WARREN BEATH

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.