Emperor X – Erica Western Teleport
He wakes up, every morning, with the sun in his eyes, the faint flush of a dawning sunburn on his face, sprawled diagonal across his rumpled bedsheets, cellphone alarm bleating, toes tucked, and thinks of her. [Western Teleport.]
Big Hard Excellent Fish – Imperfect List
Adolf Hitler, Mike Gatting, Terry and June, fucking-bastard Thatcher, insincere social climate of mixed origin, overdose, Scouse impersonators, macho dick-head, Bonnie Langford, poll tax, Neighbours, lost keys, phoney friend, the Royal Family, Stock Aitken and Waterman, heartbreaking lying friend, smiling Judas, Myra Hindley, acid rain, stinking rich female in furs, disloyal lover, wife and child beater, drunken abuser, racist, bully, the Sun newspaper, AIDS inventor, Leon Brittan, all nonsense, massive-massive oilslick, loneliness, cancer, hard cold fish, hunger, greed, imperfect list, gut-wrenching disappointment, homeless, evil gossiping fashion bastard, Radio 1, tasteless A&R wanker, Nurse Ratched, the Tory invention of the non-working class, cold turkey, Mr. Jesse Helms, Thatcher coccyx, Hillsborough, weird British judges, depression, apartheid, J. Edgar Hoover, John Lennon’s murder, Hiroshima, anyone’s murder, Vietnam, the breakdown of the NHS, the bomb, Heysel stadium, Police harassment, the death of the rain forest, the Troubles, red-necks, the Clan, rape, imprisonment of innocents, the all-American way, the sending off of Len Shackleton, red sock in the white washing, Nancy’s term, Tienanmen square, Ronnie’s term, sexual harassment, Jimmy Tarbuck, mile long checkout queue, sick baby, Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment, miscarriage. Where were you? [Amazon.]
On the top of Penang Hill, the mountain in the middle of the island, everyone piles out of the cable car. I take my position among the other sightseers along the initial bit of railing and look out over Georgetown. Following the road from the state mosque with my finger, I locate my condo. My apartment faces the other way, out to the sea, so even if my roommates were on the balcony waving I wouldn’t be able to see them.
I hike up my pants and head down the narrow paved path, veering left at random. A sign tells me the canopy walk is closed. An Arabic family asks me to take a picture, and I oblige. The man is in jeans and sunglasses. The child has a Ralph Lauren polo on. The woman is covered head to toe (she wears socks) in thick, flowing black. I can barely see her eyes through the slit. He could get remarried and not have to change any family pictures as long as the new wife was roughly the same height, I think, handing back the camera.
I like to take pictures of signs. Tourists like to take pictures of me. They whiz by on neon green golf carts, video cameras pointed intrusively at me for disconcertingly long periods. Fucking tourists, I think. Then again, I’m up here taking pictures too, aren’t I?
I take a steep path under the canopy, now with planks of wood nailed in front of its entrance, and end up at something called the Nature Lodge. I recognize it as the location of a weekend Drama retreat in high school. Over to the side is where Jacqui found one bar of service if she cocked her head just right. The red-floored space under the rooms is where we first planned an improv group that resulted in one performance during chapel. (In one skit I was only allowed to say the line “Ho ho ho.” I did well to escape expulsion from my conservative religious school.)
When my ankles hurt, I turn and head back. Apparently it is a good time to leave; they pack the cable car until I cannot shift my shoulders. A middle-aged gentleman gives up his seat for an old Chinese man, who initially tries to refuse but ends up taking it. This pleases me.
I take a different road and drive halfway up the mountain to a massive Buddhist temple I saw from the top. As I pull in front, a parking attendant yanks his thumb toward a side path with “more parking” spray painted along the wall. I turn around. I’m not sure how I feel about living in a world where temples are tourist attractions. I drive further up the hill to a giant statue, incense wafting over the landing area. I buy two “wishing ribbons.” One reads: “Booming Business.” It’s for my roommate because he’s starting his own online business soon and excessively Asian things like this are funny to him. The other reads: “Being Coupled & Paired.” It’s for me because I’ve got the biggest, stupidest puppy-dog crush on this girl and sometimes it’s ok to be earnest.
Back at the bottom I find a hawker stall to sit, drink tea and smoke cigs. The man serving coconuts next to my table keeps saying “ping” when shouting drink orders across the 10 or so tables, so I ask him what language it is. “Oh, it’s Chinese.” “Mandarin?” “Yes, yes. Mandarin. How long have you been here?” When I start speaking Malay I give myself away. “Oh, six months.” I wave my hand like it’s no time at all. It’s easier than explaining growing up here off and on and then leaving and then coming back, especially in bilingual conversations.
I walk across the street and into a narrow stair passage flanked on both sides by souvenir shops selling gloriously awful t-shirts and other nicknacks. I’ve been here before, I think. As an elementary kid we’d come here on an outing and Kevin and I had found a small pond with turtles. It had felt like we were the first to ever discover them. We’d sat watching and feeding them green leafy vegetables for hours. I brush a wind-chime absentmindedly and the man in the store says, “Yes? Can I help you? Special price for you!” “Turtles?” I ask. “Up,” he says dismissively, going back to his newspaper before the word is even out of his mouth.
Near the top I find the turtles. They’re grimy, piled on top of each other in the sun. The ‘pond’ is an inch deep, less in parts. It smells. I turn and drive home.
I still don’t understand my childhood, but I’m starting to piece together where it happened.
Summer Camp – Better Off Without You
She had made all those men so alive, hadn’t she? So miserable, true, so aching, true, and breathing with limps, but didn’t the blood march so strong in their channels? They stuttered after her like full hearts on the brink of infidelity, their guts warped by nervous fuzz. They had dressed up for her in their dreams – of this she was aware. In turn, she taught them loneliness of a sidewalk depth, a reality often cloaked – made fair – by the arousal of their billboard joy days and filthy moments rising, like mucky suns. Those men and their lugubrious smiles. The liars of romance with this misbegotten lover. [Pledge Music.]
Iron and Wine – Belated Promise Ring
They lay, heads next to each other, feet apart, on the grimy pavement of the parking lot atop the hill. A dormant crane’s neck points straight up into the sky nearby. It’s dark. They pass the taut line to a kite which sails high above them, invisible beyond the gray night clouds, back and forth. The string vibrates in the wind, whistling. They share a cigarette she had rolled, its embers crisscrossing the string during the switches. I wonder if she likes me as much as I like her, he thinks. She lifts a knee bared by a hole in her jeans. They trade cig for string, hands touching in the air. I’ll never feel as free or unencumbered as this kite does right now, she thinks.
Dear Daniel,
Considering the fact that everyone in Ireland knows everyone else in Ireland, having chatted pleasantly about how very green the color green can be over pints of Guinness, please convey my earnest marriage proposal to Lisa Hannigan.
Much obliged,
Zac
[Passenger.]
Meursault – One Day This’ll All Be Fields
“I’m torn,” Aspin sighed.
“Torn, huh?” quizzed Manila, halfheartedly, as she thumbed through the National Geographic sitting on an angle to the neatly stacked pile beneath it on the plywood table of the cramped waiting room slipping into the corridor that lead to their general practitioner’s office. It wasn’t the most recent edition. It was the one that required nothing of her. No sifting through the months, years, searching for the photograph that met best the magazine’s signature yellow frame. She never found a means to settle her nerves in waiting rooms. It bothered her that the idea existed, was promoted, became normal in buildings across the world. She had yet to meet somebody who felt comfortable in them. “Where?”
“Between.” Across them sat a miserly man, his wrinkled gaze begat the defeat that drowned his posture. His coat-jacket sat on his knees, pressed tightly to his slacks, the right sleeve reaching for the lint-ridden carpet. Aspin’s fists clenched. Released. The mismatched tones of skin on his fists cuddled tightly against tired veins.
“Yes, between what?” Manila was impatient. It wasn’t commonplace for her, Aspin knew, but he knew also that she had never felt comfortable in waiting rooms.
Even he wasn’t sure what he meant. Manila pinched the page of the magazine: her tension on the edges of the photograph skewed the exterior north wall of the Sera monastery in Tibet, it’s surrounding mountain threatening to crumble from the pages onto the slanted tiling of it’s roof. The monks stood unchanged, their expressions warm, their demeanor betraying nothing of the impending destruction around them.
Aspin reached out and felt for her knuckles, his tenderness prising her clenched thumb and forefinger from the red switch of chaos they pinched against. “I’m not sure, my dear. It’s just a strange feeling,” he soothed.
Not a month had passed since he had been rustling through the refrigerator of their apartment early in the morning, searching for something to sate the niggling pull of his stomach, tugging on his insides like a hook through the upper lip of a restless, impatient carp. His thoughts were disjointed, in strains of coupled words, like “unpaid rent” and “broken lock” and ” dirty carpet” and “sleeping woman”. He eased the utensil drawer back into place. His ears prickled at the sound of Manila’s soft snores. Not abrasive, he thought, but more as if she turned from headstrong woman into fidgeting hummingbird as dusk fought for dawn. He fumbled with the bread slat.
Manila rested the magazine on top of the pile. She nuzzled the cuff of Aspin’s collar, his scent lingering on the fabric. “Are you alright, Aspin?” She tended to use his name when she was concerned. A year earlier they had met at the housewarming party of a mutual friend. Ezequiel had introduced them, smugly joking that with Aspin’s light frame and slender expressions they might be best girlfriends.
Aspin grimaced with the ill-timing of Ezequiel’s humor.
Manila, in her casual jeans and open flannelette shirt escorting an unironed singlet, had an ebullient charm to her movements. It was Aspin’s absent-mindedness that had brought them together, speaking briefly early on he had pressed his palm against the bars of an electric heater and, without realising, burned himself. He cursed and nursed quietly his hand against the cool fabric of his shirt. Manila grinned, vanishing, a blur through the hallways that snipped into the kitchen. Returning with a wet tea-towel, she held it against his irritated skin and, still grinning, carried on with the conversation. “I’m okay, Manila,” he assured.
Lips pressed to his sweater, Manila recalled the night a month ago. She had been asleep when she awoke to a tumble, a sound in the kitchen. Reaching instinctively for Aspin, she found only creased bed-sheets, a duvet deflated by the disappearance of its person. Pulling together her nightdress, she wandered into the hallway, lights flicking on as she passed. “Aspin?” she queried against the empty walls.
It was the silence that frightened her. The silence that comes with the nightfall where creatures and persons alike tire and rest.
She heard rattling, a bundling sound like a group of children dashing across the courtyards of their school. Patters of steps, in tandem and out. Aspin had fallen, was seizing. He had collided with the corner of the bench-top, an unseen wound bearing blood along the length of his skull. A soft, high-pitched sound escaped her, foreign to her throat. It was a dash blurred more so than when they first met, when he had seared the skin of his palms and tried tirelessly for nonchalance. It was there, cradling him, pressing her weight against his convulsions, that the silence stood steady, unwavering.
“Mr. Vasquez,” called the young, unruffled receptionist from her desk cluttered with office filings, portable drawers, and a computer running spreadsheets with listed appointments, administrative notes, and Solitaire minimised along the taskbar. It was always at this point of the afternoon that she could feel the wear in her calls, could feel her fingers lagging with each keystroke. “Dr. Avielo will see you now.”
Manila grasped Aspin’s hand in hers, pressed her thumb tightly against the fickle hairs on back of his fingers. [All Creatures Will Make Merry.]
