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InterText Vol. 3, No. 5 / September-October 1993
================================================
Contents
FirstText: On-Line Friends & Free Publicity......Jason Snell
SecondText: The Internet: Not Business as Usual
......................................... Geoff Duncan
Short Fiction
The True Story of the Gypsy's Wedding_.......... Kyle Cassidy_
Bread Basket_................................... Kyle Cassidy_
Sue and Frank_.................................... Mark Smith_
Eddie's Blues_............................... G.L. Eikenberry_
Cosmically Connected_............................ Aviott John_
....................................................................
Editor Assistant Editor
Jason Snell Geoff Duncan
jsnell@etext.org gaduncan@halcyon.com
....................................................................
Send subscription requests, story submissions,
and correspondence to intertext@etext.org
....................................................................
InterText Vol. 3, No. 5. InterText (ISSN 1071-7676) is published
electronically on a bi-monthly basis. Reproduction of this
magazine is permitted as long as the magazine is not sold
(either by itself or as part of a collection) and the entire
text of the issue remains intact. Copyright 1993, 1994 Jason
Snell. Individual stories Copyright 1993 by their original
authors.
....................................................................
FirstText: On-Line Friends & Free Publicity by Jason Snell
=============================================================
A brief but hearty hello to you, as I begin this issue of
InterText with a brief note before handing the column over to my
assistant editor, Geoff Duncan.
Things have been busy around our neck of the woods (or, since I
live in a city, my neck of the thick bushes). In addition to
finishing up my internship at a nearby computer magazine (more
about that next issue), getting started with my second and final
year of graduate studies in Journalism, and finally getting
InterText into the Library of Congress' magazine database (which
explains the eight-digit ISSN you see in this issue), I managed
to take some time to meet with my cross-continent electronic
publishing counterpart, Quanta's Daniel K. Appelquist.
A few weeks ago, I ate a lunch with Dan as we talked about
electronic publications. I have no doubt at all that we
completely baffled our waiter, who kept overhearing us talk
about FTP sites, LISTSERVs, and PostScript.
In addition to puzzling the waiter, Dan and I talked about our
experiences working on these magazines of ours. Believe it or
not, it was the first time we've had a chance to compare notes
in person.
A couple reviewers of InterText and Quanta have taken apparent
glee in noting that "the editors of the two magazines are
friends," not realizing we've never really met. Despite that,
we'd like to think that we're 'on-line' friends. Considering
that people have even fallen in love via computer networks (I
even met my first girlfriend on a computer bulletin board),
having on-line friends doesn't seem like too unlikely a concept.
Anyway, my visit with Dan Appelquist ended up being a couple
hours of fun, and I'm glad I managed to see him (albeit briefly)
during his brief Labor Day visit, before he flew back to his
home in Washington, D.C.
Since I mentioned "reviewers of InterText and Quanta," I suppose
I should mention that InterText has received a little bit of
free publicity recently. The September issue of BYTE magazine
devoted a chunk of their magazine to electronic publishing,
including a sidebar about on-line publications written by Kevin
Savetz. Both myself and Geoff Duncan were quoted in the article,
which was quite good despite the fact that it referred to me as
a "respected journalist." Respected? Maybe by my mother. To me,
I'm still just a potential journalism school dropout until I
finish my Masters Thesis. (The topic of my thesis article will
likely be MUDs on the Internet. If you're
Seeing the BYTE article was interesting to me because I got to
see myself quoted in print, something I'm not used to -- after
all, I'm usually the one doing the quoting. Also, I discovered
something about both myself: I'm not particularly quotable when
I give interviews via electronic mail (which is how I was
interviewed for the BYTE story). Geoff Duncan, on the other
hand, is a veritable cornucopia of e-mail quotes -- he has a
couple big ones at the story's heart. That'll teach me to get my
e-mail skills in shape.
In any event, the BYTE article has brought us a bunch of new
subscribers, which is nice to see. And next issue, when I tell
you more about my experience at my computer magazine internship,
I'll hopefully be able to mention even more free publicity for
the magazine. And as far as I'm concerned, the more readers
InterText has, the better.
My limited space this issue is quickly running out. Now it's
time to turn over the soapbox to Geoff -- whom I've still never
met in person -- so he can give you some food for thought before
you turn to the entertainment we've got in store for you. That
entertainment includes a couple crazy and funny stories by
frequent contributor Kyle Cassidy, another story from Texan Mark
Smith, and two stories from outside the borders of the U.S., one
from Canada, one from Austria. I hope you enjoy them.
SecondText: The Internet: Not Business as Usual by Geoff Duncan
==================================================================
There's a lot of talk about how the Internet will be changing in
the next few years, about how the worlds of telephony and data
processing will merge. Acronyms and buzzwords abound: NREN, NII,
ISDN, CATV, broadband, megabit... the list goes on. The Clinton
Administration has proposed an "information superhighway" to
carry the United States into the twenty-first century. The
telephone and cable industries are already scrambling to control
the on-ramps and off-ramps of that highway -- the cables leading
to wall jacks and the cellular services that tie you in anywhere
at any time. Interactive television has been brought into test
markets and software companies are gearing up for the next round
of information appliances: digital assistants, personal faxes,
global locators, and intelligent agents. As you might expect,
the Internet will not go untouched in this impending
technological deluge. Some changes are right around the corner;
others will creep up on us in slower, more subtle ways. Either
way, we've got to be prepared.
The Internet is a big place. Recent figures indicate over 32,000
networks connect to the Internet, allowing millions of people
on-line access every day. And the Internet is growing rapidly,
with traffic increasing by as much as 15 percent per month. If
you think that such a fast-growing market of computer-users is
attracting commercial attention, you'd be right. While the
Internet's management is decentralized and its origins are in
the realms of the government, research, academia, and
non-profits, the "non-commercial" Internet is a thing of the
past. For a price, the clarinet newsgroups bring UPI news to
anyone with a Usenet feed. Media Mogul Rupert Murdoch just
bought Delphi, a commercial network offering complete internet
access. Corporations, organizations and software companies are
increasingly providing services, information, and goods to
customers and clients via the Internet, both for free and for
profit. These services range from simple email addresses to
on-line bulletins, technical support, and product sales. While
electronic funds transfers aren't taking place over the Internet
(and aren't likely anytime soon), the simple fact is that if you
want to spend money over the Internet, you can. That means
there's money to be made, and that means commercial use of the
Internet is only going to increase.
What's going to happen when commercial interests swing their
clout and capital into this new market? Imagine directed
mailing: one day you log in and find a note: "Dear Internet
baseball fan: Would you like to have the latest season
statistics delivered to your electronic doorstep every day?" Or,
"Dear Internet Windows User: Want to upgrade to the latest
version of the world's most popular word- processor?" Dial the
800 number, do the credit card thing, and presto! it's in your
email the next morning. Allow six to eight hours for delivery.
This is just the tip of the iceberg: imagine the possibilities.
Home shopping newsgroups. First-run novels, uncut and commercial
free. Libraries, research services, film, music, and restaurant
reviews, interviews, user directories, weather reports, travel
tips.... These items are easily within the scope of today's
technology -- in fact, all of these items are presently
available on the Internet or on commercial networks such as
CompuServe. Add to this a network providing high-speed
connections to homes and businesses (exactly what cable and
telephone companies are doing right now) and we have real films,
real music, real books, magazines, and encyclopedias, live
performances, participation in sports events, game shows, talk
shows... you name it, you got it. And these companies will score
shiny green Eco-points for using less paper, plastic, and
packaging to get these products to you. So the commercial
Internet is good for public relations, too.
You might ask what this has to do with a magazine called
InterText. As commercial content providers get interested in the
Internet, are non-commercial content providers -- like InterText
and Quanta -- going to have trouble keeping up? If you're an
Average Internet User, are you going to subscribe to a magazine
like InterText or opt for the more-expensive-but-well-advertised
Tom Clancy/Danielle Steele/Barbara Kingsolver/Stephen King
novel? Why try Quanta when Isaac Asimov's and Analog are within
reach?
The solutions aren't simple, but hopefully Internet publications
will survive this onslaught of commercialism. While no
electronic publication has the resources to compete directly
with commercial interests, a consortium of electronic
publishers, working together, could go a long way toward
maintaining and expanding non-commercial electronic publication
on the Internet. With a few exceptions, electronic publications
do not compete directly with traditional publishers -- we do not
affect their writers, readership or subscriptions to any
significant degree.
The beauty of the current system is that no one participates in
an electronic publication unless they want to do so -- our
readers tend to find us, through the grapevine, Usenet, gopher,
and other means. For the future, the trick is to make sure
InterText and publications like it are not priced out of the
market: readers like you must still able to find us, even when
Reader's Digest and every Time-Life book series is available
electronically. A consortium of electronic publishers --
established before commercial interests sink their claws much
deeper into the Internet -- could do just that.
Why bother? Because most electronic publications start when
commercial publishers aren't responsive enough, fast enough,
specific enough, or interesting enough to meet the needs of
their readers. And if we don't watch out, commercial publishers
will do the same thing to the Internet.
Now wouldn't that be exciting?
FYI
-----
For more discussion of these issues and information about
electronic publishing organizations, please e-mail
gaduncan@halcyon.com.
The True Story of the Gypsy's Wedding by Kyle Cassidy
========================================================
...................................................................
* Some stories are embellished each time they are told until
they either become unbelievable or a kind of legend. Others are
that way the very first time... *
...................................................................
Hobby:
I hear through Ross that you got a letter from that crazy
fucking bastard Cambridge. That Bedlam's poet is so completely
wacko he should be set on fire. A genuine psychopathian, if you
don't mind me inventing my own adjectives. There are none which
exist that even begin to describe him adequately. I once saw him
eat seven hits of blotter with his Captain Crunch and then strip
naked and go for a walk in the park, all the while gnawing on
old tin cans and fruit rinds, blabbering about "Ninja Mind-Wave
Energy." Now I don't know what he told you, but I'm sure that
anything he said, especially concerning me, is so wildly
exaggerated so as to be almost completely unrecognizable. His
mind has gone to fish-bait. So, lest I be slandered, I wanted to
tell you the real story of Cambridge's wedding.
Firstly, Derrik Cambridge isn't his real name. He made that up.
His real name is Derrik Duck-That-Squats.
Also, you ought to know that I was married to Dominique first.
Oh yes, for three months of hell in 1988. She divorced me when I
first brought that maniac psychopath over (then moved in with
him, which was really weird, because he was living with me).
Things got a lot better then. Our sex life improved drastically.
Those two lunatics were made for one another. I wanted them to
get married. Cambridge was the one who wasn't ready, he thought
he could just walk into a life of weirdness, filled with sick,
deranged relatives and flower- print wallpaper, with hideously
colored saprophytes clinging to his neck like cellophane polyps
filled with hot, stinking, rotten fish entrails. He was unaware
of the dangers up ahead; badness was at every turn. A real sick,
weird badness, the texture of brains that have been bashed out
with an aluminum softball bat and danced upon by little feet in
Docksider shoes. That's the one thing about Cambridge: he never
knew when the sickos were trying to kill him.
"This whole thing's getting too weird," I said. "You look like a
fucking waiter in some godawful Village bagel shop that sells
sixty varieties of bottled water."
He paused at this and squinted at himself in the mirror, then
peered over the tops of his wire-rimmed John Lennon specs. He
said nothing. I continued:
"You know where bottled water comes from, Cambridge? Have you
any idea?" He shrugged and pulled his black hair back into a
speculative pony tail.
"Other people's taps," I said. "Some guy in Hoboken, or Queens,
or -- darn it, Cambridge -- from Pickensville, Alabama for all
we know, filling up hundreds of empty 7-Up bottles and gluing
new labels on them. Probably fills up his bathtub and submerges
them, and then he sells them to people who believe that since
it's in a bottle, it must be better than what's coming from
their tap. Out of sight, out of mind. I'll bet he doesn't even
wash his hands."
"Hair up or down?" he asked.
"It's hopeless. You're doomed."
"Up?"
"You're an art deco waiter with a fake European accent."
"Down then."
"You're one of those painted dweebs from fucking Motley Crue.
It's the tuxedo, guy. The tuxedo makes you ambiguous. You
weren't built for tuxedos. Roger Moore looks great in a tuxedo;
you look like some fucking carpet-monster-hair-bear-penguin."
"Hmmmmm..." he said noncommittally. Then, "I'm going to head on
over to the church."
"Sure, you sick, crazy motherfucker, go, go to the church. It's
full of Nazis and bats, and stoned Polynesian women with
grotesque ovarian cysts who'll probably gouge your eyes out with
sticks and fill the empty sockets with black lumps of coal.
Churches are crazy, dangerous places. Have you considered taking
a gun? Any sort of weapon?" I reached into a desk drawer and
pulled out a dangerous- looking K-Bar Bowie knife, which I
proceeded to wave menacingly in the air. It was almost fourteen
inches long, painted dull black and weighing about nine pounds.
Any bozo could easily use it to crack open a coconut with one
blunt and inarticulate blow.
"Government issue," I said. "Cuts through a human limb like a
Ginsu through a ripe tomato. Here, strap this on in case things
get crazy. Anyway, you'll need it to cut the cake."
"No, really," he said, swilling the last of his rancid Saint
Pauli Girl and rising with a bizarre, awkward, semi-debonair
swagger, "I think I'll be okay."
"Fine by me, pal," I said, setting down my glass of whiskey and
bending to strap the knife to my own leg, "I'll be there to back
you up if things get out of hand. You just give a war-whoop if
those cannibalistic old ladies with the flowered hats start
eyeing you lasciviously. It's mean down there, old boy.
Organized social gatherings -- ugh! It skeeves me to think of
them. But you can count on me."
"I'll do that," he said, picking up his keys and lurching out of
the room like Abe Lincoln. He stuck his head back in the door.
"Bring my luggage down with you, will you?" He stumbled out of
the room in a marriage daze. I'd seen it before, on my own face
even. It's not a pretty sight.
"Don't let them domesticate you!" I called after him.
Then, with the house relatively empty and quiet, there were
things to be done -- crazy, evil things. I took the jar out from
under my bed, where it had been sitting in a shoebox full of ice
cubes all night, and went into Cambridge's room. His honeymoon
luggage sat completely unguarded on the bed, waiting for me to
load it into my ugly old Cadillac and drive it off to the
church. Opening the nearest bag, I dumped in eleven South
American Hissing Cockroaches -- they were three inches long,
looked like crazy sparrows in the air, and when frightened,
hissed like a pierced dirigible. They were hissing like mad now,
even though I had set them in the ice to keep them sedate.
Several of them reared up like gophers as I slammed the lid
down. The suitcase hissed frightfully for a full two minutes
before the bugs nestled down in the clothes and got calm.
"Yes, you fierce, ugly brutes, the fun's just about to begin." I
carried the suitcases to the door and somehow roused the dog
from her hidden lair. She clacked along behind me on the
hardwood floor like a bag of castanets in need of some toenail
clippers. She sniffed the cases and my hands for signs of
edibles.
"He doesn't believe me, Petunia, old girl. But you just wait.
When he sees the life they've got picked out for him, he'll
start clawing at the walls. I bet one of them's going to offer
him a job in the mail room of some widget factory." Petunia
banged her tail up against the wall and stared up at me with
limp, woeful dog-eyes. I walked into the kitchen and she
followed, scavenging for food like some monstrous four-footed
vulture. I opened the fridge, which was empty save for a pizza
crust and a plate of jalapeno chili that Cambridge had made the
night before while tripping on animal tranquilizers.
Petunia looked up at me balefully. She was a two hundred-pound
mongrel pit bull and Russian wolfhound with a mouth full of
butcher knives and a photograph of the devil behind her eyes.
She drooled worse than my great aunt Winny on Thanksgiving, and
wagged her tail like Godzilla whenever she was happy. To open
the fridge and produce nothing for her was tantamount to
suicide. I split the booty evenly. She licked up about half a
pound of the chili with the first swoop of her tongue, which
resembled a slab of raw beef. There followed about ten seconds
of absolute silence where she looked up at me quizzically, and
then her eyes rolled back into her head like ping- pong balls.
She started to quiver like a plate of Jell-O on a buckboard
being driven across a frozen, furrowed field. I could see her
legs going limp, her ears falling like wet washcloths down past
her face. Then she howled in the excruciating manner of a dozen
men being horribly castrated by fire and dull knives. She leapt
blindly and savagely for my throat.
"Jesus Christ!" I shouted, flying onto the stove and diving
through the window which connected the living room with the
kitchen. The howl turned into a strangled whine and there was
much thumping from the kitchen, reminiscent of a pressure cooker
filled with live, crazed, cast-iron rats.
I savagely kicked the sofa where Kim the green-haired punk
rocker had been sleeping with her guitar in an MTV-induced
trance for the past seventy-two hours straight.
"Jesus Christ!" I shouted again. "Wake the fuck up! It's the end
of the world! The fucking Four Horsemen are here! Move!" I
grabbed her arm and started to drag her to the door.
"What is it?" she shouted, "What the hell's going on?"
"Somebody gave the dog amphetamines -- Cambridge and that crazy
pack of dope fiends he calls friends! She's gone start raving
mad! She's chewing through the goddamn walls! We've got to get
out of here!" There was some wheezing and a crashing sound from
the kitchen, as though two drunken knights were settling a
hundred-year-old border dispute with a pair of rusty ball peen
hammers.
"We don't have much time. The flesh-eating brute is wired, and
it's not going to be long before she figures out that the
kitchen door's wide open and she has us backed into a corner,
tearing chunks of flesh from our bodies and spitting them onto
the floor!" I started throwing random objects into a shopping
bag. Kim wandered into the kitchen, scratching a morning mop of
olive hair, while Petunia lay on her back sputtering like a
diffused bomb, her paws twitching limply in the air. Kim came
back into the living room a minute later using a soup spoon to
eat freeze-dried coffee from the can.
"Dog looks okay to me," she said, "Though she's had some of
Derrik's jalapeno chili... Probably nothing in her mouth but
seared flesh and irreparably damaged nerve endings." She sat
down on the sofa, munching. I stuck my head back into the
kitchen. Petunia's eyes hung open on her head like watery fried
eggs-glazed over and sightless. She was making pitiful
whimpering noises.
"A minute ago it was raging like a cow moose with menstrual
cramps," I called through the connecting window. "Seems to have
calmed down now."
I threw some water on her.
"Uh-huh," grunted Kim, chewing a mouthful of coffee grounds. The
suitcases, agitated by all the noise, hissed like a basket of
distempered cobras.
"What's that noise?" she asked.
"Gas leak," I replied, "let's get the hell out of here before
the place explodes in a foul-smelling fireball and blows charred
scraps of our ragged bones and flesh onto the hoods of cars
twenty miles down the river. Help me get the dog in the car."
"Get the dog in the car?"
I shrugged, "Who knows what wild, crazy silliness will happen?
We may never come back. We may be captured by rodeo clowns and
forced to sell our bodies on some lonely dude ranch in Waco,
Texas, until we're too darned old and too stinking ugly to
continue. Communist Space Aliens may beam us up into their ship
and spirit us away." I opened the bottle of Jack Daniels and
took a long swallow. "Who knows."
Kim shrugged and grabbed Petunia's back legs. I took hold of the
two that were left -- they were thick like a wrestler's wrists
-- and together we half-dragged, half-carried her slobbering
inert form to the car, heaving her into the back seat like a
hung-over side of beef. Kim held the bottle of Jack Daniels
while I went back into the house and got the luggage and the
shopping bag full of debris which I threw into the trunk. We
roared off with the top down and Kim stoically hurling large,
white hunks of cauliflower at road signs and pedestrians.
After a few minutes she pulled a Running Sores cassette from
somewhere -- her bra or another dimension -- and shoved it into
the tape deck. As degenerate noises invaded the air, Petunia
began whining once more. Small children ran in fear. Kim leaned
back and put her feet up on top of the windshield, wiggling her
bare toes.
"Cambridge is up to his ears in vile fluids this time," I
shouted over the music.
"Umph," grunted Kim.
"This is not good -- this is way uncool. Some killing might have
to be done," I said, accelerating around a blue mini-van filled
with surfers.
"Umph," grunted Kim again without turning her head. She was
starting to twitch on what I could tell was going to be a
serious caffeine high. She must have eaten a quarter-pound of
raw coffee. That's bad news, even for someone traditionally in a
state of such arbitrary chemical imbalance as her.
The church was in a state of maximum consternation when we
arrived. Men in black tuxedos were running about
higgledy-piggledy, animated on the front lawn like epileptic
penguins. Women in long white dresses and flowers were
agitatedly discussing something at a fevered pitch.
"You'd better take this," I said to Kim, pulling an orange life
preserver out of the shopping bag. "It looks pretty hairy up
there."
She only grunted again, but her eyes were open now, wide like
saucers and her feet were tapping like a double bass player
doing a roll. I pulled another life preserver out and over my
head, snapping and tying it in case an avalanche of raw sewage
come down around us. I, for one, was going to be a floater, not
a sinker.
People were running up and down the church steps like maggots
over stale roadkill. Fat people, ugly people, the same crazy
Philistines who are at every wedding. They come included in the
price of tuxedo rental, I think. Then there were a lot of
Cambridge's relatives from the reservation milling about. You
could spot them easily because they all had long black hair and
they were, every one, unimaginably intoxicated.
"What the hell's going on?" I asked one of the wedding clowns.
She eyed my life jacket and I waited for her to say something
stupid so that I could jump on her head or maybe slash one of
her ears off with the K-Bar.
"Derrik's locked himself in the bathroom!" she wailed in
response, casting her hands over her face in anguish. "He's got
Dominique in there with him and he won't come out!"
Kim was shaking all over now, and although it was about a
hundred and four degrees, her teeth were banging together faster
than a fly's wings. She wasn't wearing her life preserver -- she
was just holding it by the strap and dragging it behind her.
"I knew this was going to happen," I said to Kim. "He couldn't
take it." We stomped off into the church.
There were about thirty people clustered around the bathroom
door, most of them men -- though I recognized Dominique's mother
from photographs. She was in hysterical tears. None of them were
Indians, so I assumed they were all related to Dominique.
Cambridge's relatives, I later discovered, were taking this
opportunity to savagely devastate the unguarded sacramental wine
stored in the basement.
"Derrik, please come out!" Dominique's mother choked. A tall man
with graying temples and a belligerent attitude knocked sternly
on the door.
"Derrik, this is serious now. Just let Dominique out and we can
talk. Just let her out, Derrik. Don't make me angry."
"Don't frighten him," counseled a short, fat, Peter Lorre type.
He dabbed his forehead nervously.
"I knew that Indian was bad news. Damn heathen savages," someone
said.
"Everybody out of the way," I roared, coming up behind them,
"I've just escaped from an institution and may kill again!"
Nobody insults Cambridge's relatives. They all turned to look at
us. Kim was rigid as a board, rhythmically pounding her head on
the wall like a woodpecker.
"Who the hell are you?" demanded the authoritarian with the
aforementioned graying temples.
"The United States Fucking Marines, you sorry aphids," I said,
widening my eyes insanely and ripping the K-Bar from its sheath.
There was a squawk and everybody jumped back about three feet.
The guy with the temples pointed an accusing finger.
"You -- "
"Shut up, you gnarled, ugly toad of a man!" screamed Kim,
yanking the flowers out of a vase and tearing them apart with
her teeth. She probably had enough spare nervous energy by then
to rip a horse in half.
I banged on the door as hard as I could, shouting, "Cambridge,
old buddy, hang on! We're here to rescue you! We're busting you
out! I've got your R2 unit, I'm here with Ben Kenobi!" I shoved
the knife between my teeth and raced down the hallway, grabbing
Kim's hand. With the other one, she was swinging her life jacket
around her head to keep the weirdoes at bay. Through the church
and down the steps we shot like living arrows, scattering old
people with menacing gestures and fearsome war whoops, around
the side of the building, looking for a frosted window. I could
hear the rumble of pursuers behind us; the savage, carnal cry of
caterers, lousy insurance salesmen, and used- car dealers whose
wives are ugly and know how to play bridge.
"There," said Kim, pointing.
"Give me a leg up." She cupped her hands together and I stepped
in them. She lifted me to the window.
"Derrik!" I shouted. "Open the window!"
"I tried that," he coughed back. I could see the hazy outline of
his face through the glass. "It's locked, or stuck, or painted
shut or something. Get me the hell out of here!"
"Well then, back off, back off," I shouted and when I heard him
scramble away, with four clean blows from the K-Bar I smashed
the windowpane and brushed the chunks into the bathroom. They
tinkled and cracked on the tile floor. A thick cloud of
marijuana smoke boiled out.
"Come on," I said, "hurry."
"Those disgusting and foul-smelling Nazis are coming," groaned
Kim through gritted teeth.
Dominique came out feet first in her long, white wedding gown, a
half-empty bottle of Southern Comfort in each hand. Cambridge
lowered her down.
"Here," I said, taking off my life jacket and throwing it around
her neck, "You'll need this; the rancid treacle's really deep
out here. You'll have to wear this to keep from drowning in it."
"Here," said Cambridge from the window. "Catch." He threw down
Dominique's veil, which I caught, and her bouquet, which Kim
leapt wildly to avoid. Cambridge jumped down.
"You were right: I couldn't take the banality. It's a nightmare
in there. I was going nuts being surrounded by all those
weirdoes."
Just then the crazy barbarians rounded the corner of the church
not thirty feet away -- macho-men in tuxedos trying to save
Dominique from us crazy barbarians.
"There they are!" someone shouted.
"My car's out front," I said to Cambridge. "Keys're in it."
"We've got to get my Uncle, Belching Eagle," he said urgently,
bobbing on his feet like a baseball player getting ready to
steal third. His feet were bare and he had cut off the legs of
his tux just above the knees. The jacket and the bow tie were
gone.
"Well, where the hell is he?"
"Passed out in my car."
"Go then, go!" I brandished my knife at the macho-men and
shouted: "Die, you shiteatingnazirepublican pig-fuckers! I'll
crack your skulls open and stuff them with dry leaves! I'll feed
your intestines to dogs!"
I put the veil on.
Kim gave a primal scream and charged them, swinging the life
jacket. Cambridge and Dominique disappeared around the back of
the church. The vermin swarmed around us. Kim bellowed, rushing
the Nazi- king and clocking him in the side of the head with the
life jacket. It made a sound like a wet blanket falling a dozen
stories onto a cardboard box full of peanut shells.
"Die, you scum-suckers!" I shouted and ran at them. They
quivered momentarily and then fled like the maniac pansy-cowards
they were, splintering into a dozen different directions and
fleeing for their very lives, yelping like dazed and wounded
hyenas with rock salt in their haunches. I screamed
incomprehensible obscenities and raced off after them with Kim
five steps ahead of me screaming: "Cannibals! You'll drown in
your own blood!" We routed them like Custer's army, until they
had mostly shinnied up trees or squirmed beneath cars where Kim
would set their ugly, protruding feet on fire with an old Zippo
and a can of lighter fluid. When we reappeared around the front
of the church, several of Cambridge's relatives were lying
asleep on the lawn, lazily dressed in buckskin tuxedos and
feathered headdresses. Carnage and mayhem were everywhere.
Squirrels and turtles ran amok. The air seemed to be filled with
a maelstrom of burning leaves and shrapnel. Derrik and Dominique
were sitting in the back seat of the car. He had Petunia's
massive head in his hands and kept trying to push her out of the
car shouting "Kill! Kill!" But all she would do was lay there
and drool like a diarrhetic rhinoceros with inflamed salivary
glands. Several of the remaining macho-men surrounded the car
and Dominique was busily heaving coffee cups and chunks of
cauliflower at their pea-shaped heads while crazily waving a
sharpened stick in her left hand. Kim and I jumped into the car,
almost causing serious bodily harm to Derrik's Uncle, Belching
Eagle, who was lying comatose across the front seat.
"Scurvied ruffians!" I bellowed, throwing the car in gear and
scattering them like chickens, Kim firing off a barrage of
viscous and accurate snot-hockers as we passed. Down the lane we
raced and vanished over a hill. Dominique's veil flew off my
head in the wind and sailed upward and upward into the air, as
though it were made of helium, waving its arms like a crazy,
lazy, friendly space octopus saying good-bye as it climbed home
through the atmosphere. In the rearview mirror, just as we
reached the top of the hill, I could see the losers shaking
their fists at us.
And that, Hobby my friend, is the true story of the gypsy's
wedding. About thirty miles down the road we stopped at a bar
where Belching Eagle was forced back into consciousness by way
of five or six gallons of ice water, and being a medicine man,
he married Dominique and Cambridge in a very cosmic and perhaps
even legally binding manner, then suddenly relapsed into his
state of alcohol- caused catatonia. We left him there, propped
up on a bar stool.
"Where to now?" asked Dominique frivolously. She kissed me hard
on the mouth. Her tongue slid down my throat and into my stomach
like a raw oyster. She put her arms around our waists --
Derrik's and mine -- hugging us close.
"Swaziland," I said.
"The Caribbean," said Cambridge.
"The Caribbean," I assented. "Sounds good." He went to get some
clothes from the luggage in the trunk, but I stopped him, making
hasty assurances that he looked just fine. Now that we were all
in the same boat, I had to think of a way to get rid of half a
pound of South American Hissing Cockroaches as unobtrusively as
possible.
"I'm not going," said Kim. I looked at her. "I can't go
anywhere, I don't want to go anywhere."
"There will be wacky times, and wild orgies in the big bed," I
suggested gleefully.
"We'll beat stray tourists with rocks and sticks until they
bleed from many orifices, and we'll inject small animals into
our bodies..." added Derrik, climbing into the front seat
without opening the door.
"Good company," offered Dominique, now sandwiched in between us.
Still, Kim shook her head, twisting her lips into a wry pucker
that drifted off to one side of her face. Derrik snapped a
picture of her with his Nikon and we left Petunia with her.
"Go back to our house and burn it down," I said, getting in the
car. "As a favor to me." Kim nodded serenely and patted Petunia
on the wet snout. The dog moaned, or farted, or something, and
lifted its head in a forlorn ignorance.
The three of us stayed together for about four years down there;
it's hard to tell time when the water's so blue, you know? But
finally the jungle rot and the perpetual hangovers from
Cambridge's bad coconut rum caused me to head back to
civilization.
The last I ever saw of Cambridge and Dominique was about two
years later: they had bought a boat and were running bananas or
mangos or something from Honduras or Nicaragua or some place and
living in a tin shack with a family of Rastafarians on a little
island off San Paulette. They had the one kid then, named Zongo
or Jungle Boy or Tarzan or something. She'd just finished her
book and he was trying to raise capital for a mosquito farm, I
think.
You just ruminate on this, Hobby: Cambridge baked his brain in
the sun down there. Whatever he told you about the wedding
probably wasn't true. I've told it like it was.
Yours, Et Cetera,
Homer
Bread Basket by Kyle Cassidy
===============================
...................................................................
* Here at _InterText_, we pride ourselves in putting out issues
on a regular basis. We swear that this story has absolutely
nothing to do with us. Honest. *
...................................................................
Aside from the voluminous yearbook, which approaches biblical
proportions in both size and mythology, the literary magazine
Bread Basket is the only publication which comes out of the
University of Indiana at Weehawken. We don't have a newspaper or
anything, only the literary magazine. They've got an office on
the fourth floor of the Student Union. The school is big, but
the office is small and cluttered with junk. The staff is huge.
It seems that everybody with a weird haircut is on the ed-board
of that rag, but this year for some reason they haven't done
anything, not a thing, and it's almost graduation.
Editorship of Bread Basket at one time was the greatest
privilege the student body could bestow upon any sub-mortal
undergraduate grunt; now it's more or less a sinecure. My former
roommate and mentor Alex Sutpin was the editor for an
unprecedented two years. That was a while ago -- he's dead now.
(Alex was killed in a gruesome combine accident, but that's
another story.) Myself, I've never even really been on the
staff. They were always too cool for me. Recently though, they
seem to have fallen upon stereotypically hard and unproductive
times.
"Have you guys read my story yet?" I say as I push my way into
the junk-filled office. Taft is standing on the sofa wearing a
toga and little round purple sunglasses. His feet are bare and
he has two amazingly grotesque birthmarks on his left calf.
"Huh?"
"Has anyone read my story yet?"
"What issue did you submit it for?" asks a dazed young woman
with aviator shades and a bandanna tied around her head. All in
all there are about seven people in the office. Aside from Taft
and this vapid woman, two guys are sitting on the sofa at Taft's
feet. One of them is leering down stupidly at two open cans of
Joe's Beer he has perched on a mud-brown cardboard lunch tray
which is in his lap, the other one I can't see through Taft's
immensely hairy legs. Another woman is hunched over the
typewriter, not typing, wearing what looks like a wet suit and a
diving mask. There is some abstract person in the corner staring
up into the shade of the floor lamp.
"November. I gave it to you guys in November."
"Oh," she says.
"Come on, get in the picture," said Taft. "We're taking a
picture."
"Huh?" I'm carrying a book bag and thinking that if this keeps
up, I'm going to end up working on my dad's farm for the rest of
my life and that I'll never get out of this crappy state unless
I can get an education. I've been here five semesters and I
still don't feel too smart.
"Get in the picture. We're taking pictures for the yearbook."
The girl in the aviators stares senselessly at me with her mouth
hanging open, like I have duck shit on my face or something.
"Yearbook picture?"
"Yeah," says Taft, "we're taking a whole four page layout for
the yearbook of us just writing poems and working on the
magazine."
"You're taking a fucking yearbook picture? Jesus Christ, it's
May and you haven't put out a single issue. You're supposed to
do nine."
" 'sat the printers," says Taft, striking a melodramatic Grecian
pose. There is no photographer in the room, and they all look
stoned and lifeless.
"What's at the printers? There's nothing at the printers. Have
any of you even looked at my story yet?"
"What was it called?" asks the woman at the typewriter. I can
see now that she is wearing flippers.
"What do you mean, 'What was it called?' It's the only damned
submission you've got and you lost it?"
"We didn't lose it," says the first woman, the one with the
aviators. She seems to have suddenly woken up, and now her mouth
closes like a bug trap. "We just haven't got around to reading
it yet."
Across from the sofa is a floor-to-ceiling bookcase filled with
books that nobody's read. The woman at the typewriter pulls a
half- pint flask of whiskey from the machine's guts. She takes a
swig of it and then shoves it back inside.
"Keeping in shape?" says the guy with the two beer cans on the
tray. He doesn't look up at me. He's wearing a red Bob's Guns
T-shirt and an absurdly tall straw cowboy hat. He's got
dreadlocks protruding from beneath his hat, which is pretty
risque in Indiana, let me tell you. I recognize him vaguely --
his name is Vance or Lance or something. There is a drop of spit
dangling from his lower lip.
"What?"
He doesn't answer me.
"Are you going to read it?"
"Oh yeah. Sure." This is the woman in the aviators again. She's
wearing a faded, dark blue UIW sweatshirt. "It's really warm
outside, isn't it? Did you come from outside?"
"Yes I came from outside. It is warm." I don't know why I am
answering her.
"You look like you're really keeping in shape," says the guy
with the beer cans. He still hasn't looked at me. I'm wearing a
Charlie Daniels T-shirt with this blue flannel thing over top of
it to hide my sagging gut. It crosses my mind that I look like a
fat slob and that I should lose some weight.
"I'm going home."
"Naw," says Taft, jumping down from the sofa. "Stay here. Get in
the picture. You're an integral part of this magazine. Here, get
in the picture."
"Integral part? What the hell are you talking about? There's not
even a goddamn camera in here."
"Not important," says the woman at the typewriter.
"You haven't put out a single issue of this magazine."
"Not important," she says again with a loud, choking hiccough. I
notice that the guy in the corner has his whole head shoved up
inside the lamp shade.
"...bright," he says languidly.
"We're advertising on the radio now," says the woman in the
aviators; she's not talking to me. "For submissions. We've got
commercials on WKBS now."
"The last meeting was really packed," says the guy with the beer
cans without looking up.
"We're giving Iowa a run for their money," she says.
"Iowa?" says Taft.
"The University of Iowa."
"Hey, let's all go out and watch the harvest," pipes up the
woman at the typewriter, feeling suddenly farmish. Her voice is
nasal because of the diving mask. "We could write a
group-experience poem about it."
"They don't harvest in May," says the guy on the sofa that I
couldn't see before, who now reminds me of an albino Bela
Lugosi. "They don't even plant in May. How long have you been
living in Indiana?"
"I need a beach," she says.
"Hey," I say, waving good-bye. "You guys have got it all under
control without me. I'm going home."
"Really nice out," says Vance or Lance or whatever.
"Yeah. You guys don't need me hanging around here."
"Sure you don't want to be in the picture?"
Downstairs I run into this guy who I went to high school with
named Two-By-Four-Tom. We called him this because during the
Fourth of July parade when we were both eight, he rode his
bicycle full-tilt into the back of a parked truck filled with
lumber. Must have been going twenty miles an hour. There's this
crazy rectangular scar smack in the middle of his forehead the
exact size and shape of a two-by- four end. He's married now and
is working on his masters in psychotherapy at UIW. He tells me
that his younger brother just got his law degree at Columbia.
He's practicing in the city now, in Indianapolis, at Rabinowitz,
Rabinowitz, Rabinowitz, Schwartz and Mussolini or something.
"It's really nice out," he says as I'm about to go, and I notice
that there's something wrong with his eyes -- they're too green.
I wonder if he's wearing contact lenses.
"Yeah," I say.
"Hey," he asks, all manly suave and tanned. "Are you still
writing? Have you submitted anything to the literary magazine
here? Bread Basket? It's a really nice one, I hear; giving Iowa
a run for its money."
"No," I say. "I haven't submitted anything. I'm not really
writing anymore."
"It's a shame," he says. "This is a good place to get published.
I met a couple of people on the staff. They really look like
good writers. You should submit to them."
"Maybe," I say and go outside. The weather is very nice.
Kyle Cassidy (cassidy@rowan.edu)
-----------------------------------
Kyle Cassidy rides his motorcycle out into a field and plays
with his PowerBook instead of pulling all his hair out. He has a
collection of hammers the envy of people the world over.
Sue and Frank by Mark Smith
==============================
...................................................................
* Some people keep on smiling, even as their dreams are
shattered. Other people never quite pick up the pieces. Finding
your way between those two extremes might be the toughest choice
of all. *
...................................................................
"What do you mean you lost your wedding ring?" said Sue Davidson
to her husband Frank. Their car idled beside the arrivals curb
at terminal B of Newark Airport. Two minutes before, Frank had
emerged from the sliding doors, tossed his tidy suit bag into
the back seat of their Accord, piled into the front and
announced without so much as a prologue that he had lost his
wedding ring somewhere in Washington, D.C. sometime during the
last four days. Now he sat looking across at his wife, the thin
angular lines of his red face heightened by the crisp folds of
his London Fog raincoat. The bustle and excitement of travel
which he brought into the car was at odds with Susan's mood.
"Yeah, it was the damnedest thing. Right in the middle of my big
meeting with Thompson, I looked down and it was gone." He held
his left hand up, fingers outstretched in a number five gesture.
Sure enough, there was no ring, though Sue fancied she could
make out the indentation in the skin of his finger as though he
had just now taken it off.
"I can't believe it!" she said.
"Well, you don't have to look like that. I didn't mean to lose
it." Frank had adopted the managerial tone he had acquired
through years of supervising large office staffs.
"It's just that, well, I just can't believe you didn't notice
something."
"Honey, do you, ah, think we could get going? I'm kind of tired
and I'd like a shower before bed."
Sue jammed the gear shift into drive and lurched away from the
curb. Instinctively, Frank glanced over his left shoulder to
check the traffic. Fine, thought Sue, he goes away for four days
on a business trip -- which seemed to be getting more frequent
all the time -- and now he was going to shower for thirty
minutes and then pile into bed with a report or some fat, slick
trade magazine. No doubt about it, an hour after they got home
he'd be snoring away. Never mind what she might want once in a
while.
"Strange as it sounds," he said, "I didn't notice it until I was
in that meeting with Thompson. I said 'Jesus, I've lost my
wedding ring!' and she said -- "
"She?" said Sue.
"Yeah. Thompson. Janet Thompson from our Washington office. I'm
sure I've told you about her before."
"Oh, well," she muttered. "I guess you did." Big fluffy
snowflakes had started to fall, turning to water the instant
they hit the windshield just in time to be swept away by the
wipers. Sue felt her mind become clouded and jumbled. Her
emotions swarmed and crowded together like an angry, volatile
mob. Certainly she felt no jealousy about Frank's meeting with
this Thompson. (Was it some new business convention to refer to
female colleagues by their last names? It sounded so efficient
and powerful.) He worked with women every day. No, what really
galled her was the thought of this other woman, well- dressed,
confident, successful, knowing something intimate about their
marriage while Sue whistled away in her fool's paradise. She
could imagine the show of sympathy and concern this hard-nosed,
corporate-climbing career woman had displayed while to herself
she laughed at the pathetic wife, off somewhere blissfully
ignorant, powerless, forgotten.
Frank kept on blathering: "She said, 'Well, you have to find it,
that's all there is to it.' "
"How kind of her," said Sue.
"I thought so," said Frank.
"So we got the check right away and -- "
"What, were you at lunch?"
"Dinner," said Frank. "And I went straight back to my room and
searched high and low. I even went back to the bar where I had
stopped for a cocktail that evening, and also the hotel
restaurant. Nada. Of course, my room had been cleaned by then. I
figured that if housekeeping had gotten hold of it, good luck
ever seeing that ring again."
Good old Frank. When his pal Stan got caught cheating the IRS
and went to that country club prison upstate, Frank had been
really pissed. But when it came to hired help, they weren't to
be trusted. To hear Frank, you'd think the blue collar of the
world were just waiting to steal the dirt out from under your
fingernails, though there'd be slim pickings from Frank in that
department.
"So that's it?" said Sue as they pulled onto the northbound
turnpike. The snow was coming down harder and cars had begun to
slow down. The landscape had begun to take on a steely gray
aspect, and the mirror-like slickness of the pavement reflected
the red tail lights of thousands of commuters headed home.
"What else can I say, honey? You know how much that ring meant
to me. I wouldn't have lost it for the world."
He had dropped the managerial tone now and fallen back on his
old standby Mr. Charm voice that he had always used to such
advantage, especially with Sue. Frank could charm piss out of a
snake when he wanted to.
"But you did lose it. I just can't believe it."
"What do you want me to do?" said Frank. "I'm sorry, okay? I
lost the ring. I didn't want to lose it. It just happened. I'll
get another, I promise."
Case closed. Debit recorded in the unrecoverable loss column.
Dead letter file. Sue opened her mouth, then closed it again.
What more could she say?
"Good thing we'll be home before the snow gets bad," said Frank
with forced cheerfulness. "I hate to drive in the snow."
"You're not driving, Frank. I am," said Sue flatly. They rode in
silence the rest of the way home.
Lately, Sue had acquired the habit of waking in the middle of
the night and wandering around the house poking into this and
that, doing nothing in particular. She told herself that she
delighted in the pleasant perversity of being awake when the
rest of the world slept, but the truth was she felt more
comfortable and secure in the wee hours. Sue found herself
increasingly overwhelmed with the small things in life. She felt
that she literally had to hold on for dear life as the Earth
careened through space. When the world was quiet and still and
asleep, at those times and those times alone, Sue felt like she
was in control of something, that the progress of time was
slowed down to a speed she could manage.
Also, the big modern house that Frank had insisted on buying
over her objections seemed cold to the point of being alien
during the day. (She would have preferred something more
Victorian that she could decorate with baskets of potpourri,
stencilled wall paper and lots of duck decoys and antiques.) But
at night the house seemed softer and more comfortable.
She poured a glass of red wine and wandered into the study and
looked until she found the photo album that had the pictures of
her wedding. She took this into the living room, set her wine on
the glass coffee table and burrowed down into the deep cushions
of their sectional sofa.
Had it been ten years already? Of course, she had gained some
weight. How could she not? Sitting around the house all day. Oh,
well she kept busy enough between volunteering at the library,
church activities, and with her friends. But there was no real
need to work. Frank had discouraged it, in fact, not because he
didn't feel it was proper but because it screwed up their income
tax bracket or something.
She never had thought she would be a housewife. She always
dreaded the thought of that. When she met Frank she had just
gone back to school to work on a masters in psychology, but she
never finished. Before that, she worked at a number of odd jobs
that never seemed to amount to anything.
She found herself wishing idly for children, but the day for
that had also come and gone. She married Frank when she was in
her early thirties. There was still time then, and they talked
about it often, but the time never seemed to be right and year
had followed year and here she was in her early forties.
Technically, she could still consider the possibility, but in
truth, the idea had stopped appealing to her the way it once
did. If things seemed too complicated without kids, what would
it be like with? Anyway, she didn't want to be sixty with a
child in high school.
As she stared one by one at the pictures, a thought began to
present itself. Not a new thought to her, but expressed with
more clarity and force than before: it wasn't supposed to be
this way. She had agreed to a different set of conditions ten
years before. She had signed onto a different agenda. Frank was
a business major who was going to make enough to keep them fed
and clothed and spend the rest of his time playing bass with a
rock and roll band that he and his friends kept trying to start.
That dream lasted exactly one month and one gig and then fell to
pieces when Interworld had called and recruited him straight
from college.
"Still up?" said Frank from the hall door. He stood in his
pajamas and robe, well-dressed even in the middle of the night.
He squinted into the lighted room, his eyes adjusting to the
light.
"Up again," Sue answered. She took a sip of the wine. The
crystal was cold against her lips, but the wine felt round and
warm as it rolled across her tongue. She expected Frank would
turn and go back to bed, but instead he crossed the white pile
carpet and settled beside her on the sofa. Why did he seem to be
growing thinner over the years as she grew more plump? The
question mystified more than annoyed her.
"I'm sorry about the ring," he said.
"Oh, it's okay. I made too much of it."
"No you didn't. It was stupid of me."
"Let's not talk about it anymore," she said. After a moment she
said, "Frank?"
"Hmmm?"
"Let's get in the car and drive."
He looked surprised. "Where do you want to go?"
"Nowhere in particular. Everywhere. Don't you remember when we
used to talk about driving across the country? Let's do it now.
We could go down south. I've never been down there. It's slower
and calmer there. We won't take any interstates, just country
roads. We'll stop at every general store and main street diner
we come to. We'll buzz into each town, buy postcards and buzz
out. We'll stay in tacky tourist courts and stop at the
historical markers. We'll go to McDonald's and buy two coffees,
fill up the thermos and then get refills for the road."
Sue became animated as she talked, but Frank just forced a thin
half smile and said, "You're kidding, right?"
"No," said Sue, shaking her head. "I'm not."
"But, honey. I have a job. I couldn't just walk out. I have
appointments. I have at least ten clients coming in this week.
I'd love to take a vacation. Really. How about next summer? I'll
put in a leave request now. But not on the spur of the moment."
Sue nodded and took another sip from her wine. For no good
reason, she felt a sudden and overwhelming urge to ask her
husband if he had slept with anyone else since they were
married. She fought down the urge. Partly because she had made a
promise to herself years before that she would never ask. Partly
because she knew the answer would depress her no matter what it
was. But mostly she realized that to even want to ask the
question at all meant that some profound circumstance had
changed in a way that made the answer irrelevant.
She nodded again and said, "Yeah, maybe in the summer. It's too
cold now anyway."
The next morning, after Sue had dropped Frank at the station to
join the other commuters who stood hunched in their long, thick
clothes on the platform, their breath turning into tiny clouds
in the frozen air, she went home and packed an overnight bag.
She made a pot of coffee and took it to the kitchen table. She
gathered up paper and a pen and sat at the table under a heart
carved in the high-backed, Dutch-style bench, the most
old-fashioned furnishing in the house and her favorite place to
sit. She drank coffee and wrote a note to Frank. She wrote that
she was leaving and taking the car. He'd get along without it
and seldom drove it anyway. She also wrote that she would
probably be back, though as she did, she wondered if this were
true.
She reread the note. It didn't express her feelings, but it
would do. She had a second cup of coffee and wondered vaguely
where she would spend the night. She didn't have much cash, but
plenty of credit cards and that would hold her for a while.
Finally, she got up and rinsed her cup and put it in the
drainer. She put the note on the countertop and gathered up all
her bulky winter clothes that she liked so much because they
were comforting and because they hid her figure. She took her
old sleeping bag, too. She hadn't used it in years, but you
never know when you might need a sleeping bag.
As she pulled the front door to, she saw that the mailman had
been by already. Compulsively, she took the mail from the box
and looked to see if anything had come for her. There was a
Land's End catalog, another from Victoria's Secret (Frank had
even stopped enjoying those), a bill from New Jersey Bell, an
fat envelope of coupons, and a small, oddly bulky envelope from
the hotel where Frank had stayed in Washington.
She didn't have to open the envelope to know what was inside.
She could even feel the outline of the ring through the paper.
She stood for several minutes holding the envelope, letting the
significance of it flood over her. She considered her choices.
The fact of the envelope and her absolute control of it filled
her with an excitement that seemed out of proportion to its
importance.
Finally, she jammed the envelope into the pocket of her coat.
She stuffed the rest of the mail back into the mailbox and
turned to lock the front door. She walked carefully down the
front steps and out to the car. The snow continued to fall, and
she noticed where her earlier footsteps had already been filled
in by a new carpet of flakes. Pretty soon they would be
invisible, as though she had never walked there at all.
She threw her things in a messy heap in the back seat and set
out for the highway. She felt good as she thought about the ring
in her pocket and the security it gave her -- like a tiny golden
life raft.
Mark Smith (mlsmith@tenet.edu)
--------------------------------
Mark Smith lives in Austin, Texas. His stories have appeared or
are forthcoming in _The Lone Star Literary Quarterly_,
_Hardboiled_, _Epiphany_, and _Elements_. His first book,
_Riddle_, won the 1992 Austin Book Award.
Eddie's Blues by G.L. Eikenberry
===================================
...................................................................
* Like the endless tides, life goes in cycles: sometimes up,
sometimes down. Even as you watch the waters pull away, leaving
you beaches on land, remember: give it time. The tide will
rise. *
...................................................................
Time was, the eyes inside his head showed him the harbor for
what it had been in the city's early days.
But now he looks down from Point Pleasant's overlook and sees
nothing that doesn't register on physical retinas. Layer after
layer of rejections and missed chances just keep on piling up,
feeding on each other, wearing down the romance, the visions --
back then when different things mattered -- when a man could
walk the docks freely, his head held high, seeking not a
mindless job just to pay the rent and keep a body in burgers and
smokes, but a berth on a good ship -- an adventure.
Now there's nothing but the container pier, almost dead; the
autoport and refineries, their promises of prosperity long
tarnished; sleek office towers and a wild jumble of stone,
brick, and wood frame buildings: just Halifax -- the
sharp-edged, paint peeling, corrosive twentieth century edition.
No tall ships, no romance, no dockyard throngs -- no chance. The
make-believe waterfront is practically reserved for tourists,
the few working docks practically reserved for machines.
What's happening to him? Six years now in Halifax with plenty of
highs and even more lows. Then, when he first arrived, crammed
full of history, books and dreams, he was popular with the
ladies -- young, blond, chiseled features, tall, sleek, hard
prairie farmhand muscles. It had been easy. He took a few
courses, and worked when he felt like it, changing jobs like he
changed socks: when it suited him. Maybe there were tough times
back then too, but they easily succumbed to the magic -- going
down to wash away the lows with his private view of the harbor
-- flying back across 230 years to the era that had drawn him to
the old seaport.
Now the city sulking below him drains the once-was city from his
veins -- feeds an intense pressure throbbing out against his
temples -- mocks his used-up luck, his still unrealized
possibilities.
Then it was 230 years of maritime history that drew him to the
edge of the continent. Now it's 28 years of personal history
that mocks, goads, beckons from a different edge. If he had a
boat he'd make for open water and offer himself up to the first
seething Atlantic gale snarling across the Coast Guard's weather
radar.
But all he's got is a bicycle. Blue, kind of battered but
dependable -- he picked it up from Dan, trading a stereo he
almost never used anyway. It gets him around, but it doesn't get
him the sea.
He pumps the old Peugeot up the hill to be alone -- to watch the
city bleed into the harbor. To reach back. To think.
What he thinks about is making do with what he's got. What he
thinks about is purging the boat he'll never own from his mind
and pedaling away from all the hassles and all the promises that
never have and never will pan out. He thinks about the rent that
isn't paid, won't be paid, can't be paid, about grinding that
screw of a slumlord underneath the tires, about spinning down
along the shore.
He thinks about the job roster down at the Halifax
Longshoremen's Association -- the one that rarely offers work to
Eddie Plett. He thinks about feeding that list into the
bicycle's chain, shredding it into freedom. Away. Eastward.
At first he worked at simplifying, purifying his life, but
what's the point? He gave up drinking, except for the odd beer.
It doesn't help. He's down to half a pack of smokes a day, but
that doesn't make much difference either, except maybe for a few
extra cents a week for burgers and chips.
Most of his so-called friends seem to be too busy for him these
days. Oh, sure, Christi hasn't quite given up on him yet, but
even her patience seems to be wearing thin. He has always
considered her something of a kindred spirit -- not like all the
good-time Susies that fade into the shadows when things begin to
go a little sour -- but, the other night she called him a
self-indulgent jerk.
"Some Maritimer you are," she preached, "You've got to learn to
think of these stretches of unemployment as a blessing. Use the
time like a gift -- do all the things you couldn't find the time
for before they laid you off. What about that dory you're always
planning to build?"
Yeah, sure, build it with what? Out of dreams? Treat the time
like a gift? After fourteen months anything he ever wanted to do
has either been done or costs too much. So what's the point? Why
stick around?
It's late. The past is all used up and the future is crowding
in. The chill he feels goes deeper than the chill that precedes
the sunset.
He waits for the moon, but nothing changes.
That's it, then. The decision is made. It sits on the knot in
his throat, waiting for him to do something about it.
He wheels down the hill and up out of the park. Christi'll get
on his case about running away from his problems. She might even
try to talk him out of it.
Her apartment is up on the north end, a fifteen minute spin on
the Peugeot. It's a bright moon. Wispy clouds break across its
face on a surging, leaping nor'west wind -- the kind of wind
that, back when the only waves he knew were waves of wheat, used
to carry his thoughts east -- way beyond the limitations of
reality.
He's already off and away by the time he rolls up in front of
Christi's place. It's a nice place. She's got a four room flat.
She's got furniture. She's got a job.
Before he even realizes it he's up the stairs and at Christi's
door. She said he could save his rent -- stay there with here
until he got back on his feet, but they both know it wouldn't
work.
He's already gone -- the freedom -- the release pumping through
his veins. But he knocks on her door anyway -- just to let her
know.
The face she wears when she answers the door says she won't be
trying to change his mind tonight. She won't even notice the
good feeling building in his chest, percolating up, slipping out
through the small crack of his smile. Somebody's in there with
her. A guy. Necktie, suit, the works. Looking right at home. Mr.
Right.
"Oh, hi, Eddie. You must be looking for that book of spells and
incantations I was telling you about. Last week. You know, at
Ginger's. I can let you borrow it, but you have to promise to be
careful. It's my cousin's -- it's really old -- ancient. Wait
here. I'll get it for you."
So maybe he is a self-indulgent jerk, but he doesn't need a
telegram to figure out what's going on. He may be broke, but
he's not stupid. But what the hell, why make a fuss? No point in
making things awkward in front of Mr. Right. Mr. Desk Job. Mr.
Paycheck Every Friday. But what damned book?
Returning with a crumbly, leather-covered book, smelling of
musty old streamer trunks and attics, the face she wears says it
all. "Just take the book," it says. It's a face that reminds him
that, even when things go right there can still be knots in the
throat -- knives in the gut. She's finally got a shot at the
things the guys she usually hangs out with can't give her. So
who can blame her? If opportunity walks up and kicks you in the
ass you can't ignore it.
He leaves. He can't to take off for good without going home to
pick up a couple of things first, but he can't go there 'til the
slumlord's lackey of a superintendent heads off to his graveyard
shift job.
So he goes down the street to the cafe -- the same place he used
to go to with Christi. Killing time. Drinking tea. Flipping
through the old book -- she just wouldn't let him get away
without it.
The pages fall open to a place marked with one of Christi's
fabric scrap bookmarks. A spell to turn a run of bad luck.
That's Christi, all right. Always ready with the free advice.
Another tea, the book, the spell -- and the guy on Christi's
davenport. Mr. Right? Mr. Just-What-the-Checkbook-Ordered? A run
of bad luck turned around? Read the spell. Nothing too
complicated. What's the harm in pulling up a few weeds?
Eddie slips up the fire escape and in through the door on the
roof. His Queen Street bedsitting room stays dark, just in case
the super is running a little late.
The exhilaration of the decision to split is fading now.
Everything's closing in again -- all the jobs somebody else got,
the rent he hasn't paid for almost three months, Christi, the
guy on her sofa, the jobs, the bills, the guy, Christi -- a run
of bad luck.
A run of bad luck -- real bad -- shattering -- splintering,
stabbing with sharp edges: past, present, future. Eddie gets up
and lights a small, dark candle.
Eddie opens up Christi's cousin's book.
Grass blown by an east wind. Grass blown by a west wind. Grass
blown by a north wind. Weave it into an amulet. Steep it in rain
borne on a south wind. Steep it under a full moon up on the roof
for good measure. Well, almost full, anyway -- what the hell.
Mumble a little Latin or something. Everybody does it, right?
Cast a quick spell to change a run of bad luck, right?
How stupid can you get?
Is he taking off or isn't he?
It's 3:37 a.m. A good time to break away.
Away. Down along the waterfront.
Away. Up to Brunswick Street. Along the city's spine, gliding
out onto the bridge, out across the harbor. Out through
Dartmouth. Lawrencetown. Wheels spinning. Seaforth. The
Chezzetcooks. Spinning hard. Musquodoboit Harbor. Thrusting,
surging...
Sunlight is just beginning to spill over the horizon, seeping in
off the Atlantic.
The early morning wind blows over him, blows back to the city,
the harbor that was, the tall ships from far-off lands --
aromatic with the romance of the seven seas, with the rum, the
tea, the salty, pungent, acrid, back-of-the-throat smell of the
spice merchant's clipper.
Eddie Plett, pushing eastward, cresting yet another wave,
pulling against the pitch of the wheel, peering through the
viscous mists of another morning, drinking deeply of the wind,
the spray, the snap of the sails, marvels at the luck of a farm
boy like him -- securing so choice a commission...
G.L. Eikenberry (aa353@freenet.carleton.ca)
---------------------------------------------
G.L. Eikenberry is a part-time computer programmer/consultant,
part-time freelance writer, part-time martial arts instructor
and full-time father who rides his bicycle or the Net almost any
place he has to go.
Cosmically Connected by Aviott John
======================================
...................................................................
* Ever dreamed about immortality? Maybe if you saw what changes
the future held, you'd change your tune. *
...................................................................
"There was only passion in the beginning," said the Old One
slowly, pouring himself another round of gin. He added Saturn
Ice and held up the glass admiringly, savoring the greens and
golden yellows that flashed from the cold crystal and swirled
like mists through the gin, glowing in the dying light as though
breathing life into the potent liquid.
"And then what happened?" asked Little One. He loved listening
to the Old One, Little One did, steeping himself in tales of
other times on other worlds, wonderful times, wonderful worlds.
Little One knew nothing of physical passion, which was a relic
of those other times. Only the oldest survivors of civilization,
widely-travelled oldsters like the Old One, could talk about
these things from personal experience.
"The funny thing about physical passion is that it breeds its
own kind of cosmic dynamics." The Old One sipped slowly,
relishing the gin as he dreamt of other fountains at which he
had drunk in his varied youth. He smiled faintly as he dreamt.
Little One looked at the Old One with amused tolerance. Soon old
age would take its toll of his spent shell and he would be gone.
This particular formation of flesh and blood, living cells and
human fiber, would cease to exist. After that Little One would
only be able to communicate with the Old One by thought, and
that was never as satisfying as the reality of flesh and blood.
To think the Old One's thoughts in his own brain could and never
would be as satisfying as listening to the sound of his
reminiscing voice and seeing the twinkle of past happiness shine
through his eyes.
"What do you mean, cosmic dynamics?"
"Don't look for exact meaning. You won't find any. If you try to
grasp it, you will be disappointed."
"Why use these words, then? Why say something when you have
nothing to say? And why be silent when you have something to
say?"
"You don't understand," said the Old One, banging his glass down
on the tabletop in sudden annoyance. The table was a
state-of-the-art force-field, a multicolored surface which
absorbed all the impact of the Old One's movement. The glass
would have shattered on any ordinary table. "You don't
understand. We used to have other ways of communicating in those
days."
"I know all about that," said Little One with a superior smile.
"I've read in the history books that in the old days, your Stone
Age, your predecessors used to communicate with harsh guttural
cries."
"No. At the time I'm talking about we used to communicate
without words, without using sound at all."
"What! You used to communicate without words?"
"Yes, of course." The Old One's thick, gray eyebrows rose to
twin peaks. "We did it all the time."
"How could you communicate intellectual ideas without words?
You're surely talking about writing. You used to set your
thoughts down in cumbersome fashion on white planar surfaces
using complicated, liquid-filled marking instruments and
button-controlled hammer mechanisms."
"We had better ways than that and certain things are more
worthwhile than abstract intellectual ideas," smiled the Old
One. It was his turn to look superior. He took pity at Little
One's perplexity. Little One thought he was clever. He thought
wisdom lay in what he had learned in the history books. That
knowing about pens, typewriters, word processors and other
outdated writing implements increased his power. "Yes, we had
better ways than that," the Old One repeated. "We used to
communicate through our other three senses; touch, taste and
smell."
Little One tinkled in amusement, humoring the older man. After
all, he was two hundred years his senior, and one had to make
allowances for that.
"Can you show me how?" he asked indulgently.
The Old One's hand shot out and smacked the open end of Little
One's communicator, causing it to swell and turn blue.
"Like this, for instance," said the Old One pleasantly. "But
there were other ways, which needed special circumstances."
"What kind of special circumstances?"
"Oh, um, privacy, for example."
"Privacy? Great Galactic Gonads! Why did you need privacy for
communication?"
"Look. Little One. Do you know anything about philosophy?"
"Oh, that stuff!" Little One's communicator imploded in
distaste. "An ancient educational tape did whisper something in
my ear about philosophy. Why?"
"There were many kinds of philosophy, you know, and hundreds of
different philosophers."
Little One was almost asleep with boredom. "Tell me more," he
yawned.
"There were hundreds of different philosophers; Bacon, Locke,
Spinoza, Radhakrishnan. There were dozens of schools of
philosophy, the Greek, the Roman, the Judeo-Christian, the
Hindu, the Buddhist and its Japanese offshoot, Zen."
The Old One, afire with enthusiasm for the past, paid no
attention to Little One's gentle snore. He was speaking for
himself, reliving other kinds of encounters, others ways of
communication which were unfortunately now extinct.
"It's especially Zen I want to talk to you about, because this
philosophy is particularly unconfined by those times. The
language of Zen is modern even today, and I'm sure you'll have
no problem grasping the ideas it tried to express. And through
Zen, you'll be able to come to an understanding of the euphoria
of communication by nonverbal means."
Little One was snoring loudly now, but the Old One did not wish
to stop. He reached over and hit the button of his companion's
passive voice recorder, knowing that the conversation would be
automatically played back when the Little One awoke.
"Yes, communication by nonverbal means. It was wonderful, simply
wonderful and it was impossible to express this wonder in words.
For that you had to bypass words, conventional communication,
and convey ideas in the mental shorthand of Zen." With a snap of
his fingers, the Old One made an aural asterisk for Little One's
passive recorder, so that he could insert a question here when
he awoke.
"You have probably never heard of koans. A koan is a Zen
mechanism whereby you try to associate ideas that are
essentially non- associable. But you are asked to try; and in
trying you realize the absurdity of trying, and learn to accept.
Let me begin with an example. The most well-known of all koans
was the following: The master says, clapping his hands, 'This is
the sound of two hands clapping. Now tell me, what is the sound
of one hand clapping?'
"And when you knew the answer, you heard the sound. Of course
there was no answer, and that was the answer; and there was no
sound, and it was that no-sound that you had to learn to hear,
the sound of silence. And when you heard the sound of one hand
clapping and accepted it, you were on the path, the Tao of Zen.
No, it's wrong to say you were on the path. Rather, you yourself
became the Tao of Zen, even as you, Little One, are the Tao of
the twenty-fifth century. Do you see?"
The old one asked the question and inserted another aural
asterisk here with a snap of his fingers.
"There was another famous example used by Zen to dislocate
conventional ideas. This is told in the form of the following
story. One day a would-be disciple went to the master and said:
'Teach me. I want to learn everything you know.' The master
invited him to a cup of tea. He set a cup in front of the
disciple and began to pour. The cup filled, overflowed, filled
the tray and spilled over on the floor. Still the master poured.
'Master, master, my cup is full,' said the disciple finally.
'You are like this cup,' said the master. 'How can I fill you
until you empty yourself?' "
The Old One stretched on his airbed.
"So you see, Little One, life was full of imperfections in those
days, but it was these very imperfections that made everything
so enjoyable. And often you had to drain yourself like the Zen
master's cup, because until you were empty, you were not ready
for another filling."
So saying, the Old One drained his glass and poured himself
another gin. He was getting quite fuddled now, and the aching
power of lost memories made him want to cry. There was a lump in
his throat and he had difficulty swallowing, so he did not add
Saturn Ice to the drink. He drank the gin pure, something his
doctor had warned him never to do.
The power of nostalgia to transport him back to the happiness of
his youth! Not that he hadn't been happy in later life. Of
course he had. He had progressively left pieces of his body
behind, to be replaced by more durable components. By the middle
of the twenty- fourth century, he, like many others of his
generation, was a completely new man, so new that the term
"generation gap" ceased to have any meaning. Many of the Old
One's parts were no different from that of the average twenty
year-old. But there was one thing that the replacement people
could not duplicate. The imprints that ancient sensations had
left on his brain. These imprints were like the footprints of
extinct animals immortalized and petrified in volcanic soil. And
they were mind-numbingly beautiful.
He threw all caution overboard and poured himself a fifth glass
of gin, three beyond his quota. Three hundred and seventy-eight
years was a good old age. Or was it three hundred and
eighty-eight? What did it matter? Time to go, in any case. Make
a graceful exit. There was no point in hanging around slinging
old-fashioned gins with the callous likes of Little One.
Nowadays there was no difference between the sexes, so Little
One knew nothing about old-fashioned sex. Twenty-fifth century
intercourse was essentially a matter of exchanging views, and
reproduction was a task for the qualified technician.
In his time, intercourse had meant something special;
communication had been deep, ecstatic and wordless. He thought
back to some times which had been special to him. He thought of
her again, something he had not done for nearly a century. For
some reason, at the instant when he thought of her, he stopped
speaking to Little One. Deep inside of him, in his ultimate
core, this was an experience that still demanded absolute
privacy. Why, after all these years? He struggled to explain it,
but could not. That too, was part of the Tao of Zen.
He was quite dizzy now, and thoughts swirled in and out of his
gin-fogged brain like the mists that rose from the tray of
multi- colored Saturn Ice on the force-field table beside his
designer- molded air bed. Her image rose from the mists, as
clearly defined in the fog as the last time he saw her, a
century ago. She stood slim and erect and smiled at him. The Old
One's heart swelled almost to bursting at her beauty. She would
always be like that for him. Even now, wherever in the galaxy
she was, and whatever outward form she had chosen, she would
still be for him as he had last seen her.
Ah, beauty! The Old One sighed and slowly shook his head in the
fading light. Who could define it? Each age has its own
standards, and standards change with the ages. But this is what
he had tried to tell her. That she had an ageless quality that
would always remain the same. Her beauty was not bound by time.
He remembered trying to explain that to her. And she had
laughed.
"Wait till you see me a half-century from now."
And here he was, more than a century later. His body was feeble
with age, but the memory of her was as powerful and clear as his
longing for her beauty. What was this longing for her beauty?
Was this simply a thing of firm flesh, pert breasts, slim calves
and fine muscle tone? Of course that was a part of it. But the
other part was something that you did not try to define. In the
language of the Zen master, it was the sound of one hand
clapping. And she brought forth that sound in the Old One. This
was what he had tried to explain to her. That he loved her firm
body, her beautiful face and her not-so- golden pubics. But even
without all these charms, she would still bring forth in him
that sound of Zen.
"Do you see, Nina?" he said softly to her in the darkness. He
thought there was an answering reply, but it was merely the
sound of Little One snoring.
It was then the audacious thought arose in his brain. Of course
he would do it. He would ask the Master of the Universe the
question that may be asked only once in each lifetime. As soon
as the Old One's mind was made up, the fog lifted from his brain
and all his razor sharp perception flooded back to him. He
absently tossed down the rest of the gin and then turned his
eyes toward the nebula of Xanthus.
The old one pressed the button near his heart that activated the
crucial transmitter, the single-use-only, one-way communication
machine, and let his thoughts roll. His thoughts turned to her
without his knowing why. And then he heard the voice close to
his ear. It was a voice he had never heard before, but he
instantly knew who it was. The Master of the Universe.
"You called?" asked the deep, friendly voice. "Are you sure
about this? Do you want to take your Terminal Trip now?"
"Yes, yes."
"Are you sure?" the voice repeated. "You have some more time if
you wish."
"I'm certain. I'm certain."
The Master of the Universe was nothing if not thorough.
"Would you mind stating your reasons for wishing to take this
Terminal Trip?"
"Yes," said the Old One. Suddenly the last missing vestiges of
Zen clarity came flooding into his mind and the meaning of
everything became clear. "I mean no, I wouldn't mind stating my
reasons for wishing to take the Terminal Trip. You see, Master
of the Universe, I've been living for the past 150 years now in
a world where the need for tactile communication has been
eliminated and sex is nonexistent. The conditions of human life
have been improved immeasurably, but I'm still used to, and long
for, the old ways, imperfect though they were. I've had a good
life, on the whole, and I have no complaints. From my point of
view, you've done an excellent job."
"Thank you," said the Master of the Universe, deeply touched by
the simple praise. It was not often that he was complimented by
Terminal Trippers. More often than not, he was treated like a
sort of galactic gondolier who merely ferried bodies to their
final destinations.
"But now, I've had enough," the Old One continued. "I feel so
empty and used up, and there's nothing left for me to do here.
You probably can't tell me what the destination is, so I won't
ask. But I want to go on, so please arrange my Terminal Trip at
your earliest convenience."
There was a brief silence. "Very well. We will leave at the rise
of the third moon."
The voice of the Master of the Universe was grave to suit the
occasion, but inwardly he chuckled; for the Master knew
something that the Old One did not, could not, know.
Just seconds earlier the Master had received another Terminal
Trip request from a distant section of the Universe. And he knew
with his superior knowledge that although her outward form had
changed drastically with age, she would still bring forth in the
Old One that feeling of overflowing in his heart that is the cup
that spills over until it can hold no more.
Furthermore, he wished them well, because he also knew that
where they were both going, they would have more than enough
privacy to listen together to the ultimate sound in the
universe.
The sound of one hand clapping.
Aviott John (avjohn@iiasa.ac.at)
-----------------------------------
Aviott John works as a science writer and reference librarian in
an international research organization in Laxenburg, Austria,
near Vienna. In addition to short stories, he has also written
several novel-length manuscripts and is actively looking for
publishers for three of them.
FYI
=====
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