“I always wanted my own statue when I died. In the cemetery, I mean. Something like a giant thumbs up. Something different. It’s all so dreary and droll. Archaic, really. What do you think, shouldn’t we add some pizzazz to this place?”
“It’s probably not welcome,” I said.
“Well,” she shrugged, “who cares? Convention is being given a whirl everywhere else. Why not in the graveyard, too?”
Somewhere along this conversation she started sobbing.
It was one of her friends that had died. Winston I think was his name. She only said it that one time. No mention thereafter. Kind of a rejuvenating thing, seeing her weep so and then never mention the person again, her remorse immortalized in that instant of mourning. Mind you, she didn’t forget this Winston or whomever, but she certainly kept the memory to herself after that extroversion after the funeral. She didn’t need to constantly remind others of her remorse, it was with her like all other experiences, creating her and blending in with the good, the bad, and the in between. She was beyond knowing who she was. It was Dao, I suppose. Something of the sort.
At the gates of the cemetery, she passed me a card. I was appalled at first, thinking she was trying to render some kind of service, taking me for a sucker in my current morose state. But no. It was more of an invitation. This Winston chap, it turns out, had left something open on his way out of the world. Either I made an impression on her in those few moments spent through the cemetery- or maybe she felt whimsical invitation was best, associating the here and now together, what with Winston’s death and my consecutive arrival. Whatever the case, the card was an invitation. She gave me a hug and told me when and where to meet. As she walked away I looked at what she’d handed me. Seemed to me that the card brandished the title of some secret club or cult. I didn’t know. But I did know I would find out. For sure. I was in her orbit now.
The time was a Monday from the Sunday a week before. So in those eight days I had to busy myself. When I wasn’t working at the Impusendeum, I went over to my neighbor’s house. An old woman, an invalid. Clarice was her name. She was all right when she wasn’t trying to feign senility to get her way. Always offered me goat cheese and some strange milk made from neither cow nor goat. I forgot what animal, probably on purpose. Mostly I just ate the salty crackers on the side to vanquish the acridity in my mouth. There I would be, sitting in one of her corduroy upholstered chairs, nibbling like a pet mouse while she explained her most recent predicament. Predicaments found her like they were 49ers and she was gold. That metaphor is weird…
Right, so, nibbling I would be, somewhat askew on my ass in the chair because I had to lean forward for fear that I would pass out from boredom. Such somnolent words the elderly speak, befuddled by too much experience and regret so that by the time their words hit the air they’re mutilated by so much reluctance and contemplation, refined to a sentence that even has third graders rolling their eyes. What secrets would be revealed about humanity, I wonder, if those old biddies would just let the fountain of words burst forth, unmitigated by their timidity and regret? Sitting there, it was like trying to sift through garbage for food (a very real metaphor for yours truly as of recent). There were cracks leading to subtext in old Clarice’s yarns, but they were so chewed up and mulled over that I couldn’t detect anything beyond what I fabricated to keep myself interested. True, I never even knew the old lady.
So why was I there? Why would I listen to futile yarns and be propositioned into building her a shelf or offering mechanical assistance? Because she also had a daughter. Ok, so what? I was a tool for an old lady so I might lay her twenty-seven year old next of kin. So what?
The daughter’s name was Amanda. She lived at home because she could never hold a job, but she was never around. Always out running the streets. Part of me suspected she was addicted to some substance and maybe even selling her body for her next fix. This all might have been spurred by fantasies of mine, trying to form some loophole to accessible sex. Although, there were instances when my suspicions were nearly validated. Whenever she was around I made sure to ignore her. Quite a difficult task, trying not to look at something that makes your eyes want to grow teeth and chew her like some succulent kabob. But I knew that was the best way to spark her interest in me, ignoring her. I also was not the worst thing to look at back then, not a hobo for sure, and somewhat polished and mysterious like any other man of twenty-five.
Some nights it would be awful. Amanda brought home so many men, always different, rarely recurring. And some nights I could hear the bouts of debauchery through my thin walls. At times I could only hear her, and these would be opportune for masturbation, mind you. But other times it was all just thumping, like someone was trying to capture a hippopotamus on speed, followed by intervals of grunts, the timbres of which I never liked- always indicative of sweaty forty year olds who were experiencing a revival of a lost libido as they plunged their filth stick into a young female.
One night it was terrible. Clarice had called me over, saying she couldn’t sleep due to night terrors. So there I was, nibbling on baklava she explained was on sale at some store she couldn’t remember, but one which she did take her time trying to remember so I might get more for myself since I was “enjoying it so much.” All the while, thumping in the background was the ruckus of an infamous romp in her daughter’s bedroom.
“Oh, it was one of those foreign stores. Greek I suppose.”
THUMP!
“Are there Greek supermarkets? I suppose there ought to be.”
GROAN!
“What do you suppose Greeks would buy. Yogurt? Spinach?”
SLAM!
“I eat those things. Maybe I would like to shop there more often.”
GURGLE!
Yeah. Gurgle. This was a usual onomatopoeia issuing from that sordid bedroom, one I would constantly contemplate with sheer objective curiosity when falling asleep. Sort of like my version of counting sheep. How could a gurgle be so loud? It was obvious the gurgle was from Amanda, as she was the perennial element in all these bouts. So what did that imply about her? Was the sound vaginal, oral, or… well, I thought maybe it was best not to know at times.
But then, back on the corduroy chair, trying not to wince with each vulgar utterance from the depths of the presumably dingy bedroom, I was trying to force concentration on the old lady’s potpourri recants, and simultaneously wondering why she was so oblivious to the sexual mayhem occurring not twenty feet from us. But what trouble to pay attention to the jibberings of an old turkey voice, when some scoundrel is dismally and viscerally enacting your fantasy, mangling that two-legged sex’s viscera into loud gurgles.
Jibber jabber on and on, until finally Clarice told me about the night terrors. About some giant wooly monster, maybe likened to a teddy bear with teeth, scratching and banging at her door. It wasn’t until she said the wooly teddy bear monster gurgled that I finally realized the poor old woman was not only oblivious, but in denial. Somehow the nightmare of her daughter whoring herself out for heroine/cocaine/ether was beyond translation in that mutilating refinery of a brain, to where the nightmare had become something more outlandish and intangible, per say a giant teddy bear, that she would be incapable of recognizing the genuine fright of the situation, thus ignoring and negating all concern for a healthier mindset. And there she would be, routinely setting the table with goat cheese and baklava as she had learned to do so, cooing along to some litany on the phonograph that reminded her of her golden age, her peak period, and furthering her descent into that pod seventy-some-odd years in the making.
I tell you, I returned mighty depressed that night. That a mother could be so far disconnected from her daughter as to imagine giant teddy bears were the actuality of visceral sex noises- the very sex noises that portended a brutal degradation to all genuine emotion- was a testament to humanity’s adapting techniques. How much could one sustain was no longer an issue, if ever. No. The issue was how much could one ignore, how much truth could one subvert into pleasantries or nugatory audacities. How much could we snip away from ourselves? Perhaps