Something in My Eye: Stories (4 page)

 

I call my sister from time to time. She says to me:
Verily, verily, verily verily. You know I love you brother, verily.
I can't say it doesn't feel good to hear that once in a while.

 

The last time I saw my parents, they assumed I was dying. Or at least quickly disintegrating. My father, in a rare uproar, planted a
kiss right on my mouth, hard, like he used to do to my mother, how I used to do to you. I never did make it back to see them before they died, which I regret. What was one more terrible kiss, if seeing their son brought them just a little bit of joy?

 

Lately, I've been doing something I call
running by.
I strap on my shoes, I pull on my shorts. I wear no shirt because of the heat, and because I'm not old enough to feel ashamed of my body. I sprint under streetlights, through redneck yards. And though I keep my eyes fixed in front of me, what I'm actually doing is honing my peripheral vision.

 

I wrote this on my mirror in lipstick yesterday, but don't think it applies to me or you or anything, really:
There once was a man who needed affection, badly. He wasn't so tall, a little on the mangy side. Always he walked downtown with his arms spread wide, in the hopes of an embrace. What an asshole; he died a violent death.

 

You know, the only thing keeping me from death is the unsubstantiated feeling that it is worse than life. That was the only issue we ever disagreed on, I think.

 

I love hearing the wind whisper cryptically. This is what it said yesterday:
The price is paid. The price is paid every hour of every day.
I have yet to decode that particular one.

 

While driving, I saw gas prices change before my very eyes. A magic hand pushed four into five. I took slow, deep breaths, pulled over, and got myself into some air conditioning.

 

In a bar, I saw a songwriter sing her haunted guts out. I wrote this on a napkin while listening to her sing:
Human beings are not so cheap.
Then I put a date next to the entry, as if the moment was important. I must have been about eleven or twelve drinks in. Still easily duped, I'm afraid.

 

I shouldn't tell you this; it isn't very flattering. I spotted the Devil on my street, as I was returning home from work. He was easy to recognize. I spoke to him, asked him to turn around. When he finally faced me, he kept his hand in his pocket. I asked to see it, then blushed. I didn't really want to see it. I just hated the idea of him keeping things from me. The next night, he was on the front stairs. I could hear his light, perfect steps padding up to my door. I flung it open, knowing it was he, but I was too late to greet him—he'd gone hunting some other. I unlocked every door, every window. Later on, I heard him sliding dishes in the kitchen while I dreamed. I got out of bed, demanded, begged him to show his hand. Instead, he fooled with himself in his pocket until I went back to sleep. The next morning, I found him dead on my sofa. I picked up his hand. He had nothing to be ashamed of; it was just an ordinary hand. I tell you this only because I want you to know that the Devil is dead.

 

Sometimes I masturbate on my front porch. No one's around, the streets are usually empty, I'm no pervert. Just myself, my loving extension, and the ribald hissing of insects. I would stop, but it's never less than acceptable.

 

I came from a place of no history to a place where history has no place for me. It's my own fault, don't think I don't know that.

 

I was buying trifles one night at the gas station. A clerk asked me whether I'd ever heard a church bell toll. I told her no, feeling violated. Then I left. I was already in my car when I realized that she was probably just making conversation.

 

The man who bolts the cattle informed me that he was quitting. I told him his body was a galaxy, his eyes stars, some real low-down corn-pone to flatter him. I also complimented his detachment when killing. He asked that his last paycheck be sent home.
I nodded and smiled politely, but secretly, I was damning the distance of men.

 

I had a lover here. She was so good-hearted, too, so composed and calculated. One day, she found herself a bird that could talk, then set herself apart from me. Eventually, she lost the will to do anything but listen to the bird. I don't know where she lives now. But I did hear that the bird did not make it through the winter.

 

Not long ago, I took a vacation. I rode the train. Such a pretty, impoverished view I had. The soil recoiling from the broken buildings, the farm machinery all rusted out, the trees transfigured by their kudzu cloaks. Under an overpass, several afflicted but affable persons seated on a sofa enjoyed a cracked conversation. And later: a toilet, alone on a hill, patiently waiting to fulfill a purpose. And then, in a ditch, a man lying face down, his arms splayed in victory. That night, I dreamed what that dead man was thinking:
Wait, wait for me. I'm but an old, outraged thief.

 

I often wake with my face turned to the sneering sun. This might surprise you, but it's usually easy for me to fall back asleep.

 

Some things to remember: Never call a lover while in disguise, never have a little something on the side, never hail from the country, never hail from the city, never hail ever, never move where they don't like you, never look for someone when they're already gone, never keep pretty dresses in your closet, for when you die, your relatives will raid your room and judge you.

 

I have something in my eye; I might as well go ahead and tell you. It's no bigger than a grain of sand, and does not impair my vision. It is aggravating, though. My doctor, may God grill him, suggested a risky procedure, told me that science had finally caught up with my problem. I agreed, signed the papers. I stipulated that if I was
killed, they would have to bring me back to you and lay me by your side. He agreed, but the procedure was unsuccessful. That something was driven further in.

 

If I were ever given money to make a movie, I would get an actor, not tell him anything about the project, then fly him to the moon. I wouldn't pay him, wouldn't feed him any lines, I would just film him thinking.

 

Sadly, I've been driving drunk around town, floating through stop signs, taking generous turns. I reason it this way: either I'll go, or there'll be one less good old boy on the street. But sometimes I think that's too generous to them, and I'm only generous to those who worm their way into my heart. I was the one who wanted the plug pulled on you, after all.

 

You'd think that in my year here, I'd be able, just once, to catch a spider biting me. It's never happened. It's always the sweet patter of little legs, the vanishing act, the welt, the scratch, but never the moment of puncture. How do they do it?

 

I've been writing a number of essays on various subjects. Here's a small sample: In all my various travels through our great land, I have seen an extraordinary variety of dead things along the road. Most recently, I saw a vulture on its back, its claws curled toward the sky while the asphalt cooked him. The world would be a better place if I learned how to be like that vulture. I mean the finished product, the handsome corpse. The sign to the living: it isn't so bad. The end.

 

I can't prove this, but somewhere, here, in this town, outside a bar, there's a man in a bad panama hat and a wrinkled suit dancing with a friend, whose head is crowned with greasy curls. They sway and sway; under the streetlight they sway. The man removes his
panama hat and suddenly releases his friend to the ground. I can't see blood from his head wound, but I can hear it trickling.

 

I had another lover; I'm sorry. She was an artist, in a way. She could have been famous in her time. She offered to draw my face for free.
An old face haunted by nothing,
she said. I told her I would like to live within her, but she told me that she had another. I told her I would be willing to live between her, her and her other. Then she said that loving me had grown her a conscience, and could I please leave her.

 

Here's an unfinished joke: have you ever woken up with your fist missing, only to find it on the end of your wrist again? As I said, it's unfinished.

 

All the cattle low until the final day, the one they can feel coming in their blood. Then they begin to moan. Isn't that terrible?

 

I would love to believe that God is both massive and passive. Did you ever make up your mind about that?

 

I might join the military. Maybe I need someone looking over my shoulder again, hunting me with my permission. I'll become a hardliner, you know, spit in the eye of evil? Carry heads home in a sack?

 

Recently, I peered in the mirror, was surprised to see my smiling face. I decided that it couldn't be my face, that I must have acquired a new one during the night.

 

This is a beautiful story: when my mother died, they measured her brain and found that it had doubled its size. It wasn't even something she wished for; it was just given.

 

There are good woods near my house. They'll be gone next year, but for now, I can walk within them. At night, I walk within them
and look up to the moon. I say,
Hey, you up there, drop a little silver tear down on me.

 

I've been sleeping outside lately. I wake up covered in ants, with moths perched on my eyelids. They adore me out here.

 

You might like this town. There is just so much room for development.

 

My last fortune cookie:
If you don't believe us, raise the blinds.
I didn't eat the cookie.

 

The title of the children's book I am writing is “Where the Flames Reign.”

 

This is me keeping my chin up, by the way.

 

I buy a lot of fancy ties. Not to wear. To run the silk through my fingers, between my legs. A nice tie is a nice tie, as far as I'm concerned.

 

Another lover, he was cold as a fish, but his skin was beautifully blue. He told me his love would change me, would prickle unknown zones. He fell asleep in my car one night and never woke up.

 

If all of history is held within the present, I don't think it's unfair to assume I will be failing the future.

 

I put an ad up for myself, selling my potential. Nothing fancy, just a picture of me in a jacket looking vaguely bored, threateningly curious.

 

It's only you I miss, you know. The people here don't do anything for me.

 

It's not that I don't agree with your decision to leave the world. This is not a judgment. At the same time, I do wish that you had finished the job.

 

I visited a psychologist only once. He tried to get me to remember a time when I was tickled as an altar boy. I told him there was no altar, and I was never a boy. Then I told him that people were meant to live bottled up, rubbed raw. Until the Great Ventilation, of course. On that day, it's our earned right to leak as we ascend.

 

I think I really knew what I was talking about then.

 

I accidentally had an orgasm while watching footage of a dictator being hanged. I hadn't meant to watch it; I'd simply flipped on the news. Oceans away, he swung something through me. To each his own special goneness, I suppose.

 

I received a message from your father today, telling me, perhaps you are already aware, that they plan on sending you on. Life support isn't the bargain it used to be, apparently. After I heard the message, I fell fast asleep. Then I woke suddenly again, and thought with a strange, panicky hope:
I'm going to be happy amid all this soul-robbery, you fuckers. One bright morning, I'll stand above the herd and make my voice heard.
Then I wrote a spiritual I will never sing:

It was then I wished you could carry my body back to the West, where you are. I'd be alive. I'd keep myself alive—I promise—I just want to be carried, that's all.

 

Here are some final recommendations: Always keep to the middle of the road, always stop for the freights, always keep a sharp lookout, always keep a blade in your pants, always wear shoes you can run away in, always write your will before traveling, always thank the buzzards as they carry you off, always leave a little for the next day, always say goodbye with your face already on the other side.

 

I've been getting steadily drunker, and I'm now going to tell you a story: Once, a man and a woman had a conversation on a stone bridge. The river beneath the bridge was green, polluted, and toxic, but the water had some place to go; it ran swiftly through the city on its way to somewhere else. As for the two people, the lady was sickly and pale, and the man was not so sickly or so pale, but one could not say, upon seeing him on the street, “That man is healthy.” Although they had not met before this afternoon, both had ruined their health looking for things that they were unable to find. The woman, whose speech was often interrupted by a raking cough, had lost her child, a boy, who had fallen off this same bridge when he was young, which was many years before. The man, his loss less severe, had dropped his gold ring into the river as he adjusted his tie, crossing the same bridge several weeks before. “What will you do when you find your child?” said the man. “I'll teach him not to disappear,” said the woman. “What will you do if he leaves again?” said the man. “I'll teach myself to disappear,” said the woman. “What will you do when you find your ring?” “I'll return to my life,” said the man. “I'll reunite with everyone I've pushed aside.” “What will you do if it leaves you again?” said the woman. “I'll drag them all along with me,” said the man. Both unsatisfied with their answers, the man and woman tried to impress one another with miraculous visions. “Look,” said the woman, “I see seventeen angels skimming over the water.” “Look,” said the man, “I see a bicycle cycling with no rider upon it.” “Look,” said the woman, turning bashfully to the man, “I see a child sleeping in the river with a ring around his finger.” “My ring is not in the river,” said the man angrily. “Neither
is my child,” said the woman angrily. So the woman went her way, and the man went his way, and only once did they look back to see how the other was getting along. The water beneath the bridge did not show any sign of having known it was the cause of their sorrow; it kept flowing. The man and woman are still alive even today: mad, wretched, and searching.