10000 napkins
Transcription
10000 napkins
4 $3.95 EDITORS FRONT COVER JOE PETERSON & MIKE BREHM IAN HUNTLEY WALLACE SPECIAL THANKS WHITNEY LINDER INSIDE FRONT COVER KEVIN RIORDAN JOHN BROWN SUSAN PHILLIPS Published Quarterly by StoryHead 1340 W. GENIE Granville, Chicago, Illinois, 60660. Subscrip- N ATA L I E S . WA I N W R I G H T I L L U S T R AT E D B Y C H R I S W O O D WA R D tion rates: $16.00 per year. Please make all COMICS checks payable to Mike Brehm or Joe Peterson. JOE MCDONNELL Please include an SASE with art work and writ- SELF PORTRAIT ing contributions. All rights revert back to artists. Copyright Fall 1994 StoryHead. Story- FRANK GAARD 10000 NAPKINS Head is distributed by Ubiquity and Fine Print ANTHONY BERKLEY I L L U S T R AT E D B Y M I K E B R E H M Distributors. Printed by the University of Illinois EVERY DAY I’M THERE GREGORY COOK at Chicago Printing Department ISSN:1071-3336 WILDERNESS JOE PETERSON TOWER OF BABEL D AV I D G R E E N B E R G E R I L L U S T R AT E D B Y J O E M C D O N N E L L WOMAN’S FACE K AT H R Y N S T E M W E D E L THE VOICE JOE PETERSON I L L U S T R AT E D B Y M I K E B R E H M DRAWING FRANK GAARD INSIDE BACK COVER AND BACK COVER IAN HUNTLEY WALLACE B Y N ATA L I E S . WA I N W R I G H T W I T H D R AW I N G S B Y C H R I S W O O D WA R D A woman met another woman on the street. The second woman seemed to be in pain. She held a small bottle, which had a stopper. When she staggered, and nearly fell before a car, the first woman, unthinking, rushed to help her. “Are you all right?” she asked. “Take this,” the other breathed. “What?” asked the first woman, startled and unsure of what she had heard. “Take this. Be careful. It is a very literal genie. Wish carefully.” Finally, the woman came to herself. She remembered she had an appointment. No wonder she had forgotten. A doctor’s appointment. But the woman already knew what the doctor would tell her. The pain had been information enough, and she knew enough about the disease to understand: by the time you knew, there was not much hope. It would be cancer. Her mother had had it, her great aunt. Probably others. She went to the appointment anyway. And it was cancer. Fourth stage. The woman’s husband was there to pick her up. The bottle was in her shoulder bag, but he would not have noticed it in any case. He knew from his wife’s face the diagnosis, and he could not help the tears that sneaked into his eyes and forced their way out down his face. He felt he should be strong, for her. They were not an old couple. In their early forties, they had two young children, seven and ten.What would the children do, motherless? What would the husband do without his wife of The second woman went limp in the arms of the other. The bottle dropped to the ground and rolled a short distance. The first woman called to the bystanders, who had by now gathered around. “Call an ambulance!” She laid the woman down gently, knowing she was dead. That bottle? She could not resist the mystery. As if the mystery were necessarily hers, a young boy picked up the bottle and gave it to the woman. “Thank you,” she said absently, and oddly, began to wander away. She dimly heard the sounds of the ambulance as she walked. twenty years? Neither spoke. They would try surgery, chemotherapy. They might be lucky. That night, the woman could not sleep. Pain, sadness, a thought that she was forgetting something. The bottle. She quietly went to the living room and found her bag. She opened it. There was the bottle as it had been. Quiet, inert. There could be no magic. Still, it was a mystery. She held the bottle for a moment, then gripped the stopper and pulled. She waited without much expectation. But then, something seemed to change before the woman’s eyes. Around the open bottle the air seemed to thicken, to coalesce and become opaque. Another woman stood before her. There was something familiar about her, although perhaps it was only that she looked very much like the woman who had died on the street. The woman from the bottle spoke. “What do you want?” A miracle. Complete remission! Everyone was astonished and happy. The husband, the children. Time passed. There were moments when the woman was tempted to make the last wish, but for a feeling that wishes could not be so inexpensive.That and the dead woman’s warning. Once when the family was in severe trouble for money—the husband had lost his job, the woman was not working, the children were expensive, and “I believe I need to know the rules,” said the first woman, remembering the warning she had been given. “Ah. Two wishes. Only.” “That’s all?” “Yes.” The woman was unsure what to do. She was a deeply religious woman, in her own way. Her commitments and her actions had always held a profound significance for her. What should she do? Should she consult her husband? Yet, given her present circumstances, she did not feel that she could resist the wishes themselves. How would it be phrased? A literal genie. Very dangerous, no doubt. Perhaps simplicity and humility would be the best. If she were not greedy, who could fault her? “I wish to be healthy,” she said “Done,” said the other woman, and vanished. The woman went back to bed with the illness, and when she woke, she did not have it. how could they owe so much in taxes? She opened the bottle. “What do you want?” said the genie-woman, who looked more familiar than she had before. “If I were to wish for wealth?” “You would have it.” The woman stoppered the bottle. She did not trust it.Their financial troubles passed, not without leaving scars. changed, grew older—except the woman. She remained healthy. She discovered, finally, how she was to pay for her wish. Health precluded aging, apparently.The woman’s husband grew older and older, the children became adults, she remained the same. When her husband’s love took on bitterness and resentment, the woman was tempted to tell him of the genie and the bottle, and perhaps to wish for youth and health for him, too. But she was afraid. The genie was not kind, would not reward humility or lack of avarice. The children, too, grew suspicious, and then resentful. Another time, her daughter was very, very ill. It was uncertain whether the teenager would recover from a drug overdose. The woman unstoppered the bottle.The genie appeared. The woman understood now the sense of familiarity. The woman from the bottle now looked much like her, not the woman from the street. “What do you want?” the woman who looked so much like her asked. “If I asked for my daughter’s recovery?” “You would have it.” “And no more wishes?” “Yes.” The woman stoppered the bottle, deciding to wait. Her daughter recovered, a changed girl. The years passed, the family Finally, the woman realized she could not live like this. She would have either to run away and live a different life among strangers, or soothe the bitterness of those she had always loved. She could not leave. One night she unstoppered the bottle. The woman appeared, now identical to the other woman in the room. “What do you want?” The woman thought for a time. How to phrase this? Allow for the least damage? “Please restore to me the normal aging processes.” “Done.” The woman’s double disappeared. The bot- She went back to her of their life could be tle was gone, too. bed, stroking her restored. The woman went to the mirror in the bathroom and stared at her own face. Was that a wrinkle already? She hoped so. sleeping husband as she climbed in. He was far on the other side of their bed. Perhaps the better things Just before she fell asleep, the woman was struck by a thought. “I hope death is included. 10000 NAPKINS A N T H O N Y B E R K L E Y SHE CLUTCHES AN ODDLY SHAPED PURSE WITH BOTH HANDS MEN DON’T BECOME AFRAID THE WAY WOMEN DO. Jim was standing on the top rung of a step ladder fixing a light bulb in his garage when his back gave out on him. He felt a sharp pain in his spine and then couldn’t move any of his limbs. This lasted for minutes. After 30 years working for the county, 45 years of marriage, and 1 year of retirement, Jim found himself frozen at an odd angel six feet above a cement floor, unable even to flinch. Immediately he thought about her, not calling for help, not the ce- ment floor, not accidental death, only her. She flooded his mind, a girl glimpsed from a moving train forty years ago. See, he told Eddie later, you don’t even have to go anywhere. The great abyss is in your own garage. When a man’s back goes out it is a lot like a bridge collapsing. Not only do you have to clean up the structural damage but you also need to figure out how all that traffic is going to continue getting from point A to point B. The doctor persuaded him to shorten his golf swing, give up softball all together, and leave the heavy work to younger men. Jim responded by developing a new hobby: model trains. If Virginia thought he would be moping around the house snacking all the time then she was dead wrong. He rearranged the garage, put up four sheets of plywood on two saw horses, climbed back up the step ladder to put in a clean bulb with twice the wattage and on Mondays and Thursdays began frequenting Hunter’s Train & Hobby. Jim models a fall day in 1945, late afternoon with the sun still strong in the sky, a cold wind blowing off the lake and leaves gathering in piles around the base of the trees. There are a few people on the train platform, newly arrived. Two boys lug sports equipment. A grandmother holds tears in her eyes. A man with a briefcase and a blue suit points at a girl, standing alone, waiting for a train going the other direction. Jim’s first and last impression was that he had never seen a girl so beautiful before, or so alone. Everyone he knew and had ever known, everyone he would ever know, belonged to something, a family, a school or a town, an army. Not even in Europe had he seen a girl with such strange clothing, a haircut that short. She clutches an oddly shaped purse with both hands, her feet sort of planted there, not moving. The train approaches without slowing down. Jim can see her clearly now, the arc of her face, the pattern in her coat, matching shoes, all so completely and perfectly out of place like a flower brought back from the future. Then she turns toward him. Their eyes meet almost without seeing each other and in that instant he knew he needed to get off that train. It was only an instant but he knew he was making a lifetime of THE SHOCK JERKED HIM OUT OF HIS SEAT AND ONTO HIS FEET. mistakes if he didn’t get off, that no matter how fast he got there he was going in the wrong direction. The shock jerked him out of his seat and onto his feet. He struggled to maintain his balance while the train shuddered and clacked. Looking around none of the other passengers seemed to have noticed. No conductor was in the car. They were moving at least forty miles an hour. And so the train hurtles past her, past the sledding hill covered with orangey pine bushes, past the centimeters of plastic topsoil, past the velvet baseball diamond, past the painted toothpicks and molded tin foil. The train shuttles past Lake Michigan, an orgy of details where ridges of blue velvet lap like waves along the rocky shoreline and a shimmering image of the afternoon sun contrasts with the water’s greeny blue. The exposed bulb hangs just above eye level. Recently he lowered it a foot by letting the socket hang directly from HE FELT HOW ALL THIS COULD HAVE A SYMBOLIC VALUE IN RELATIONSHIP TO HIS LIFE, LIKE A CRECHE HE HAD BUILT AND DEVOTED TO HIMSELF. . . SHE STILL FINDS IT HARD TO BELIEVE HOW QUICKLY HE MADE THE TRANSITION FROM THE REAL WORLD TO THE MINIATURE WORLD AND HOW MUCH JUNK IT REQUIRED. the power chord, the extra light becoming necessary for the detail work as his eyes got worse. He is perched on a high-backed chair reading the local newspaper, The Lake Towns’ Free Press. He squints as he reads. SCIENTISTS PREDICT. TIGERS LOSE. CHINESE GIRL RAISED BY PIGS. The bang of the screen door interrupts him. The screen door bangs again and Virginia, wearing a house coat over a pair of slacks and a blouse, sets down a tray of dry sandwiches on a strategically stationed stool, placed carefully amid the work benches, the boxes of unused or already-used material for constructing miniatures, the quickand slow-setting glues, razor blades, tiny watch tools, as well as the implements required for direct action in this life, a life-sized rake, heavy and solid tackle box, sleds leaning against the wall, equipment for the boat, an empty car berth. She hates these scenes with him in the garage over the newspaper. “Did you hear they found this naked Chinese girl raised by pigs in some remote valley in China? Her name is Fang Wang Chen. Scientists at the linguistic institute there want to teach her to speak Chinese.” She drops the tray and moves back toward the door, stopping in the door well and propping open the spring-loaded screen with one foot. Not putting down the paper or lifting up his eyes he says, “Sounds like the name of one of those restaurants in the mall. Probably means something too. You know how the Chinese are.” “I need you to pick up something for me at The Store, Jim, napkins, a big box of napkins.” He folds and refolds the newspaper, shoulders hunched over, searching and searching for another article, his exertions out of place with the physical effort required to read. Watching him perched over the train set she still finds it hard to believe how quickly he made the transition from the real world to the miniature world, and how much junk it required. With her foot wedged against the banging screen door, the aggressive kind, made out of aluminum with a rattling screen and a spring-loaded drum prepared to fling the whole contraption against the frame at the slightest hesitation or lapse, she rummages on the work desk for a pencil and a slip of paper. “Why do you need napkins? Eddie and Mary aren’t coming tomorrow, we’ll have to wait for next Sunday. They’ve gone to Reemy, France to seek a cure from those nuns they got there. Didn’t Mary tell you?” “She just called me from the airport in Chicago,” she begins to say. A weight was being lifted off Jim’s chest He put the paper down. He had already decided what attitude it might be best to take in the face of such an adventure, but always keeping in mind Eddie’s advanced state of lung cancer. “They haven’t left yet—couldn’t get a flight out at the last minute as easily as they thought. They are still waiting there in one of the hotels for cancellations. Marilyn tells me that Eddie is scared, really scared, and acting sort of crazy, enough to finally quit smoking.” Eddie, Eddie Manning. A painter, best friend in the world, scared enough to seek a miracle, a man who has never been to church once in his life so long as Jim has known him. “They sure are going to make Eddie pay for this adventure, aren’t they? Last minute flights, looking for something somewhere and he doesn’t speak the language. What is he thinking, they are going to remember him? What, it’s only been 45 years since his last visit.” Eddie just finished a commission last month: painting all the federal bridges blue along Route 38. That is good work and it only took his crew two years to do it. Who knows why the government wanted the bridges blue rather than their original gray? It was good work and Eddie was happy, a top wage, lots of holidays, good insurance, which came in handy after all didn’t it? He didn’t have to get up too early, an important point for a night bird—wasn’t he always saying how easy it was to get a day or two off when he needed them?—because it isn’t pressure work when you are painting them like it is building the damn things, with cars honking, a single supervisor running three crews and screaming at everyone when he wasn’t trying to catch an odd hours sleep in the back of the car, dreaming during his catnaps of looking over his shoulder at the Chambers of Commerce and the newspaper editors at his back and screaming. She has found the piece of paper with a pencil, blunt and apparently recently used to scrape wax and begins to write instructions using the door frame as a hard surface. Finished scribbling she brings the note to him, a news item which consists of the words, 10000 Napkins. He reads it with all the seriousness of a late-breaking story crossing his desk. “Maybe you should just lay off the finger food and the cards tomorrow. It doesn’t feel right with Eddie gone off like that, it being Sunday and all.” What particularly rankled him was having to go to The Store.The place wasn’t natural. Buy a snow shovel in April and they already have the Halloween decorations up. That, and as he turned the note over and found part of one of his old sketches on the back, the number 10000. All those zeros in a row like that resembling nothing but bubbles floating off the page. Bubbles of nothingness. One coming right after the other. Identical bits of nothingness. But she was adamant, proving what he had long suspected of his wife: she wasn’t as fond of Mary as he was of Eddie. She bangs the door on her way out and he folds the slip of paper once and slips it into his pants pocket. He wonders what he will do when he gets home carrying that big bag of napkins in his hand, wondering just how big a bag of 10000 napkins actually is, how heavy it is if it weighs anything at all. Will he go right up to the house or take the fork in the path and stop by the garage? A sandwich gets wrapped and placed in his shirt pocket. He grabs the car key off its hook and locks the side door from the inside, exiting out the car berth where the car sits waiting outside, leaves wedging themselves beneath the front grill and beginning to gather in a mulch pile under the bumper. Another fall day. Almost the holiday season. One season just slipping into another. He looks back at the house—he almost wanted to say for the last time—at the lawn, at the white stone path he laid 20 years ago with its gentle curve and fork in the road, at the boat. How long has it been since he called his kids and invited them over? He felt how all this could have a symbolic value in relationship to his life, like a crèche he had built and devoted to himself, a miniature replica of the key events of his existence with a spiritual significance difficult to state clearly. A turn of the key and the engine drowns out the rhythmic clacking of the train. A light rain begins to fall sealing him into the comfortable interior of the car. His foot on the gas and a hand HE NOSES THE CAR INTO THE ALLEY BEHIND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH TO AVOID THE LONG RED LIGHT ON TELEGRAPH AVE. manipulating the radio it feels like being just back from the army when he still had a bachelor’s blood flowing in him. Why didn’t he get out more in those days when the world was different, hit the streets? Not that he’s done badly for himself, 2 boys raised well, a home paid off and a summer cottage on the lake. He noses the car into the alley behind the Catholic church to avoid the long red light on Telegraph Avenue. He and Eddie built this damn community. There was nothing but farms and dirt roads when they returned home like they promised they would and started spending their GI checks. He laid some of the cement himself. Two decades later he was still here to supervise the extension and enlargement of what by then everyone was calling the old county road system. The rain falls harder now producing a steady drumming sound, both relaxing and distracting. Passing behind the church brings to mind boyhood wisdom concerning Catholic girls and he begins flipping the radio looking for the Mexican station. Songs in a foreign language make it easier to appreciate the sadness of the melody. More than anything else it is that moment when you can feel the meat of her hanging in your hands, when the woman throws open the doors to her body and just lets you in. He settles instead on rock-n-roll. It is a song by one of his son’s favorite groups, the singer screaming again and again, “If rain keeps on falling, love is going away.” He pulls out the sandwich and begins chewing into the softness. He finds himself slowing down, watching the roadside and looking for anything that might detain him, taking a wider angle than necessary on the curves, letting the car sway a little back and forth, the soft rain sounds with the darkening sky creating an effect of near bedtime. The ride already feels like it is taking longer than usual and he decides on the indirect route out past the loading dock and along the lake, back up along the other side of the old dairy, under the overpass where he and his crew turned two lanes into four and then Eddie painted it blue. He knew the way he wanted to remember Eddie. The way he was the night the Tigers won The World Series. Eddie getting his Irish up, screaming “Lou” as Whitaker stepped up to the plate so loud it sounded like he was booing him. After the game, riots broke out right in front of the stadium. Eddie brought out a box of phonograph recordings made on little 45s of the triumphant CBS Radio broadcast given the day the war ended. The TV camera seemed to just sort of swivel in slow motion following the arc of a long ball down into the violence of the streets. Eddie dropping the needle down on those little 45’s one right after another like he was on a mission—that was true Eddie in his element. He imagines Eddie and Marilyn standing in line beneath the bright lights of O’Hare. How much is a trip like that going to cost? Eddie, Eddie, he sings along with the sad melody. Eddie painted the bridges blue. Wheeling into the parking lot a drowsy feeling of sadness flows into the car and it is not without effort that he avoids laying his head down on the steering wheel and closing his eyes in the relative darkness. He finds himself just wheeling around the immense parking lot, making a slow circle around the glowing building. In front super-heated lights shine out through the huge glass windows, bathing the parking lot with long shadows. Around back in the dark trucks off load an endless number of boxes. The Store occupies its own tract of land, as large as a shopping mall, like an amusement park or a small village where anything can be bought, repaired or eaten. In a vacant section of the lot next to a light post he stops the car. He has parked in section C, row 38 and after finding a pen in the glove box, writes “C 38” beneath the number 10000. On AM the host talks with a scientist at the university about a recent discovery: the world’s largest living organism right here in Lake County. It is a mushroom that has been growing for thousands of years several inches below the topsoil and stretches over 37 acres. Someone calls in and wants to know how many elephants could be folded up into it like a taco. A woman complains hysterically about the tragedy of this sponge sucking up the water and poisoning the air for her children. Another caller wants to know what is being done to commercialize this mushroom in the way of a tourist attraction. The giant sponge, the DJ declares in a rising voice, is beneath our feet right now and it is growing larger every day. Jim clicks off the radio. He puts the half-eaten sandwich down on the car seat and looks out of the side window at the rain. It is a fine drizzle which doesn’t fall so much as move sideways like a spell changing the nature of things. It was in drizzles like this that he spent a lifetime half expecting to see her again. Velvet. He would step off that train and on to the platform and be offered some- thing, a strange haircut, silent conversation, an invisible gift. He felt sure it would be something he had never seen or heard before. If someone called his name, called him by his name in this rain and he heard it, heard his name in someone else’s voice and turned to see who it was and saw her standing there then no matter what, tears would come rolling down his face. He would be incapable of explaining himself. She would just be standing there watching him while he choked. Everything would be different then. Velvet, he would say and she would come to him. inside her just like you and me. Today, though, standing on the edge of the the pigeons and squirrels her eyes turned back at the storm breaking within. I don't know who she is who needs to, she has wilderness park she made a decision to listen to it throwing corn to ? ? ? ? OF BY DAVID GREENBERGER drawings by JOE McDONNELL Tower of Babel originally published in The Duplex Planet, #107 WILLIAM “FERGIE” FERGUSON: The Tower of Babel is supposed to be in, in Italy. DAVID B. GREENBERGER: What’s the purpose of it? FERGIE: That’s what I’d like to know. Christ, I was lucky enough to get here. I, I came through Italy, but, there’s a tower there, it’s an immense tower—it goes a-way up in the air. And, it’s solid concrete—not cement, but concrete. And it goes a-way up, it goes about sixty to seventy feet up in the air. And whether there’s anyone in it I don’t know. I don’t know, I don’t know if you know either. DBG: I don’t. I was hoping you knew. FERGIE: There’s no windows in the darn thing that I know of, that I ever saw. DBG: Why’d they build it so high? FERGIE: That’s what I can’t figure. If it’s some kind of a, a fortress, I don’t know. It looks as though it’s solid concrete. Or solid cement. I don’t see any entrance to it. DBG: I’ve seen pictures of it bigger than that. DBG: What’s it for then? What’s its use? FERGIE: I mean, from the FERGIE: That’s what I imagine DBG: It’s written up in the Bible. many are wondering, what it’s for. It’s, it’s a round tower—I’ll bet you it’s about ten feet in diameter, isn’t it? bottom. FERGIE: It IS? DBG: Yeah. FERGIE: It’s in the psalms, huh? P-s-a-l-m-s. curious and they wanted to find out what was in it. And if they found out somethin’, they sure as hell, Christ didn’t tell me. DBG: How’d you find out they even went there? FERGIE: Well I was goin’ through there when Amos and Andy came along. And they knew me for a long time, many years. And Amos says, “Hello Fergie!” Amos and Andy, they’re only about my own age. I was born in nineteen-five, so what does that make me now? DBG: Ah, seventy-eight. FERGIE: Seventy-eight. Well DBG: Why’s it in the Bible? FERGIE: Why? DBG: Yeah. FERGIE: I suppose that’s where Amos could answer that question, ‘cause Amos was over there in Italy, that’s where he came from. Amos and Andy. to do with the Bible though, did they? DBG: And what’d they have to do with the Bible? FERGIE: Not that I know of. FERGIE: Huh? DBG: What did they have to do with the tower then? DBG: They didn’t have anything FERGIE: I s’pose that they were they’re, ah, just about my age, seventy-eight. DBG: When does the tower date back to, or the legend about it? FERGIE: Huh? DBG: What are some of the stories about it? FERGIE: That’s what I’d like to FERGIE: There’s a legend? know. DBG: The story of the Tower of Babel. DBG: You said there’s quite a few, right? FERGIE: Babylon. B-a-b-a-l-o-n. FERGIE: Huh? DBG: And what’s the story of it? DBG: You said there’s quite a few stories about it? FERGIE: There’s many that entered that tower and they ascended up into that tower and how far they went I don’t know. There’s not a, a darn—a window or nothin’ in it, that I know of. DBG: What are some of the stories about it? FERGIE: There may be many sto- ries about it, of who ah, who ascended it, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who was a a power—a powerhouse over all of us. DBG: It’s where people spoke different languages, the tower. FERGIE: Well our Lord and Savior could speak any language. He was no bigger than I am, fivefoot-eight, but power he had. Where he got it, I don’t know. DBG: What’s he got to do with the tower? FERGIE: Who? Jesus Christ? DBG: Yeah. FERGIE: I don’t know, all I know is that he’s been up into that power—into that tower. He goes up to the top and he goes and looks all over. And he can tell you anything you want to know, if you’re lucky enough to get his attention. But there’s very few that I ever knew that ever got his attention a’tall. Our Lord and Savious. Capital J e-su-s-, capital C h-r-i-s-t. He isn’t any taller than I am, five-footeight. DBG: Do you know the story of the Tower of Babel, that he made everybody speak different languages? FERGIE: Well they all speak Lithuanian and, and German and French and Italian— ”Capeesh Italian.” I can’t speak any language, I mean I’m lucky to speak the English language, that’s all I can speak. I’m lucky to speak that. DBG: Well at the tower they were FRANCIS: Oui oui. FERGIE: What did he say? DBG: He’s speaking French over there in the corner. DANA: Where did they come from? DBG: No, this other fellow in the corner there. FERGIE: They come from about the tower — DANA MOSER: Do you know how FERGIE: You’ll have to ask some come there are different languages in the world? Do you know why that is, why everybody’s not speaking the same language? of those historians. And there’s many of them around over there. And they look at you and they ask you questions, Motherof Christ, that Mother of Christ couldn’t answer. Maybe she can speak to them and we can’t. DBG: But one more thing now, FERGIE: Why they can’t speak FERGIE: They couldn’t what? DBG: They couldn’t get any work done because everybody was speaking a different language. JACK MUDURIAN: My mother speaks French. FERGIE: His mother speaks French? DBG: Yeah. there everybody spoke a DIFFERENT language—no two people spoke the same language. FERGIE: Well parlez-vous JACK: Yep. Francais? —I can’t speak much French. FERGIE: Could she go and answer FRANCIS McELROY: In France you any of it? say, “Parlez-vous Francaise?” DBG: I don’t know. At the tower FERGIE: Huh? everywhere. DBG: But why is it that different countries ended up with different languages, instead of everybody having the same language? French. J’ne sais pas, tres bien. DBG: His mother speaks French. DBG: Why does everybody speak different languages? FERGIE: I was? FERGIE: Oh—I can’t speak all speaking different languages and they couldn’t get any work done. the same language? I don’t know. DBG: But you know how big Europe is—it’s not that big, and there’s different languages in every country. Don’t you wonder about that? FERGIE: Huh? DBG: Don’t you wonder why there’s all those different languages in Europe? FERGIE: Well, they converse with one another. DBG: But they speak in different languages from one country to the next. FERGIE: Like, just like you’d say, “Parlez-vous Francaise?”—Can you speak French? I’ll say, “No, I can’t.” DBG: Why is that, why do differ- ent people speak different languages in different countries? FERGIE: Well I s’pose they are taking care of their own, their own families. But how they take care of them I don’t know, anymore than I know how we take care of ourselves. We ah, we have bread, and butter. And once in a while we get ahold of a jar of jam, and how we get it, I don’t know. . . The children of Israel don’t tell you anything. any more than how this is our property, I don’t know either. This is Huntington Avenue, isn’t it? DBG: Why not? DBG: Harris. FERGIE: I s’pose they ah, don’t FERGIE: Huh? want to infringe on their, their property. How it’s their property DBG: Harris. FERGIE: K— DBG: S. FERGIE: Harris. DBG: Harris. FERGIE: F! DBG: Finally. FERGIE: Harrette. DBG: S! FERGIE: What they are doing DBG: Harris. FERGIE: Like my name, F? FERGIE: Herron? DBG: No, S, like Sally. DBG: HarrIS. FERGIE: Oh, Sally—S! FERGIE: H-e-r? DBG: Yeah! DBG: H-a-r. FERGIE: H-i-s? FERGIE: H-a-r DBG: H-a-r DBG: R-i-s. FERGIE: H-a-r, i-s. FERGIE: R-i-F? DBG: H-a-r-R-i-s. DBG: S. FERGIE: (slowly:) H-a-r, r-i-s. FERGIE: S? DBG: Right! there I don’t know. If it’s their home, it’s their home. H-o-m-e. How they made it their home, our Lord and Savior could only answer that. Jesus Christ. And he is a power that, ah, if he wants to talk to you, he will talk to you. by JOE PETERSON drawings by Mike Brehm W hen the voice first came to Ben in the night he sort of laughed to himself as if it were a joke because if it wasn’t a joke it was a voice, and if it was a voice, then he had every reason to be terrified. The voice told Ben strange things that he half knew to be true, secret things that he was afraid to admit to himself much less dwell on. Things about himself that were new to him, revelations of character, foreshadows of his own destiny, he saw it all laid out for him like the road map he scrutinized beneath the dashboard light of his car. He saw the thin red vein as if it were his other history coming into and out of focus as the car careened into darkness, around bends, skidding on and off the shoulder of the road. And the voice, speaking in the night, was making things clear to Ben in a way that things were never made clear before. Making, for instance, the exact nature of his relationship to his wife Trisha known to him. Telling him how bad the relationship really was, how far gone he was from any type of possible reconciliation with her. The voice told him crazy things like the fact that his son Kevin was bitterly inconsolable until the day he jumped from the third story window of his math classroom, committing suicide.The young kid was inconsolable because his father Ben, searching for comfort, struggling for consolation, in fact never found comfort or consolation. He didn’t let himself be consoled, and the boy, following his father’s example, refused as well to be consoled, a refusal that cost him his young life. Ben was behind the wheel tonight trying to get a grip on things, and the voice, an incantation in the night, spilled those things all over the world. There was the time, for instance, when people used to tell Ben that his time was going to come. He was famous in a way. He carried a knife with a ten inch blade, a veritable butcher knife. He was a big man, a strong man, unpredictable when he was sober, downright dangerous when he was drunk. He had many friends who loved him, but one by one the friends disappeared as he threatened to wreck havoc with their physical well being. Those who didn’t believe him, who didn’t take his threats seriously because they thought they knew him better, well then, he’d get them too—sending some to the hospital. Others he’d send away bruised and bloody, vowing to get revenge. “Your time is gonna come Ben,” they would say. “Your day will be here soon. You better be looking over your shoulder when it happens because these things are gonna come back to you. And when they do, you’ve got hell to pay.” But to Ben, a man who has no inner voice, no conscience, who already has it figured out that it’s him against the world, and who is perennially frightened by the solitude he thinks he faces— to that man, to Ben, these threats are nothing. He’s encountered them in bar fights from one end of town to the other. In fact they’re just more opportunities for him to prove that not only is his principle of action correct, i.e., him against the world, but that he is a survivor in such a world. “Your time is gonna come Ben, just you wait!” And that’s what Ben did, wait. Those people who threatened, disappeared one by one leaving him far behind like a violent spot in the distance of their memory. They never did find out whether Ben’s time came, whether or not he had hell to pay, or even if he’d lived long enough to pay it. There were other times as well, unpredictable times that touched closer to home. There was that time, for instance, when he and Trisha packed their car and drove off early one morning for their first vacation. They were still living on the top floor of the two-flat Trisha’s mother owned. That morning, when Ben couldn’t get the door to their apartment locked, when the key failed, and a half hour of his efforts were spent securing the lock he threw a fit. Trisha leaned against the car in the early morning light and watched as Ben walked down the stairs to the first floor flat where her mother lived. He rattled the door until the wood frame splintered loose. Bursting through the living room to the bedroom where Trisha’s mother was hastily pulling herself out of bed and putting on her robe, he grabbed her and threw her to the floor.Then, standing over Trisha’s screaming mother, he kicked her in the kidney as if she deserved more than a kick for the lousy condition she kept the twoflat in. Afterward, he grabbed Trisha, threw her in the car, and drove off. Ben wasn’t always violent though. In fact, when they first met, Trisha told him what most men hate to hear—she told him he was a nice guy. Truth be told, he was a nice guy. Back then he was even witty. With brown hair, a sort of rough but dimpled smile, and clear blue eyes he was often irresistible. He could be tender too. For years Trisha would tell her friend Natalie: “He knows how to touch me just right. Holding me in his arms, he makes me feel wonderful, like I’m his baby, like he needs me.” Ben dated Trisha for three months and then asked her to marry him. Trisha was still young, not yet old enough to know a nice guy from a dangerous one. “Alright,” she said, “that would be great.” She often recalls that moment, and now so does Ben as he pulls away in the night. The voice continues, there were times, Ben, when I tried to speak to you, when I tried to get around your meanness, hanging in wait for a moment when I might reveal myself to you. There was your wedding for instance.You were alone in the wings of the church waiting for your bride Trisha to be brought up the aisle by her father.There were people in the pews of the church, people you invited to the wedding, friends of yours, every last one of them could be called a friend, in fact you did call them friends, you had more friends gathered together there in that church that afternoon than you ever had before or since.The best man Charley Watson had taken his place before the alter, and the bride was being brought up the aisle. It was a long aisle, and all your friends Michael, Allen, Rodney, Albert, were facing it, watching the train of her wedding gown spill out behind her like the wake a ship leaves. She was escorted by her father.You called him Dick, his name was Richard, everyone thought you should be calling him dad. He was a tall private man with his gray hair slicked back, as graceful as a summer weed in his black tux. He was proud that afternoon holding his beautiful daughter on his arm; proud, because other than the people you and Trisha invited to the wedding, there were his people, men he’d worked with for twenty, thirty years, friends of his all the way back to his childhood, brother’s and sisters—Trisha’s uncles and aunts, and her grandparents. Music was playing as well, filling the church. A woman was singing, the organ was making slow happy noises and the priest stood at the head of the alter with the Bible in his hands. All at once it occurred to you, standing alone in the wings of the Church, just how isolated you were.You were separated from all these people and yet you were also about to converge with them any minute; converge with them for a lifetime. At that moment you were on the brink of happiness, for a moment you felt a bit of satisfaction, a bit of what people experience when they are in touch with themselves, when they are in touch with the world around them. You were almost satisfied, but suddenly you felt the absence of your parents.Your mother and father hadn’t cause you never told her, because this single incident was the keystone of all other incidents in your life, the one you tried to bury at all cost; the one you finally did bury, at the expense of all other memories, at the expense, most of all, of intimate human contact. But what was it that you in fact buried, only this: that you heard about their death from a neighbor who approached you on the driveway as you came home late that night from school. When he pronounced the word: dead, you asked him three times over, Both of them? Each time he shook his head a bit more sadly, Yes both of them, and then you rolled your eyes and said:Well I guess I’m old enough to made it because they had both died.Trisha had asked you about them several times.What happened to them? she’d ask. How was your life changed without them? How would OUR life change without them? But you never wanted to talk to about it, and she never knew, nor for that matter did anybody else know that your parents had died when you were only fifteen years old. They had died, or so it went, violently, in a car crash; died two miles from home; died just a half hour before you came home from school. Trisha never knew these things about you be- be on my own, and turning away you disappeared down the street, you disappeared away from the catastrophe, away from yourself and you’ve been trying to disappear ever since, but it was that afternoon—the afternoon of your wedding four years later as you stood alone in the wings of the Church remembering this— when I wanted to come and speak to you. I wanted to whisper all the possibilities the future might hold for you and Trisha. I wanted to expose worlds that didn’t exist but might exist for you and her, but you only saw the aisle that she was walking up get narrower and narrower and you felt the presence of her father, of her family trying to push these secrets out of you, secrets that you tried to bury, and would bury at any cost. When you took Trisha in your arms that afternoon, you vowed never to return her to family and you didn’t. When her father died, not long after the wedding, you only turned away from the news, in abnegation to it all, to Trisha’s pain, to your pain, and so it went. . . . Trisha could have lived with Ben a thousand years and she would have never once heard him mention the fact that there were people out to kill him. He had a quality of fearlessness about him, a sense of being above mortality. Yet Ben wasn’t without his share of suspicions no matter how tough he may have seemed. So when Trisha told him, after taking a particularly severe beating, that she hoped he would die soon: when she said “I hope I see the day when you die in hell,” Ben took it as a hex thrown on his head, something that would be tough to outlive, he turned and beat her. It was an incident she swore she’d never forgive him for. But when he later apologized, when she looked into his eyes and saw a truly repentant human being, when he said, “I promise honey, I can change,” she forgave him and for three whole weeks there was peace between them, and then he beat her, again. The voice goes, there were times Ben, there was that time, for instance, after you and Trisha had an argument, when, unexpectedly, you stepped outside of the trailer and walking around towards the hitch, you caught your son Kevin smoking a cigarette.When you looked down at him and saw the fear in his eyes, you simply said—unhook your bitch Tooley from the post and throw her up in the back of the truck—you and I are goin’ for a walk— whereupon Kevin dashed out his cigarette, unhooked his dog, and the two of you, jumping into the cab, drove off across town to a place called, Reservoir Park. As you drove through town, you didn’t say anything about the fighting, or the cigarette, you only asked whether he thought Tooley was pregnant or not. But Kevin, still too frightened to answer you, didn’t say anything. He only looked out the window at the passing shops on Dundee Road and watched how the light from the setting sun reflected off the hoods of cars on the road. When you came to the reservoir you brought your truck to a stop and got out, slamming the doors behind you. Tooley, Kevin’s dog, leaped out of the pick up, and as if she were already moving too fast to touch ground, took off flying towards a group of ducks, her sable coat gleaming in the same soft evening light that reflected off the calm surface of the reservoir. That’s when you first heard your son Kevin laugh—a sort of nervous laugh, that grew more expansive the closer Tooley got to the ducks—Get ‘em girl! Kevin hollered. If that bitch is pregnant, you hollered above Kevin’s laughter, she sure don’t show it! You and Kevin watched as Tooley contracted into a ball, then sprang open, then back into a ball, leaping forward towards the ducks, her hind legs kicking the wet mud high into the air. But the ducks, as if they didn’t realize that Tooley was on to them, didn’t fly away like you thought they would. They just floated quietly in the shallows of the reservoir. That’s when you realized that the reason why the ducks didn’t take off flying, was because, stumbling out of the weeds and onto the mud in a straight line, were a half dozen ducklings. They were scrambling for safety in the water.You and Kevin stood transfixed, ankle deep in the mud, your voices suddenly silenced as Tooley tore into the little ducklings.You watched Tooley grab the first one, shake it once, then toss it with a broken neck onto the bank where it lie. Meanwhile the mother ducks were squawking frantically. Tooley grabbed another duckling and did the same, head shake, once twice, and then another, until finally she came to the last duckling, who, in a state of terror darted back towards the tall grass. That’s when you, finding not only your voice, but a sort of mercy, hollered after Tooley, bringing everything menacing and authoritative that was in you, into the tone of your command, and called her back. Tooley knowing not only your voice, but the kick that would most certainly follow it, was called off. “He doesn’t want to work things out. His way of making things work out is by exploding or leaving or both.” Trisha whispers this litany over the phone to her friend Natalie, a woman Ben doesn’t even know exists. Natalie is Trisha’s only confidant; has been for years. Ben doesn’t know about Natalie because he never made it his business to know about her. And tonight, as he disappears fast around the cor- ner into the darkness, Natalie tries to console her. “If he don’t come back, he don’t come back, then you’re free of him. Sell the house. Move in with me.” Natalie tells Trisha this because Trisha has just been abused by him again. Curled up on the kitchen floor, barely able to talk, she tries to collect herself. “I don’t even know why I put up with this. It’s not like it’s the first time he’s run out. It’s not like I’m suprised or shocked—I’d be a fool, but I’m tired. I want to know when it’ll stop happening to me. When will it end?” “Do you love him?” That was Natalie again. She’s on the other end of the phone, and this question is her way of checking the internal pressures and temperatures of Trisha’s soul. “Do you love him?” and as Natalie asks this she’s prepared to receive one of several possible responses: “Yes—but...”, and always it’s a ‘yes’ with qualifications. “I love him despite what he does to me. In fact, he doesn’t even know he’s doing those things to me, and that’s part of the reason I love him. Isn’t that the strangest thing you ever heard?”Trisha reasons out loud as she goes: “The reason why I love him is because he doesn’t even know what he’s doing to me, he can’t sense when he’s being cruel.” “Do you love him?” Natalie asks, and then repeats herself, quietly, “Do you love him?” Tonight for the first time in many years, Trisha tries to answer that question. She feels the importance of the occasion. She’s at her breaking point. Now that Ben has left, Trisha’s not altogether convinced she’ll take him back, even if he wants to come back, even if he apologizes like only he can apologize. “Do you know,” Trisha says, speaking in the dark of her kitchen, “at this point I don’t know who or what I love if I even love anything at all.” Suddenly Trisha feels alone, even though she isn’t alone, even though Natalie is on the other end listening, trying to understand. She feels scared too, because it’s dark, but she presses on. I’m alone, it’s dark, do I love? And it occurs to Trisha that after thirty-eight years of socalled loving she has arrived at a spot where she can’t even say conclusively if she loves anyone or anything. Maybe she misunderstood what love was supposed to be in the first place. Maybe she’s had it wrong from the beginning, and was only now beginning to understand something important: that solitude and darkness are not the worst things in the world, perhaps no worse after all, than being in love. “Natalie,” she goes on saying, “It’s shitty being a woman. Don’t you know that? It’s shitty being a wife too, and it’s even shitty being a mom!” Trisha thought about that last statement for a moment, and was surprised by it. Is it possible she didn’t even love her son, Kevin? She thinks she might have loved him, in spite of everything. In spite of all the troubles she had raising him; his constant bouts of depression, his suicide. She thinks she may have loved him and his infuriating moodiness, but his death was still too close to make a final judgment on that one. It was too fresh ting a sense of things by going a one two three, a one two three, and then jumping in to see how long she could last. She truly loved jumping rope with her girlfriends out there in the sun light. Each year she would get better, get the rhythm deeper into her soul so that the one two three became an instinct, and she became the best jump roper in school . “Perhaps I loved that Natalie. I loved laughing as I did it. It was laughter more than anything that I loved, because I loved laughing and nothing could make me laugh faster than jumping rope. He doesn’t know this. Like he doesn’t know a lot of things. How can you say you love a person who doesn’t even care to know the simplest things about you?” “Do you love him?” The question forces Trisha to move back in her mind. She kept flip-flopping on what he meant to her. She could go either way, any time of day. So when she thinks about love separating Kevin out of the formula the first thing her mind wanders to is jumping rope when she was a little girl. Jumping Double Dutch, ducking her head, getting the feel of both the ropes going round in different directions, get- through a landscape of barren days that she now calls her past. It makes her remember. To begin with, there was the trailer park where they owned their own trailer home. To the north of the park was a junkyard, and to the south was a strip tease club called, The Cheetah II, that Ben liked to visit on payday. The summer brought all the traffic noise from Milwaukee Avenue, and the stench from the Desplaines River. In the winter there were large windy draughts of cold that came through the windows and every crack in their trailer. The pipes were always frozen, and the roof sagged with the weight of the snow. These things never got fixed because she couldn’t ask Ben to fix them. She couldn’t ask him, because the mere asking would be so provocative and potentially dangerous that it wasn’t worth it. “Other men, normal men can be expected to fix things,” she once told Natalie. “But my man can’t be counted on to do anything. You can’t even count on him to bring home the check at the end of the week.” Besides all the bars Ben frequented, there was that strip tease club he was fond of. He knew the girls there. He spent money on them, that should have gone to fixing the pipes at home; money that should have been saved so that they could leave this wretched trailer and find a real home. Trisha was convinced that part of the reason Ben had become so violent was because he couldn’t stand the place they lived in. He couldn’t stand the stench from the river in the summer. He couldn’t stand living between a junkyard and a strip tease club. At first it made him feel worthless, and then he became consumed by it. Even now, as Trisha sits on the phone in the dark listening to the faint presence of Natalie coming across the wire in the form of her quiet breaths, she curses the day they packed their bags from the apartment above her mother’s house to move out here. She curses the memory of Eddy Pinella, an old friend of Ben’s. He was the man that set Ben up with the trailer in the first place, and convinced him to move out here from her mother’s apartment building in the city. “Come to Wheeling,” Eddy Pinella told them. “In the next ten years Wheeling will be where it’s all at. Schools are being built. Businesses are moving in. Buildings are going up to house the new population.” She remembers that night now, and lowers the phone a little bit. “But nothing ever came of it,” she told Natalie. “Just this rotten place that has made us so unhappy.” Trisha pauses, still curled up on the linoleum floor, then brings the phone back to her ear. “Not long after we moved in, he whacked me for no reason. It was the first time he ever did that. I should’a left then. But I didn’t.” There was a silence then Natalie spoke up. “Trish, I’m right here, I ain’t going nowhere babe, so you can let it all out’a you now.” “Alright,” Trisha said, “I’ll try.” And she did try. But Trisha had held her sorrow in for so many years, never expressing it to Ben, nor her mother, nor even the priest at Church who had such kind eyes, that suddenly she wasn’t so sure she could just give it up. This kind of sadness had come upon her before, and when it did she tried to let it out. At night, when he’d leave after one of his outbursts, she’d stand over the sink cleaning the dishes, and she’d try to make tears come to her eyes. But for some reason they never did. Sometimes when she felt this kind of sadness she’d walk out back behind the trailer park where the Desplaines River flowed. There she’d hold her h e a d , watching the slow moving muddy water that even on good days smelled like sewage. She’d watch the current move, carrying sticks and fallen trees, plastic bags and beer cans, downstream. Now and then a dead animal, a dog or a crow, would float by, bloated, belly up and ragged, bouncing along the bank. She’d squat down for a long time on the river bank, her hair falling down across her face and stare despondently into the water until her legs were stiff, or her back hurt from leaning over. She’d feel old then, older than the river, and her face was sad, but she could never release a tear.The river was continually flushing it’s system, the muddy water flooded by, but it couldn’t take her sadness away. She’d leave the river and go back to the trailer and get into their bed where she’d sleep on her side like a stone, all curled up and silent. “Trish you with me honey?” Natalie whispered. “Are you ok?” Trisha gripped the phone tighter in her hand. “Yeah, Nat, I’m ok. Just hold a minute, everything’ll be fine.” Trisha lay there in the dark of her kitchen and didn’t, couldn’t say a word. Deep inside, however, she was wishing she could let it all out, just once. She thought of her boy Kevin. She tried to visualize him the morning of his accident as he stood waiting for the bus at the side of the road. He was wearing his yellow school jacket. He was carrying a chemistry book in one hand, a brown bag lunch in the other. She remembers seeing him wait all alone on the roadside gravel for the bus. She remembers feeling proud of him that morning, proud despite his sulleness. As much as she wanted to be a good mother to him—a thing she felt she was capable of—she could never get him to open up. She regretted this more than anything. She also knew that he sustained all kinds of abuse on her behalf. For that reason, probably more than any other, he could never say a word, never tell her what was on his mind. Not him, a fifteen year old boy with big feet that slipped a little when climbing up on the school bus, where he sat, his head falling against the window, with despair. He wasn’t capable of saying: Hey ma, I’m ok, don’t worry. He couldn’t tell her why, later that same day, he’d do the unthinkable and jump out the third story window of his math classroom, landing head first on the empty concrete fountain below. He couldn’t tell her, because, she, his mother, couldn’t tell him the very same words. She couldn’t say: Hey son, I’m ok, don’t worry. She couldn’t, because she wasn’t ok. Trisha held her breath and tried to forget all that. She wanted to feel proud of her son— his hair neatly combed, the lunch that she’d made for him, held secure in his hand. As she sat there trying to picture him in her mind, she couldn’t help but wonder how things would have been different if they had never left her mother’s flat in the city, if they’d never come to this—the poorest section of town where the unsanitary river flowed behind them, and trouble was all around. She wondered why she ever left, why she agreed to pack her bags and move out here with Ben. But in the end, she understood: Because he vowed to kill me if I didn’t, and I believed him. Soon the map was no good to Ben. It was too dark to see and he was too drunk to see it. The car just kept moving, carrying Ben and the voice northward, up into the flat cold desolation of the continent, and into the reckless awareness of his deeds. He hears it speak to him, there were times Ben, when you would stare into Kevin’s eyes trying to discover the clues not just to your son, but to yourself, and as you looked into his eyes, when you saw first his eyes, and then his sadness, you’d begin to hope that you could forget his sadness, and see only your son. But the harder you tried to look beyond his sadness, the more you saw not only his sadness but what it reflected. You saw yourself in Kevin’s eyes.And when you saw that you too were inconsolable as a child, I wanted to come to you, like you wanted to come to your son Kevin. But you didn’t go to him, just like you didn’t let me come to you. . . . The voice keeps speaking. It keeps Ben company in the middle of the night, and Ben, crashing on in darkness, is trying hard not to listen. ISSN: 1071-3336