Christina's Room

Well, it's been a little rough for Papa Bam, as was to be expected. He needs to understand that bi-partisanship is impossible. Clinton found out and so did the Child President, and the faster Bam finds out the better.

Other then that, I just don't care about politics right now. And the waves have been flat. So here's what happens when these terrible things come together: Some fiction.

Christina's Room

Twelve palm trees lined the driveway. Manicured, treated, fertilized like movie stars. They swayed in the gentle breeze, lounge singers with no audience, six on each side. Army ants marched dutifully up and down those threaded trunks. They found safety in the warm thick interior. Mark found no such safety. He rolled slowly up his driveway, windows down, Cat Stevens very low (menacingly so), with a whisper behind his right ear. Something leaving messages and expecting no answer. Getting none. He would give it none.

He barely hit the peddle while rolling up that grandiose driveway, and he noticed that the garage door was left flagrantly open, but didn’t care. Mark muddled to a stop in between one very large car and three small but loud ones. They were all very shiny. But it was dark, and Mark couldn’t see the colors. Green, red, purple, maybe. The garage door unraveled behind him, announced its meeting with the ground, and Mark turned the key. Everything went silent as he sat breathing thick humid air. Wasps buzzed around his car. Laziness on his part, but clear commitment on theirs. He valued commitment but hated wasps, and worked diligently to stomp out each one that drifted into his path.

And he hated the smell of his oversized garage as he stepped languidly into it. Detergent. Tons of it. The titan sized bottles were something to fill the large crevices of space that had no other meaning. Mark bought most of it for Christina. She loved the smell of detergent. He knew where she would be once he got inside: upstairs, with a large green hat on, shaking numbers or spinning wheels, spreading images or destroying them. Living in luxury and being luxury.

Mark flipped on the lights as he stepped inside. His house didn’t smell like detergent. Good. Something’s were still good. The light was shaking slightly upstairs, smoke was simmering out of a small neurotic five-walled room. Christina’s room. Two walls were black and three were yellow. He told her it reminded him of a bumblebee, and she was say it was a bumblebee. And then they would sit awkwardly and look at each other with small grins. Mark loved it. A lot of nights he would just sit and watch her paint. She drew lots of squares and triangles, but none of them ever seemed to come together. She’d say she was making screen savers.

More smoke from upstairs. She shouldn’t smoke in that room, Mark thought to himself, there’s too little ventilation, and there are no fire alarms in a bee’s nests.
Mark adjusted his pants slightly and stood very still. He stared upstairs for a long time, wondering if she would come out to greet him or whether he’d go up to greet her. He looked forward to either greeting. Minutes passed. He could smell the cigarette smoke, felt it pass through him and his neatly contained kitchen. And then he started walking upstairs. The smoke filled his lungs, her smell hidden within it as some potent broth, and he pushed the blue door open lightly.

“Evening honey,” she said as he leaned against the door. Her eyebrows vibrated.

“Hello,” Mark said simply. He wanted to say more. He toiled with a lock of his hair. Knotty. Christina stared quietly, she was sizing him up, and Mark could never tell what for.

“You painting?” Mark finally said.

“It’s a paint by numbers,” Christina said.
'
They stood there. One at the doorway, the other near a window, and plenty of space stood between them. Yet there was no space. They were one. Christina’s blond hair was straight and perfect. So perfect. Her eyes were blue and sometimes green. But usually blue, and Mark thought it depended on how much detergent he could smell upstairs. Her eyes were mood-rings.

“I’m bad with numbers”.

“What?”

“I said I’m bad with numbers, and it makes this much more difficult for me, so don’t snicker,” and she started giggling.

Mark realized how young she was.

“Was I snickering?”

She turned back to her painting and sighed.

“I can never tell what you’re doing Mark, I just see you snickering in that doorway a lot.”

“I like this doorway.”

“Do you?” She swiveled on that stool and looked at Mark fiercely. It was grotesque. They finally made eye-contact.

And they stood in perfect silence again. Mark counted the fibers in the orange shag carpet below him. He wanted her to turn back to her painting. This look hurt more than any of the others. She did turn back around, slowly.

“Could you open the window when you’re smoking, hun’?” He said.

“This house could use a little character dear, so no. But I was not smoking.”

“I saw smoke, dear.”

She turned back around and made another round of eye-contact. This set hurt even more. The projection seemed clearer, but there was a hesitation to it. Some hesitation in confidence.

“So did Mary Poppins, dear,” and she turned back to her painting.

94 under the left foot. 86 under the right foot.

Mark started breathing again. He hadn’t even noticed that he’d stopped, but was sure that her eyes had changed to green.

“I’m going downstairs to watch the television,” he said tentatively. “If you’d like to join, that’s where I’ll be”.

But she said nothing, and she continued painting away in her strangely colored room. Mark turned and shuffled downstairs. She hadn’t followed him in some time. He was used to the walk alone, as used to it as he could be. Seventy-six, forty-four, sixty-eight, eighty-one. Downstairs. Back to hard tile. He wandered towards his television, drawn to it, for no other reason than to avoid looking upstairs. Indifferently, he pressed the play button on his answering machine during his flyby of the kitchen bar. It had been flashing ONE. It smelled like detergent.

“Hey buddy, it’s Jeff. Good news. Big news. Call me on your cell”.

Mark continued towards his television. He wasn’t sure where his cell phone even was.

“Was that Jeff, dear?” She called from upstairs. On cue. Reading lines it seemed.

“He’s been calling a lot lately, I should have spoken to you about it”.

He didn’t respond. Mark was feeling the weight of his tired living room. Every piece of leather, every Aztec painting, long walls of white Indonesian paint, dusty vacation pictures, thick tile and flat screens. Mark stepped off the tile and onto to the leather, and faced his bright screen. He wanted a dog. Any kind. Just one that could watch this flat screen with him. And Christina didn’t want any dogs. They were messy. They’d distract her from her paintings.

So Mark sat with nothing. Stiller was arguing with Deniro about something. The screens flashed. Smoke slithered from downstairs. He was sure of it, but he was distracted, or he at least tried to be. Distractions were his only friend.

“Are you going to call Jeffrey back?” She yelled from upstairs.

Pixels flashed before him, swirls of energy, dreams without consciousness. His tile floor was cold, there was nothing on it to count, and he wasn’t sure if it were even there. Mark stood up and walked to his large bay window. He shuffled past the electric light parade that helped him pass the days and breathed in deeply. Outside the houses looked the same. They were the same. Built by the same manufacturer, stucco splattered in synchronicity, regulation bushes. Every house had a bay window. Every house was painted blue and had palm trees. No one lived in those houses. They occupied them.

“Well?”

He still didn’t answer. Jeffrey would be loud, he’d laugh a lot, and he’d buy Mark martinis. Jeffrey had one bay window in his blue house.

“I’m going for a ride,” Mark said flatly, randomly.

She stopped painting, he could hear it, and he could hear all 356 individual hairs quit their job simultaneously. He started walking to the garage door quickly. Get to the door before he could see her blonde hair again. Mark wasn’t sure if he could stand to see her again. He got to the garage door and then looked up. She was on the loft staring down at him.

“It’s not a paint by numbers”, she said softly. “It’s real, its mine. I made it myself and it’s a terrible painting.”

Mark tapped his fingers on the door and turned fully towards her. He finally saw long canals of clear salt.

“I bet it’s beautiful”.

She lit a cigarette and smiled.

“No. It’s ugly and awful,” she said.

“What is it of?”

“You’ve seen it plenty of times Mark, you should know”.

“That canvas has always been clear”.

She smiled again. “Then that’s what it is”.

Wind was whipping straight through Mark, it was inflexible, unrelenting, and he was as locked into it as he was with his seat. The seat of one of his shiny loud cars. He was roaring down the highway, leaving the honeycomb room far behind him, and he felt the distance. Cracking through static, eating everything in his vision, blasting Cat Stevens. He’d left his convertible top down, which he only noticed when a wasp stung deep into his right thigh, straight through his thin armor, demanding satisfaction. A stubborn stowaway.

And it surprised Mark, but did not bother him. He let it be, let it dig deeper and find for itself if there were actually anything under that armor.

His cell phone started sending off vibrations in the seat next to him. The name Jeffrey sat highlighted and begging for conversation. That name lit up the entire car, bouncing off every leather seat, and Mark could feel its frenetic energy. It slithered out of the phone. The wasp dug deeper. Mark picked up. Jeffrey hit the ground running.

“Hey buddy, good news, great news. Everything’s in Asia. Remember the six-percent we were getting? Gone. We have the nine we wanted in the first place. You know what that means?”

Mark said nothing.

“Mark?”

He could feel the pain of the wasp. Finally.

“It means what, Jeffrey?”

Jeff paused. He was breathing heavily and shoveling sushi down his throat (Mark figured) like a fish elevator. Jeff never thought about the pixels that made up this painting. It was what made him strong.

“It means, that we are now filthy fucking rich. Not just rich. Gates rich, Oprah rich, the Shaw of Saudi Arabia rich, we are now that quarter of the quarter of one percent. Monetary Cosmonauts.”

Mark said nothing. His thigh felt numb.

“Mark, are you hearing me? Rich.”

“Does that mean she can buy more paint?”

“What? Brother, she can buy the Mona Lisa.”

“I think I’ll buy her more detergent. She likes the smell.”

He could hear Jeffrey stop his sushi parade for a moment, and he heard him sigh deeply through the phone.

“Mark, I have a girl that wants to meet you, she’s fantastic. I think she’ll help you a lot.”

“With what?”

Silence.

Mark cupped the wasp in his hands and pushed the peddle down harder. Much harder. Colors blended together. The world around him was vibrating and the wind shuddered through him.

“You still seeing her upstairs, buddy?”

Mark slapped the phone shut.

He slowly (and gently) removed the wasp from his skin and felt a faint trickle of blood. Lights boomed past his vehicle, people were honking, some maybe even yelling. He wasn’t watching the road: He was feeling the small insect cupped in his hands. Six legs, one stinger, two wings. He couldn’t tell which direction he was going anymore, but he pressed hard. And in that loud car, with noise and vibration all around him, he let the insect free into the night air.

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Commentary: It's to mean and to short.