Lost in Cat Brain Land Read online

  The bus never arrives. The man sits there for longer than he knows. It gets dark and he debates walking home. The walk really is a short one.

  The sun comes up.

  The man must have fallen asleep. He should call work and tell them he is sick. No, he won’t call. They’ve probably fired him anyway. He doubts whether he ever did a satisfactory thing in his life. It seems strange to him that no bus should ever arrive and that no one else waits at this stop. Everyone must know the awful truth of it. The man curses himself for being out of the loop.

  It gets dark again and he curses himself. Get with it, he says. You goddamn failure.

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  The grocery store closes. He wonders why he bothered or what he came for in the first place. It must be nothing good.

  Why else should he forget? As the temperature drops, the man crosses his arms and shivers. He tries to remember how it feels to be cold. He worries about the sickness that has threatened to consume him for so long, and the people who love him. They must be worried by now. The man laughs. His own humor creeps up on him at times. The people who love him must be worried.

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  A

  SCORPION TOWN

  IN CALIFORNIA

  The jacket rode into town on its man. “Stay right here,” the jacket said, “this is a scorpion town and men aren’t welcome by scorpions.”

  Sliding off the man’s sweaty body, the jacket told its man one last time to stay out of trouble and then slink-slithered into town.

  It saw no scorpions. The jacket figured that scorpions either hated the ticklish twittering their souls made when exposed to the outer world or they were just dreaming.

  It tried the saloon. There must always be a scorpion in a saloon, it thought.

  All the booths and barstools stood around shuffling their feet, waiting for arachnid masters. A man on the other side of the counter slouched over a wooden crate. The jacket wondered if this man had frightened away the scorpions. He had never heard of men frightening scorpions but an old wickerwham once told him that anything was possible in California scorpion towns.

  When the man opened his eyes, his skeleton leaped over the bar, blindfolded himself with the jacket, and dashed through the saloon’s double doors. The jacket whipped in the wind like 47

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  a bullfighter’s bandana hurtling through outer space.

  The next day, it rained shoe polish, lobster claws, and scribbled notes that all said, “Everyone has abandoned themselves.”

  On the far end of a scorpion town in California, a man waits for his skeleton.

  48

  BROOM PEOPLE

  I notice the girl when I come home from The Know. Until tonight, I had not left the house since Tully left. I decided to go out to the bar where we’d had our first date. Now this girl sits beside the shoebox in the bottom drawer of the dresser in my closet. Her flesh is petrified and the color of maple syrup, as if she has lived on this planet since the age of dinosaurs. Her hair is stiff straw. I ask her, “Who the hell are you? What are you doing here?”

  The shoebox holds my revolver. She looks so tiny beside the box.“I am a broom,” she says, her voice a whistling kettle. “I have come to clean the cobwebs.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  I look around the bedroom. Pizza boxes and beer bottles lie scattered on the nightstand, the floor, and even the unmade bed. You can order anything online these days and have it shipped right to your door. Maybe company will be good for me, even if it’s not human company. “Sure, you can clean, but how’d you get in here?”

  The broom girl raises her arms. “Pick me up,” she says. Her pupils twitch inside her amber eyeballs like flies. “Pick me up. I don’t like guns. Why do you keep a gun in your house?”

  I bend over. The last few beers I guzzled at the bar slosh to 49

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  my head. Dizziness and nausea make a carousel of my brain. I nearly fall over.

  “Don’t squash me,” the broom girl says.

  I balance myself against the top of the dresser and take her in my right hand. “I think you’re too short to reach the cobwebs,” I say. “But if you could sweep away these boxes and bottles and maybe the dishes in the sink, I’d be grateful.”

  She stands in my palm, arms crossed. A frown splits her face in two. “I’m not your housekeeper.”

  I shrug. “So you’re just a cobweb cleaner?”

  The broom girl sighs. “I’d like it better if you shut up.”

  Same words Tully always said.

  “I can shut up. I can shut up for a week, a month, a year,”

  I say, like always.

  “Better make it infinity. Now lie down on the floor and cross your arms like a dead person.”

  I lie down on the floor and cross my arms like a dead person. I don’t know what else to do.

  “Stick out your tongue.”

  I stick out my tongue. Between the Pizza Hut box beneath my head and the soupy fog inside me, lying here and taking orders feels comforting.

  The broom girl climbs onto my stomach, employing my jacket as a ladder. She treads up my chest, across my neck, pulls herself onto my chin, and wraps her arms around my tongue.

  I freeze, suddenly nervous and realizing what a crazy situation I’ve gotten myself into.

  “Calm down. This will only hurt if you let it.”

  The broom girl twists. She wrenches my tongue right out of my mouth. I bolt up, achingly sober. I spit blood. Hunched over. Choking. Helpless.

  Behind and below me, the broom girl says, “You didn’t have to let it hurt. You’re stronger than this.”

  I wipe my mouth. My right hand comes away looking like a butchered five-legged pig. I go to the closet and grab my 50

  LOST IN CAT BRAIN LAND

  revolver. I spin around. The broom girl kneels on the floor and massages my severed tongue. It’s the same size as the broom girl.I aim the gun at her, arms trembling. My brain feels like it’ll pop out of my head any moment. I lower the weapon. I want the broom girl dead, but I would hate to shoot my tongue.

  There might still exist a possibility of reconnection.

  I toss the revolver onto the bed.

  The broom girl kneads her fists into my tongue. She batters it into a pulpy, lifeless hunk. Is this painful to my tongue? Have the nerves and taste buds died, or does it feel the same pain as me? Stop, I try to say. A red bubble pops on my lips. No words come out.

  The sole lamp illuminating the room dances and swerves.

  The lamp hisses and emits a stink of human. A certain human.

  Tullis. Tully.

  Too lightheaded to stand, I collapse. Pizza boxes pad my fall, but my knee cracks against a beer bottle. The minor pain alleviates a little of everything else that’s killing me. But not enough. Nothing will ever be enough.

  I crawl over to the broom girl. Tiny hands and feet jut out of my tongue. The broom girl sculpts a head out of the tip. She impresses a mouth, chews two holes for eye sockets. She spits the excess flesh into her hands and shapes a crooked nose.

  I lean over her, breathing hard. The blood flowing down my face must be heavy as rain to her.

  “You’re blocking my light,” she says.

  I lean closer. I want to ask about the cobwebs. I want to shout, If you came to sweep away the cobwebs, tell me what you’re doing. Explain yourself. Explain the cobwebs. You can’t, you little bitch. You can’t explain cobwebs. You can’t even explain yourself.

  She pauses and looks coldly at me, her pupils sad and dilated. “You’re blocking my light,” she says. “Let me finish what I came to do.”

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  I slump down on my side, less than a foot away from her.

  I start to cry. Her busy hands blur into my tongue like two people making love in a room fractured by their hate for one another. I wipe my eyes until they burn and tell myself the broom girl is right. I am stronger than
this.

  “Are you feeling better? Now pay attention,” she says.

  I inhale as much air as possible, air mixed with blood, and look at what she’s done.

  Standing beside the broom girl, my tongue waves at me.

  They are holding hands. Only, my tongue is a miniature replica of me. “I forgot to bring some eyes,” the broom girl says, “but hair and skin and nails will start to grow soon. You’ll be back to normal in no time. Let’s start at ground zero.”

  No, no, no. I shake my head.

  “Why are you depressed? It’s only winter,” she says to the tongue version of me. I guess I can no longer lay any claim to it. The tongue clears its throat. “Nothing of the cold or rain.

  Being away from you. That’s what kills me.”

  The broom girl sighs. “We need our time apart. Spending every second of every day together is unhealthy. We’ve gotten too intense too quickly. I need some space.”

  “Like outer space?” the tongue says, in the same sarcastic tone I used when uttering the same line to Tully months ago.

  “Forget it,” the broom girl says, walking away.

  The tongue points a meaty finger at her. “You’re treating the death of our love like it’s the fall of a fascist dictator. Have the past eight months really been so bad?”

  “Yes, yes, because that’s how it feels.” The broom girl turns around. “You’re so needy, so demanding. And whenever I try talking anything out, you turn my feelings into a farce, and then you get paranoid. You’re so full of yourself, and you take nothing seriously.”

  “Why wouldn’t I take nothing seriously?”

  The broom girl throws up her arms, victorious. “That’s 52

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  exactly what I mean. I won’t fall for it anymore.” She turns to walk away.

  The tongue cartwheels after her, laughing maniacally, pushing me beyond my limit of tolerance.

  I outstretch my arm and scoop up the tongue in my left hand, the broom girl in my right. I shake my head disapprovingly at both of them. I want to tell them they must go their separate ways.The broom girl smiles at me. We lock eyes for a long time.

  “Look,” she says. “You’re sprouting hair.”

  The tongue has grown a full head of stiff, long hair. A broom head. My miniature is a tongue-broom man.

  “You’ve learned so quick,” the broom girl says. “I knew you were strong, and you found that strength in yourself. Now you can sweep up your own cobwebs whenever they build up.”

  Panic clutches at my heart. She can’t go. I can’t let her. She’s done so much for me. I’ll go back to being miserable if she leaves now. Maybe a little later, after my tongue returns to its proper place.

  She recognizes my horror, and smiles. I catch my reflection in her amber eyes. “Do you want me to stay with you?” she says.I nod.

  The tongue-broom man bites my hand. I drop him and he scurries beneath the bed. “No need to worry about him,” the broom girl tells me. “He’s just a bunch of cobwebs.

  “We can be together forever. Let me show you how.”

  She skips over to edge of the bed and reaches for a blanket hanging off the edge. She fails to grab hold. I’m unsure whether to help or sit back and watch. So I sit back and watch.

  The tongue-broom man reappears. He bows like a gentleman. “Let me help you,” he says to her. He urges me over, then gestures for me to lower my head. “Help us onto the bed,” he says. “Do right by both of us, the good and the bad, because we’re the same at heart.”

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  I turn my hands palm-up on the floor. The broom girl and tongue-broom man each step into one. I raise them to the bed.

  They scurry toward the revolver. The broom girl tilts her head to one side and frowns. “I don’t like guns. Why do you keep a gun in your house?”

  “Sometimes for protection, sometimes for peace of mind.

  Sometimes when the ones you love turn your world upside down, you want to take them with you,” the tongue-broom man says.

  The broom girl turns to me. “Is this true for you also?”

  I try to open my mouth and find that blood has sealed it shut. Incapable of speech, I’m clueless as to how to respond.

  “Nevermind,” she says. “I want to play a game. Pick up the gun and point it at my head. Let’s pretend this has never happened before. Everything is make-believe.”

  I don’t want her to leave, so I pick up the revolver and point it at her head.

  “Ready,” she says.

  I will do as she says, for she has done so much to save me.

  “Aim,” she says.

  My heart set to explode.

  “Remember this is all a game,” she says. “And fire!”

  I squeeze the trigger. Click, an empty chamber.

  “Fire!” the broom girl screams.

  The tongue-broom man joins her in a duet of “Fire! Fire!

  Fire!” I lower the gun. I don’t need the broom girl anymore, and she never needed me. I raise the gun again and find the strength inside myself, a clumsy human strength, and fire at the tongue-broom man, my miniature. There is more than a chamber click this time. What happens is louder and emptier than a cobweb, and unspeakable.

  54

  LAZY FASCIST

  I grow a mustache. It is a fascist mustache. The fascist mustache conquers my face. I am sad because my face is oppressed. The mustache turns my nose into a vodka distillery. My fascist mustache spends most of its time in the distillery. It even sleeps in there. My mustache is a lazy drunkard, but whenever I try sneezing it out or brushing it off my face, the mustache stabs me with its well-groomed, razor-toothed hairs. “I will squash your rebellion,” the mustache says, so I don’t rebel. I think to myself, God damn you, mustache. God damn you.

  The mustache says I cannot wash my face anymore. It is popping zits and distilling the pus into vodka at an alarming rate. The mustache needs more pimples and that just won’t happen if I’m taking care of my complexion. When the mustache is not making vodka or drinking vodka, it goes on parade. It marches from my chin all the way up to the crown of my shaved head. The mustache says, “Someday the whole world will be mine!”

  The mustache never tries to expand its empire. It is too lazy to put any effort into being a good fascist. It drinks vodka, holds parades, combs its hairs, and makes empty threats to me and my body.

  One day, guerilla scissors invade my feet. My mustache is 55

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  too lazy to fend off the radicals. I am quickly cut apart. When the scissors have destroyed me up to my heart, the lazy fascist leaps off my face, plunging to a cowardly, self-inflicted death.

  I open my mouth to cry my first free words since I grew a mustache, but my vocal cords are already in tatters. After my face is liberated by the army of scissors, the scissors lay siege on the nasal distil ery. They hold a toast to Victory and the sovereign, crippled, unrecognizable, totally fucked nation of Me.

  The drunken scissors make snow angels in a pile of my guts and bones and call it a treatise on the means of production.

  Beneath my guts and bones lies the squishy hollow of my brain.

  In the squishy hollow of my brain, the hairs of a baby mustache goosestep in blood-shaped lines.

  56

  THE

  DRESSING BOOTH

  On the day James Timmerman could no longer face himself, he awoke naked in a dressing booth. He was musty and damp and his head ached.

  A gray suit hung from the hook on the back of the door, so he took the pants and suit jacket off the hook and put them on.

  No other articles had been provided.

  James reached for the door handle.

  He hesitated.

  It was not so much the contact between his hand and the door handle that he dreaded, but how he felt as if he were viewing himself from somewhere else as he reached for the door. James sat on the dressing room bench to contemplate this crisis.
<
br />   He sat for many days.

  A week passed.

  “I will have to break the mirror if I want to leave,” he said.

  “I can waste no more time.”

  He had grown old, as if each day were a full decade.

  He stood up and punched the dressing room mirror. He punched it again and again. He punched and he kicked it until his fingers broke.

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  His legs collapsed and he fell and hit the wall. In his week of thinking and aging, he had lost the strength to smash the dressing room mirror using his fists or feet.

  His vision turned fuzzy. He was out of breath.

  When he finally caught his breath, he struggled to his feet and tried lifting the dressing room bench to throw it into the mirror.

  He failed miserably. The bench would not budge. He took a deep breath and exhaled, “Remain calm, James, remain calm.

  You’ve missed the simplest solution.”

  He reached for the door handle, trying not to fear it.

  He twisted the handle, but the door was locked from the outside.

  “Please,” he cried. “Let me return to my life.”

  “This is your life,” a voice said.

  He did not know where it came from. He did not know who it was.

  “Who are you? I demand answers,” he said.

  He received no reply.

  He banged on the door until the cuts on his fingers split open again and his hands folded into black and blue claws.

  Exasperated, he took off his suit and threw himself against the walls of his holding cell.

  And accidentally glimpsed his naked, skeletal body in the mirror. He shuddered and turned away, and crumpled into a ball on the dressing bench. He was so pale and featureless. A weakling. A faceless blob.

  “James, look in the mirror,” the voice said, from just the other side of the door.

  “Why should I?” he said, face buried in his hands.

  “Look in the mirror and I’ll let you out.”