"Fattening the Billie"

For the longest of long times he is prone horizontal across his desk dreaming of a smoky glass cargo ship overflowing with superbly colored gnarl-horned goats. Goats lustrous as Technicolor stock photos of wildflowers – orange, a fierce fuchsia, that yellow that is all the rage this season. Roger, his star salesman, tapping his pencil on the desk; the fervent tap, tap, tap, and then five quicker taps does nothing to rouse him. The taps merely take on the rhythm of a computerized goatherd struggling to maintain order as goats cavort across the deck, laze in the sun, and stretch out bleary-eyed on warm rope coils. Who would have guessed that goats would become the latest pet fad, after radiation or pollution or chemical feed de- or re- (depending on your philosophy) formed them to have gums so tender that they cannot chew at all. Non-chew goats got hot as shit. Roger's money had been on mini-elephants the size of small dogs. The non-chew goats had to be fed via injection, but a lot of people were into that nowadays. They were so wildly popular that injecting drugs intravenously became known as “fattening the Billie.” Roger coughs. Our hero sputters an apology. Assures Roger that he had not been “fattening the Billie” before lunch. His mind is his own nemesis and his electrons take tremendous liberties when his consciousness secedes from his rational internal monologue. Young and brutal he wears the same color socks every day; that is every day on which socks are appropriate. This perpetuates a veneer of constancy.

It is not until much later, after the haunting had been discovered and his wife is cured that he gains a curious cosmic access to the precise meaning invested in every action. He also develops what can only be described as a yawning and cavernous empathy for victims of hubris and gravity. He repeatedly lives – through the eyes of swarms of downtrodden bus travelers and boardroom magnates alike – multitudes of melancholic descents, which by the earliest definition of manhood must accompany (the way a whore is accompanied by her thighs and chaperoned by her overcoat) any departure from a high place. These descents can happen everywhere once one is attuned to them: on a star-riddled, moonless and windless night, on public transport, at private wood paneled clubs, shopping malls, in living rooms and minivans.

His second failing was that he was always forgetting his wife. When he was away from her for more time than it took to run to the all night convenience store, but less time than a television show, he would forget her name. He would forget about her utterly. Coming back into his house he would make such a grand entrance, forcing the lock in the key with the patience of a conquering Norman Knight. He would then proceed to stroll throughout the halls – shoes still very much on – snapping the successive vertebrae of darkness by dropping light switches one after the other, an army of automated guillotines.

He was no longer suburban in those moments. His mind traipsed over verdant summer grass and catapulted across rollicking hills. He capered, minced, violated wood nymphs, milk maids and well respected dames. The Berber carpet sprouted upward bursting in a wild profusion attracted to the searing warmth of the track lighting. It soared up all around his feet in parcels of tall grass and heather. A violence of daffodils materialized to the right of the hutch. A small white hand would grasp his own. His horse was a sofa; his loveseat a chestnut mare. He would cry out as the little hand squeezed his bludgeon shaped pointer finger. Blue shock, medleys of the deep laughter of cigar smoking men cut with the harpy coral shrieks of debutantes, red meat, sputtering camp fires, carnivalesque embroidery work of battles long forgotten, needles, wine, and in the layer of dry brown dirt atop the coffee table a crude child’s line drawing of a heart.

Even as his mind catapulted from one atmospheric remembrance to another he always knew that the child’s sketch in the dirt was his very heart. He fucking knew. And he had to get it back. The last time he had tried to reclaim it the bitch he found, the sharpshooter with the kewpie cheeks, had drugged him, clubbed him with a second place trophy and left him for dead in an exorbitantly expensive hotel room. Last he had heard she had converted to a stalwart Suburbansim much like himself. He would ponder this transformation reflecting: When you're young you don’t need comfort, especially with chemistry like that. When you’re old you fervently wish you didn’t need comfort. He vividly remembers what it was like to bed the sharpshooter. She was malleable, commanding and she had excellent hand-eye coordination. His shorts would surge sweet and sticky at the thought of those deadly, exacting little hands.

And then inevitably on his ramblings through the gabled rancher he called home he would stumble across her, the old ball and chain. Her skin oiled, her sloped body hunkered at the small enameled kitchenette table. She was always a shock to him. How she got there he never knew. Upon hearing his quick intake of breath she would place the weight of her head back upon her rigid neck and let her shoulders sink.

Then he could see that she was not at all stunned or fearful, just very tired. As a woman she was functional, pinkish and normal, necessary. Her name had two syllables and two vowels; it was those damn consonants that screwed him every time. To avoid the awkwardness he would address her as Kitten or Honeycomb or Sugar Blossom or Cherry Calf. This wifely creature bore his endearments on her smooth stable back. She had fallen off the wagon of reality years ago, right after they wed.

A youthful passionate indiscretion had exposed her (quite unprotected) to the white light she once called love. She had spent her best efforts at living early, an impulsive child, pitching all her bread to the ravenous swans with a dramatic flick of the wrist. All that was left for her was to watch the other children who had somehow learned to measure the distribution of their meager fist of crumbs with a dispossessed rationalism. The envy inside her eventually became so strong that she had to stop shopping, walking and talking.

Often she sits at the kitchenette table wrapped from head to toe in sterile cotton gauze. Inside the gauze she is yachting. The sailors on the vessel are burly and don pea coats even though it is quite warm. She wears a green silk evening gown. Her dark hair done up. Water is pulled tightly over the grid of space, black and infinite. At her throat her necklace is the one truly bright thing. The ocean is a fragrant ballroom with its doors spilling open. Balconies and balustrades swell with the luminescence of lanterns. The salt kisses of a warm summer night brine her skin with a heady tropic balm of yearning. Between her thighs a sacrificial blossom smolders.

She shovels martini olives one by one into her mouth. The sailors look on laughing, licking lips, slapping backs. It is just the type of talent that has to do with primitive hunting and gathering. Without warning the olive jar is empty; she casts it into the deep with the vehemence of a spurned starlet. Her little bow lips all agrimace. The sea, taken aback, parries with a violent thrust against the ship. Her own head is somehow visible to her as it falls towards the open hatch. Her cheekbone hits the woodwork and blood blossoms forth. Olives spin out across the reddening deck, glass eyes in a demented Christmas pageant.

After what seems days, but is probably only hours judging by the position of the stars, her head is lifted. Someone pushes back her hair and licks the blood from under her cheek bone with a soft pink tongue. Two little white hands stroke her temples. This continues for far too long. She is hungry and the sky is a trashy turquoise green. The stars are tiny fires. The colors of this seascape are horrific, atrocious, in poor taste, some preposterous paint sample pairing from a flippant, trendy television design program. With time the sea grows darker and the palette more mature.

There are torches on the shoreline. No sound now except the swaying hips of the ocean knocking the deck about. She has to get out of this dress. She unfurls the deep green fabric reluctantly at first and then with the mounting passion of a once somber child opening a single well-wrapped gift. Placing her body against the dry blood, she rests.

Our heroine dreams of kitchens.