Puck

fiction by Brian Charles Clark

“I’m in heaven,” Orkney sings as he and his little black bag bloom through the door. I’d swear he was gesticulating wildly, but no, it’s just his aura flaring.
I’m smacking cornflakes, sitting stoic as a reader in bed.
“Where ya been? Been specten ya.”
Orkney trips another step into the little yellow room. He grins like a refrigerator door swinging open, waves away my question.
“We’re in the news,” he says.
AWOL, base police, truncheons, court marshal, the Group W bench.
“I’m trying not to jump to conclusions here,” I say. I feel like an old felt hat. Too comfortable to have much backbone. I eye Orkney suspiciously.
He hands me his cache, snicks it on. I click the Morning with WNN bookmark automatically.
“Click on obituaries.”
“Scu me?” But I click anyway.
Flip me. There we are. Our names.
“We were killed in the war.” We were killed in the war? Did I miss something?
“No surviving family,” Orkney summarizes, grinning like the oracle of victory finally proven true. “It’s, like, a glitch.”
“We’re dead?” Now I feel like a wet felt hat. My cornflakes have gone to sag.
“We’re dead!” I can see Orkney considers this an improvement. “Free at last, free at last. Thank God—”
“Yeah, yeah, but what do we do now?”
“Anything we want, you moron!”
“Drink wine. Smoke cigarettes.”
“Crap that. Smoke more of the ally,” he says, reaching into his black bag.
Whatever it is, it looks like a big green dildo. But it smells like a woman. Wildness, wilderness. There is nothing more flammable than wildness.
“Would I be a necrophiliac if I managed to get laid today?”
Orkney considers this for a moment.
“Absolutely. But we have more important adventures ahead of us.”
“Oh gawd, what now? Start a revolution?”
“No,” he says, his Bic flickering. He looks me in the eye. “Start a hallucination.”

* * *

We take the Greyhound bus to the nuclear war. It’s one of those tactical affairs. Orkney has on his panties, holds his can of cool beer. We’re all Americans on this bus, and it’s Tuesday. We’re headed south. I think I’m going to die.
Orkney turns to me, takes my spidery hand. His eyes are islands, a blue three miles deep. I melt down into the bus seat. Nuclear winter, mass extinction, punctuated equilibrium.
I sit up, dizzy. I grab Orkney’s shoulder and say, “Baby, this is nuts, I’ve had a change of heart. Ork, listen, if we stay on this Greyhound, the internals are gonna get us and force us to buy controlled substances. We’ll be worse off than an MTV edit. We’ll be sequenced right out of existence!”
The stewardess quakes down the aisle of the bus, saying, “Please extinguish all smoking materials. We’ll be exploding soon.”
Orkney grabs me by the arm, yanks me down the aisle, and slamming me out the doors, yells, “Let’s get off this bus!”

* * *

I wake up, shake my head. Something about a theory of silence. Did I just fall off a bus? No. I was pushed.
“This looks like Why-fucking-oming,” Orkney calls back over his shoulder. The wind is blowing through my hair. I’m sitting on the undulating back of our camel. We’re trotting along at a pretty good pace.
“We’re heading north to do us some spelunking. But first—”
“—a word from our sponsors?”
“—you archaic moron, would you look around you?” Orkney gestures expansively.
I look at my lap. I’ve got my jeans on, everything seems in order. No need to worry.
“Let’s stop at this 7-11 and pick up a newspaper and a couple Cokes,” I suggest.
A beautiful man takes our money, smiling like nobody knows, or maybe because he thinks Orkney’s cute. Hands me a pack of Kools, winks. Orthodonture is such an important luxury. Orkney slots the newsdisc.
“My gawd, we’re worming our way into a black hole or something,” Orkney says as he hands me his viewer, clicking at some squirming bits of text.
This time it’s a mining accident. A photograph, a caption with a list of the names of the dead and injured. Heroes, just for one day.
Orkney jams his finger into the viewer. Everything goes dark. The newsdisc goes sailing like rhetoric down an alley.
“Are we famous? Doesn’t anybody realize that we’ve died twice on the same shift? Sorry, I’m cross today.” I swallow my meds with a sip of Coke, grin and bear it.
Orkney sips from a pop can with a grace acquired only after years of lying in bed. AWOL Army test subjects dead. Once in the morning and once in the evening, with meals. I pat his hand. There, there, it’s not the end of the world. Quite yet.
Orkney suddenly looks up, startled, like he’s finally remembered his line.
“Are we dying out?”

* * *

Suddenly, there are interrogatives swarming all over the place.
We stare at each other like the two poles of a blue steel barbell.
Syllables are attacking my face. Big green ones. The kind that inject toxic memes.
“I think it’s time to visit the ally,” Orkney says. The black bag. The envaginated phallus within.
I light a cigarette. “This should help, too.”
I don’t have my sting kit. I feel there are all sorts of problems here. I can’t tell if I’m meant to be alive by being dead, or if I’m still alive because I’ll be dead soon. I may start smoking my fingers.
“Light this.” Orkney, Homo habilis that he is, has fashioned an outsized transport device rolled in a sheaf of very thin Bible paper.
In my lungs I hold the image of a smithy hammering in the smoking cone of a volcano. I flick my Bic. Inspiration occurs. My hands are glowing tongs. I pass the spliff to Orkney. He may well hand it back to me. There’s a dark element here, and I slap at it as if a fly were buzzing around my head.
With aura wraithing, a man approaches. He’s waving urgently. I clutch Orkney’s arm, terrified my wings won’t work, terrified they will.
“The bus is leaving soon,” he yells from ten feet away. “You two’ve got to be on it.”
“The bus to the refrigerator door?”
Orkney swings open the shiny white door in a kitchen painted a yellow that could have been the color of daisies anywhere but in a single room.

* * *

I look up from the fridge, through the kitchen window, and out onto the nuclear war. The urbanscape rises before me like a map of the individual, a ragged blanket of monumental architecture. Rictus sardonicus, I think, we’re all being grinned to death:
Have a nice day committing random acts of kindless beauty.
Orkney follows my gaze out the window. We have some celery and peanut butter.
He cups my hand as he lights my cigarette.
“Do you really need me?”
The reason my back hurts is from too much reading in bed.
“Yeah, it’s still us, ” he tells me as I burrow into his arms. “Forget about what happened in there. None of that matters now. Let’s talk about something else.”
“We’re going to have to leave town. Don’t you think?”
Cameo appearances on a crimetime TV show.
We look like a couple whose clouds are beginning to accumulate.
Stealthen quiet, Orkney inches the window upwards. We climb out, our auras priestly purple cloaks.

* * *

Orkney pulls the covers back up over his head.
“We’re going to catch the bus today,” he whispers. “I just want to snooze a little longer.”
I watch a few advertisements on TV. I wonder how I’d look with blue contact lenses. Orkney doesn’t give a twit about white noise, but he makes a decent cup of coffee. Why not now? Why do I have to get up and make the coffee? Because he carries his penis around like an eggshell burden. He never answers yes or no. He topples my questions. Only he is allowed to make insertions. Assertions. From which he will not budge.
I pour boiling water over the grounds.
Maybe he doesn’t just want to be on that bus, he plans to drive it. He’s desperate for punctuation.
I trap a bug—blue as eyes—beneath a glass tumbler. The bug just sits there, a study. From the bed, Orkney looks at me, it, silent across the room.
I could pump him full of drugs, but easy listening might work just as well. I turn on the radio, but it’s only more news. Dead again.
This time it’s a jet crash in the Everglades. I’ve never felt so rejected in all my life.

* * *

I clamber out of bed, pick up the phone.
“I’m going to call in well today.” Perhaps an announcement to the air.
Orkney slots the newspaper, just delivered.
“World needs redemption by fire,” he reads aloud.
“It’s like AIDS or something,” I say to the phone.
“I didn’t know you had a job,” Orkney mumbles, peering at me from over the top of the viewer.
Expecting even more heavy fire today in the weather thunderheads gather in my gaze followed by depression in their wake of the liberation front.
“I might as well tell you the truth. I’m going to catch the bus. That’s why I’m calling in well. See you later, bye.”
I turn, grin brightly at him.
He’s already down on his knees.
“Anneal me,” he begs me. “Take me apart and put me back together again. Roll me in your arms like an eel. Don’t leave me.”
“I’d love to stay, really I would, but look!” I click on the headlines. “The war is on for real this time, and I’ve got to do my duty.”
The refrigerator door slams behind me.

* * *

Orkney doesn’t want my coffee. It’s got that burnt taste from having been nuked too many times.
I know his shoulders ache from bearing the weight of the world. Too much reading in bed. We never talk about it. We just dance around the issues, as if we’re smoking a cigarette while waiting for the bus, studiously not talking to strangers.
We share a sinuous smoke for humanity. We have built bonfires beneath an obelisk of hope for a peaceful death. Atomization. The news injects us in our palms. People always say Orkney has a rad handshake. The dollar bill he slots for fare is clearly impressed with fingerprints. There’s no going back now. They’ve got our quanta.
“Back here,” Orkney says over his shoulder, pointing to the rear of the bus.
My hands are shaking. I can’t seem to climb the steps. My attention ellipses around the monumental architecture of the station. Blank slate, empty state, I stumble up onto the bus, slot a bill. I’m trying to ignore us ignoring them through the bus window. I sit up front. A few more displaced workers get on, and the doors of the bus slam shut. I don’t see anybody following me. Can appearances be deceiving?
That’s it, case closed, I decide, and walk outside into an air that glitters with particulate colloids. The doors of the station take a few seconds to close behind me. I walk down the steps. If they find me. I guess the internals might as well ask me why hover on the brink of destruction as why hover on the gasp of orgasm. AWOL test subject found secret documents dead on his doorstep.
But Orkney hushes me. He lays a finger on my lips. In the street, a newsdisc rolls by in a wind as fitful as a rat before a hurricane. I brush his cheek. Saying good-bye is always harder, I remember he once told me, when you know the other will never write.
The nuclear war will take up all our time, no doubt.
I walk through the streets, not far from anywhere at all, and finger purple beads. Safety in numbers. In this light, the beads look blue.
“We’ll see each other on the news.”
Silence reigns supreme. Everything falls into place. The bus finally arrives to take us to the war.

* * *

My heart aches like a pine tree stranded in L.A. The weather seems cruelly sardonic. The needle shakes in my hand. My vein bulges like an obituary page during wartime.
I don’t know whether to feel happy or sad.
Self-inflicted test subject inoculates six gunshot victims.
I feel like the Earth beneath pavement. My blood is magma. My tongue feels like a sponge.
I button up my overcoat. It looks like rain.
Like a sudden gust of wind, the labyrinth yields before me. Silence will build a cathedral in the wake of our engineering.
Orkney walks over to the bed. He peeks over the top of the book I’m reading. He says, “I’ve gotta go now. Night. And hey, thanks for listening to me.” The door quietly closes behind him.
I should really get off my ass and do something constructive. The viewer’s screen still glows blue. My arm is tense and waiting. I want to click the page but, hypnotized, find I cannot.
I push the pen in a little deeper. The button on the control panel clicks and changes from green to emergency orange. A prick of blood blossoms into the syringe. As the blossom bursts into a mushroom, there is the crushing anesthetic of monumental architecture. A solid wave, I become bricks. My dick is in the dirt. Now I am no longer so discontented. Now I am ready to build a new civilization.
After all the heat and noise, the room grows very quiet and still. I decide to start naming things, and begin with silence.

* * *

[Originally published online by Retort, an Australian zine whose archives have appeared to have gone tits up (I say that because the aforegoing link leads to a lot of 404s, but please correct me if I’m wrong.) That would have been late 2001, just after the Grand Hullabaloo, the GWOT, the Global War on Terror, started.]

Trackback URI | Comments RSS