Summer Stroll

It was just another summer day. The sun was high in the sky and warm on my face. The air was full of the scent of jasmine. The street was quiet. I was pretty much on my own and I walked. Then it dawned on me how quiet it was. Not just peacefully quiet. I couldn’t hear anything.

Nothing at all.

I raised my hands in front of me and clapped. Nothing. I breathed hard. Still nothing. Curious, I thought. Had I been struck deaf? When I’d left my home half an hour earlier, I had been listening to the radio. I had heard the slam of the door, heard my footsteps on the pavement.

How long had I been experiencing this silence? It must have just happened for me to have noticed it. In its way, it was like a sudden loud noise. But the complete opposite. Sudden, all encompassing silence.

It was horrible, I decided. I couldn’t wait for it to be over. What if it wouldn’t be over? Was I indeed deaf? I realized that I had lost track of time. I looked at my watch, but I had left it at home. Why? I never went anywhere without my watch. I looked around me and I realized that I had never been in this street before. I knew it was my neighborhood, and it was a perfectly nice suburban street with semi detached houses and manicured lawns, but I have never been here before. What was I doing here? Why indeed was I out walking? I never walked very far, unless I was playing golf. What had possessed me to go walking? And why was I in this damn street?

I turned around and headed back in the direction I had come from. The sun was getting hotter, it was starting to be a little uncomfortable on my head. It was funny but, this side of the street was like a mirror image of the other half. The houses looked identical, right down to the colors of the curtains, the rust on the mailboxes, the trees in the gardens. I realized that I had in fact completely lost my sense of direction. And still this drowning silence! I yelled in frustration. Just a quick burst – I didn’t want the residence of this unfamiliar street to think they had a lunatic in their midst.

Nothing.

I yelled louder, more out of frustration that anything. Still nothing. Where the hell was everybody? And why was this street so long? I wasn’t walking fast, just ambling really, but I couldn’t see an end to it. I was sweating now. And I was starting to feel light headed. God damnit! This was becoming a nightmare! In the middle of the day!

A day-mare!

As I walked I looked through the windows of the houses I passed, hoping to see someone I could call out to for directions or maybe a glass of water. But I couldn’t see anyone. Not a car had passed, nor a dog. I decided to knock on someone’s door. I walked up the garden path of a nice, normal house, not unlike my own, and rapped on the door. To me, it was a silent rap, but I knew it would have resonated inside the house. I waited a few seconds, and then I tried the doorbell. I rang it several times, then knocked again. I looked through the living room window. I couldn’t see anyone, just a couch and some chairs.

I turned and walked into the road, looking back at the house, hoping someone would answer. But nobody did. I continued in the direction I had been walking, not really sure if it was indeed that or if I wasn’t just back-tracking. I paused for a moment, glancing backward then forward again when I suddenly realized that I had just seen something in my peripheral vision when I had looked back. I thought I had detected something – (a person?) – standing in the street. Or had I? I wasn’t sure, and I knew I needed to turn and look again, but why did I feel a pang of fear in my gut? I should have been elated. Why wasn’t I?

I even had a sense of dread in just the thought of turning around to look.

But I did.

A man was standing in the middle of the street two hundred yards from me.

Staring right at me.

And the man standing in the street staring at me was dead.

I knew it as soon as I saw him. He was about forty and was wearing a suit. His face was ashen and gaunt with dark shadows under his eyes. He was standing rigidly straight, but his head was tipped at an angle. His mouth was open, and was a black hole just the hint of a smile there. His dead eyes were wide and staring. He looked pleased to see me.

He didn’t move. Neither did I. I couldn’t. I was frozen with fear. Funny really, considering how hot I was. Every cell of my being screamed that this apparition in front of me was not of my world, and whatever world it was from, I wanted no part of.

And then he started to walk toward me.

Not a slow, staggering trudge, legs dragging, arms outstretched like in a movie, just a straightforward walk, with his head cocked at an angle, and still the expression of pleasant surprise written across that most unpleasant face.

I still couldn’t move. I just stood, rooted to the ground, watching him stride toward me. I could smell him, I realized. It was indeed rotting flesh. He had halved the distance between us, and I still hadn’t moved. I could see his expression had changed. Now he looked positively elated, in a horrifying way. Because I was making whatever he had planned for me so easy, no doubt. He was just seconds away now. I closed my eyes and willed myself with all my might to move. And I did! My legs and arms sprung into action. I turned and opened my eyes. But I saw nothing, just blackness. I turned back to look at the man, but I couldn’t see him. I couldn’t see anything. But suddenly I could hear! I could hear his footsteps. I could hear my gasps for breath. I could hear the pounding of my heart!

What cruel trick was this?

I turned and ran blindly, my arms outstretched, as I heard the man’s footsteps behind me. The smell of him was intoxicating. I staggered and fell to the ground. I felt his cold, clammy hands on me. I knew it was over. I screamed as hard as I could, although I knew it was worthless. It was over…

***

“God dammit Jack, not the scream! I hate the scream!”

I opened my eyes and I was looking at my wife’s beautiful but annoyed face. I was in bed, not in a strange street.

“Which one was it? The zombie in the street? The vampire cop?”

I looked around me, still disorientated.

“The zombie…” I uttered eventually.

She smiled that slightly disingenuous smile, like a concerned parent.

“Remember what Doctor O’Hara said? The night terrors are a symptom of the feelings you’ve had because of your redundancy. Basically, you feel inadequate because you lost your job, that’s all. Redundancy has made you feel vulnerable. And ass soon as you get a new job, these dreams will go away.”

She got up and walked to the bedroom door. She looked back at me and smiled, although there was something off-kilter about her smile, her eyes.

Then she opened the door.

The zombie from the street was there. So was the vampire cop.

“Morning fellas” she said as she walked past them, pausing to glance back at me one last time.

And then I realized the screaming I could hear was coming from me.

Saving the World, One Appliance at a Time

“Can you hear me now?”

I know. I know. But we only get the one go-round, right?

We’re at the place, our special place, and my work face has replaced my everyday face, lack of hair included.

“I’m only going to tell you why they call me ‘The Arm’ once, so do yourself a favor and listen up. You do that, all three of us can get to where each of us needs to go.”

I look over to Randy, offer him the megaphone. He shakes his head, pulls his pants up and over his ever-expanding gut.

“I ever once take that thing when you ask?”

I smile and look back down at the man of the hour; the man whose name was Paul. He’s wearing skinny jeans and a ratty flannel shirt, trying over and over in vain to run up the sides of the empty pool. Sliding back down, nothing changes, the man coming to rest amongst the beer cans, wine bottles, and other, less distinguishable waste.

“It was an accident, really, how I got that nickname. Me and my brother here just doing our bit the day it went down.”

I go on, my voice echoing down from above. I tell him all about Marty Barnes and how he and that particular piece of shit shared the same strain of dirt-bag; middlemen to monsters who used children like toys.

Taken by surprise, Barnes had gotten past both Randy and I that day, but Randy, his abdomen nowhere near the unstoppable expansion it would become, was up and after him before I could pull myself from the floor.

“Everything happened fast after that, Paul. I mean, really fast…”

In boxers and a beater-T, Barnes was catching his breath behind an old, rusted-out Ford down below. To my left, on the concrete, was the air conditioner I would become famous for. I picked it up, heaved away, and called out to Barnes two or three seconds after the leaking machine had left my hands. Now, I have never been the best of shots, not on the best of days, but I will admit to being somewhat lucky in life. It’s the only reason Barnes broke cover when he did, I think, and why he’d looked up at just the right moment.

“I saw his eyes too, there before I took them away. Not fun. Not how you’d think. Every last bit of bone, hair, and gray matter parceled out into something like a nine foot radius. This doesn’t even include the blood puddle his neck creates.”

My little speech done, I finally release the bowling ball I’d been promising. Lob it like the weapon of destruction I want it to become. Paul screams as it descends toward him. Continues to scream as the concrete beside him cracks, relents, and comes to hold the ball like a big black eye.

Behind me, Randy sighs. “You know you have a problem, right?”

I want to ignore him, I do, but sometimes a brother is the only friend a man can have.

“It’s only a problem if you can’t stop. I’ve read the books. Pretty sure you should read them, too.”

He eyeballs me hard, just like our father used to do. It doesn’t do half of what he thinks it does but it’s a game neither of us can quit. Not if we wanted answers.

I turn back around, drop ball after cinderblock after microwave oven. The balls I found on sale at SPORTCHEK, everything else being me adjusting to the environment I’d been given. So you know, either way.

Paul dances and rolls, shucks and jives, and still I come close to hitting him more times than not. I can’t quite hear the words pouring from his mouth, not really, but a pretty good bet would be he knew we were done with fucking about.

Last bowling ball deployed, I straighten first my holster and then my badge. Randy does the same.

Time to see if our incentive took.

Time to see if our bird was ready to sing.

Scatter

I feel fingers grasp my forearm and I am swallowed by the crowd.

Smiling faces surround me like circling sharks; neon signage and stage lights burning my retinas like sea salt. The dirty, sticky floor of confetti, glass, and trampled beer cans like jagged coral. I am drowning in a claustrophobic ocean of sweat and people, and I just want to swim back to shore for a single breath of cool air.

I scream, but I am stopped from being heard by the pounding of the bass.

Fingers grip tighter and yank at my wrist. I follow a trail of black chipped nail polish, light brown arm hair and a cascading shoulder tattoo of a male peacock to see a browned face giggling at me — crooked teeth barred with nicotine stain yellow. I have no idea who this person is but she pulls me on to the seat of a Ferris wheel and lowers the steel bar to lock across our waists.

Finally my arm is free and my forearm feels cold with the cooling patch of sweat made by a grimy, clammy hand. Before I take a moment to breathe, the Ferris wheel shifts upwards and the arm grabber looks out across the festival — a reflection of the lights below caught in the beads in her brown dreaded hair and making her look like a Christmas tree.

“Hey,” she says in a friendly tone as she turns her head to the left to face me.

“Are you okay?”

My furry brain tingles with chills of confusion and I say “P-Pardon” with a stutter.

“You look worried,” she says “Your forehead is all crinkly.”

“Oh… no… I’m fine,” I say, still having no idea who the fuck is sitting next to me.

“Good” she says, and her olive shaped green eyes squint a little as she widens her uncleaned smile and makes her fatty cheeks look like half-toasted marshmallows dropped in to a pile of dirt by the campfire, “Have you had a good day?” she asks.

She sounds so friendly and casual but I can’t remember her face at all. I blink my eyelids together hard and hope that I wake up somewhere else, somewhere not trapped with whoever this is, wherever I am, climbing higher and higher above the crowd that now looks like a mob of poisonous jellyfish bobbing around under fluorescent light.

“When was it day time?” I respond. “It feels like day time was forever ago.”

“Oh Jesus,” she says. “…You are fucked up.”

She leans in to kiss me and I pull my head back as her big, puckered, red lips come towards me like a loose vagina, flakes of chapped skin looking like fish scales on labia. I have nowhere to go but back down in to the ocean of monsters so I must kiss these scaly lips coming forth. I purse my lips together and squeeze my eyes closed. Her peeling skin tickles against mine and soon it is over. I re-open my eyes and she is still there, a loose thick dread drooping over her acne scarred forehead.

“How cool is it up here?” she says, as she peers over her feet at the crowded festival below and the vast blackness of empty fields that expand beyond it.

“How the fuck did I get up here? Why am I up here?” I shout, my heart thumping out of my chest and my brain spinning in circles. Suddenly I can think of nothing better than being on the ground. It’s as though I was never even down there. Who is this person who brought me here and why is she kissing me?

“Yesterday was nice, wasn’t it?” she asks in a half-rhetorical tone that makes no sense to me.

“Yesterday? What day was it yesterday? Why can’t I remember yesterday? It was just yesterday…”

I realise that I just said that all out loud and I turn to face this girl staring at the side of my face.

“We met yesterday,” she says. “…You were pretty scattered.”

“Oh,” I say, and I become transfixed on the pretty fairy lights below — they look like golden stars…

“Fuck. I don’t ever want to go home,” I mutter.

“No-one does, babe,” she says.

Big City Dreams, Part 2

My enemy Lester and I started out in the same place. He’d been the new boy at the zendo before I showed up. Roshi must’ve taken him on as a hard case. He wore cologne, couldn’t bring himself to cut the labels out of his zen robes. 

Curiosity is an attribute I couldn’t eliminate. It’s become a job, sort of. Upon request, for a fee that’s whatever the client thinks is fair, I snoop other people’s lives, locate and remove whatever stands between them and serenity. 

Back then, at the zendo, Lester Frills couldn’t achieve serenity. I wanted to help him, honestly. I snooped his inner and outer lives. Wasn’t hard. 

Lester had built a career in advertising on other people’s backs. Lester bit backs, chewed them, stabbed them. He got where he wanted to be by jumping on backs. To give him his due, he wrote brilliant copy, created unforgettable campaigns. His spots sold product to the tune of millions, billions. The emptiness of big numbers must’ve scared him, or the ghosts of the potential careers he’d trampled. Maybe he got hung up on coke. In any case, one day he left a note on the desk in his duplex corner office. He broke his lease on a Central Park South dream pad with terrace, walked away from a walk-in closet as big as the Waldorf Astoria. He turned up at the zendo with a cool million in cash, wrapped in rice paper crafted by a human living treasure in Kyoto, with a daisy from Central Park taped on top of the package. The daisy got him in. At least I hope it was the daisy.

The way is hard. Lester snapped. It’s possible he found his true vocation as the Pope of Black Zen, but his mincing, giggling devotees don’t call him Serene Highness. 

Paranoia isn’t zen, but it’s human. Lester Frills is a genuine enemy. He’s sent his adepts to beat the crap out of me on several occasions. Paranoia said Lester was sending the Deco dreams to turn me on to Black Zen. Intuition carries weight, more or less equal to a photon’s. Lester Frills wanted in on my dream life, or was already there. The usual dreams of garbage, ground into clean white sand blown by fragrant breezes into the Northern Lights, were replaced by streamlined decadence. Whether I wanted to be or not, I was on a case. The case was personal.

Know yourself. Know your enemy. Is your enemy your self? 

Lester and I used to go out for beers, post-meditation. He was a funny guy, great talker, good listener. He had style, paid his rounds, bought drinks for total strangers who looked like they could use a freebie. Beered-up Lester usually had a good-sized crowd around him by closing time. My thirst shifted from beer to ginger tea. I dropped the bar scene. Or the bar scene dropped me. 

Lester worked the zendo scene. He shaved his head, did the kneel for days on end, placed himself in abstract mental locations, began to phase himself out of the world and into the Big Picture. He nearly made it. But achieving oneness with nothingness requires one terrifying step. There’s no going back, and it’s better not to look down. Lester might’ve opened his eyes at the wrong moment. The universe rushed in to fill his near-empty space. The resultant Big Bang rattled windows city-wide. 

Effete but muscular Deco warriors dropped their Dunand shields and Ruhlmann spears, screamed and ran. But they ran towards imploding Lester instead of away from him.

There are material things human beings need. Particularly those who live in New York. Clothes, for instance. The winters here are rather rigid. One shop-window always caught my eye. 

There was a SoHo zendo, before real estate in the urban industrial wasteland skyrocketed. Wandering around SoHo at night was eerie, especially in front of a seamless sidewalk-to-ceiling window. Translucent fiberglass mannequins on invisible strings glowed from within, levitated and almost imperceptibly spun in shop space, as if set in motion by the breath of big city ghosts. A cloud of desire passed overhead at the sight of those perfect zen duds. I wanted to be seen wearing them, wanted people to know where I shopped. One day I waltzed in to have a look at the price tags. Disbelief bent me double like a baseball bat. I shimmered out. 

The cute Japanese shopgirl whispered farewell.

***

Big City Dreams, Part 1