art by Mattthew Skenandore
self portrait by Owen Kaelin
An Audible Palace
by Owen Kaelin
When I was a boy, I was not musically hospitable.
Those songs never stayed for long. They’d plant their impressions in me and then they’d move on, dragging their obedient echoes behind them. I didn’t much care: By the time they’d mastered the distant mountains, I’d forgotten I’d known them. A good many things have lost their history in those mountains.
Most things I would never have heard from again, but songs are peculiar in that they’ll bend back again and return to you whenever they want, finding and tracing their old path as easily as a simple thought. Now that I know this, I expect every one of them to return to me, in time.
I do not know why they return, but as I am not averse to mysteries, I do not let this concern me. These songs will do as they like.
Just yesterday, I watched another one cross my rug into my apartment. I could hear it in my kitchen, fishing inside my refrigerator. I did not like this song. Some are less agreeable than others, but like any orphanage: I must make room for these songs when they come.
During the time since they left me, I managed to satisfy the songs’ absence with other songs, chosen more carefully for their appreciation of me. I’ve found these new songs to be useful. As they journey my passages they apply agreeable coats to all these soft, vulnerable walls.
When I was in art school, I painted this music. We all did.
When we painted, we were possessed.
We loved how effortlessly the elements could converge, our image-families learning new identities off the wild tongues of music. Still, we never quite appreciated the magic, this stark simplicity of casting music upon our canvases, the encouragement of those eager, intrigued canvases urging us in. Any notion of simplicity we might ever have discerned from our activity was lost always and inevitably by the fantasies which elaborated so quickly for us, from us. With the motions set in: all the world became a mundane blur behind inadequate windows.
Once the music had been placed, we promptly began working it down into careful vanities. This was the most fun for us, and in this a secret genie came into play: it was in how the paintings managed, against so many difficult factors, to come into being . . . it was in the way that they showed how they knew themselves so surely . . . it was in the personalities that these paintings developed, and finally: it was in the way that they spoke to us, the things they said. Alone with our paintings, we could never be bored.
But beauty will always die in us, eventually, even if it is captured young. Earth’s pull is irresistible. One day, one of my cassettes betrayed me. I’d believed in this cassette and its captured music, but time had abraded its sloppy veneer, and this I saw reflected on my canvas in a repulsive kind of carelessness. Immediately I understood this music’s true nature. Its pale artificiality obscured nothing any longer, for all was now clear to me. This music had been lying to me all along.
I shattered the cassette beneath my shoe, picked its pieces and left them in the basket. In the wake I breathed a melancholy but cathartic air. The cassette’s death left me feeling more liberated. By passing the cassette on I had passed on a part of myself that I now realized had always been superfluous. I thought: Now I’ve an opportunity to take command of my own being. From now on: my very form and shape will know the precision of desire.
All this time I remained blissfully forgetful of the old songs. And with such a wealth of new music available for me to appreciate, so much sound to sift through, discover and then change upon canvas: I lived, as did my friends, in a sort of audible palace.
I went on painting my songs, and the songs flourished into versatile creativities. Each of my new paintings met each of my friends’ new paintings, fostering conversation. All these works composed a community, speaking tongues of notes and verse.
Our palace became magnificently changeable.
The webby networks we generated confounded our bodies with each step we took. Every day we’d feed those snares with joy, then roll upon the floor among them, shouting: “Idea ! Idea!”, the snares biting. Then we’d rush for our sketchpad and pencils, our ballpoint pens.
In our carelessness toward everything but musical impression, our palace grew ever more cluttered. Our floors were interlocking collages. Litter migrated from one room to another and in each room we welcomed its contribution. If no sketchpad happened to be local to us at the moment of insight, we’d grab a scrap of paper from the floor and, implement in hand – pencil, pen or brush – render our education religiously.
Our paintings flourished with such fervor that their colors often spread to our clothes , our floors , our walls which we urged gradually into brilliant murals. Our affected clothes became statements, expressing for us the very sentences that only our colors could be made to say.
When our landlady finally visited one day, she was not appreciative of what she observed. Her reaction was not expected. Our music had driven us mad.
In the little room where I have them, now, stored altogether, I’ve been reviewing my canvases.
To this day I’m not entirely certain what brought me to stop producing them. I do remember that once we left our palace: a substantial loss of energy followed. At the same time, I felt strangely and very suddenly detached from my music. That familiar eagerness, my need for more and more sound, for musical input, had abandoned me. Those paintings which were incomplete remained so. I stretched new canvases, but I could not make them fertile.
When my desire for music finally returned to me: I found that instead of revitalizing me, it promptly completed my impotence. I could no longer paint. Eventually I had to accept that I would never regain the energy, the drive, the ability to create. And today — as then — no matter what music I listen to, no matter what it stirs in me and how it goes about in its stirring: the music’s energy will not transfer itself to me, it will not lead me to my canvas , my easel , my paints.
There are many sorts of deaths, and one can never be certain how any one of them has or will or can come to be formed; or wherefrom, in fact, it has been or will be driven; or how such a death will initially come to be birthed within us. Perhaps the seeds of all these assortments of death lie slumbering in our flesh from a point very early in our development, waiting only to be awoken.
Those forgotten songs come more frequently, these days.
Just today I collect another. Once inside my home, this song proceeds to examine itself in all my various mirrors, and suddenly I can remember an awful lot of things.
These are neither good nor bad memories; they’re merely parts of my life that’ve by now become unimportant. Despite my acute examination, I have yet to discern from this song — from any of them, truly — a reason for the return.
I suppose that the simple fact that I’m here in this room, so miserably reviewing my collection, all the music I ever loved, all the music that moved me into painting after painting, and all the music that came afterward and still moves me although not to painting . . . that this is a demonstration of something critical. Logic and reason will tell me that my being here is the result of a succession of situations and motives, therefore an inevitability.
And just so, it has always been inevitable that I do as I do now, which is to take every record and every disc of mine and break it between my hands, to empty from its case a beloved cassette and shatter it with the nearest strong object, all the while softening the damage with my tears . . . this was inevitable: my floor managing a collage that spreads.
Today, the songs fill me like hundreds of Daniel Boones.
Had I commanded something like a floodgate for them, something like a dam, I could say that I’ve opened that floodgate wide, or shattered that dam. I cannot stop them. They get along brilliantly with one another, singing and shouting, laughing. They’re up to something large, they appear to be forging some secret agenda. They’re excited.
Each new settler is welcomed to the colony with loud enthusiasm. The residents throw a party for every newcomer, never concerned with the messes they produce. The overflow leaves on its own by drains, joins water and crawls miserably from my eyes.
Author's Commentary
As
do all my works, An
Audible Palace attempts to
give bodies to ghosts, to explain ephemeral notion that I find
difficulty grasping and certainly cannot nearly explain. They are odd
ghosts, ones that I suspect many people are haunted by but are afraid
of mentioning. I want to free them, for reasons probably too
complicated to mention here. But to be sadly blunt: the exercise in
trying to do so is one that people generally do not understand, and
often find uncomfortable.
I remember hearing/reading a writer, when interviewed, stating that she never writes down ideas, because ideas that you don’t end up remembering were probably not worth remembering in the first place. I found this an extraordinary contention, because the ideas that slip away are usually the best ideas of all! It is the idea of the ephemeral, of the notion that does not normally grip you... those, to me, are the interesting ones. I like the things you find inbetween the major stuff, in the interstices... the minutia. These things intrigue me much more than the “big themes”.
Anyhow: typically, the strategy for giving form to these odd ghosts involves two literary qualities that are more than generally frowned upon by editors and critics, if not outright despised: introspection and direct psychology. It is this combination, I suspect, that often makes my work eminently distasteful to editors.
The introspection of my work is a nature of necessity, the psychology a nature of obsession. It is simply how I do things and it is very simply all that I can do.
I do not worry about the prejudices, because if I did then I would not be able to write. Ultimately, all I hope for is what I want from any book: which is that the material that I write makes a reader — perhaps any reader — both feel something and think something that twists their thoughts into something remarkably new.
I remember hearing/reading a writer, when interviewed, stating that she never writes down ideas, because ideas that you don’t end up remembering were probably not worth remembering in the first place. I found this an extraordinary contention, because the ideas that slip away are usually the best ideas of all! It is the idea of the ephemeral, of the notion that does not normally grip you... those, to me, are the interesting ones. I like the things you find inbetween the major stuff, in the interstices... the minutia. These things intrigue me much more than the “big themes”.
Anyhow: typically, the strategy for giving form to these odd ghosts involves two literary qualities that are more than generally frowned upon by editors and critics, if not outright despised: introspection and direct psychology. It is this combination, I suspect, that often makes my work eminently distasteful to editors.
The introspection of my work is a nature of necessity, the psychology a nature of obsession. It is simply how I do things and it is very simply all that I can do.
I do not worry about the prejudices, because if I did then I would not be able to write. Ultimately, all I hope for is what I want from any book: which is that the material that I write makes a reader — perhaps any reader — both feel something and think something that twists their thoughts into something remarkably new.
About Owen Kaelin
Owen Kaelin has been living between the
Boston area and the wilds of northeast Connecticut. He currently edits the
literary webjournal Gone Lawn.
Boston area and the wilds of northeast Connecticut. He currently edits the
literary webjournal Gone Lawn.
2 Stories by Jess Tibbals Maggi
The Beast
The Beast
booms through the ocean. It’s a fat—size of the continental U.S.—mass of trash. It swirls red like a Target bag, orange like Tide detergent, green like Mountain Dew and overwhelms the original great blue. Its plastic body parts outweigh ocean life seven to one. Its solid, water-edged voice—hysterical and reverberating out of each piece of trash—makes the thick salty water vibrate, forcing the fish to cover their ears.
*
Evelyn,
stark naked, a mirror, five blinding round bulbs shining above. “I fucking hate myself.” Her eyes are bleak, charcoal tracing their edges. She grabs her side, just above her hip bone, her love handle, grips it hard with her fingers—it’s barely a handful—but she pulls and tugs, looking from every glaring angle and then lets go, trying to smooth it off of her. She turns and turns to see each angle of her belly and ass using a second handheld mirror. She imagines taking a pair of sharp, hair cutting scissors and carving away at herself. “So fucking fat ohmygod I’m disgusting.” She laughs, takes a deep breath and begins.
**
The Captain
emerges onto the deck of a small ship in the center of the Pacific Ocean. Almost at once his calm eyes cloud over, “What in the rotting hell is this?”
A young man responds: “We don’t know, Captain, appears to be something with the Central Pacific Gyre, like all the world’s trash is slowly moving along the currents to end up here in this one place, just swirlin’ in the ocean for years … we came up on it at about three hundred hours, didn’t even notice until we were maybe one hundred and fifty yards inside it—thought about backtrackin’ Esperanza out to where the ocean is clear again—but, man, we just couldn’t take our eyes off it. Me and Noah been watchin’ it all night. We were scared of running Esperanza right straight into something solid, but soupiness seems to be the main thing, though we did see a whole god damn mobile home trailer go by just as the sun came up.”
The Captain is silent, staring out into the enormity, his cracked knuckles gripping the edge of the boat. “Unfathomable.” The ocean had never looked so vast—so monstrous—to the Captain before. The infinite blue, so blue it was sometimes nothing but haze had never scared him. Interminable rides in his father’s eighteen wheeler across Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa had prepared him for the cosmic ocean which had prepared him for the time he stood at one end of the Atacama Dessert in Chile and saw it stretch six hundred sandy miles out of sight. But this, this was not natural …
***
Evelyn,
letting the air out of her lungs in a deep sigh, reaches forward, never taking her eyes off her eyes, and picks up Neutrogena Moist and Healthy Moisturizer, massaging it into her young, pale skin; next, Avon Healthy Glow foundation, then loose powder, and spray to set loose powder, then eye liner, eye shadow and mascara, then Big Sexy Hair full body gel, root lifter, blow drying and forcing that cowlick to lay flat, then straightening serum for her bangs, then teasing, then a pink hair clip in dark hair and finally her hands drop.
****
The Beast
starts to ramble as the sun comes up, the sun and its four billion year old existence, trying perpetually to break him apart, working to photodegrade his organs. It sets him going. It really gets each piece of his disembodiment in a tizzy and then they start to scream:
“Yoplait lids save lives!” “Eco-shaped bottle: less plastic, less impact!”
“Panty liners, first ever with wings!”
Voices in all languages. Individually they are not much, just good-for-nothing discards, angry they’ve been cast out. But together, they—the beast—are hungry to grow. They control these waters.
The Beast reaches out with one tentacle, one plasticy finger—the white ring from a two liter of Coca-Cola—and begins to caress a baby sea turtle, coaxing it to play. Slowly the finger pulls the little turtle in. It wraps itself around the pliable young shell and as the little fins flap and push against the water, the plastic ring finger settles down to wait for the turtle to grow. Over the course of fifty years, maybe, that shell will mold itself inside the small ring of plastic, deformed until the turtle’s life is squeezed out.
*****
Evelyn
fills a small Wal-E themed plastic bowl with water and puts it inside of a dog cage. She sinks to her bedroom floor with a faint smile gathering a small white dog in her arms. Stroking its head she murmurs, “Esperanza, you’re beautiful. Yes. Tomorrow we’ll go shopping. We’ll get you a new squeak toy. You want anything else, girl? We’ll get some more piddle pads and see if we can find a pink argyle sweater since you ripped up your old one.” But even as Evelyn’s hand continues stroking, the dog starts to struggle, “be a good girl and sit still. Esperanza!” She wiggles free, yipping and jumping and playing on and off Evelyn’s lap. Evelyn picks the dog up, “you just won’t listen, will you?” She kisses the fluffy black head and pushes her gently into a cage. “Mommy will be home after work.”
She revs the engine of her 2001 Camry and pulls onto the busy street. A red light stops her and she paws the ground impatiently. Laughing teenagers cross in front of her on skateboards, one of them turns, sticking out a long red tongue. “God, just get the fuck out of my way.” The light changes and she shoots forward only to be stopped again. She sips a Rock Star and checks the mirror even though she knows her face has not changed.
Outside the sun is just beginning to set, but inside, the bar is made of darkness.
******
The Captain
is left standing alone on the deck. His small blue eyes, so used to seeing that which is infinitely intricate but without detail, try to remain unfocused, the way that they usually view the ocean, allowing him to see the big picture. But all of this, all of the little tiny pieces of trash, won’t let the Captain’s eyes rest.
The ocean. Its currents and colors. The sky above and the universe below. The reefs, the eyes of the fish, the zooplankton and the krill. The trash. No, not real. With his eyes closed the Captain can tell by the motion of the boat what the water looks like. It is the calm of early October when winter choppiness has barely arrived. Only small and intermittently does the water shine white with breaking waves. It rocks like the tire swing in his grandmother’s yard fifty years before, like the never ending-ness of a place that is home.
He opens his eyes again. Not real, not real. A black-footed albatross descends and the Captain sees it land on a white piece of debris, a thick looking plastic that might have been used to wrap circular hay bales. The Captain’s hands grip the railing tighter, get away from here! But the albatross hops around and begins pecking. It tears off a long strip of white plastic, looking at the Captain and then across the water before flying away. The albatross, the bird of the ocean. The ocean, its currents and colors, the albatross and the trash.
The Captain straightens, his face grim as he turns and disappears inside. His voice reaches out into the air: “Turn around and back track out to exactly where this mess begins. We are going to circumnavigate it, find out just how big a thing it is that we’re dealing with. That’s the first step. That’s what we need to know before we can conjecture how to clean this abomination up. When we get to the edge, start west. Noah, you keep aware of how far we’ve traveled once we start.”
The Captain continues into his private quarters, his steps firm on the oscillating floor. He kneels down next to his desk, opens a drawer and takes out a leather-bound notebook and pencil. Without pausing he passes the men and returns to the deck.
*******
Evelyn
hangs up her jacket in the back room and kisses the DJ hello before sliding in next to the other Thursday night bartender. A sticky warm feeling surrounds her as she leans against the bar on her forearms, drawing low-cut attention from a few early customers.
“Gentlemen.”
“Miss Evie.”
“Today was hell. Who’s gonna buy me a shot?”
Five Jager Bombs and a ten buck tip. Evelyn’s eyes shine as she pulls the money from the bar as soon as the men aren’t looking.
As the sun goes down the bar fills up. Fifteen people pour in together and Evelyn takes a deep breath. A pitcher of Blue light with two cups, a rum and coke, a Skinny Bitch, three Blue Moons, three PBR tall boys, two Hurricanes, two vodka and Redbulls, a Yuengling and fifteen shots of tequila.
The sticky warm feeling grows as the sweat trickles across Evelyn’s lower back. A glass of beer is dropped as pool balls break across the room. At the bar a boy with steady eyes asks a girl who he doesn’t know if he can stick his hand down her pants and touch her and she laughs. Coolly, she lets him. The chalk board hung way above the bar reads: Buy the bitch a shot. As Evelyn swirls back and forth between the cash register and the bar, the tap, the cooler and the liquor, her mantra—tips, tips, tips—manifests.
********
The Beast
orgasms as the people who wander past and in and out of Evelyn’s bar let their lighters, plastic cups, condoms and wrappers from roses purchased on the street fall to the ground and die. In this is the fruition of his dreams.
*********
The Captain
strikes a stiff pose at the bow of the boat. There is camera equipment available but he can see more clearly through the work of his own hand—it leaves room for the feeling of a place, for this feeling the Captain has that he has returned to his childhood neighborhood to find it demolished by war, the remaining inhabitants starving, dumb and deformed, the whole place filled with rubble.
First he makes a rough sketch, letting all of his anger come out in thick hard strokes. He starts with a clear and beautiful ocean, slowly adding what must have been there first, stuff from the boats—fishing line, nets, traps and liners that continue to catch fish long after the fishermen are gone.
He continues his documentation for hours without moving, making sketches of every floating fish next to every nondescript plastic bag, every bird that lands and has its dinner, every indiscernible conglomeration of degeneration and then imagining what is happening under the surface where the sunlight doesn’t use its power to breakdown the plastic into microscopic polymers.
When the sun begins to set he puts the notebook under his arm. A report is ready and waiting: “We don’t seem to have made much headway, Captain. Assuming the gyre is going to give the garbage a loosely circular shape, we’ve traveled about four hundred miles and haven’t really even turned one hard degree. This thing is big, Captain. Unfathomable.”
**********
Evelyn
wipes grime from the bar and the back tables. The show has ended. She pauses and stares at the wall. Something.
No. Nothing.
When she reaches home, Esperanza is yipping and doing three-sixties in the cage as Evelyn drops her purse to the floor and lets her body crumple onto her bed.
***********
The Captain,
notebook under arm, returns to his room, underneath, where he can’t see out. His right hand moves to his face and up into his white hair, gripping hard, the notebook falls to the floor. He sees his grandmother’s tire swing in front of him, the always steady, always rocking of his life.
He falls to his knees. He does not move, as Evelyn sleeps, as the Beast breathes.
booms through the ocean. It’s a fat—size of the continental U.S.—mass of trash. It swirls red like a Target bag, orange like Tide detergent, green like Mountain Dew and overwhelms the original great blue. Its plastic body parts outweigh ocean life seven to one. Its solid, water-edged voice—hysterical and reverberating out of each piece of trash—makes the thick salty water vibrate, forcing the fish to cover their ears.
*
Evelyn,
stark naked, a mirror, five blinding round bulbs shining above. “I fucking hate myself.” Her eyes are bleak, charcoal tracing their edges. She grabs her side, just above her hip bone, her love handle, grips it hard with her fingers—it’s barely a handful—but she pulls and tugs, looking from every glaring angle and then lets go, trying to smooth it off of her. She turns and turns to see each angle of her belly and ass using a second handheld mirror. She imagines taking a pair of sharp, hair cutting scissors and carving away at herself. “So fucking fat ohmygod I’m disgusting.” She laughs, takes a deep breath and begins.
**
The Captain
emerges onto the deck of a small ship in the center of the Pacific Ocean. Almost at once his calm eyes cloud over, “What in the rotting hell is this?”
A young man responds: “We don’t know, Captain, appears to be something with the Central Pacific Gyre, like all the world’s trash is slowly moving along the currents to end up here in this one place, just swirlin’ in the ocean for years … we came up on it at about three hundred hours, didn’t even notice until we were maybe one hundred and fifty yards inside it—thought about backtrackin’ Esperanza out to where the ocean is clear again—but, man, we just couldn’t take our eyes off it. Me and Noah been watchin’ it all night. We were scared of running Esperanza right straight into something solid, but soupiness seems to be the main thing, though we did see a whole god damn mobile home trailer go by just as the sun came up.”
The Captain is silent, staring out into the enormity, his cracked knuckles gripping the edge of the boat. “Unfathomable.” The ocean had never looked so vast—so monstrous—to the Captain before. The infinite blue, so blue it was sometimes nothing but haze had never scared him. Interminable rides in his father’s eighteen wheeler across Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa had prepared him for the cosmic ocean which had prepared him for the time he stood at one end of the Atacama Dessert in Chile and saw it stretch six hundred sandy miles out of sight. But this, this was not natural …
***
Evelyn,
letting the air out of her lungs in a deep sigh, reaches forward, never taking her eyes off her eyes, and picks up Neutrogena Moist and Healthy Moisturizer, massaging it into her young, pale skin; next, Avon Healthy Glow foundation, then loose powder, and spray to set loose powder, then eye liner, eye shadow and mascara, then Big Sexy Hair full body gel, root lifter, blow drying and forcing that cowlick to lay flat, then straightening serum for her bangs, then teasing, then a pink hair clip in dark hair and finally her hands drop.
****
The Beast
starts to ramble as the sun comes up, the sun and its four billion year old existence, trying perpetually to break him apart, working to photodegrade his organs. It sets him going. It really gets each piece of his disembodiment in a tizzy and then they start to scream:
“Yoplait lids save lives!” “Eco-shaped bottle: less plastic, less impact!”
“Panty liners, first ever with wings!”
Voices in all languages. Individually they are not much, just good-for-nothing discards, angry they’ve been cast out. But together, they—the beast—are hungry to grow. They control these waters.
The Beast reaches out with one tentacle, one plasticy finger—the white ring from a two liter of Coca-Cola—and begins to caress a baby sea turtle, coaxing it to play. Slowly the finger pulls the little turtle in. It wraps itself around the pliable young shell and as the little fins flap and push against the water, the plastic ring finger settles down to wait for the turtle to grow. Over the course of fifty years, maybe, that shell will mold itself inside the small ring of plastic, deformed until the turtle’s life is squeezed out.
*****
Evelyn
fills a small Wal-E themed plastic bowl with water and puts it inside of a dog cage. She sinks to her bedroom floor with a faint smile gathering a small white dog in her arms. Stroking its head she murmurs, “Esperanza, you’re beautiful. Yes. Tomorrow we’ll go shopping. We’ll get you a new squeak toy. You want anything else, girl? We’ll get some more piddle pads and see if we can find a pink argyle sweater since you ripped up your old one.” But even as Evelyn’s hand continues stroking, the dog starts to struggle, “be a good girl and sit still. Esperanza!” She wiggles free, yipping and jumping and playing on and off Evelyn’s lap. Evelyn picks the dog up, “you just won’t listen, will you?” She kisses the fluffy black head and pushes her gently into a cage. “Mommy will be home after work.”
She revs the engine of her 2001 Camry and pulls onto the busy street. A red light stops her and she paws the ground impatiently. Laughing teenagers cross in front of her on skateboards, one of them turns, sticking out a long red tongue. “God, just get the fuck out of my way.” The light changes and she shoots forward only to be stopped again. She sips a Rock Star and checks the mirror even though she knows her face has not changed.
Outside the sun is just beginning to set, but inside, the bar is made of darkness.
******
The Captain
is left standing alone on the deck. His small blue eyes, so used to seeing that which is infinitely intricate but without detail, try to remain unfocused, the way that they usually view the ocean, allowing him to see the big picture. But all of this, all of the little tiny pieces of trash, won’t let the Captain’s eyes rest.
The ocean. Its currents and colors. The sky above and the universe below. The reefs, the eyes of the fish, the zooplankton and the krill. The trash. No, not real. With his eyes closed the Captain can tell by the motion of the boat what the water looks like. It is the calm of early October when winter choppiness has barely arrived. Only small and intermittently does the water shine white with breaking waves. It rocks like the tire swing in his grandmother’s yard fifty years before, like the never ending-ness of a place that is home.
He opens his eyes again. Not real, not real. A black-footed albatross descends and the Captain sees it land on a white piece of debris, a thick looking plastic that might have been used to wrap circular hay bales. The Captain’s hands grip the railing tighter, get away from here! But the albatross hops around and begins pecking. It tears off a long strip of white plastic, looking at the Captain and then across the water before flying away. The albatross, the bird of the ocean. The ocean, its currents and colors, the albatross and the trash.
The Captain straightens, his face grim as he turns and disappears inside. His voice reaches out into the air: “Turn around and back track out to exactly where this mess begins. We are going to circumnavigate it, find out just how big a thing it is that we’re dealing with. That’s the first step. That’s what we need to know before we can conjecture how to clean this abomination up. When we get to the edge, start west. Noah, you keep aware of how far we’ve traveled once we start.”
The Captain continues into his private quarters, his steps firm on the oscillating floor. He kneels down next to his desk, opens a drawer and takes out a leather-bound notebook and pencil. Without pausing he passes the men and returns to the deck.
*******
Evelyn
hangs up her jacket in the back room and kisses the DJ hello before sliding in next to the other Thursday night bartender. A sticky warm feeling surrounds her as she leans against the bar on her forearms, drawing low-cut attention from a few early customers.
“Gentlemen.”
“Miss Evie.”
“Today was hell. Who’s gonna buy me a shot?”
Five Jager Bombs and a ten buck tip. Evelyn’s eyes shine as she pulls the money from the bar as soon as the men aren’t looking.
As the sun goes down the bar fills up. Fifteen people pour in together and Evelyn takes a deep breath. A pitcher of Blue light with two cups, a rum and coke, a Skinny Bitch, three Blue Moons, three PBR tall boys, two Hurricanes, two vodka and Redbulls, a Yuengling and fifteen shots of tequila.
The sticky warm feeling grows as the sweat trickles across Evelyn’s lower back. A glass of beer is dropped as pool balls break across the room. At the bar a boy with steady eyes asks a girl who he doesn’t know if he can stick his hand down her pants and touch her and she laughs. Coolly, she lets him. The chalk board hung way above the bar reads: Buy the bitch a shot. As Evelyn swirls back and forth between the cash register and the bar, the tap, the cooler and the liquor, her mantra—tips, tips, tips—manifests.
********
The Beast
orgasms as the people who wander past and in and out of Evelyn’s bar let their lighters, plastic cups, condoms and wrappers from roses purchased on the street fall to the ground and die. In this is the fruition of his dreams.
*********
The Captain
strikes a stiff pose at the bow of the boat. There is camera equipment available but he can see more clearly through the work of his own hand—it leaves room for the feeling of a place, for this feeling the Captain has that he has returned to his childhood neighborhood to find it demolished by war, the remaining inhabitants starving, dumb and deformed, the whole place filled with rubble.
First he makes a rough sketch, letting all of his anger come out in thick hard strokes. He starts with a clear and beautiful ocean, slowly adding what must have been there first, stuff from the boats—fishing line, nets, traps and liners that continue to catch fish long after the fishermen are gone.
He continues his documentation for hours without moving, making sketches of every floating fish next to every nondescript plastic bag, every bird that lands and has its dinner, every indiscernible conglomeration of degeneration and then imagining what is happening under the surface where the sunlight doesn’t use its power to breakdown the plastic into microscopic polymers.
When the sun begins to set he puts the notebook under his arm. A report is ready and waiting: “We don’t seem to have made much headway, Captain. Assuming the gyre is going to give the garbage a loosely circular shape, we’ve traveled about four hundred miles and haven’t really even turned one hard degree. This thing is big, Captain. Unfathomable.”
**********
Evelyn
wipes grime from the bar and the back tables. The show has ended. She pauses and stares at the wall. Something.
No. Nothing.
When she reaches home, Esperanza is yipping and doing three-sixties in the cage as Evelyn drops her purse to the floor and lets her body crumple onto her bed.
***********
The Captain,
notebook under arm, returns to his room, underneath, where he can’t see out. His right hand moves to his face and up into his white hair, gripping hard, the notebook falls to the floor. He sees his grandmother’s tire swing in front of him, the always steady, always rocking of his life.
He falls to his knees. He does not move, as Evelyn sleeps, as the Beast breathes.
Author's Commentary
The Beast is real. What I mean by this is that there is a garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean. There is also one in every other ocean. Various patches are estimated to be as large as Australia. In these patches plastic does outweigh ocean life 7 to 1. However, as far as I know, these patches don’t have consciousness. They also don’t have nearly as much structure as what I gave the Beast. Much of the plastic trash that ends up in the ocean is tiny polymers, barely noticeable to the eye but deadly to ocean life. (greatgarbagepatch.org)
Reading a biology based research paper, however, does not capture many people’s attention. So I gave the Beast consciousness and made the plastic more tangible. Evelyn represents anyone or at least many typical young women. I am a young woman who has lived with and shared life with many other young women and I write her truthfully based on these experiences. Her simple, everyday actions literally feed the Beast as ours do.
Incidentally The Beast turned into the eighth canto of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The present day albatross must be worn by all people who thoughtlessly cause death. In a throw away society people become life in death, like Evelyn, existing but not living, trapped in an obsession with possessions and appearances.
Reading a biology based research paper, however, does not capture many people’s attention. So I gave the Beast consciousness and made the plastic more tangible. Evelyn represents anyone or at least many typical young women. I am a young woman who has lived with and shared life with many other young women and I write her truthfully based on these experiences. Her simple, everyday actions literally feed the Beast as ours do.
Incidentally The Beast turned into the eighth canto of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The present day albatross must be worn by all people who thoughtlessly cause death. In a throw away society people become life in death, like Evelyn, existing but not living, trapped in an obsession with possessions and appearances.
Hide and Seek
A boy and a girl are spinning in circles in a clearing on top of a small mountain. Their arms are slung around the rusted red metal legs of a fire tower and their small bodies gain momentum each time they whoosh past each other. The girl’s long braids whip by and geese honk in the overcast sky above as they circle around and around below. The children are spending their fall day searching for magic. They are working hard to spin straw into gold.
The girl, Beauty, whips herself off the metal bar so that she is spinning free in the clearing. As she flies, she calls out to the boy, Beast, ‘This is how you find magic, we just need to try harder.’ Pulling her spin sharply to a stop she runs to the nearest tree and wraps her arms around it tight. She puts her ear and cheek against the bark and smiles, ‘We need the help of the trees. Please help us find magic, mister tree.’ Seeing the excitement on Beauty’s face, Beast, without saying anything, squeezes his eyes shut and wishes as hard as he can, the way Beauty taught him, that he’ll be able to help her find it. He wishes on the veins in the fall leaves around him, on all the parallel pine needles pointing the way to the solar system, on the seeds in the crab apples at the bottom of the mountain and, just to be safe, he gives his final wish to Mother Mary, like his grandmother taught him to.
Beauty watches him for a few seconds with his eyes squeezed shut before saying, ‘Let’s try again. I’m gonna hide and you come find me.’ Keeping his eyes closed as Beauty moves away, Beast counts fifty slow spins around the metal bar and then stops.
He takes a deep breath and journeys away from the tower toward the edge of the clearing. Before entering the woods he pauses and sends out one final wish to a little green caterpillar crawling along a low hanging branch. Earlier, Beauty had told him, ‘we see everything with our eyes so to see magic we have to be blind! All blind people can see magic.’ So he closes his eyes and stretches his arms out straight to guide him as he walks, wondering with a start if he is supposed to catch the magic in his hands. He gulps, scared that he won’t be strong enough to hold onto it. He moves into the trees slowly at first, making himself aware of the branches and leaves as they touch his body.
Beauty is hidden, lying on her back buried in a pile of fallen leaves not far from the edge of the clearing. The ground is cool beneath her and she pretends she can feel the earthworms wiggle through the layers of dirt, their bodies part of the forest, just like hers. Leaves tickle her chin and she giggles, making everything around her shiver. She imagines Beast moving towards her, his brown eyes squeezed shut and his red hair indiscernible among the autumn leaves as his hands feel past each tree. Silently she calls out to him.
With each step Beast gains confidence. He is almost running now and moving towards a young maple tree. The tree has grown in such a way that its bottom mirrors its top—in addition to the regular branches, growing from the trunk up towards the sky, a foot and a half from the ground, branches sprout and curve downwards before entering the earth.
The tree’s name is Wakan. He is watching the children just as he has watched everything in this forest since time began for him. Wakan is a child also, only ninety-six years old, and because of this he loves to play. He sees Beast’s approach and knows that this is his chance to be a part of the game. He wants to pretend, to imagine, like the children. So he strains, and slowly moves one of his long legs out into Beast’s path.
Wakan is imitating the strange perceptional power of humans, this ability for one thing to be so many different things, for the children to say that they have found magic, for him to say that he helped them find it. To Wakan, the games these children play—the way they brought the rusty fire tower into existence, building it piece by piece as they sat on top of the mountain during the summer before and Beauty described to Beast a fire tower she had seen on top of a mountain far away, the way they built it so that Wakan can only see it when they are present and seeing it in their minds—to Wakan, because he does not know ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ these games are the same as all games of muddled human consciousness.
To Wakan it is the same as the day he watched Beast’s grandmother come to these woods with Beast’s grandfather. Holding her hand he had strode through the brambles with conviction, leading her to a thick maple trunk. With her back hard against Wakan’s neighbor, her cotton skirt and underclothes had been pushed hurriedly off and into the earth. The skin of the maple had scratched deeply into her back. She closed her eyes and bit her lip until it bled. As he pushed his hands into her stomach and then up, smashing her breasts, he said, ‘this is love.’ ‘This is love, this is love, this is’ she said to herself over and over as his rough hands had pulled on her small, soft, roundnesses. The full sun had shined hard onto her face. Orange leaves, fire leaves, still soft in the early fall, brushed against her skin, giving her comfort without knowing that she needed it. She had pretended that the softness of fire leaves was the hand squeezing her breast too hard now and a sloppy, overzealous tongue shoving inside of her gentle mouth now and now the excitement that eluded her of the hardness in front of her, so much harder than the hardness of the tree behind her, as it became a huge angry shape forcing itself where her soft love was dry and confused and wanting to remain closed. When he came, his body had crumpled onto her, his head falling to her shoulder pushing his red hat off his head and to the ground.
Afterwards, as he again grabbed her hand and held tight, leading her away, she had turned quickly to glimpse the sky and the tree. She had reached out, a second before she was too far, and stolen a fire leave.
To Wakan it is also the same as the day that Beast’s grandfather had brought other men here. They came, three of them and a little boy, with a truck bed full of mostly empty Phillips 66 Unique Motor Oil cans and the twelve tires in Hamilton County that were recalled in 1970 from all the new Chevrolet Station Wagons in town. Beast’s father was the little boy and as he was lifted onto the cab of the truck to watch the men unload the cans and tires, making a castle of garbage, his father had said to him, ‘this is our land, son.’ Rippling before him, Beast’s father saw his sun shine down and light up all of his trees and he saw his birds ascending into his blue sky. While he gazed, the oil from the topless cans dripped out and seeped into the layers of dirt, making the earthworms writhe and squirm even harder than normal.
And Wakan is fascinated by all of this. He concentrates now, and angles his leg just right. Beast’s foot catches underneath it as he runs by. He flips forward, and crashes to the ground, landing on his side and rolling down for several feet. His body comes to a halt on a thick blanket of fallen leaves, right next to the unseeable Beauty.
Her giggles break out through the fire leaves and she is screaming. ‘It worked! Did you really keep your eyes closed the whole time? I KNEW YOU COULD DO IT!’
Exploding out of the leaves, she grabs Beast’s hands and asks, ‘how did you find me??’
‘I don’t know … I was running. I just tripped …’ Beast points, ‘on that tree.’
Beauty turns to look and her face relaxes as she gazes at Wakan, ‘it was the magic of the tree that brought you to me.’
Beast is stunned; ‘Magic? Magic is in the trees?’
* * *
The air is so thick with snow flakes that Beauty and Beast cannot see each other’s faces. Beast’s mother had told them not to go far but in the first real snow of the winter they had to go to the mountain because they had to see for themselves what happened to the magic when it froze.
They hike past the crab apple trees at the edge of Beast’s yard and up into the thick forest where the trees are shadows dancing in the snow flakes. Masked into parallels of their original selves, they are half black and half crisp white, moving and changing places. The whole mountain is transformed and the children are so awed that they forget to imagine the fire tower into existence.
But when they finally reach the top, they see that the clearing is not empty. The snow has filled it like a small stage fitted cleanly with a painted set. The children stop at the edge and Beauty knows that the winter magic is strong. She grabs Beasts hand and whispers, ‘do you see the snow flower?’
The snow is falling in a pattern, thicker and deeper in some places, leaving a walk way for Beauty and Beast to trail their feet and their sled through. From the edge where they emerge from the trees to the middle of the clearing they follow a shrinking spiral of shallow snow, edged by deeper walls—like a hedge maze. Coming in on itself, the spiral path rotates and shoots back out again. It leaves the children disoriented as they run, laughing and falling through the slipperiness of the shape, careful always to stay in the lines.
The first snow always makes Wakan giddy. It’s a time of beauty and strangers do not often come. He watches the children follow the design of winter energy, tracing the shapes with his branches. He remembers when Beast’s grandmother had come here, alone, in the winter dusk of the first real snow years after the spring she had married Beast’s grandfather. She had worn a long dark green jacket and a dark blue scarf wound around her hair. She had gone to the edge where the clearing dropped sharply and stood very still looking out across the valley below. Wakan had wondered if she was going to fly off and make time stop for herself, but she had not and had stepped back instead. At the other side of the clearing she reached down with small, bare hands and formed a ball of snow, rolling it cogently in a straight line until it had grown to be two feet in diameter and sat at the edge of the clearing. She made two progressively smaller balls the same way and stacked them up, biggest to smallest. Wakan had been able to see through the darkening sky her sharp and steady eyes. He had seen them reflected in the two dark stones that she placed side by side in the middle of the top circle. ‘An animal?’ he thought, ‘she is making a snow animal!’ A pinecone had been transformed into a sharp mouth, a mouth that could chew through anything, once the snow brought it to life. Beast’s grandmother had added more and more snow, smoothing the edges and shaping long, human like arms onto each side of the middle ball. Finally, a red Miller High Life baseball cap was secured to the head of the snow man. Then she had looked at the creation, taken a deep breath and pushed it all at once so that it went flying over the edge of the mountain, crashing and dying below. Her eyes lost their sharpness after that and she marched calmly out of the clearing and out of the night, without even putting her hands in her pockets.
Wakan had been fascinated with the way she had shaped and created the world. This had been the day that he started growing intentionally, shaping for himself those crazy legs with the sheer effort of his will.
‘We have to try now,’ Beauty says, stopping in the middle of their path. ‘The snow is going to take us home.’ They make their way through the clearing and through the trees to Wakan, a spot where they know the magic is strong. Climbing onto an orange plastic sled with broken handles, Beauty in the front and Beast behind, they grip tightly and aim downwards. ‘I can’t even see my house,’ Beast says.
‘That’s okay. We’re going into the unknown. But you’re imaging the path that will lead us there, right? Okay, good. We have to ask the trees to let us through or we’ll never make it alive. Okay, hold onto me! GO!’
They push off and this time the earth shakes around them; they don’t close their eyes because the snow blinds them, and they don’t fall because they slide and the snow takes their breath away and brings them through the trees and gently home.
Author's Commentary
I wanted to create a character who was a tree. I did not want this tree to be fantastic or unrealistically animated but instead to make him or her only a tree. The nature of a tree, however, includes an incredible amount of life energy. In other words, magic. I wanted to show how the natural energy of the world is and can be perceived as magic, just as it was by the children.
About Jess Tibbals Maggi
Jess Tibbals Maggi is alive and kicking in upstate New York. She spends her time growing food and playing with children.
published May 19 2011
published May 19 2011