Half-Remembered, Fully Felt

The beginning of a story I've been writing over winter break, heavily inspired by Dave Eggers's novel A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, as well as events from my own life.

            Through the small window behind the stained wraparound curtain – stained with what looked like either coffee or a case of Montezuma’s revenge, Brook wasn’t sure – the November ground looked frosty and crystalline-looking.  Like the way ice cream gets in the freezer when you don’t touch it for months.  Winter wasn’t even a month away and already the ground was turning to ice cream, with a little grass for garnish.

            Brook’s mother let out a moan, one free of any intonation.  He couldn’t tell whether it was a moan of pain, or of grief, or of something else.  What something else?  People don’t moan under favorable circumstances.  Unless it’s an orgasm.  A really climactic, get-the-camera-rolling-it’s-the-money-shot orgasm.
            “Nurse!” he yelled into the hallway.
            His mother had been cycling in and out of consciousness as if she were running laps.  Brook had alternated day and night shifts with his twin sister Andi (imagine the confusion of their A.M. kindergarten teacher when she had taken a roll call on the first day of school) since their mother had stopped eating five days ago.  Andi had come in for the first day, while he had taken over that night – since Andi had a husband and two kids to look after and what in the hell did Brook at age twenty-five without a college degree have to show for himself?
            He had a plastic cup of cinnamon applesauce he poured into a little styrofoam bowl.  He held the spoon to her mouth.  “Eat up, Mom.”
            Mom made no gesture, no indication that she was even aware of his presence.  Nothing.

            Nurse Rhonda came in, a stout black woman whose purple scrubs made her look like a distant cousin of Barney the dinosaur.  “You called?”
            Brook was surprised she had reported.  He was used to waiting minutes that turned to hours that turned to what seemed like centuries for the women at the nursing home to come by, trotting at the speed of toddlers, with their squeaky food and medicine carts full of mauve-colored trays that were bizarrely shaped like UFOs and probably doubled as bedpans.
            “She’s crying out.  Maybe she needs more morphine.”
            “I already gave her the dosage the doctor told me.  Sure she ain’t just trying to tell you somethin’?”
            Gee, maybe I’m in utter agony and wish your useless ass would put me out of my fucking misery something?
            “Well, I think maybe a few more milligrams will do the trick.  It would make me feel more comfortable.”

            “I don’t think the law or my job bends for what makes you comfortable, Mister Stanton.  ‘Fraid you’ll have to talk to the doctor when he gets here in the morning.”  She stomped merrily back to her cart – “I’ll take her food tray though” – and continued down the hallway – stomp, stomp, stomp – like a good dinosaur.
            Brook took a seat in the wheelchair his mother had used when she was still mobile.  He wished he and his sister could’ve pulled together the funds last year to send their mother to Westhaven, the unequivocally more glorious convalescent home on the other side of town (because whatever’s the better of two options is always on the other side of town; don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise).  But Mom had spent most of the government pensions she had received since their father’s death on vodka and cigarettes and barely had enough left over for a stick of gum, let alone a nursing home that wouldn’t be in every way perpetually execrable.

            Furthermore, Mom’s Medicaid kicked in late, and most of the first three months of nursing-home-rent ended up coming out of Andi’s pocket, to her made-very-known chagrin.
            “So, I’m paying half a thousand a month for a woman who probably didn’t spend half a thousand on me for my entire childhood?” 
            “Well, I’ll pitch in a hundred or so.  Whatever I can scrape up.  Odd jobs here and there.  So you’ll probably end up breaking even.”

            Andi worked as a patient care tech at the community hospital to get herself through nursing school.  Her husband, Steve, was a nurse at the same hospital.  At times Brook wondered why the two didn’t just take Mom in and save everyone the trouble of having to stop by every other day to see if her meals were finally being delivered on time and whether or not she won the week’s round of Bingo and got to add a little something to her forty-five-dollars-a-week allowance, and to drive around town to spend that allowance on a twelve-pack of beer or some other hopeless expenditure like a new pair of socks that could never be allowed to travel to the building’s laundry unit, otherwise known as the Land-of-Say-Hasta-La-Vista-to-Your-Underpants.

            There was an old Sylvania television unit – TV was too modern of a term for it – in the corner of the room beyond the track that the curtain ran on.  A crappy soap opera was playing on mute – probably something the nurses watched when they came in to deliver meals two hours late.  These shows were only fun if women were beating the hell out of each other in their kitchens or swimming pools, which they were not.  Brook switched the channel haphazardly to a tabloid news channel airing a documentary on Courtney Love.  He gave up and turned the television unit off.

            His mother had gone through phases like this in the past, since she had been diagnosed with COPD.  She would give up talking first, so that no one could be sure of the problem at hand to do anything to assuage it.  Then she would give up eating, no matter how many bowls of peaches and cottage cheese and cups of 7-Up were placed on the wheeled table at her bedside.  Then she would zone in and out of reality – either an effect of malnourishment or a futile means of willing herself to die – no one was completely sure.  “They’re trying to kill me, they’re trying to kill me,” she would sometimes say, which in that hellhole was never entirely ruled out as a possibility in Brook’s mind.  This time wasn’t much different than the others.

            The door creaked open; Andi had arrived with last week’s laundry.  It had become increasingly difficult to change their mother since she couldn’t (or wouldn’t) move of her own volition, so the nurses had been leaving her in diapers and nightgowns that could easily be taken off and put back on.  Most of her wardrobe she had shrunk out of; while she had weighed about one-hundred-fifty pounds the year before, give or take, she was now a kind ninety.  Skin hung off in her arms and thighs like Grecian drapes.
            “How is she?  Said anything?”
            “No, but I’m sure that when she does,” Brook got up from the wheelchair, “it will be something glorious.”

Country Rain

His grandfather had owned a farm
Far from the city bustle, where
Easter eggs were cleverly hidden
in the nooks of trees.
Some were found, and placed in
wicker baskets filled with plastic grass.
Others were left to rot.
One boy, clad in overalls, didn't eat eggs,
so he threw them at his grandfather's ducks,
one by one, because back then he
didn't know anything about pain.

Sixteen years had passed,
and the boy, now grown,
drove his pickup truck through
that country town,
in search of his late grandfather's farmhouse.
It rained and rained,
and even with his road map in one hand,
and a cup of cheap coffee in the other,
he didn't know the address.
Somewhere in those creeping provinces,
that house surely still stood.
Perhaps he had already passed it.

Hump-Day Hunk: Chris Folz

 Because he's been here, misting over my computer screen:

Source Credit: CoverMenMag

Songs I Love, Vol. 2: The Smashing Pumpkins - "The Boy"

This song was released only as a b-side to the legendary album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.  While "The Boy" was not officially released until the "1979" single was issued months after the album's debut, I think it is easily one of the best songs from its recording sessions.  As a love song, it's about as simple as they come, dappling in the childhood innocence of falling in love for the first time, and capturing that spirit better than the five billion other songs that say the same thing.

MHz

The top is erect
like a Loxodonta tusk or the tip of
a pen.  A bastioned antenna that can broadcast
you into the 50s on Nostalgie or piss out the current
affairs on the Radio publique.  These sine waves whirl above
the smog and traffic like diamond dust sprinkled across a shipwrecked
ice cream float, so discordant yet dulcet in their dos-à-dos, minueting over
the quoins and the shingles that oscillate from vanilla to beige to vanilla.  Even
in the shards of sex shops and cobblestone the tendrils of the city are a chopped-up custard slice of brown and ivory puff pastry cream, dissolved chessman reflecting on an aqueous surface of pulverized sugar.  Who chopped off the heads of these bishops and squashed them into mille-feuilles?  From a prostitute’s parapet we can see the roads split off into twelve different directions,                    
each cleaved from their Neoclassical umbilical cords. 

In each direction past the fearful symmetry of Coca-Colas and Motorolas are boisterous arabesques that scream over the humdrum of sub-people stepping out of submarine-taxis like matryoshka dolls.  A slice of wedding cake they call the Sacre Coeur sits perched on one hill, guarded by blue horsemen who sleep on the job and a lady rained down with a cocktail parasol and an accordion, octaves out of tune. 

Homecoming

Brown the walls, dark the coffee stains
The carpet maroon, dusty museum rope
Smell of age-old food and medication tethered ‘round my nostrils
and the snaky rattle of the drinking fountain
spitting out water, poisoned and polymer.
Nicotine rooms with flyspecked floors as an oxygen tank
that muffles the soft, raspy sweetness of your voice.

It was the eighth of November.
Words whispered through willows of the unconscious,
Taunted by distant gestures of a clock crucified to the wall
With each second, pulled farther from the seconds that were ours,
when sunshine bled into your venetian blinds like grapefruit
and a deck of cards lay scattered on your bed.
Gin and rummy and games I never bothered to remember
between the indifference of your machine and cigarette breaks.
Fresh spring flowers and watered-down insta-coffee
soaked into my nostrils as I wheeled your throne
on wood etched with trails of a thousand others.
The legless man who roamed the hallways and never missed a hello,
Where is he now?

For 22 months you called it “home” but as you jerked your hand
from a compendium of phone numbers—addresses—grocery lists,
and jerked my tears to diamond dust
we knew it was not quite that, a mere mat at the door.
So when I float back to that November frost and the
cerulean clouds clashed against crimson sky,
I think of that mat at the door where you went to die.

Called it a garden on the sign, but what a joke, we knew.
The only thing that grew – your own impatience,
and I guess sometimes my love.
Even if it didn’t always outpace the hasty fleets
of birthday cards—grocery lists—poorly-assembled desserts,
usually shipwrecked upon arrival.

“Tell them I’m not here” I said when the phone intruded,
grabbing the month’s worth of laundry and inhaling a petting zoo
and abruptly vanishing, because sometimes the car radio
was an easier conversationalist.
Your hands were soft as a pincushion
and your body a mere framework
and you shrank into a new wardrobe each week
to break the static, because there had to be some change that didn’t
make its way into the backs of the daily paper.

It was the eighth of November.
Your hand squeezed colors into mine
under a cotton candy sky,
whether an act of conscience or electricity,
of love or of urgency.

"Conduit"

The X-Files - Season One
Aired: October 1, 1993
Starring: David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson
Written by Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon
Directed by Daniel Sackheim

Following on the heels of three impeccably-filmed and engagingly-written episodes is no easy task. Couple that with a formula that starts to mold as any televised series progresses, and the element of surprise begins to wane. Unfortunately this episode falls victim to both obstacles, but in spite of itself proves a valuable character piece, capitalizing primarily on Duchovny's poignant and determined portraiture of Mulder in an episode that provides a vehicle into his character's backstory.

The plot of "Conduit" centers around an alien abduction not drastically unlike those from the pilot, yet follows a structure more akin to the previous episode "Squeeze." Like that episode, this one doesn't do much to further the main story arc. There's no presence of alien implants, government cover-ups, or shadowy figures lurking around the Pentagon. But all the same it is a story about aliens, and thus doesn't qualify as a monster-of-the-week affair.

This episode is perhaps most notable for its focus on the Samantha Mulder storyline briefly addressed in the pilot. In the teaser, a teenager named Ruby Morris vanishes while camping with her mother and brother at Lake Okobogee (there's one for the tongue), a presumed hotspot for UFO sightings. The case obviously has a personal stake for Mulder, who is all-too-reminded of Samantha's abduction that he is driven to some rather slipshod errors in judgment, namely tampering with a crime scene.

One particular point of interest to this episode is the character Kevin, Ruby's younger brother who seems to be perceiving binary code through television static. Later in the episode these numbers are revealed to be part of a satellite transmission, suggesting that Kevin is the titular "conduit" capable of decoding messages from space. While this is initially written as the crux of the episode, it's importance is never quite resolved, as Ruby is returned in the final act with no apparent link to Kevin's psychic ability. "Conduit" was in part written by Howard Gordon, who would go on to achieve greater fame as the eventual showrunner of 24. One unfortunate commonality of his episodes are red herrings that have little fundamental bearing on the main plot. This one is forgivable, as at the heart of "Conduit" is Mulder's personal journey to face the loss of his sister, and the denouement is quite beautiful to say the least, but it detracts from an episode that could have otherwise been far more compelling.

Grade: B