[Over the past four years or so I have written a number of short stories. I submitted these stories to a magazines and literary journals but they were not accepted for publication. I figured I would put them up here.]
Edward had surrounded himself with the detritus of many ages.
Edward had surrounded himself with the detritus of many ages.
Not garbage but tools he did not know how to use yet. Old quiet cat cable and network switches. Fried display systems and half used packets of proprietary documentation stationary. In the bathroom, perched on the sink side: gallon jugs of laboratory calibration solution concentrate, long expired and off-color. Screw top vials, empty and clean. Cast off glass-headed vacuum tubes, chip boards and diodes. Notebooks and binders filled with sketches and observations. Hard-handed and cryptic ink. Obsolete, already transcribed and worthless.
These were his mysteries, his prayers and incantations. Little loose coven of beautiful symbols under his purview. It was enough to run his fingers over the texts. To see the patterns that he alone saw, never mind their original intent.
One vial of radioactive sulfur he had procured one marvelous and shaking night from a university dumpster. He kept it in a small wooden box within another cardboard box within a locked cabinet. He took it out every couple of months, this holy vessel, after donning his highest vestments: some woodshop goggles, a dust mask and some yellow scrub gloves. Stroked it and stared at it. Little resin container with a few drops of cerulean floating within. Glorious proof of god there. His ultimate talisman.
All of this, ages of washed up stuff, had gathered in the corners of his room and on the raised surfaces until all he had to live within were a few square meters which held his sweat washed mattress, a microwave kept clean only by the grace of cellophane covers and his computer: black encrusted relic, tethered to all the world through a single exposed outlet.
These were his walls and within his walls he felt safe.
Within all this roamed the animal. Small, patched rag creature, slinking through the holes and gaps formed by the objects. Pathways had opened up for it, caverns and lodges within the stuff that it alone knew. Diabetic, scrofulous, tick-ridden it roamed, true monarch of the place, feasting on the bountiful teeming host bred and fed on the scraps. Daily it curled up on Edward’s bulk, sunned lazily on his warmth, licked lovingly his face and hands. It made small noises around him and placed in him its utmost trust. Perfect scion of affection, it alone understood him and spoke to him the language he understood. Edward need not open his mouth for the Animal to hear him. Thoughts of pouring out its tortured veins or cracking its pointless neck inserted themselves into his mind, evil jerking thoughts that sent him into a shuddering sob. He could do anything to it, ask anything of it, and it would assent.
#
The job was a paltry rite. Data entry at the university. Monotonous, thoughtless, eternal return: the sheets came in. The values extended. The errors returned. Edward went home.
These things repeated every day. The sun so audacious and garish in the sky he liked to avoid it. Hours he chose and he came to work late. Nocturnal nearly.
There were others there on the night shift: one named Aiden and another Kayden and another Carl. Quiet men Edward admired for no other reason than their silence. Avoiding interaction was a necessity, a pleasure, a skill for each. They had developed a subtle system of unspoken symbols and timing which ensured that none would be standing at the coffee machine nor the microwave, nor even walking down the hall to or from the bathroom in conjuction. It was total isolation under close quarters, a feat of solitude. The system was elegant and perfect and had taken months to establish, made more difficult by the absolute lack of communication between them all.
Then, one night, a cool fall blower with little regard for his preferences, Edward arrived to find that immediately next to his station there was aligned and sitting a young woman.
Waiting for his workstation to boot he stared at her, sitting there a repulsive and shameless two feet away. She had short hair, dark and angled. Some sort of foreign look. Striped shirt. Everything about her seemed striped, black on white or white on black he could not tell.
He walked to the coffee machine. He had been so distracted by her presence that he had not noticed Carl there, standing portly, red and ashamed. Already their harmony and elegance had been thrown off. Already their world had been shattered by her.
She left the data entry center soon after, packing up her things with swift, elegant movements that he only allowed himself to perceive in the periphery. She left not a material trace there, not a crumb or artifact nor even the lingering smell of soap.
His workday was shot. He tried to set the values but his mind went ever back to the intruder, the interloper. Later, returning from the bathroom he saw Arthur, the data entry manager, bearded and bespectacled and balding old man, sitting in his office.
Edward rapped on the door: two short, one long, one short. Arthur waved him in.
“Hello Edward. How are you.”
“There was,” he could hardly make the words out, “A new person in the data entry center?”
Arthur squinted, nodded. Opened his hands and closed them.
Sweat had pooled in Edward’s armpits, seeped into the cotton cloth there. Rage and sweat escaping from him, one and the same.
“A woman?”
Arthur nodded, took off his glasses.
“Simone. A visiting scholar. You met her?”
Edward shook his head. Rage. Idiot.
“No.”
He wiped off his hands.
“She was sitting right next to my station. Just,” he shook, unable to find the words, “Just sitting there?”
Even now she seemed impossible, the apparition of a ghost.
“I see.” Arthur said. Nodding. Eyes closed tight. Rubbing the bridge of his nose between forefinger and thumb.
“Sitting,” Edward said, “Just right there? Where I work?”
Edward was unsure if he even did work there anymore.
“Well,” Arthur began, “I can see you are upset. Simone seems quite kind and capable. She’s here from France working with Don for a few months. There was some snafu with her funding so we offered to take her on. She’ll be here at least through the end of the semester. Sorry for any inconvenience.”
#
He left early. The thought of her stayed with him just barbed and poisoned and lodged deep within his viscera. He shook.
Campus was empty. Loft lit with those urine yellow orbs laid out each at achingly equal intervals. Occasional lights on high up in the marble edifices, casements set deep with the bleary eyed work of the overstrung. In the distance, always in the distance, the dark loping form of some last student, stumbling home to bed, broken by the thin night’s fare. And here: Edward. Awake and angry, burning furious.
He stalked down to a park, thin strip of land hugging the inner sinuous curve of the campus cleaving river. Out of earshot he began to speak, the low grumble of the dispossessed. Soliloquy of hatred and anger. Sitting, standing, pacing. Along the river and away from it. Her, this woman, the whole thing ruined by her ignorant presence. The perfect system, hard won by months of patient care, the easy place, the safe place, torn apart by the very presence of her breath. Perfect presence, like the sun. Glaring and audacious and casting light on everything, on all his flaws and mistakes. Pulling into relief the sundry streaks of grime by which he was composed like a sudden wash of acid.
He sat again. Picked his nose. Rocked back and forth, head bent, thinking.
Trying to think.
#
He had not slept through the day. It had been weeks, months maybe, since he had last seen sunlight. He spent the day in his room, pacing the few open feet, picking endlessly through his piles. Arranging objects, moving them around. Taking some torn posterboard from the southeast corner of the room to the northwest. Digging out an electrophysiology device, flipping it around and reseating it.
There was something to find there, some hidden solution.
The animal watched intently, dodging out of the way when an adding machine came crashing to the ground or a coil of yellowed tubing tipped on its side.
“What to do Animal?” Edward said.
What to do Edward? The animal said.
He decided to go to work early, to not waste his waking hours any more than he had.
Again, she was there: headphones on, sitting at the terminal right next to his own. On seeing her, he froze. He tore against every instinct and pushed onwards, pressed over and sat. Territorial desires overriding all others. He stared but she did not budge: only checked the binder, entered the values, checked the binder, entered the values, checked the binder, deleted a value, reentered the value. And so on.
It was as if she was filled with the radioactive stuff: luminous and dangerous and impossible to approach. He wanted to take her apart like an old machine and find the source of this power. He wanted to isolate her in a small room and watch her movements, measure her activity, until she ran down into silence.
He pressed the button on his own machine and it croaked up to warmth. Gibbered and squeaked and moaned into full life.
He opened his own spreadsheet, fingers sweating and cold. He pulled his binder over and the cover slipped in his hand. He saw her look at him, turned to meet her gaze, but she was not. Only a trick of the periphery. He wiped his face, his hands. Blew his nose into the rough fabric of his polo shirt: lime green, sagging and patched over with machine oil and ramen water.
He stared at the great grid, the numbers marching top to bottom and left to right. A great crowd of data that might never be seen by human eyes again. He tried to type. Nothing came. He looked at the value, he looked at the keys. In the interim it slipped his mind, sublimated off into powdery emptiness. He looked again. Spoke it out loud, repeated it over and over. Glanced up at the screen, over at the woman, down at the keys. Nothing. Rushing emptiness. Great howling cavern.
He ran his fingers through this hair. Stood up, went to leave, changed his mind, circled around his chair and sat again. Stared at the screen, the blue glaring mockery. Looked at her, the impossible presence. Looked at the value. Pulled out a pen, wrote the value on the back of his hand. Held it up to the screen. Stared. Looked at the woman.
The sweat had smeared it in the few seconds between.
He walked to the water cooler. Kayden and Aiden were there. Long blond undergrads. Carpet sweater bedecked, perpetually stoned work shirkers. Trustless and null. They stood staring out the window, cool cones in hand, Kayden breathing softly through his mouth.
“Hello.” Edward said. It took the full part of his effort.
Kayden turned. Aiden nodded.
“Oh. Hey mam. What’s up.”
The long pause, Edward’s eyes darting. Sifting through piles of responses, churning through the detritus of his mind.
“She,” Edward gestured, straight armed and claw ended, over at the woman.
Kayden looked, craned. Nodded. Aiden rose on tip-toe.
“Yuh. The French chick?”
“Indeed.” He joggled a bit, strained and shook, “What is to be done?”
Kayden squinted, shook his head. Aiden chuckled.
“Whus to be done about what?”
Aiden surreptitiously pulled out a vaporizer and took a candy scented puff.
Edward sighed. Recoiled at their ignorance. Scuffed the ground. Bridging his own universe with another.
“The very presence? The lack of absence?”
Kayden nodded. The two met eyes and smiled.
“Oh, you don’t like that she is sitting there. Next to you?”
A novel crack and shift on Edward’s steel-stood visage. Some sort of rare outward display. Amusement, confusion. The bridge had been built, just the skeleton. Bare rickety thing, just enough for this.
“Indeed?”
“Oh I donno mam. I guess you could move? There’s like plenty of other computers around. Just pick another one?”
Edward shook. The audacity. The sheer belligerence.
“It’s? My? Station?”
“Right but, I mean, there are like twenty others right? They’re all the same. You could just move to another row or,”
“Mine? Four years? Longer than any other here? Mine.”
“Alright mam.” Kayden looked off, stifled a smile. “Well I guess you could just ask her to move or something.”
“No, no.” Edward shook his head, “Not on speaking terms.”
Aiden and Kayden chuckled.
“Then you could get her to move somehow? I donno.”
#
Back home he dropped his bag and dropped into bed. It felt better being there. The animal came and crawled and creaked and curled up, slopping its filthy sharp body down beside him.
It burred. It looked up at him.
“Animal,” Edward said.
Edward, the animal said.
It felt for a moment like the world just might be made whole again. Then the intrusions came. The face. The skin. That striped shirt like test bars on a midnight broadcast.
He got out of bed. The piles of his things, his treasures, rose around him. He picked through, pulling stacks of empty paint cans down. The animal hopped up onto a high place, a stable place, and watched over. Upset towers of glass jars. The architected heights of paintbrushes and string spools and chair legs. These things toppled down helplessly, clattering about and setting off side reactions of tumbling matter throughout the room. Each set off another, which set off two others, the things crashing and rolling about like a burst dam. The animal watched, silent, totally still.
When the highest parts had fallen and only the low places remained there came a few dull thuds from the floor below, then silence. It lay at his feet then, a sort of sea of matter. With the materials of creation surrounding him he felt like a god. He had to wade through it, but there it was, years of his collection laid bare and present and shining in the light.
He picked through the piles, wading slowly and carefully, carefully considering grease covered wrappers and broken rulers. He arranged a small space, a sort of stage made out of boards bound by wire.
He looked up at the animal.
“Give her a reason to leave animal.” Edward said.
Give her a reason to leave Edward.
#
When the sun rose he had a good supply. The board was arranged all over with his materials. He felt good and exhausted. He had fallen so deeply into this work that when its ultimate purpose came back to him it was like a hot dart out of darkness. Her face and presence piercing him, the unbalance running over him in waves of nausea and unease.
The mattress was covered, so he fell onto one of the softer parts of the pile and slept. Animal descended and curled up there between an arm and his face.
He dreamt that he was bound within a thousand oil soaked plastic bags, one wrapped within another.
#
The blinds lit red from the low slung sun. He wiped his hands on a hospital sheet and looked at what he had made. It stood on its platform wobbling back and forth under some invisible force as if it were alive. It resembled her, this thing: altar and gibbet. Holy relic and handmark of the cursed. He raised it up. It shifted and wobbled and seemed for a moment as if it might disintegrate. But it did not. He lowered it into a wooden crate and tacked the top down with the broad side of a shattered blender.
He felt like a man at sea who sees a distant ship. The possibility of freedom visible but far off. Hope and harmony and utter despair present in his ears all at once. The skepticism of the drowned man blossomed full within him.
Lugging the thing around was a mess. It stood in his vision. He stumbled up the bus steps and ran full on into door sills.
In the elevator he set it on the floor. The thing wobbled in its crate and let out a low, metal groan. This caught some dean’s secretary’s cautious eye,
“Research equipment.”
She looked away, embarrassed, but no less unsure.
In the data entry room he set the box beside his chair. The woman was not present, but her residue, a phone and small bag, were present at her station.
Edward removed a claw hammer from his bag and pried the box’s top loose.
Aiden and Carl appeared from behind their machines craning their necks to see. The thing jiggled and swayed in the darkness. He reached down and pulled it out, bottom heavy and limber like a wedding cake. It leaked a wan, tarry fluid onto his hands.
He placed it in her chair. It tipped back a bit then fit perfectly. He grabbed a protruding piece on the front and pulled, extending and unfolding the thing into a shape nearly human. From his bag he pulled two latex gloves, donned them and removed the stuff, the vial, the pale vital syrup. He unscrewed the cap and brought it to a small orifice on the thing’s chest.
She appeared then at the door, wiping her hands on the back of her pants.
Edward fumbled with the vial and it clattered to the floor, the liquid spilling out below. He stripped off the gloves and pressed the button on his machine.
There was a moment of silence and calm. The thing shifted slightly and emitted the noise of two rubbing metal pieces.
He heard her steps approach. Soft padding, not unlike animal in the cluttered dark.
He opened his program and feigned focus, absconding from guilt.
The thing vibrated slightly.
“Excuse me?” Her voice was honey pure and perfect.
He did not turn, only focused on his values.
“Excuse me, do you know what this is?”
He turned. Looked at her, looked at the thing. Shook his head. Returned to his work.
“Did you place this here? This thing?”
She put a hand to it gently. It swung wildly on a tipped axis.
Edward turned to the thing in the chair looking directly at the orifice in its chest.
“Excuse me ma’am. I am engaging in my work at the current moment. I find your questions to be a distraction. Could you please refrain from speaking whilst I am engaged in my work? I thank you for your cooperation.”
#
Edward was sitting in a chair. The thing in its crate in the floor beside him. Arthur was listening on his desk phone, running his fingers through his beard. He nodded, said Thanks, put the phone down.
“Well Judy in HR says this is an event for immediate termination. Unless you can give me better explanation of what happened here,”
“There is nothing to explain.”
“Yes, I believe there is.”
“No. Nothing.”
“Edward I would say that this is unlike you but honestly I’m not sure what would be like you or unlike you.”
The thing shuddered in its box. Edward and Arthur both looked at it.
“Can you at least explain what this thing is? Is it a sculpture? A robot? Is it a gift? It is going to explode?”
“It is her?” Edward said.
“Her? Her who? Who is her?”
“Her? The woman?”
“Her? Simone?”
“Correct.”
“No. It is not her Edward. She is a human, this thing is something else. If you refuse to speak about this situation then I have no other recourse. I am terminating your employment here and you need to leave. I’m glad that I don’t have any reason to call campus security on you but if you return here again, with or without that thing, I will. Is this clear?
“Amply.”
#
He ascended from the dumpster, awkwardly shaking out piece by piece. Its lock lay unceremoniously on the ground. He had been more careful the last time but there was no need now. The animal paced nearby, ripped from a lovely slumber.
The box held three of them, taped up and wrapped in a biohazard bag. Two were empty but the third was only half used. Some headlights ran along the far alley wall. He froze, crawled quickly behind the dumpster. But no one came and he continued.
The thing was propped there, still sagging and sad. A few drops of the spilled fluid brilliant there on its outer shell. He wiped these off with his sleeve and opened the fresh vial. It was cold, the wind blew. Scraps and whispers flew through the alley. This was the last chance, this was the only chance. He touched the lip of the vial to the orifice and poured with as much care as he could muster. The stuff disappeared suddenly, none visible within or without.
He tossed the vial aside and righted the thing, setting the internal ductwork straight. There was a long silence, nothing happened. Then the arm jerked. The head twitched. It waved back and forth.
Where it had once sagged it grew taught.
What had been quiet and cold grew warm and shining.
What is my input? It asked.
Where are my values?
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