What's the Worth

June 29, 2012

I can’t stop thinking about Brussels sprouts, of all things. But let me tell you, mystery can spring from the unlikeliest of sources. Brussels sprouts! Last week I pulled into the drive and I dropped my keys, right after pulling them out of the ignition. You know how you sometimes fumble with everyday objects, and then feel like an idiot? One minute you have ahold of your keys, and the next your fingers do a number on you and you drop – no, fling! – for no reason at all I flung my keys over the center console and they dropped down between the console and the passenger seat, sank into that no man’s land that can’t be reached unless you get out of your car and come around from behind. These minor events are so frustrating, when they happen, these small irritations that interrupt the flow of life for just no reason at all. So I get out of the car and go around to the other side and open up the rear passenger door and peer down beneath the front passenger seat and there are my sunken keys. I reach to grab them and felt some sort of unexpected netting. I pulled on the netting and out came one of those bags of Brussels sprouts. And it frightened me. Because they were old. That bag had been there a good while. The sprouts were completely desiccated, like a bag of little shrunken heads. But I was startled too because I can’t tell you the last time I bought Brussels sprouts. Much less a time that I would have bought them, lost them in my car, and then forgotten all about them. I mean, have I lost my mind?

In addition to Brussels sprouts, I’ve been giving some thought to the last time I saw Jonah. We ran into each other downtown last April. I had been shopping for a particular kind of pantyhose. I know nobody wears pantyhose anymore or even calls them that – now they’re hosiery, or tights. But I like this one particular style and color and these days only Weiss Drugstore downtown carries them. And as I walked back to my car there was Jonah, pulling his recumbent bicycle into the parking spot next to mine. Always so healthy! He’d never take a car anywhere he could bike to. We hugged and he told me he liked my galoshes. We’d just had a week of heavy rains and I wore my red rubber boots. I love those boots and I’d wear them more often if I could get away with it but they make quite a statement so I only wear them when there’s a practical excuse. I was pleased that he had noticed them. And as we stared down at my boots we heard a crackling. We looked up and there in one of the grand trees that line Palmer Avenue a bird’s nest crumbled, just disintegrated, from all the rains I suppose, before our very eyes. In the upper branches stood a somewhat startled bird balancing on what bits and pieces remained of its nest while the rest of it fell down through the tree limbs in clumps. A particle landed on my lower lip, like a flake of tobacco. I started to cry. Jonah said, “Don’t worry, he’ll make a new home.” And he’s right, we all do.

Story by Rebecca Beegle

Photo by Eylül Aslan

11:49am

June 15, 2012

Door to Door

I often find myself thinking back to a time when I worked for a summer walking the neighborhoods of Dallas, going door-to-door, asking concerned citizens to support a citywide curbside recycling program both with their signatures and a donation. I was good at the signatures, bad at the donations, and it’s a surprise that I held the job for the whole summer since I was paid based on the donations I received. I say I was bad at donations, which isn’t entirely correct. People gave, but instead of checks, they gave water or lemonade, or a few minutes inside their air-conditioned houses, though these small gifts had nothing to do with my salesmanship and everything to do with my health or what people perceived as my declining health. It was a brutally hot summer and I was required to wear a suit and tie, and I was not in the best shape of my life. Let me just say while not at the heaviest stage of my life, I was not far off it, either.

Most people, then, when they saw me at their door, sweat-stained and red-faced and hard-breathing, they invited me in before I even had a chance to say anything at all. They brought me inside and had me wait in their front hall while they poured me a glass of ice water or tea and judging by these quick glimpses inside these houses, no one in these neighborhoods could afford more than the bare essentials, and most were living just barely within their means, and while I could say that these signs of obvious scraping-by-ness made it difficult for me to really push these people for donations, or that they’re situation made them unwilling to give, the truth of the matter is my colleagues returned with packets full of checks and plainly I was and have always been a poor salesman.

One morning halfway through the summer, I found myself once again sweating in the middle of an elderly gentleman’s hallway. I say elderly. I was a young man in my early twenties, and no doubt he was maybe fifty, or just over, but even still, even now I can’t help but think of him as elderly. He had gone to the kitchen and then had come back with a cold can of beer in each hand. It wasn’t yet ten o’clock. I told him, I’m sorry, but I couldn’t, and he told me to come inside and have a seat, and not to worry since they were both for him. The rules were very clear on this point—not entering a person’s home even if invited, not engaging for lengthy conversations—but I had never been apt at rule-following, and the day ahead of me promised to be a brutal slog through a humid hi-90s day, so I followed him deeper into his house.

His living room was furnished with a patio chaise and two plastic lawnchairs. He took the chaise, laid himself out, took a large pull of one of the beers while he held the other one out. I took it, took a sip, sat uneasily in the plastic chair, unsure of its strength, my weight. He finished his beer in another large swallow and then stood up and padded into his kitchen and came back with two more, which he told me really were both for him, and which he finished before I’d finished my own. So far I hadn’t once mentioned anything about curbside recycling. I hadn’t said much of anything at all, in fact, but he didn’t seem to care and hadn’t said much either.

Half-finished with my beer and feeling increasingly uncomfortable, I was about to excuse myself when he dove into a long, rambling story, the gist of which centered around a six-month stint he pulled in Mexico City, where he’d gone because he had theory about Mexican girls, which took him six months to disprove. Then he told me he had some weed too and that it was upstairs in the attic. He told me that when he was married he would go smoke up there, but now that he wasn’t married, he still couldn’t quite break that habit. I told him that I didn’t smoke weed and he told me, Suit yourself, and stood up and walked out of the room and for reasons I don’t quite remember, I followed him.

The attic was empty of normal attic junk. It had a floor, and there was a small mattress laid out on the floor next to a window. I saw the bed and thought distressing thoughts and was about to back my way back down the attic ladder when he grabbed me by the scruff of my neck, not in a violent or difficult way, and pulled me the rest of the way in, then let go to slap me hard on the back, and then he plopped down on the mattress, pulled a tin box off a windowsill, pulled out papers and a baggie and rolled a joint.

The point to this story, I’ll tell you now, is this: I was waiting.

That was the time in my life when I was always waiting for something to happen.

He lit his joint and took a drag and coughed and took another drag. I waited for him to offer it to me, having decided I’d take it if he did, but he never did. Then he started talking about his ex-wife and how he used to play guitar and about how shitty it was to live in Dallas. He smoked his joint down to a roach and didn’t stop talking, until he started yawning and then he told he was going to take a nap and that it was nice of me to stop by. He laid down on the mattress. I walked back downstairs, grabbed my clip board, and then left.

Story by Manuel Gonzales

Photo by Emily Raw

3:31pm

Filed under: fiction landscape photo lit flash fiction

May 11, 2012

Sex in the Echo

Nobody visits the surface of the earth anymore and this, according to Flicker, whose real name is Elizabeth Watson, and who, when she talks, blends contemporary bubble slang with what she claims is a vintage kind of swearing, is not just a problem but an opportunity. A money-making opportunity.

“Back when I was a kid,” she tells me, “it was badass totally the shitty thing to do, going down to the surface. It was dangerous and exciting.”

But now?

“There’s—I don’t know. It’s lost its hunt,” she says. “It’s legal, now, and regulated. There are those boots you have to wear and they’re ugly and huge and those suits you have to rent that are too expensive, and have you been in one? They smell like sweat and puke and who knows what else. And rappelling sounds like way more fun than it ever is. The whole thing has been drained of all romance. I mean, for a while, they tried billing it as a family place to visit, with museums and tours, but, I mean, even families could tell that shit wasn’t cool.” Then she smiles. “But don’t you worry. I know a way to bring it all back.”

Ten years ago, when she was still Elizabeth Watson, Flicker dropped out of school to open the retro nuclear-winter-themed club, End of Times, which she marketed with the slogan, Go out dancing.

“This friend of mine, this totally vintage found-object artist, had been hauling up band from the surface—mannequins and ceiling fans and coffee machines and goddamn—and creating these shitty towers and intricate miniature mazes with it all, but he had a lot of band left over and I told him about my dance club idea and he gave me some of that extra fuck he had and helped me haul up a bunch of other band. We found this old dentist’s chair and he helped me turn it into a fog fucking machine. Who doesn’t love a fog fucking machine? And we found this shitty beautiful mirror, like a real mirror, but at one point, during fallout maybe, it had fallen onto something, or someone, and had melted and molded into the shape of whatever and then, you know, after a while the whatever had disintegrated, but the mirror was still there. That mirror was shitty amazing. My friend wanted to keep it for himself but I was like, fucking no way, that goddamn is mine. Then, you know, after we got all this shitty contraband up and installed, we opened the club, and we had hired those kids to dress up like Korean refugees for opening night, and people went bananas over it.” She smiles and sighs. “We pulled in so much goddamn acid.”

End of Times, though, closed within the month after Agents raided the space and confiscated the surface contraband.

“People were getting sick, apparently,” she tells me. “I don’t know. I was in that club every night and I’m goddamn fine.”

For a while after she left End of Times, Flicker bounced from one project to another. She helped produce the Living Cube, a giant cube based on the Rubik’s Cube, but using people who had been skin-dyed to match the color squares from the old toy and who were moved around by competing teams. She managed the touring installation, Homeless, for almost a year. But time and time again, no matter what project she began or took control of, she couldn’t stop thinking of the surface.

“I just missed it,” she says. “I mean, I have so many shitty memories from high school of sneaking out of the house and jumping off the platform, back when we rigged up our own chutes, none of this rappelling fuck, and you get down there and everything is so foreign. It’s all shitty and like nothing else.”

So when she first heard about the discovery of the Echo, she knew she’d found her way back to all of that.

“Do you even know what it does, the Echo?” she asks me, and I have to admit to her that, while I’ve read the reports and studies, I do not know what the Echo does. “That’s the whole point, fuck. Nobody knows what it does. People just know what it is.”

In truth, researchers aren’t sure what it is, either, or, rather, what the consequences are of what it is. According to studies, the Echo is an atmospheric disturbance—or more accurately, a clearance—that materializes for ten to fifteen minute intervals. While the surface is rich with various chemical and atmospheric disturbances, what separates the Echo from these other disturbances are its radiation levels, which are lower than radiation levels taken anywhere else on the planet or in the upper atmosphere, including within the Bubble, but even more compelling is the fact that highly-radiated objects passed through the Echo become themselves radiation-clean.

Flicker’s idea, then, as she explained it to me, is to run semi-legal couple tours down to the surface and to the Echo for sex sessions.

Why sex sessions, I ask her.

She laughs. “Sex sells.” Then, “But really people can do whatever the shit they want to in the Echo. I mean. Drink a glass of water or just sit around naked for fifteen minutes and then when it disappears and you’re exposed all you do is wait for it to come back and clean yourself off.”

I wonder aloud if sex in the Echo might be tricky. According to the reports, it’s a small space, for one, and also, ten minutes isn’t very long.

She raises her eyebrows at me and offers a mocking smile. “Really? You think you’ll need more than ten minutes?”