WARREN BEATH

We hope we haven’t given away the ending
Spoiler alert
Feel the burn
We are back and we have brought the stuff
the Things
You know
the pictures?
well This is going to hurt
we’re running through your halls
we’ve dilated your cervix
we’re tearing it up
we’re knocking things over
we’re breaking out the windows
We’re on roller skates
we’re cool kids and we’re happy
It’s a dot.com world and it’s ours
We laugh in our throats
We cough blood
We can’t sing
But we can dance just as good as we want
we think you’re going to remember This
we’re everything we’ve claimed
This has got to hurt—
we think you’re going to like This one.
Well what do you think of This?
You thought we were gone
Well isn’t it a wonderful world?
This is never going to end
There’s something in your Inbox
He put it there
It’s going to make you bleed
Well everyone wants to think about the One
You know what we mean
There’s true love once
That repeats repeats repeats
themselves
That’s how it’s going down
We come from a world that is so far out
you could watch for us a hundred years and
we would surprise you
We have the pictures
They are graphic
we think you’ve always known
Are you listening?
It’s the tick of the death-clock beetle
Behind the realness there’s a world
of hurt
We’re going to open the can
We are going to staple your eyes open
You will be strapped in the wheelchair
and we will turn you to the screen
Start the video
This is going to make you feel strange
But there is intoxication
for you
There is the dream
You won’t grow up on us?
Shut up.
This is never going to end
No pain no gain
You consigned us to flames
we emerged on fire
Our backs aflame
and ran through your ruins
igniting the galleries as we go
It’s fun for us
You may not like it as much—
Top of the world
sitting on a million gallons
of nitroglycerine
We know what we’re doing.
You cheer us on and you know it
We are the power
We have steroids
Riding the backs of cockroaches
whipping them to frenzy
We laugh and gurgle
Aren’t you tickled?
Those are razorblades under your eyelids
That is blood on the keys
Your own shadow rips and plows
through a thousand thighs
You’ll never know all the names
You’ll never know enough
We have the security camera
We are antacid
We have motor drives
There’s nothing you can do about it
Yeah, we’re cute
We’re cute kids
We talk babytalk
But your ears still bleed
Boot to the head!
It’s a heavy metal thing
It’s alternative pop-rock
It’s an indie movie
It’s the broken spaghetti strap at Cannes
We paparazzi with guns
You’re blind in one eye
You’ve heard this all before
It all sounds alike
This is never going to end

. . . . . Mel Gibson paused in his musings and chewed the tip of the pen. The words he had written seemed affected. There was the awkward “ticking of the death-clock beetle” which seemed too literary and contrived. There were the usual allusions to time and blood which he thought of as his signature. A sense of loss that was really a self-pitying solipsism. Just like the others, and maybe he just had one story to tell.
               He poured himself a vodka martini from the wet bar, and lay back in the recliner. He thought about the insufficiency of language— but maybe it was his own insufficiency of feeling. Maybe as far as his personal poetry was concerned, he had turned self-absorption into a literary cottage industry. What he thought was inspired was maybe really just calculated promotion of sympathy for himself— an attempt to portray a basically cold and unfeeling person as demon-ridden and therefore his own victim.
           He smiled lopsidedly and took a deep drink. Well, wasn’t his self-excorciating honesty an indication of a basic ruthlessness for the truth?  He hesitated and took the pen from his pocket.

“Demon-ridden victm
contrived
time and loss
self-pity
insufficiency of feeling
the literary cottage industry
of self pity
We are the children of your id
Strangling the Russian supermodel of the soul….”

     He stopped again. He fell to his knees.

      “Help me God,” he breathed hoarsely, clenching his fists. “Help a poor sinner— Mel Gibson—- and save him from himself. I have turned my back on you, O Lord, and your wrath is too great. God please help me. Deliver me from myself. Heal me. Let me know Your will. Your will be done, not mine.”

     When he opened his eyes, the room was suffused in a glow.  A radiant figure appeared above the wet bar and seemed to hover in a corona of scintillation.  He squinted against the radiance and thought it was the Virgin Mother.  It was Elvis Presley. 

       The King raised his hand in benediction.  “There was born to a virgin a man who shall be called Mel Gibson and his life shall be a trial and his sufferings shall be great for the sporting of mad wood and his blood shall rise and he shall know adversity from the seed of woman.  He shall wait on the seed of woman and his own seed shall lay uncast in his testicles outside the water bubbling forth and he shall lay abed and know the sufferings of the Son of Man and the hard wood shall remain unchallenged by the botox of quenchedness and the fire of his loins shall spread through mankind unabated,  and he shall make a movie of the Son of Man and yet his wood shall be hard as the Cedars of Lebanon and he shall not know rest nor balm but shall lay chaste aside woman of Babylon and her heel shall smite his bone unto dissatisfaction beside the waters of a jacuzzi.  And he SHALL be known as MEL GIBSON in capitals and the earth shall sing hosannas to his performances except for the last Mad Max thing, and he shall make a movie that shall heal those who have not heard The Word and forever shall his name be praised when praised names are praised or even when the wood is high, and they shall carve his image on the head of supermodels of all nationalities and his seed will flourish across the lands of the earth and even into dvd Region 3 of the PAL variety and he shall smite the teeth of the whore of Babylon and they will know it in the world and where dentistry is forsaken. Thank thou thy God that thou has suffered the pummeling of supermodels with taut abdominals intact, and hast not expanded to a girth such as strains the bonds of your pants until the whiteness consumes your manliness in swaths of fatness, for the sandwiches of life thou hast made of the peanutbutter of conceit and the fried banana of sin are the fruits of forgivedness which shalt expand ten-fold upon thine garage of collectible vintage automobiles.  The shrill plaints of bruised supermodels of a Russiany persuasion shall be the trumpets of victory blazened over the winning of the soul of Mel Gibson to a salvation that far surpasseth the earthly joys of virility and mouthly pleasures of jacuzzis.  Though the harlot of the east bloweth not the trump of glory nor even Mel Gibson’s harp of desire she beareth hard wood for the winnowing of the sins of the flesh.  Thou shalt triumph over thine enemies and shalt reap supermodels seven-fold and spite thine enemies with envy for thoust treasure in heaven and the Kingdom spread before you shall be verdant of supermodels with ripe loins in which thou shalt plant thine seed for generations untold.  The carburation on thine expensive cars shall be a trial to those who would smite you or deny thou the orally joy of bubbling hot water and brooks running from the hills to fill the jacuzzi of your soul in a radiant glow of modeling concubinage bowed in homage unto thy Mel Gibsony-ness forever and ever.”

     Well now, that’s better, Mel Gibson thought to himself.

I wish to see the Mississippi before I die
I wish to let healing waters roll over me
I wish to feel New Orleans skies grey with rain
on wet brick and limestone
and your reflected face in the puddle at the porch of Marie Laveaux’s white tomb
I wish to share your pattering umbrella
and drink in bars with ghosts
I wish to see the Mississippi before I die
I wish to feel the healing waves
and see razored white water trailing barges
and die a thousand times with you
on a creaking mattress beneath bamboo blinds.
I wish to feel your coolness under white sheets
and let your healing waters rush over me.
I wish to feel your cold moonlight through me
in a room with a ceiling fan
while the Mississippi rolls.
I wish to find you in the dark
and swim to your center.
I wish to feel your Mississippi River before I die
and feel you wash through my empty piers
I wish to feel water
the cold spot on my pillow
where you cry in the dark because you are happy.
I wish not to talk
I wish to drown in you and see your eyes
rippling on the surface above as I sink
into your depths.
I wish to drown in your Mississippi
I wish to be your dark dream and
your Mississippi River.
I wish to flow unvexed to the ocean bearing the freight
of all the hearts
of all the hearts
of all the hearts
the ghosts of the lovesick sailors
on your bone-white shoulders in the dark.
I wish to be the Mississippi of your eyes
I wish to see my reflections in the pools
and rain down in paper pieces
from the bladed ceiling fan.
I wish to be moist
I wish to be cool against you
I wish to be the music outside your window.
I wish to be the rustle of leaves
in your wind
I wish to find you
I wish to find you
in the dark
break your levee
and feel your Mississippi rolling
over me
before I die.
I wish to be dead inside you
I wish to be with you in marble beds
in Old St. Louis Cemetery
I wish the Mississippi at flood
to mingle our molds
and carry our dust
together down freshets and gutters
and join you in the Mississippi
let the healing waters
roll over me

It hurt so much when Mel Gibson thought of her sexually with another man.  It hurt when she said that she loved him and that he was special, but there was the evidence in human experience that she had been in love before.  She had feelings and been moved, and cried.  She had learned to love and to make love.  She had cared and crossed continents to be with her man of the moment.  She had given herself and withheld nothing.  She had told men she loved them.  She had told men she wanted to be held by them, she had been flirtatious.  She had allowed herself to be undressed, and there was not an inch of her that had not been touched.  And her mind likewise had been touched, and her feelings sounded.  And poor women get cornered and only can offer the protests that no this one is special or that one is the only one who and I never felt this—  but it was all the same and he knew it.  And there was a deadness to the knowing of that.  He had followed her into this deadend of feelings and all he wanted in return was to be special, and wanted her to love him at that moment in that special way.  What had she done?  She had fallen asleep while he lay there in fear and desire.   
         “. . . . . . And he cometh unto the disciples, and findeth them asleep, and saith unto Peter, What, could ye not watch with me one hour?”

It was an exhausted Mel Gibson who stared at his black razor phone on the settee. The session with his therapist had helped him, in addition to the new swear words he had learned from a cursory reading of the misogynist newsletter in the waiting room. His inner child suffered and the world could not understand and he could himself barely admit. He loved the woman. His Russian model named Osaka or Osama or something was not sprung virginal and fully-grown from the head of Zeus but she had clawed her way to the top of her profession by intense labial suction and she had been roughly-used by men. His, Mel Gibson’s, tender love had been pawed and clawed and handled by a succession of men who did not care for her and by extenuation did not care for him, Mel Gibson, nor his fragile regard for himself. He was tormented by images of her with her ex and when she signed the occasional love note with XXXXs he imagined it was an encryption indicating to him the number of ex’s with whom she had experimented with a variety of positions and attitudes that beggared his— Mel Gibson’s — imagination. In the Passion of the Christ had been the seminal figure of the whore Mary Magdalene and it was no accident she shared the name of His mother because the nature of woman was two sides of the same coin, the daft cows, telling one man this and another the same thing, they were weak and that was why Satan had tempted woman in the garden of Eden and she probably had come onto him just like the Russian model at the debut of the Fall Versacci line— he stopped himself. So he was tormented by the images behind his eyelids and it was of his love and the mother of his child with Timothy Dalton, James Bond himself. Bond was the uber-male, the hyper-masculine alpha-uber-hyper-male that rolled on eight testicles like a juggernaut through popular culture amidships of women with names like Pussy Galore and Tiffany Case and … Tim Dalton. James Bond. Dalton embodied Bond. Bond embodied all the masculine attributes that had threatened himself— Mel Gibson— since the advent of poverty. He meant— puberty. An accident? Because Mel’s self-esteem was intimately linked to his worldly success. And advent itself was a religious holiday or something— and wasn’t Christ himself a sort of spiritual James Bond? And God the Father was like M, equipping the Son with a grab-bag of miraculous gadgets and gimmicks to ensure a doubting world that God could multiply fish and turn water into wine, and even red wine which would perhaps not be preferable with fish but with a meat, say a rib-eye steak with garlic mashed potatos or something equally of the like— which brought to mind the dinner he had shared with the Russian model who tormented his dreams with visions of her encoupled and feverishly entwined with Timothy Dalton/James Bond or even Tim Bond or James Dalton, or some other awkward permutation that would denote the monstrous hybrid of the actor with the cultural colossus of the masculine image of James
Bond. James Bond did not care about his baby his Osaka or Onsuna— the name of the model he cared not nor remembered probably the infinity or couplings. But Mel Gibson knew and he was flagellated by the images of the mother of his child with James Bond or Timothy Dalton or even both of them in a troisome or whatever you called it– a troika or something, unless that was a sleigh of somekind with reindeer. And the incident with the jacuzzi— it was nothing to her she had done it with Dalton probably a brazilian times without complaint. But when he— Mel Gibson— had wanted it she had fallen asleep and was snoring. Her monumental indifference to him was evidence and how was she to know it had been a test, that she was being watched to see if she would care or whether she loved Tim Dalton more. It was these horrible thoughts and sounds that had driven him to inexcusable violence, well inexcusable for him— Mel Gibson— but when Bond had knocked around Lotte Lenya in From Russia With Love no one had complained or raised a stink or accusations of misogyny or racism. Was it because she was so old, or had poison-tipped razors in the toes of her shoes? That was indicative of the hypocrisy of culture, you could knock around old Lotte Lenya all you wanted and no one complained or thousands cheered, but you get a little physical with a Russian supermodel and they all came after you. The woman always was the sympathetic figure but it was man who was the weaker and wounded child, thought Mel Gibson as he lay sleepless on his pillow. It was not easy being Mel Gibson— it was not easy to be a man.  He wished he could hit a woman right now!

Mel Gibson screamed once more into the phone and slammed it his pocket, hyperventilating for a moment as he watched  the aneurysm pulsing from the swollen vein in his neck and up to his temple.  He took his own heartrate and brought it down to double-digits with the force of will which had brought concentration to his role of Fletcher Christian in the third remake of Mutiny on the Bounty.  Women did not understand what a man needed.  Women want and they have it easier, but men have difficult lives as when he himself essayed the role of that guy in the movie about the Indians in the jungle or something.  Wait he had only directed it, but the loinclothes mostly did the acting.  What on earth did she think a man really needed?  Women want, but a man needs.  He thought of writing a book of aphorisms about the difference between men and women, something that could be read in an airport or in the crapper.  Well, there is a Mel Gibson in every man and it may be harsh and demanding at times but it is also the fuse that drives the quest for outer space, and the acquisition of a good table at a restaurant.  Men have different needs and they are stronger than that of women, and all in all more important.  They are driven by testesterone which is secreted in quantity and thickness according to the masculinity of the individual.  Men are angry, and they are angrier and their demands more urgent in proportion to how manful they are.  The louder a man shouts and the more agitated he becomes over the issue of his needs, the less he has to worry about issues like homosexuality or even the absorption in cooking shows such as Iron Chef or the one where they make the cakes and have to carry them to a table in front of judges.  When a man shouts and hits a woman it is to assert a primitiveness and a prerogative which women actually understand and accept as an indication of his level of manliness and freedom from fear of his own effiminancy.  This was simple.  The fans of Mel Gibson had always sensed the volcano beneath the surface of his urbane portrayals.  But it is a scary world when your manful powers are waning and your woman is younger and attractive and knew her way around Timothy Dalton, he could remember a day when he would not have contented himself with knocking out two teeth but would have delivered full body blows to the torso, but that was what it was like when you got older.  He had fathered a child, what more could the world want or even the Pope for that matter?  Mel Gibson smiled to himself at the recollection of a bit of scripture, recalling the synoptic Gospels and even Ur-Mark which had been the earliest form of the recollections of the living Christ by his disciples.  The silly fools, they had eaten honey in the desert and slept in sand, while Mel Gibson had a bathroom of Italianate design and a maid who had a confidentiality clause.  There was at the foundation of every man- woman relationship a tacit understanding that a man has needs and those needs had to be met by a woman, otherwise he would be with another man because of the mutuality of interests such as sports cars the bonhomie of locker rooms and World Cups.  Not for Mel Gibson a yachting regatta which was the athletic equivalent of sipping tea from a demitasse, oh no he remembered as a lad growing up in Australia beating waitresses on the field as his mum and pop cheered from stands and chewed a koala.  Now here was this Russian model stealing his heart and replicating him in female form such as a daughter, and he thought of Braveheart and how he must inside him have a medieval hero in fact to be able to embody such a role to the satisfaction of the men in his audience.  He recalled lighting a match on glass for a Rolling Stone reporter, and acknowledged the admiration of women the world over.  And he had annointed this Russian beauty with his lavishments and even his DNA and look what she had done to him, and what with his shoutingness and manfulness wanting her in the jacuzzi, and what man didn’t?  And what man of the legions crying for his blood like villagers outside the moat in a Universal classic horror film of the 1930s, did not need the same thing and wish that he was great and powerful to demand attentions from Russian models or even models of the non-Russian mode, or even the girl with red lips on the Geico commercial?  Every man knew the pain of laying in bed and listening to the snores of a disinterested female who had promised unspokenly to meet his needs.  The warm jets of the jacuzzi only bespoke a more heated inflammation of the skin, and it was good enough for the Pope.  Mel Gibson recalled the Bible verses he had learned at his mother’s knee, and to have risen to the exalted position of directing the famous Film the Passion of the Christ which was notable for having dialogue entirely in Aramaic.  Now there was a language.  In Aramaic there was no word for “penguin” because they had never seen one.  But probably there were dozens of words for sand lice, speaking of which he reminded himself to fire his lawyer and adjust the carburation of his seminal vesicles.  The racial rants were only the expression of the latent prejudices that resided in every man, and women if they admitted it were suspicious of men who did not have at least some bigotry and intolerance, not to mention impatience and several other anti-virtues not mentioned in the New Testicle of the Bible.  He thought with abashment of Bill Bixby and other actors who had died of prostate cancer and contemporaneous judgement of pundits that it was a ten-yard penalty from a wrathful God for man’s mistreatment of models and the hope that a super model would arise in the East who would smite the menful half of the world with reproductive afflictions which may have come true already as evidenced by the Russian supermodel giving birth to a daughter rather than a son.  He felt a boiling rage in the pit of the bowels of his undermost digestive tract, and his finger trembled over the speedial button of his razor phone if they actually have one, and who could be sure of anything in an age where Russian supermodels gave birth to girls and the Pope himself was mute in the Vatican while his favorite son was enduring the calumny of an international press?  Well the good news was that his attackers would wake up tomorrow and be only insignificant nothings among the unimportant people who comprised most of the world, while he would be Mel Gibson superstar.  Haha he laughed to himself.  Life was good.  Damn good.

.

.

Mel Gibson hung up the phone and laughed to himself. He was a ritch man and not to be trifled with. Certainly not by a female so recently swollen with his own daughter given birth to umbilically. “I’ll knock out the rest of yer teeth,” he thought to himself. Manhood thrived under adversity. I need a real woman, he thought. “I need a jacuzzi.” He needed a steam room to release the poisons. This was no anti-semitic rant, he promised himself. This stroke-like excitement infused him with inflating gasses that promised to fill his internal shower stalls to the nozzles. It was grim business being a rich and powerful man, and an actor of his proportions. The Passion of the Christ had moved Christendom to tears, even those who had read the book. And now he had received his own message for the world and transmitted it via the medium of tabloid headlines and court reporters. He knew it would be received with derision and even with bewilderment at the incomprehensibility of the whole thing. But it did make a bizarre kind of sense to him, purged now of poisons he could regard himself more calmly. The Passion of the Christ had moved Christendom to tears, and there is no denying that it had a powerful message to those who had no time to read the book upon which the original idea had been based; ie., a super hero-like figure who descends into space and time with a message that revolutionizes the sphere of human morality and even of dietary supplementation. It is not what goes into a man’s mouth that defiles him, but what comes out of it The Fisherman had said. And now he– Mel Gibson– had advanced civilization another hair’s-breadth with a rant deftly calculated to be emblazoned across the world via the supermodel mother of his own child. And how well the cow had been chosen. It was no accident. This was better than drunk driving, or even directing an epic motion picture with the imprimatur of the Vatican. But it was after all only another day in the life of a very rich superstar.

It was the most disgusting
of autopsies
We had ever worked on.
This remain
was spread on the chrome with its holes and gutters
the fluid was out.
The incisions were deft and clear.
The brain pulsed in our antiseptic gloves
it had never thought so clearly
smoothly
We worked in bisection
vertically to the spinal column
splayed the organs.
The worm was revealed
if worm it was
Parasitical anyways.
It was as tall as a man stretched out
or a child dismembered and separated in spaces
in pieces.
We knew what we were doing.
The worm spun in fluid and was still. We could hardly uncover its words
when it spoke. The mouth was
We could barely hear its words
the words were hard to hear
we could hardly decipher what it said
We took a tape measure
and its length was determined in centimeters.
This worm had lived and fed
and organized itself
wound around the brain stem
and its open mouth was closed on the globe
of the cerebellum.
The medulla was clean
the body healthy and well-nourished
As was the worm
parasitical.
The body is only host
it feeds and encases
a worm
in this case a large worm
long and well-formed.
It was the knot in the stomach and
the pain
You can’t see this worm
it hides in details.
It sees out the eyes and it controls the brain
through a series of contractions and
pressures exerted
on the emotions.
It will kill you.
It entered through the urethra
and thrived on fear
it wintered in the bones
poisoned the heart.
We cannot kill the worm.
It capitalizes
the worst of
the feelings of the
the blindness of the
deafness is a mercy.
It was there since birth maybe
It was the most disgusting of autopsies.

It was the artist Vincent Van Gogh who cut off his ear and sent it to his girlfriend with the note, “Why haven’t I heard from you?”

Mike Tool waited at the computer for a reply from his girlfriend.  He knew she was there, unless she had to run those little errands she had mentioned in the morning.  She probably had run to FoodMaxx for cereal for her six children.  She probably had opened the pantry and shaken a cereal box and seen that it was empty.  So she had left the kids with her mom and run to the store which was only three blocks away. Undoubtedly.  And while there she had run into Rod the old boyfriend from the time she worked as despatcher at the trucking company.  Pleasantries had been exchanged and no doubt that was the end of it.  Unless maybe in the parking lot he had seen her struggling with the sticky latch on the trunk and gone over to help.  That was when his bicep had brushed her breast, and there was that electric spark between them.  Their eyes had met and it all flashed before them that fevered night outside of the Highlander when they were sweaty from dancing and wound up wrestling their clothes off in the front seat of his truck—-

He smiled to himself at his own silliness.  Probably there was a problem at the internet and she was on her way right now to her cousin’s to use her computer to reply to him.  Because she knew he would worry. 

He worried about her.  He knew she had been sad recently.  Or depressed.  It was problems with her ex husband.  Perhaps he had shown up unexpectedly in violation of the order.  Maybe she needed his help even now.

Or maybe he had shown up and an argument ensued.  He became violent again screaming into her face and holding her against the wall with his forearm against her throat.  Maybe with the loss of oxygen to her brain she felt a stirring called erotic asphyxiation and maybe she gasped for air but also writhed with something else, and when he pressed his lips to her she responded in her limpness her brain black dots around the edges as she felt an upsurge of that passion and pressed her own hips against—-

He shook his head to clear it of these silly thoughts.  Some times she pampered herself with a massage and maybe she had parked the kids with a friend and run down there.  Women worked there so there was no worry, well, mostly women but the big guy with the cleft palate.  And her only ninety pounds.  How do you get a ripped six-pack like that?  His hand kneading her shoulders and working the way down to the lower back, the towel slipping.  Her becoming excited like she did when she sat on the dryer during the wrinkleguard cycle with the buzzer going—- it was silly.  She would roll over and the towel would be on the floor and she would not know why it was happening it was the sensitivity of his hands and the way they—-

These were silly silly thoughts.  These things did not happen or did not happen with her.  They certainly happened in the larger world.  Everyone had some sort of experience where the moment was right and things were in alignment and the unexpected happened, the unanticipated unguarded moment.  They did not happen but they happened a little to everyone at one point probably.  He did not know it had ever happened to her an unguarded moment like that.  If it had not then she had one coming.  And he would never know, would he?

Well the mind of even a normal person can be an own worst enemy,  unless you counted the UPS driver in his shorts taut around firm buttocks who should that day be delivering the edible bouquet he had sent her.  Ringing her bell, and her signing for it and her robe slipping open slightly in that endearing way.  But she would sign and close the door, and that would be that.  And she would turn and there would be her ex on the couch smoking a cigarette, the smoke curling around his shaved head with the mudflap tattoo of  a centerfold silhouette on his beefy forearm.   The three-way with the masseuse had left all three loopy but satisfied,  and if it did not bother Rod to be thirdsies why should it bother him?  Mike Tool  wondered to himself.

Yes, the imagination took you strange places he thought as he poured himself a second cup of orange juice.  The imagination was itself the only limit to what could happen.  You never knew where things came from when you imagined things, and probably it was that way with everyone.  It was a fevered and trembling world out there where insects hooked up and flew off back to stomach all buzzing wings, and somehwere in Africa a scarred male was running off younger lions and herding his pride together.  An Arab sheik was inspecting pale and terrified stewardesses with the mascara running down their eyes, separating them like heads of lettuce with a riding crop.  This one spoiled, this one—-  over there.  On the microcosmic levels atoms collided and bounced away and formed new combinations.  Well the human mind was a ranch and you had to keep all the horses coralled, but it was inevitable or the law of averages that one would get loose and run wild—-  Or maybe it was chaos theory where any system—–

—–The blaring of the intercom on Level III woke Second-grade Starship Trooper Frank “Wrench” Stevens from this weird dream. 

Whoa!

There must have been a breach of the outer wall of the hull.  He shot from the top bunk and landed on deck with metallic clang of his anti-gravity boots.  The thrusters carried him down the length of the hull to the War Deck where the alien attack drones were firing antimatter missiles at the intergalactic transport.  He saw pilot Tracy Aldebaron at the control struggling to maintain the vector to the Saturnine rings where they could hide from the attacking starfighters in the flow of rocks and dust.  There was a slight sheen of sweat to her upper lip, it was very attractive.  It seemed she was sitting awfully close to Starship Ranger Paul “Chip” Armstrong.  That wasn’t her regular seat, was it?  Why was she sitting there? 

Probably the ship had taken a hit on the starboard side and the auxiliary guidance system had been disabled so that she had to improvise on the manual panel amidships and that was the only seat and so it was just coincidence—-

An antimatter bullet pierced the hull and the sudden decompression tossed him hard against the solar shield deployment system.  He saw his arm was bleeding profusely through the rift in his suit as oxygen escaped from the level.  The concussion had broken the plasticord securing the alien specimen chamber to the wall.  An Andromedan Octo-crab had escaped through a crack was scuttling across the floor toward him with tentacles whipping like chainsaw blades.  Its double mandibles opened to release the excess of red neurotoxin that was secreted when excited.

On the other hand he had thought he had seen glances between them, or a trace of glances if that was the word.  He had not known they even knew one another.  Maybe they had been at Academy at the same time, or had some kind of training together.  Anything was possible in a world where antimatter had been harnessed and gravity turned on its head to power million-ton space barges to distant galaxies. 

Globules of his own blood were floating before his face in the decompressed cabin as the torrent of escaping oxygen tore a larger rift in the delicate foreskin of the inner hull.  The thermodroids of the security system had been released with the accidental activation of the self-destruct timer, and they advanced with lasers down the wall on suction feet while deploying the circular bonesaws on forearm extensions that were their chief offensive weapon.  There was sizzling at his toes and rising sulphuric fumes that blinded him. The glowing atomic acid from the damaged retrothruster was burning through the floors toward the nuclear core.  He could see the red glow of the overheated cooling rods of the reactor through the widening metal gap between his feet. His radiation warning shield was glowing a hot red.

The close confinement of the control modules in the barges had left little room for the crew—- it was all dollars and cents to the designers.  More room for freight the more money each payload—- and the smaller the crew quarters.  So there were co-ed showers and that was where this might have started.  In theory the men and women had separate hours of employment but sometimes if the coils leaked radiation there was need for instant decontamination where the niceties, or proprieties, or whatever you want to call them—– men peeling off their anticontamination gear right alongside female crewmen and don’t tell me that when the showers went on and them pressed together there in that little chamber with the needles of spray hitting them and pressing them together maybe by accident the first time but touching anyway and her raising her arms to scrub her hair of contamination or space lice—–

He smiled to himself as he felt his lungs collapsing with oxygen starvation.  These are crazy thoughts.  And so they were no doubt.  But it probably was not as if it had never happened or couldn’t happen.  Anything was possible.

“Coffee ennobles the man,” waxed the great poet and songwriter Bob Dylan, a modern troubador if ever was.  Spot-on, the warbling Jewish poet laureate of his generation understood the attributes of this black elixir.  It also jumpstarts the process of elimination for those unfortunates who have difficulty with regularity.  Well, it was a cheery thought, anyway,  Rich Dick thought as he brought his cat—- a lynx—- to a boil by stroking it subliminally.  Subliminal massages had been a nattering annoyance since his early days in the laundromat yes he remembered the rough handling of the spin cycle after a bracing second-rinse.  It was at this time he became addicted to bleach which he took straight from the bottle.  It burned going down but did magical things to his kidneys.  And why two, anyway? 

These and other thoughts formed parentheses to his chief and overriding concern:  What is the point of life, and why are we here?  These existential musings often took place in the garage where he had stored the hundreds of defibrillators he had accumulated during a long and varied career of lifesaving.  Lifesavers were his favorite hard candy so it was no accident when you stop and think about it.  But if you stop in the middle of the street you are taking your life into your hands, but why not you rather than a stranger?  Who should you trust?  These and other random thoughts pummeled his imagination as he stroked his cat on the way back into the house.  He was drawn by the wafted aroma of the boiling coffee on the stove.  Unfortunately there was no coffee pot and he was alarmed by the seemingly independent life of the boiling coffee, which he found to be scalding to the touch as it greeted him with its flavormatic tastiness.  He herded the ennobling black brew into a cup and drank deeply, and for a moment he was Bob Dylan himself.  But not the Bob Dylan of the folk period, or even the Bob Dylan who slept with Karen Hamm a minor actress in the sixties, but the Bob Dylan who was booed during the electric period. 

Going electric was an unpopular idea at the time but practical when you think about it, for if one Bob Dylan was a poet laureate then a fleet of electric homunculi could also corner other markets like folk/rock and electric/folk and even the original Bob/Dylan.  All this was thought in the time it took to quaff that first draught of hot coffee, and it was time well spent.  Tired from his musings he resumed stroking the cat with a subliminal massage that pleased both cat and pet owner.  He wondered at the hyphenated-nature of much of modern pop-rock, and acid-jazz.  He thought of music a lot, and had learned to think about it without humming it, or even snapping his feet.  On Fridays a dead cod would suffice and he would hold its jaws and clap them together in time to Edith Piaf or Bobby Blue Bland when Slam Smith was unavailable—– odd names all, which originally had attracted him to that decisive kind of music.  And there was a lot to be learned from the music.  It calmed him and took him to faraway places—- some of which were uninteresting as when it took him to Des Moine, Iowa, or Dry Prong, Louisiana, but an outing to Rhinelander, Wisconsin, was well worth it especially during the sweltering days of summertime when the living is easy. 

Well it was one of those days and he sat and enjoyed the finer things in life—- one of which was a cup of coffee.  To be able to appreciate such small pleasures was a gift, and one which he was better able to unwrap because he was on public assistance and had plenty of time.  So there you have it, a cup of coffee in the morning and the simple pleasures of life, while you and I and such as we are struggle to work and carry on through the mist and confusion.  Wouldn’t we run over his cat if we could?  I think so.

He walked to the trashcan at the curb and dumped out the wastebasket from the kitchen.  A paper sleeve of wet coffee grounds was the last to come out as he shook it.  He looked into the can to see the patterns the grounds had made on the other trash, as was his habit.  He could see them but could not understand what they were saying to him.  What on earth?  It was crumpled yellow papers and when he unfolded one he saw it was a story he had written when he was ten years-old.  It was called Thomas Hargrove and the Great White Shark.  He recalled it warmly as he had been told at the time that it was good.  He started to read.  He wondered where he got the name Thomas Hargrove which was stilted and unnatural.  Not the name, but to wonder where he had gotten the name for someone who was not real almost fifty years ago.  Hm, and he wondered who had thrown this away.  He remembered then that he had thrown it away because he had felt that you should throw everything away that is the imperfect product of your inexperience or youth, because what will be left will be the best and that is what should be remembered.  What was left would be “representative.”   Why should he have forgotten that he himself had thrown it away? 

It brought a smile to his lips as he shook himself from this trivial revery and pushed the paper nearer the bottom of the can compacting the garbage as he went.  At this point he noticed he had three hands.  There was a left and a right, and a third that was both left and right.  The fingers seemed rearranged in a way that seemed to try to balance their lengths somewhere between what a left hand and a right hand should look like if they were combined into one hand.  He held them up and was involved in this comparison.  It made him wonder seriously why he should have three hands at all.  What could be the use of a third hand—- though he was sure it must have its uses.  Why was there then only one thumb, and that in the middle?  An examination of the nail of the thumb revealed those intriguing whorling patterns that look like a sun setting or a moon ascending—-  this was his thought.  Had Thomas Hargrove lost a hand to the white shark and could this then be that hand?  Highly unlikely, he thought with the dry laugh that had become his trademark among the people who shambled in and out of the life behind him.  They only spoke behind his back and they made inscrutable movements he could not see because they were all behind him. 

So it had been a funny and alert life,  aware of whispers and not hearing them and seeing the shadows of indecipherable movement which was not there when he turned quickly.  He had ceased to turn at an early age and instead cultivated the eye in the back of his head.  Between obscuring growths of hair he had refined the facility of seeing the traces of movement and the incipient smiles on their faces, only to find they would finish the movement only in the spaces of the blinks—- which is to say the business of the world was transacted entirely during the little blinks of his eye.  In the blinks everything would change and be in different places, and this was a source of amusement and interest to Thomas Hargrove.  He would look down and there would be the shark with its teeth buried deep in his abdomen as it swallowed him from the legs up.  There was no pain involved and the glassy eyes of the shark reflected back at him his own chinlessness.  Hah, that was like the royal family it was none of them had chins. 

He had felt mutilated from an early age by this chinlessness but had grown into acceptance of no chin and what use was a chin anyway.  There was no practical function that he had ever been able to discover for a chin and the strange looks he thought he received as a result built a certain character that had served him well in difficult times.   This character’s name was Thomas Hargrove.  Where might he have got that name at such an early age?  It now seemed a very odd name, odd in its normality.  It was crazy in its normalness.  What did it mean?  There were coffee grounds now between the teeth of the shark swallowing him up to his waist. 

The trashcan pickup was on Thursdays but he set it out a day in advance.  He did not like to wait until the last moment.  And the last moment was approaching.  He had felt that all his life.  Felt it even when he was a kitten suckling at his mother’s teat in a soft box near the door in the washroom.  He was the smallest of kittens and he had no chin and so often was budged out away from the teat by a stronger one.  He had because of this very weakness been the favorite of the sympathetic young boy named Thomas Hargrove who lived in the house and did not go to school because of a crippling disease which caused him to shake uncontrollably.  Why a kitten at one point and at the next a man emptying a wastebasket into a trashcan? 

It was insoluble mysteries like this which had vexed him most of his life,  this Thomas Hargrove with the wastebasket in his hand studying the coffeegrounds in the bottom of the can.  Chinlessness was not the worst thing that could happen to people.  There were other sorts of calamities that had befallen other and better people, and they had been stronger for it.  Or at least taller and that was the truth.  He was used to being surrounded by the tallest of people, people who struggled with tallness all of their lives.  It had been an inspiration to him.  When a shark began to swallow you the worst was the first insertion of the serrated teeth, but the memory of how others had borne their tallness seemed to uplift him.  He liked to think his own shortness was in fact due only to the loss of his legs deep within the shark.  Masticated, they would have been of little use even if withdrawn. 

Withdrawal was in fact one solution to so many of the pitfalls of life—- and he was thinking of the blinking actions of the blank people behind him.   He believed they lived on the blank part of the paper on which he had written his story at age ten.  So the world was divided into a world of characters on the one side and blankness on the other.  And life was an endless navigation between these two worlds with the object of trying not to get sliced on the edge—- in other words a paper cut.  They killed more people these papercuts than many suspected,  actually more than mosquitos and certainly more than sharks.  Hah.  These were empty and idle thoughts and certainly not the subjects that should concern a grown man nor even a young boy.  He left it at that.