Prologue:
I am living here because I am not living. Which is another story. Which is also this story.
I move to a city for no reason at all and I think about taking a math class and I start smoking cigarettes which I like because I like smoke, because I like seeing my breath because I like seeing a part of myself go out into the world without me. And I like the feeling of hastening life in a really stupid way. Something certain initiated by meaningless puffing. It's my underachiever's way of being successful. One day I come home from my job as a girl who puts books in alphabetical order on an old man's shelves and there is a glass vase choking on the stems of red roses that are acting polite in purple cellophane- posing on the breakfast table. I feel embarrassed for the roses. I crunch my nose and quickly throw them away to protect them from further confusion. I keep the cellophane for my cellophane collection and later the guy who sent the roses is in a beer commercial and I turn into a mold Popsicle when I speak to him. I don't remember what happened to the vase. I go to my other job as a waitress for fancy wedding parties and lately I don't want to be a mathematician anymore. Instead I want to be the sexy butcher's daughter with all of my guts wailing on the surface of my apron. Instead of smoking cigarettes I want to be a golden tree made of saxophones growing on a man made island sticking out of the center of a laser light dancing water show and... someone is talking to me. A man. I reach in my pocket for a cigarette but I forgot to remember that I forgot them at home. Damn! I mean, Fuck! He likes, the man says, the bloody apron I am wearing and then, ahhh shit! I blush like a damn school age child octopus and swish away scooching dainty white chairs that remind me of tiny little wooden girl trees pretending to be chairs. I push them into cliques of four and eight and twelve. The man swaggers in close, looking for wine glasses-- clear shafts of hope that will later be filled and emptied by dilettantes. I dig out clumps of his personality like handfuls of grass that I shove in my pockets when he isn't looking. I will plant them later. His rhetoric gets under my fingernails. The wedding begins and I peek in at the ceremony through a veil made of white gauze. It separates the serving area from the rest of the wedding and I wonder if the bride purposely placed the gauze there so that someone else would understand how she was feeling that day. I scratch at my elbow and think about her almost new life. The man tells me his name is Jasper and to me it sounds like the name of an old library sunroom stacked with books about the physics of snare drums. Knowing his name bothers me like I am standing alone in an empty attic-- waiting to be fragmented shattered busted and reassembled.
Oh but you ARE obvious, aren't you? he goads and I fidget nervously and giggle like a retarded clown fish flopping in a puddle of lemon butter. He holds me still by the shoulders and I look straight into blue eyes and my tongue lolls out onto the ground like miles of a carpet road. He is lit up from the inside-- not artificially from the outside like most people. When he was eight, he once swallowed an entire string of Christmas lights and they are the cause of the hot lava pouring over his sternum that he politely dabs with a cloth handkerchief bearing his initials because he was raised in the South and they prefer cloth handkerchiefs down there instead of tissue because it is difficult to sew initials into tissue. And they embroider the initials- just because. He asks me if I would like to rob a bank with him later, just the two of us, and his asking breath tickles my neck and I want to say yes but my tongue is dragging on the ground so badly I trip and fall and then when the night is over, he gives me a slip of paper with nothing on it and a kiss on the cheek and when he pulls his lips away only a rough gray stone remains. It tumbles down my cheek. I catch it with the tip of my tongue, a metallic lemon drop and hide it in the cabinetry of my mouth rescuing it from a dangerous fall. He leaves and I say nothing, I just suck on the budding stone, round and jagged tasting like a copper penny – and even though it isn't as good as Christmas tree lights, I swallow it and I grab onto it with my throat. My secret charm. My inside necklace. My starting place.
I decide to move South because it is my understanding that South is where people go when they leave the place where they were at before. It is summer, and because I am unaware of local customs I become completely entangled in miles of Kudzu just like a real southern belle. Green leaves big and flat as placemats twining up and down my body imprinting entire books of the bible in pig Latin on my calves. The Kudzu ties me absentmindedly to a sofa bed. There is only TV and no math books so I agree to marry a Veterinarian who accepts me as I am- Kudzu and all and does not mind that I am all tied up and also knows how to make a lot of really interesting recipes out of nothing but couch cushions and the cat hair shed by his sixteen cats. I cannot swallow his cooking due to the rock still lodged in my throat but still he likes me to try.
One of the cats, who is my main source of information these days, tells me that Jasper is in town for a ballroom dancing convention- only for a few days. The cat recognized him from the blank slip of paper Jasper had given me. I had shown it to her months ago and she picked up a scent. She leads him over to our house and I tell him right away that I love the yellow tuxedo he is wearing and I have never seen one like it before and that's the truth. He tells me he has just had it made along with some new handkerchiefs. He performs some of his best steps and watching him dance makes me ache to be a sinner, a real old fashioned sinner! I tell him this and I want to clap really loud but my hands are tied up so Jasper finds an old rusty electric can opener in the kitchen and uses it to grind away some of the Kudzu, enough to peel my flaccid useless body away from the sofa bed.
He puts me in the wheel chair my husband keeps around for his Great Danes (who often need hip surgery) (because they are such big dogs) and we go to an old hotel called the Claremont that used to house tuberculosis patients and now is used as a cheap strip club. Many people in town believe that it's haunted but we go anyway because they have whiskey and we think that whiskey will start the circulation going in my legs again. We enter the club dapper and loud. I give a crisp solid dollar to a little mushroom of a woman who is swaying like a fat ghost on a mirrored platform. Ha! You don't scare me mushroom ghost! I scream! And Jasper lifts me out of the wheelchair and we roll around on the floor until someone tells us to stop. We drink whiskey with tin cups from a little fountain glowing red in the center of the velvet parlor. The stone in my throat becomes rattled and loose by the hot liquid as it rushes past.
More whiskey and then I feel the stone dislodge and fall tracing a delicate line all the way down my spine cutting me and nestling right into an empty pocket inside my cunt. I hold the stone, still rough, tight between my thighs. Jasper moves in to kiss me and, finding the whiskey has given me my legs again, I run out of the bar before his lips can find me because I am afraid I will swallow another stone. I continue running running running and I make my way, alone, deep into the desert. All of the Kudzu that had been clinging to my body like green alien barnacle children becomes weak, atrophied and drape away like used toilet paper.
This desert is the land of forgetfulness. No one here has to remember to water plants each day. They don't have to remember to mow their lawns each weekend; they don't need to remember to shovel snow out of the driveway. The people of this desert can drift without having to remember any daily business that might not appeal to them on that eternal lazy afternoon. I forget about my life in the south and the cats and the kudzu and my marriage. I deal black jack at the local Casino and talk philosophy with a grisly old Indian named Steve. Steve uses a wheelchair and wears glasses and a big black trash bag instead of normal clothes. I tell him that I too have used a wheelchair and based on that commonality we become a team, a duo, and he brings me over to his reservation for Thanksgiving dinner and we eat cranberry sauce from a can. I meet his grandmother and she asks me about the rock I am carrying around in my cunt which she can sense because she is a geologist and she asks if she can take a look at it. We clear a space on the dining room table and I lay down and spread my legs mirroring the roast turkey sitting next to me. She closes her eyes and presses the tips of her fingers deeply into my bready lower abdomen. After she finishes I sit up and she informs me that the rock is a kind of microchip that transmits signals to an undisclosed recipient. She says that who ever is receiving the signals from the rock, permitting that they can decipher them, would be privy to all of my deepest darkest secrets. I ask her how I can get the rock out. She smiles at me but says nothing and I don't push it and then we all go out for a ride in a hot air balloon that is shaped like a giant can of Bud Light. I try to think about the microchip/rock but the sun is so blinding and gorgeous that i feel like someone is pouring a clear pitcher filled with pink lemonade right into my open eyes. Just the right shade of watermelon pink. Splash, float, sting!
The hot air balloon drops me off on a train running high above a new white city, and I straddle it like a racehorse. I decide it would be beneficial for me to stand on my head for a long time. I am really good at standing on my head. I can do it forever. I want to get that stone out of my cunt. I want my secrets back. I am standing on my head when the The train jolts and I can feel it shiver free. I feel nauseous as it glides upwards making looped s's through my guts. The rock has become bleached white and it is glowing with radio activity and fever and time. It is sending signals in overdrive. Emergency messages: Mission in danger mission in Danger!!
It snags.
When passing the heart valve- my left ventricle sucked it in mistaking it for a giant white blood cell: The captain over all other white blood cell soldiers. Unfortunately, my heart is not always good at discerning white blood cells from radioactive microchip/rocks and I fall over. My blood is in a traffic jam. My eyeballs are horns honking- AWWOOOGUH!! My ears are blowing steam- PFSHHHHHHT! PSHFFFFSSSSSST! The microchip/rock short circuits and explodes- THUMP THUMP THUMP...MUBMUBMUBUHHHH-WHAM!!! My heart bursts like a dead star and the pain feels astonishing and glorious and at the height of my thrill... the world fades. A stain glass window with no sun.
**
Epilogue:
In my last gray moments I see running down the length of the moving train a distinct blur of yellow. I recognize Jasper instantly. He is wearing his yellow tux and easy to distinguish. He runs at me followed by the sixteen southern cats and my veterinarian husband behind him and someone carrying flowers in the distance. A puddle of black oil is spilling across my vision and pooling in my mouth. It prevents speech, it prevents singing, it prevents breathing. Soon the soft comfort of animal fur comes so close to my face and a wet whiskery nose floats into my ear- my ear, a satellite dish transmitting countless inquiries to the universe and receiving the signals back into my dying circuitry. I am full of questions and indecipherable communications- but at the last moment...I hear, feel, become the only fading answer that the cosmic 8 ball can deliver: purrrrrrrr...purrrrrrrr...purrrrrrr...purrrrrrr...purrrrrrrrrrrrr...purrrrrrrr....