Hispanic children who, from the periodic disapproving arch of his black brow, could never quite tell whether or not he was bilingual.
(Next issue will feature part two.)
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Perpetual Toxins © 2006-2007 - All Rights Reserved |
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ur leopard gecko, Romando, is unfortunately a finicky eater. That is how, unmolested, a squad of crickets have come to inhabit the baseboards, chirping along with the crowd during the NFL playoffs. There is a shuffling in the ceiling above the sink that is equally disquieting. To the best of our knowledge it comes from squirrels, though, at times, it is difficult to distinguish from the louder, more distant, thumps of the raccoon family in the garage.
