Human Machinery

Every once in a while, as I search around for a direction or feel a bit saddled with inability, I'll post something from The Collection. In this place, is the various pieces of miscellanea that I've assembled (for years in some cases, just in the past few months in others) but have never gone anywhere. Failed novels, short stories that never had the right amount of dynamite, things I've scrawled on walls with spray paint; it's all in that place.

I always feel a bit guilty about it because a.) these things all ended in failure, and b.) they basically represent a Clip Show for the Long Sunset (for those of you that are old enough to know what a Clip Show is). But sometimes it just feels good to move something out of the Collection and into the ether, to be absorbed into nothing.

I brought up direction because creatively I've been hemming and hawing with what mine should be. I'm a big believer in knowing what you do well, and then going for it. Right now, I'm not exactly sure what specific writing direction I work best in (it's why I've been experimental and varied of late). So I'm in ponder mode. And by the way, I'd love for someone to give me my direction, but I don't think it works in that regard. In fact, I know it doesn't. Just takes time.

And in that time, here's a chapter from a novel I trashed about 9 months ago. This was the 3rd chapter, introducing a main character, and frankly I don't like it all that much anymore (except for one paragraph that I wish I could just recreate over and over until it made many books and anthologies). I'll have something new and fresh, something the kids are into these days, to post soon, I promise.

Chapter 3: Human Machinery

Smoke filled the air as if it belonged there, but more aptly, it hung and mingled in the air. It used it as a resting ground, a place where decisions about what item or organism to destroy would be decided, and only the poorly used ventilation system in that run-down bar could make the decision for that heavy dank smoke. And it would make the decision, but slowly, ruefully. Without mercy. That smoke hung in the air every night, without fail, but it had a different feel every night.

At least to Margaret it did. Some nights it was a mere background noise; a poorly written sitcom or a mostly cloudy meteor shower. It barely moved her. Barely caused her senses to whither and moan. But some nights, some nights, it thumped. Thick like a plague; it would pound the temples and fill her every molecule with something not very necessary. It would add weight to the room. It would find every corner, snake around every barstool, and slow the rhythm of the long overused jukebox in the deepest depths of the frank and brutal saloon. And it was on these nights, the nights where she came home in pain, physical definable pain, that she would sometimes weep. And although, she wasn’t always certain of it, the correlation of smoke and tears was undeniable. It created a viper-bite like mix of death and dread. She would take off her plaid skirt and black t-shirt, and wash them twice. It took two cycles to cure the smoke from those smoky nights. Then she would sit out on her back porch that faced some of Northern Florida’s last true woods, and watch.

Just watch. Sometimes things moved, sometimes they didn’t, sometimes there would be a light drizzle and often she would feel cold. There were bears back there, but they were rare and small. When she moved to this small house on the edge of the woods, down the road from a joint she surely never intended to work at, she’d always been lead to believe that bears were huge and awful. Giant mammoths intent on gnawing bone and grinding flesh. Creatures of the deep woods that flourished in their raw power and exerted it on others with pride and pain, but really they weren’t. They we’re just little black bears (some she didn’t think were much bigger then a Saint Bernard), who skimmed the edge of the woods that lay along her backyard looking for scraps. They seemed like simple beggars.

Those bears made her happy. And so did the plentiful deer and raccoons, the dumbly wired armadillos and songbirds, and the ever present chirp of some insect population. They made her feel in contact somehow, part of something, and in these dark late nights, illuminated by her large orange spotlight like a solemn miner, sitting in her backyard only in her underwear as her work clothes made it through their second necessary cycle that she’d sometimes just weep.

“These beer’s to warm for me,” a one eyed man said, “I demand things cold. And I’ll get them cold. And you’ll give them to me.”

And there Margaret was, back at Honest John’s Bar, and not with her small bears and her fears. Tonight, indeed tonight, the smoke was heavy. And she was back. Her illusion lasted for only the weakest of times.

“Beer’s to warm for you Fred?” She smiled back.

The man, dressed in a slightly ripped flannel shirt and jeans, with a messy grey beard and an oddly precise haircut nodded. He didn’t make eye-contact though. He didn’t acknowledge her smile. Fred never did.

“Dump it out and get me another fucking one,” he muttered.

She took no notice. These kinds of insults were expected, thorny pieces of human meanness sprung not from legitimate angst, but something more benign, more lactose; sparks simply flying off of rusty old machinery. So Margaret filled one-eyed Fred’s beer back up, doubting greatly the first one could possibly have been warm (he drank them to quickly) and thought more about little black bears. She turned around to see Fred asleep on the bar, and to no surprise. Her clientele were clear: local, drunk, forgotten and dispassionate. In some ways it made things easier, and each night felt like tending to semi-lucid drones recently discharged from any importance in society. They took their medicine easily.

But it was also brutally trying. There was no hope here, no ingenuity, no future, for any of the tired souls who marched in and out. The bar, this location, provided them a functional (if somewhat illegitimate) sense of place and purpose. But that was all it was. A place they could say they were going, something to do, light to watch, liquids that moved, green felt that didn’t, faces to observe, with great detachment, generally, as they just got worse and worse as the years beat them with cracks and wrinkles. And Margaret had long since stopped trying to awaken some passion in anyone who dared enter these confines. So she put on her pretty smile, wore tight clothing, dispensed painkillers to those with nothing to kill and avoided getting mentally into the heavy smoke that always seemed to surround her.

She just wanted to get home. Back to her porch. Back to something that was at least comforting, unmovable seemingly, even if there was no one there to enjoy that occasional peace with her. She’d make something out of nothing, and pound through every day and night like an undersized point-guard in a tall mans game. Waiting for that moment of hesitation, waiting for a break in the defense, for a that second of laziness that allowed the downtrodden to rise fanatically, a good look at the basket, among the tall trees, where she’d take a chance and fire. She couldn’t wait for that chance.

But as she slowly turned around to give Fred that cold beer (even if he was asleep), she forgot one thing about old programmed machinery: It could wake, and when it did, it was often confused and unpredictable. A mistake of the young colliding into the undefined pain of the old. A dangerous mix.

When she put that mug down (and it clunked down, as if performing a pre-destined routine), Fred snapped awake. His eyes distant, darting, blood red both from the deep cigarette smoke of the night and the cruel unforgiving days of his past.

“You’re not real,” he growled at her.

Margaret had been thinking about small black bears and just how many cycles she’d have to put her clothes through tonight, not this routine, intense randomness.

“What?” She could only think to say.

“You’re not real,” he repeated.

“Fred, I was just pouring out-“

“I said you’re not real! You’re a fucking illusion, and you torture me!”

And then he just lunged across the bar at poor petite Margaret. His hands grabbing at whatever they could, a distorted illusion, a women, pain, regret. Just grabbing and hoping to tear. And how an old man with one-eye and busted knee could move that quickly and forcefully she would never, for the rest of her life, begin to be able to dissect. Occurring with the same surprising consistency of the sun rising, planes landings, and buildings falling. The unexplainable phenomenon that makes life commonplace against the entire backdrop that would seem to prove it not to be. It just happened.

Caught entirely off-guard, Fred grabbed Margaret by her slender shoulders and squeezed hard. Stretched across the bar like some stranded pilot whale, he dug his fingers in and pulled her with immediacy and power close to his scarred face. The beer she was holding went everywhere, flying in all directions and making no distinctions as to who it should and should not land on. A violent confetti. And all she could do was gasp for air in the middle of this brutal random whirlwind.

At this point the three other patrons in the bar (Steve Dorsey, Matthew R. Williams, and Jeffrey Dorsey) heard the commotion from across the bar, a crude interruption to a lazy pool game, and they began to rumble over as quickly as possible. But Honest John’s was a large bar area wise, and these men were well past their playing days. So as they lumbered over to help (for what to do but help) old one-eyed Fred had time to pull Margaret close. And she could feel the strength of his knurled fingers and the oddly juxtaposed weakness of his breath, however few he may have left. A savage pirate.

He pulled her close, and said right into her soft ear: “You think you know sorrow? These wrinkles, they’re real, but what good have they done me? Guard dogs to an empty bone yard. I hate that you can see them.”

And he managed to hold her close still as the Dorsey crew advanced, even as she squirmed and moaned. His spittle hitting her face from close range.

”Well do you know?” He snarled.

Margaret managed to collect herself in some precise way, for some small moment of import, and clawed back through some light tremors with, “do I know what?”

“Sorrow!”

And then Steve Dorsey grabbed Fred under the right arm, and Mitch (the bars owner) finally, finally, came out of the back room and hopped over the bar looking mainly for clarification.

“Come on Fred, let’s pull this shit together,” she heard Steve Dorsey say.

Mitch grabbed him too. Then Jeffrey (never the most athletic of Dorsey’s), and then Matthew Roger William’s in some horrific professional grade headlock, and they all began to pull.

”Not par for the course Fred,” Matthew was babbling. “Not even checking with the starter you dumb old bastard!”

They pulled but through the onslaught he held fast; a stubborn coastal barnacle of fury in a deep mean night. Fred pulled Margaret even more closely, her heels now leaving the floor, fully out of the safety zone. His force so mean, so flagrant, so desperate. And as she was as close as she could get, Margaret had this dropping feeling that he wasn’t even really struggling to hold his ground.

Still with her ear as a singular microphone, a one-time engagement, the acoustics just barely aligning, and through the struggling commotion, he said to her with some light and bizarre tenderness, “sorrow, for christsakes, you must know it.”

And then Mitch, the Dorsey Brothers and Mr. Williams pried Fred off of poor Margaret, like a floor vacuum winning its last dust fight, and they as one unit hustled him towards the large doors.

“Calm it Fred.”

“How the hell is he so strong?”

”Come on, damn it.”

“Get him the fuck out of here, Matt!”

She could hear them yell, but only in theory. Margaret was only lightly absorbing it, and as that tortured old man’s vice-like grip came off of her she had careened backwards into the taps like an abused ballerina. What a dumb powerful piece of humanity. The melee whirled outside, and then straight through the doors. Margaret was left standing with her arms crossed, shaking slightly as Mitch returned alone, her eyes focused on the ground, her head still filled with confusion and the stinging cellophane of shock.

After a few seconds she looked up only to view Mitch standing there shaking his head slightly. Balding, aged in some peculiar way from these very kinds of engagements, rusted over.

“How about you take twenty out-back, Marge,” he basically sighed. “I’ll clean this up.”

And so she did. Under the misting translucent lights of a back alley bar, she shuffled into the humid air with the delicacy of a cracked piece of porcelain. Margaret stood under the melancholy pumpkin orange lights (placed there for some reason) behind the bar with pure blankness going through her mind. Trying to realign with the mother ship. It felt like that old man had literally shocked her, in the most absolute and definitive of ways. It felt like an ancient lobotomy that they (they) would use in the old days on those deemed insufficiently programmable. These things would happen on strange, rocky islands to people whose brains needed resetting, or often, sadly, permanent revolution. Or so it was thought.

Then the static in her model broke, clarity restored, and she (Marge) thought to herself, where did that come from?

Only she didn’t keep that thought internally, as she had hoped to, she yelled it into the sizzling bug-filled air, and began to sob, poor fair Margaret, her thin arms and legs shriving on this warm hate filled night. Little sweet hearted Margaret. She dreamed of home, but wasn’t sure what that necessarily was. The woods, perhaps, the sad tree lining, her dark nights and tiresome days that ended there, were good enough for now.

Then Mitch was next to her, eyeing her suddenly with some visible concern, rubbing the nape of his neck like he was trying to rid himself of some temporary tattoo from a county fair.

“Call it a night Marge,” he almost sulked audibly, “I’ll handle the drinks for the Dorsey’s. Might as well put them on the house tab after that bullshit.”

“All right,” Margaret said blankly, and then she turned in the general direction of her small maroon car.

“Marge,” Mitch called quickly.

So she turned around, brought her surprisingly menacing green eyes up from the soft earth, and she looked at the bar owner strongly and squarely.

“Why are you here?”

“Because I work here, Mitch.”

Mitch rolled his eyes and reached into a deep pocket in his well worn blue-jeans. His hands produced a bright silver flask which he took a healthy swig from in some smooth often replicated motion.

“No, darling, I mean why are you here? In this city, dealing with the kind of backwash that comes through these doors?”

And he extended the flask to her. She shuffled a few steps forward, took it in her small pale hands, and forced down her own share of hurt. It sunk through her like a tired old battleship happy to reach the soft muddy bottom after all these years of combat.

“This is where I ended up,” she said.

“Ended up? A girl like you doesn’t end up places, especially places like this. She goes places. Puts herself into any situation she wants.”

“A girl like me?”

“College degree? Twenty-five years old. Beautiful as-“

“Twenty-six”

“can be. What am I seeing that you don’t?”

Margaret looked up into the musky night air.

“Maybe you’re the only one seeing it.”

Mitch chuckled, and then brought his flask back to port. She wondered if it had worn a place there, and more importantly, if it needed to.

“Don’t give me that,” he said as tenderly as it could be said.

“Where would I go?” She was trembling, soaked in merciless dank light beer. “I don’t fit in, I take in pain to deeply, and I move slowly.”

“Is that your whole story?”

Now she laughed. “I wish that was my whole story.”

“Sometimes,” and he looked at the ground thoughtfully as he said this, “the story we have is only true as long as we keep reading it.”

“So need I find a new book?”

“Just take a chance.”

“I don’t know what type of chance to take. I’ve never known.”

“Doubt that.”

She kicked a little gravel around, changing the scenery below her feet in some minor but nuclear way. A gnat caught itself in her silky black hair, she felt it, felt the struggle, hopped for an easy resolution for that insect. But she doubted any resolution was simple once tangled in hair. Hair must be a complicated subject for a gnat. So alien; it was something that attacked when not even trying to, and the maze to shake free of its grasp was constantly changing. She prayed for that gnat in the middle of this conversation.

“And you’ve always felt this way,” Mitch said after a moment.

“What way?”

“That you’re directionless. A monorail. No passion? Just a fragile canvas to be passed through museums.”

Is he to smart to be a bar owner? She thought, but then took in more fully what he had just said, in the deep orange light, next to the mold spewing drainage pipe for which they’d never determined an absolute purpose. Margaret collected her thoughts in the back parking lot of Honest John’s, and she breathed in and out very shallowly.

Finally she said in a whisper, still looking at the ground: “No.”

She could see, and even feel, Mitch’s grin light up for a reason she couldn’t really determine. But she did like this man, always had, hell, had almost slept with him on a number of nights like this, a man that he himself was stuck here for reasons he’d never dare say.

“Then remember why you just said that to me,” he jolted her from a mist, “And follow that thought. Follow it far from here”.

“Into the dark forest,” she mumbled.

“If that’s where it takes your dear,” and then he got a little closer to her, gently, but in her proximity, and put one of his large callused hands on her bony shoulders. “But whatever you do, don’t let life put you somewhere”.

She focused on her breathing. Once again scanning the ground and reshuffling it. Hoping perhaps it would show its own geological example.

“Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For being smart.”

“I’m not,” he said, “you’re just being quite stupid. At least for the time being.”

And she smiled faintly and whipped the salt away from her cheeks that was merely debris from an earlier emotional engagement.

“Anyway, take the rest of the night off. And tomorrow. Maybe start again Wednesday.”

“I don’t need a day off.”

And he turned his back to her and began walking to the steel door. She could no longer feel his guiding force on her shoulder. It left a void. Somehow. She watched as Mitch opened the heavy rusted door and stepped half of the way in, but before he fully entered that heavy smoke, that bar, that dimension, that side of the dice, his place, he looked back and winked quickly, in that effortless way that takes years to perfect but no practice, and he said: “I sure hope not.”

He then shut the door solidly.

Margaret watched that door for a good five minutes as she absorbed. And then she turned again began walking towards her small dilapidated car. Searching her pockets for her keys, her hand innocently bumped into her rarely used cell phone. So she grabbed it along with her keys, her hand becoming a very unselective crane game, and she brought them all out. Separating the two into each hand she quickly, casually, looked down at her phone, expecting the usual default electronic backdrop, with little else fanfare. But this time as the white sonic light connected with her still solemn green eyes it read:

ONE MISSED CALL: MILES