QQQQQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQ] QQ] QQ] QQQ] QQQ] QQQ] QQQQ] QQ] QQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQ] QQQQ] QQ] QQ] QQQ] \QQ\ QQQQQQQQQ] QQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQ] \QQ\ QQQ] QQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQ] \QQ\ QQQ] QQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQ] \QQ\QQQ] QQQQQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQQQQ] Volume II Issue III ISSN: 1062-6697 ~~~````''''~~~ CORE is an electronic journal of poetry, fiction, essays, and criticsm. Back issues are available via anonymous ftp from ftp.eff.org from the /pub/journals directory. Please feel free to reproduce CORE in its entirety only throughout Cyberspace. To reproduce articles individually, please contact the author. Questions, submissions, and subscription requests should be sent to core-journal@eff.org. ~~~````''''~~~ LITTLE DUCKS ALL LINED UP IN A ROW Randy Money . . . . Mourn the Dead Kenneth Wolman . . . Wolma, Poland Kyle Cassidy . . . . Badmetafiction ________________________________________________________________________ Randy Money LIBRBM@suvm.acs.syr.EDU MOURN FOR THE DEAD Row on row of stones jut from the ground through the snow, landmarks of memories fading as generations rise and recline. Trudging through ice-lined, snow-filled ruts worn into the earth by a century of wagon wheels, carriage wheels and tires, past the plots of other people's memories and dreams, past snuffling poodles and straining shepherds dragging their whispering owners in solemn prancing procession, we at last reach our destination. There my sister lays flowers on two graves and I recall my father squatting, a position I associate with him, either pulling weeds as he pulled on his pipe or combing our dog or steadying a small me in a photograph. He was felled by three strokes. She remembers our mother ice skating; I remember our mother dancing a polka. Our mother, rotted, carved and hollowed by cancer, did not die but disappeared in whittlings, hair by hair, pound by pound. A few grave sites away, my sister lays no flowers but stands, trying to recall some good, but only remembering her father howling, howling, howling at the pain of brain cancer chewing, chewing, chewing until the doctors performed a lobotomy, not to ease the pain but to destroy his awareness of it. Silence follows like a consequence of orphanhood, and in shared sadness we mourn for the dead. * * * * * My sister sits back in her recliner, feet up, perplexed as she reviews her life. Mom, her oldest son says, we are worried about you, and she recalls another voice with the same timber but roughened by cigarettes and liquor over fifty years earlier: her father saying Get us some beer, as, her mother not home, he and his cronies played poker. She recalls putting the last bottle on the table, and that man's hand gripping her thigh and sliding up under her skirt as her father watches and laughs then looks back at his cards. And it happened not once but several times through her teens, and she always retreated to her room, where she buried herself in books or dreamed of a time when she would have children and a husband who would kill anyone who mistreated her children. She endured those years; she endures her memories. Mom, her oldest son says, we are worried about you; we want your mind at rest; we want you to rest easy. And she recalls a second voice with a different timber but the same tone almost fifty years earlier and arrives, blessed be, to her husband who, saved by the grace of God almighty, and so assured of heaven, hallelujah, says to her stepfather, No, you stay out of my home; We don't need your help; I'll care for my wife myself when she needs it, which she does not now, for if she is ill, she is sick on her own corruption and because she is a lazy woman. And her stepfather says, Get the hell out of my way or I'll kill you, slaps the door open, pushes her husband aside and enters her bedroom, where she lay with a fever of one hundred and three, her throat closing and her head spinning, and picks her up and carries her to the hospital. She moves from hospital to hospital, reaching Florida in early summer in labor with her first child and the nurse saying, Wait, you have to hold it, the doctor won't be here for an hour; she remembers holding and holding and holding, ignoring the pain of tissue tearing, the conflagration in belly and womb, fighting the urge to push, her son straining against her straining against him. And now forty-five years later, father, mother, step-father and husband are dead and her oldest son says, Mom, we worry about you; We worry that you will not rest easy; We worry that you are not repentant, that you have not renounced your sins before the alter of God; We--including his wife, but meaning him--want you to die assured of heaven. And she, tired, weak, beckons to him and coughs as he bends over her and spits square in his right eye, which she says offends her. And as he leaves, she ponders why, now that she can travel to New York or Boston or Toronto like she's always wanted, the doctor has said cancer, the anti-cell, the devourer gnawing, gnawing, gnawing, and why she is only comfortable in her recliner, traveling her life over and over like penance for unknown sins, and she wonders if there is redemption and grace and rest. And we look on with some pride, but mostly in grief and helplessness and we mourn for the dead. * * * * * And the old lady calls and she says, Come see me. My sister answers, No, I can't, Aunt Iantha. I can't. And Aunt Iantha's voice quivers like her hand as it picks up her cigarette, Come see me; Puff; You have to see me; Puff; I need to talk to you; Puff. And my sister squirms in her recliner and says, I can't; You have to understand, Aunt Iantha, I can't come to you. And Aunt Iantha says, The tongue is the evilest organ in the human body; Puff; You lied to me; Puff; You said you'd always take care of me, and now you won't even come see me; Puff. And my sister says, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. And the old lady sits smoked and marinating in phlegm, the smell of dead tobacco and moiling cigarette smoke, all compounded by the reek of a house sealed for a generation day and night, winter and summer. She shifts in her withered skin, and sits her crooked, arthritic back against the straight-backed kitchen chair and she says, She lied to me; Puff; I have no friends left; Puff; I know she goes to the hair-dresser; How can she go out? Puff; I had cancer once, too; Puff; They said I'd die, but they cured me; They'll cure her, too; Puff; So why can't she come see me? Puff. And I don't say to her, You don't understand; You were childless and you and your husband took your money, had your good times; Now she has some time to enjoy herself as best she can and she shouldn't have to come here and face your nagging and groaning about your aches and pains, your constant complaints and irritations, your scoldings that none of us do what we do the way you'd do it, which, for you, is the only way anything should be done; But more, she can't accept your retreat, your dead run away from the world, not when she's struggling to survive. Instead I say, You don't understand; You were thirty, she's almost seventy, and it's a different cancer, in the blood, not settled in a spot where it can be carved away; As for the hairdressers, they've offered to come to her house but she won't let them, she'd rather struggle against the lungs that won't fill, the blood that won't carry enough oxygen, the tiredness that cramps her muscles and makes her stagger so she has to hold something, anything after a few steps so she won't fall down, so she can regain her breath; She walks and breathes now like you, twenty years her senior; This is her one self-indulgence, don't begrudge her that, don't make her feel guilty. And the old lady says, No, you don't understand, you don't know what it's like to be old and widowed and childless; Puff; I've sat in this room twenty years and watched all I knew and all I cared for fade away and die as I sat here waiting and waiting for the ones I wanted to come and they didn't come; Puff; and those who did come weren't the ones I wanted to come, so I sent them all away and waited and waited; Puff; my family never comes to see me; Where are you? Why won't you come? Puff. And I don't say, because I can't stand the smell and the bitterness and the reproaches. And I say, We all have families, Aunt Iantha, we all have to tend to our own; We'll help as much as we can, but we can only help so much. And as I leave wondering if my sister dying isn't more alive than Aunt Iantha, in something like horror, I mourn for the dead. ________________________________________________________________________ Kenneth Wolman Ken.Wolman@att.com WOLMA, POLAND (Bogdan Chmielnicki was the leader of a Cossack revolt in the Ukraine and Poland between approximately 1648 and 1658. It is estimated that he was responsible for the deaths of between 100,000 and 300,000 Jews in Poland during that period.) For Melynda C. Reid 1. PRELUDE: WEDDING DANCE Beyle married Kalman in the fourth year of Chmielnicki, went under the canopy, defying danger and fate: stood with her bridegroom, thought only of him, this pale, graying man with his scholar's soft hands and sad gentle eyes. The wedding jester howled with laughter, perched like a crow on the synagogue roof, shrieked out Bride-to-be, bride-to-be, think but a little of what now awaits you! and they laughed at the jest, even Beyle herself, solemn in thinking of her new estate. Their families danced round them, pulled them apart: men with men, women with women, circling in the dark. Beyle sought Kalman with her dreams, her spirit in the air, apart from the dancers and decorum of the Law: and felt his spirit move toward hers in darkness, thinking indeed of what awaited them: for Beyle, at sixteen, and Kalman, at thirty, saw in each other the meeting of souls beyond age, and longed to cleave together, fire and air, according to their spirits: and then soared above themselves, joined together in air and fire, one within the other, accepted first in fear, then in joy: looked down on the lights below, saw not Chmielnicki but Heaven in the distant-nearing flames, drifted in each others' arms, and laughed to themselves, laughed to each other, recalling the jesterUs summons to think of what awaited: for they felt this night that what waited was their gift to be borne. 2. THE CHILDREN Beyle married Kalman in the fourth year of Chmielnicki, soon fled with him from the village of Wolma to Cracow: returned that winter, heard the nightmares: but because there was nothing to do for them, she could not mourn: so Beyle went like a ghost into her husband's bed, dutifully, as she had been instructed: but at the moment of Kalman's fulfillment, remembered the nightmares: how the Hetman's Cossacks sewed a terrified cat in her pregnant sister's womb, fed the baby she carried to an underfed sow; captured her 10-year-old brother Avruml, poured raw vodka into his gullet, wrapped him like fish in a scroll of the Law, and live-buried him, before their mother's disbelieving maddened eyes, in the synagogue cemetery, laughing drunkenly at the quick-fading shrieks of Mamala! from beneath the lime: and how their mother, reduced to a keening and babbling mad- woman who had forgotten her prayers, was allowed at last to die: raped first, repeatedly, on her son's fresh grave, then beheaded; and how a Cossack hurtled her severed head at an innkeeper in payment for vodka and food. She heard her brother's spectral sobbing in the draining cry of the man thrusting inside her, and that night twice conceived: their firstborn child, and her knowl- edge that hearing the cry of the dead had doomed it. She bore that summer, crying out Mamala! in her pain, as she forced it downward, outward, cruelly, feeling nothing for its unbegun unwanted life, ended as the midwife severed the cord. Kalman mourned, took solace from his books, sought and found answers that only smothered questions, bound the mouth that would protest: and was taught to dull questioning God with his wife's body: so came to Beyle again, to sow within her, this time in joyless silence, focused, as the rabbis taught him, not on pleasure but the task of binding his wife to fertility. So again she conceived, and bore again, but the child lived: and it was the color of moonrise beneath the dark swatch of its hair: a ghostly spectre to take Avruml's name, Avruml himself risen from the graveyard lime-pit, with no more life than he. Beyle resigned herself: and sensed this child would also die, victim of its name, a curse given in devotion. But it did not, and Beyle mocked herself for a false prophetess: for she saw Death's Angel, knew herself his priestess, dedicated to his will, even to renouncing her children: but not Avruml but Kalman followed in the winter that came: not murdered, save by God's pity and the blood-spattering cough that lived in his lungs, that made him weep from pain and shiver through the hottest summer nights, and that finally came to take him. Still Beyle could not mourn: for the sickly child, the changling-Avruml, clung to her breast, demanded all her strength, fought against her darkness, drank, sucked at her breast with the lover's passion its father could not show, lived beyond its foretold days, an ancient soul and wonder to his mother, but would not grow. 3. THE INVADERS The Swede has left his wife six months behind, her face by now a dim memory of resentment, his children, two alive, four dead, all given to fill a parish register or country churchyard, his wife's womb swelling again with the promise of a new chance that neither wishes nor believes, living on a hillside farm that mocks his wife's fecundity in its barrenness: a farm of stones. One morning, he looks without passion or anger at the wolf-mangled body of a sheep, surveys his rain-withered crop that will be neither tithe nor bread to feed his family: shivers and feels himself freeze dead inside, remembering the story in church of how Hagar, cast into the desert by the Jewess Sarah, parted from Ishmael so not to see him die: does not bid farewell, but disappears from the farm, spends the day drinking in an inn filled with men whose every breath united is curses and despair; and flees to King Charles' army and the distant Polish wars. Lost after battle, wandering to the village, he contemplates the woman in the yard, sitting in the sunlight, a baby clamped to a breast, the nipple dark- swollen, visible, a feminine vision to inspire not lust but memory: of his wife on the hillside farm, perhaps alive, perhaps not (it is all one), the child in her womb now born, perhaps alive, perhaps not (it is all one), her body beneath his in the night, a shredded memory of love turned too soon to exhaustion: she, an old woman at 25, without the strength even to dream. He feels suddenly seized without reason, without experience, newborn himself, bereft of memory: and the Jewess before him a strange, darkling creature with wolf- eyes, clutching her child to her teat like a beast. She looks at him, the Jewess, quickly covers her breast, extends the child before her like a shield, shaking her head in odorous terror, a febrile quivering fright before a stranger: and he walks slowly toward her, his boots sucking against the springtime mud like a polluted kiss. What is she crying out at him, shaking her head? He feels himself laugh soundlessly: what would she cry but Don't! as he takes the child, carefully, out of her arms, sets it on the ground, turns and sees her gaping: for he has kissed the child gently, then turned its back to what will take place, quickly, behind the ruined house. She knows the sure signs that she is with child again: and will bear in the winter. What are prayers? she cries: staggers wildly through the village, Avruml in her arms, invades the study house, and pleads for death at the hands of Kalman's friends as she begged the stranger when he was done with her: extends her neck, points at the sword in the belt he had not bothered to remove. But her comforters hold her, teach her the Law: how a Jewish mother bears a Jewish child, that the child will be welcomed: a new child, a new life, in a land that has lost its children: and the words of her comforters thrust into her darkness, drive her shame from her heart, forgive her, save her from her mother's madness. God has abandoned us, he is so distant! cries the midwife that December as she draws forth the red, squalling blonde-haired Viking baby boy whose cry is like the ram's horn blown at the New Year. But Beyle laughs, weeping, holding the child: No, God is close, in my belly, like the cat inside my sister! 4. CRADLE SONG Sleep my little one, show me your future, Sleep and dream, show me your past. Show me my sister, my mother, my brother, Show me your father, show me what lasts. Sleep my little one, don't wake too soon, Sleep and dream, don't wish for dawn. For dawn takes away all your wonderful dreaming, And daylight shows nightmares, a life to be borne. Wake my little one, for you are crying, Wake my poor little one, MamalaUs here. Wake, my little one, for you have saved me, The past is a fouled curse, the future is here. Rise with me, little one, come dance in my arms, Rise and dance, come up to the air. Look down at the lights, reach out, touch the stars, For they are as bright as the gold in your hair. ________________________________________________________________________ Kyle Cassidy cass8806@elan.rowan.edu BADMETAFICTION I took formal and more or less official possession of Elvis Hemingway's room at exactly twelve noon, February the second, 1992. It was Groundhog's day, that's important. The actual physical act of taking over the back room at #5b Carpenter Street (upstairs from the _Ajax Tire Shop_ where the violently broiling sounds of cursing, pneumatic tools and _Guns 'n Roses_ could be heard almost continually throughout the day) was not a pretty sight. Elvis was a fat, fading, and failing hippie. Neo-hippie I should say. He was only 30. Most of his _hip_ness he got from smoking dope, watching other people smoke dope, listening to the _Grateful Dead_ (while smoking dope), and renting the video tape of _Woodstock_ (after smoking dope). He was born in 1962 which would have made him, what? _eight_ during the concert? _"Don't take the brown acid. The brown acid is bad,"_ he would tirelessly intone (he thought it was funny, or poignant, or at least vaguely _sixties_). He lived on vegetarian bean sprouts, Tab, and clove cigarettes. He worked for _Greenpeace_-though he kept a sock drawer you could breed maggots in. There was a bong next to his bed with an old sweat sock stuffed in the neck. I didn't know Elvis that well-I'd seen him for a total of about three hours. I got to stand there and watch him pick through old _Relix_ magazines, ostensibly looking for a picture of Bob Weir and Bob Dyllan throwing sticks off the side of London Bridge or something. He felt he had to show me that. He was the type to vanish noiselessly at frequent intervals and be gone for days at a time. He was supposed to have moved out by the 31st, but he'd vanished again instead. "He gone?" I said as I came banging up the hollow, wooden, neverbeenpaintedsince1961 stairs in my huge black combat boots, making a noise like a thousand stampeding wildebeests. Of course this comment was directed into the empty air, and I didn't know if anybody was home, but it was meant for my frail, new roommate, whose name-to his misfortune, and for the sake of elucidation-was Hershel Feinstien. I was bringing over the last of my things. I set them down on the kitchen floor. "Nope," he replied bleakly, looking up from the grapefruit half he was gnawing on and away from the newspaper he was reading, "Not gone. Haven't seen him in weeks." He was wearing a dark blue suit-jacket and slacks, a white silk shirt and this mottled pink and black tie with a knot about the size of a peanut. He had on penny loafers with nickels shoved in them. The nickels didn't fit properly and the stiff new leather was bulging and torn. "You know, you're supposed to put _pennies_ in those." I pointed. He followed my finger briefly with his eyes but didn't seem to understand me. He ran four fingers through his curly red hair, which was a little too long in the back, and shook the _Books_ section of the paper. Over his shoulder I could read the headline: "Sieze the Day!" Feinstien was inherently and overpoweringly Jewish (all his friends were either named Ira, Moses, or Saul), though he tried to pretend otherwise. Even to the point of hiding, behind the bathroom mirror, the tiny golden Star of David which his mother had given him on his barmitzvah fifteen years before. "That's why they call them _penny_ loafers." "What?" he looked up at me. "I brought the rest of my stuff. This is it." "Good. That's good." Most of my stuff was in the living room or the closet or piled up in the corner of Hersel's room. Hershel Feinstien was a science fiction author who was suffering from a traumatic, acute, and near permanent case of writer's block. In fact, he hadn't written a word in two years, ever since George Scithers cryptically referred to him as an "ant farmer" in the elevator at a Chicago convention. His exact meaning was never made quite clear to me on that one, but Hersh was devastated. (This might have been related to an incident which had taken place two nights prior, where Hersh had gotten severely intoxicated at the hotel bar and leapt over a table to kiss a woman whom he thought was Ursila K. Le Guinn, and who had in fact turned out to be the wife of a vacationing steel magnate from Pittsburgh;-whose distempered and impassioned bodyguard proceeded then to lay Feinstien across every table in the room, spilling a good number of drinks in the process.) Hardly anyone called him Hershel. His first (and only) book, _Christ & the Ceramic Belt Hammer /r_, was published under the pseudonym Mitterand Belfgore. Most people called him _Belf_. You kind of had to. (The book, by the way, was a very complicated pseudo-religious tract about an intelligent, and highly independent, race of neural impulses which existed in unused portions of the human brain (largely in idiots) and psionically regulated weather patters into a complex matrix of literature/language, basically for the entertainment of some miscellaneous and unnamed space bugs living in Dimension Z (that's not the real name by the way, the location of the true alien home- world escapes me at the moment). It's a real tough read, though it garnered Hershel a glut of favorable reviews, mostly comparing him with dead existentialists from third world countries.) He worked at _Captain Hook's!_ restaurant for children, where he dressed in an outsized foam rubber pirate's head (patch, hook, and boots) and was three times a night goosed in a mock sword fight by Staci Randall, a coquettish seventeen year old High School senior, who looked almost too good dressed in Peter Pan's green tights and tunic. He walked around bellowing, "shiver me timbers!" "you'll walk the plank!" "swab the deck!" and other such nautical nonsense. He'd first taken the job at the recommendation of his agent, Marty, who told him (both of them in a drunken stupor) that science fiction mogul Lester Dell Ray's daughter Cordelia worked there. To the disappointment and unrestrained despair of all involved (except probably Marty), Lester Dell Rey turned out not to have any daughters named Cordelia and the girl in question turned out to be named _Mary Kay_ and not _Dell Rey_ anyway (her father was a plumber from Clarksboro) ... but Belf stayed on just the same-mostly due to the way in which Staci Randall filled out her costume, and partly because he had just been promoted to Captain Hook (whereas before he had merely been an ordinary pirate who didn't get to bellow anything at all except "can I take your order?" and "would you like fries with that?"). I stomped around the apartment with an air of possessive pride:-peeing loudly into the toilet and leaving the seat defiantly in the air when I was finished-a purely symbolic gesture of bold audacity directed at my last girlfriend who maintained an obsessive, feminine, fixation about such things. "I want that man out of my apartment!" I blared from the bathroom, carefully placing my brushes-tooth and hair, in the vacant medicine cabinet. "So do I," bellowed Belf from the kitchen (he had, by now, considerable practice in bellowing, it was well suited to his meager form). Belf _hated_ Elvis, with a passion not to be found on the most memorable and egregious episodes of _Divorce Court_. While Belf was neat and orderly (he folded his trash), slim, and polite, Elvis smelled bad, snored, came in late, and perhaps worst of all, bragged incessantly about success with women who never existed. "Well, when's he coming? to get his stuff...." "I don't know...." There was the sound of a spoon being set down on a plate. I walked back down the hall-into the living room, "he should have been here days ago. Weeks ago. He never should have moved _in_. I told him he was moving out. I haven't seen him." "Where does he go?" I asked, looking over the battered books on the shelf, there were dozens of them with unimaginably esoteric titles, some in foreign languages. "I don't know. I have no idea. The only thing I know is that people call and ask for him, late at night. All these guys with weird accents," he was pouring himself a cup of some expensive smooth scented coffee, "I tell them that he's dead. Every once in a while I beat his clothes back into his room with a stick. I mean, I _dream_ about his clothes..." "What's that?" I asked, pausing by his desk, littered with paper and empty coffee cups. I pointed to a large manilla envelope tied meticulously with a white string. "My new book," he said. Written neatly across the top of the envelope was the single word "Badmetafiction". "What the hell is _Badmetafiction?_" "It's a joke," he said, "Kind of. Sort of a joke actually-it would be funny if ... I don't know. If only it were funny." He seemed weary and dismayed. "Can I read it?" "Can? well, you _could_-only there's not anything there. I mean, it's all just blank paper. It's just a title. It's going to be about a science fiction author who's-well, he's out of ideas, and it turns out to be because there are these government bore- worms inside his head ... and all he can hear are the Watergate tapes, playing over and over ... I just thought that if the envelope were full-stuffed with paper and all, that it would inspire me..." His thought processes were stratospheric, neurotic, and seldom understood by others. He sounded nasal. I untied the string and looked inside the envelope. There was a sheet of bond paper with "Badmetafiction" typed across it and his pseudonym, Mitterand Belfgore beneath it. The rest of the envelope was stuffed with coupons. "It has an almost finished appearance to it," said Belf. "You could fill your shelves with them." "I could. I may." He wrung his hands pensively. I went into my room, Elvis' room. It wasn't that there was a lot of stuff-it just wasn't in any particular order. There was no furniture, just dirty clothes and paper bags. Remnants of a hundred take-out dinners at Taco Bell. There were a lot of beer cans. It smelled like a locker room,-that particular fetid odor of wet socks and perspiration which always reminded me of ... something. "I don't think he's ever done his laundry. Since he's been here. Not once." He kicked at a sock, which rolled bumpily into a corner, "Look at this," he crouched next to the bed pointing, as through at an unusually large Haitian Tarantula which had just crawled from the drain, "he uses his _shoes_ for ashtrays. His fucking _shoes!_" Next to the bed were a pair of nondescript brandless, canvass, running shoes-they were filled with cigarette butts and ashes. "Does he _dump_ them before he puts them on?" "Yeah, he _dumps_ them all right ... he _dumps_ them here in the corner," He pointed with his foot. His hands were shoved into his pockets as though he were protecting them. In the corner was a makeshift ashtray, partially obscured by a rolled up pair of long- johns. A cookie can which must have held four pounds of butts and ashes. They overflowed and spilled onto the floor. "He's _never_ emptied that." Next to the ashtray was the filthy purple bong with a sweat sock shoved in the top-I mentioned that before. "He actually smokes out of that. He takes the _sock_ out and _smokes_ out of it. He puts the sock there to keep the _water from evaporating_. Him and those damn lazy hippies. They come up here and smoke dope and plan the revolution and meanwhile his _socks_ are sneaking out the back door and committing _armed robbery_." He stomped out of the room. "Well, when's he gonna get back? I mean, when can I start putting my stuff in here? Could I shove all this in the closet? would he mind do you think?" There was some abstract rumbling from the kitchen. "Does he _mind_?" Belf bellowed, "it no longer _matters_ if he _minds_. We ought to just start a _fire_ or something. Salt the earth," he wandered back in the room, "I say we move it _for_ him..." he was wearing this gas mask that I had gotten at a yard sale about ten years before (I had never found an adequate use for it, but somehow I couldn't bear to throw it away), a single yellow dish-washing glove on his left hand, an industrial (metal shop workers?) apron, and on his right hand he was wearing his hook which he was brandishing wildly. He handed me a trash bag and the other rubber glove. "Here," he said, "sorry I only have one glove-" I opened the trash bag and he started hooking clothes and dropping them into the bag. His breath was fogging up the inside of the mask and his head tilted at odd angles in order to see through the clear parts. He picked up the million fragrant and crumpled socks as though they were turds. "Where are we going with this?" I asked, "I mean, what are we going to do with it." He stopped for a moment and looked directly at me. Except for the hook-for-a-hand, he looked like one of those guys in the beginning of the _Andromeda Strain_, walking through that town filled with dead people. "We're going to throw it in the river." He sounded like Darth Vader. It wasn't exactly a river, to allow you to believe so would overly glorify our town. It was sort of a wide stream, but it passed beneath the main street about a half mile away in a splendid and broiling waterfall that always made me think of salmon on those PBS documentaries, you know, heroically leaping up stream and thrashing their tails, tragically and wonderfully exerting themselves in glorious slow motion, only to die horribly, gored and mauled two miles upstream in the jaws of a two thousand pound grizzly bear. "Clog the stream?" I said, "Pollute the environment?" "Yes. With the environmentalist's trash. Let _him_ drag it out of the water with a stick or something. I hope it kills a fish." He picked up Elvis' shoes with a diligent and unrelenting disdain and dropped them into the bag. "Tribbles like Vulcan's," "Huh?" "But they _don't_ like Klingon's..." "What the hell are you talking about?" "We'll put the chain on the door tonight, and tomorrow we'll change the locks and if anybody comes looking for him, we'll tell them he _died_, that he was _shredded_ in a _combine_ accident in Arkansas and they buried him in a fucking _mason jar_." He waved his hook in my face, "We'll tell them he was _julienned_. Then if he _does_ come back we can garrote him with a lamp cord and bury him in the back yard and no one'll suspect us because they'll think he's already _dead_." He was beginning to sweat prolifically under the gas mask and his wet hair was sticking wildly in the air. The plastic eye patches were completely fogged over. He emphasized his words with savage lunges of his hook, as though he were trying to swat a bat in mid flight. Belf put on a long black _Botany 500_ overcoat (it was about sixty degrees out) and dragged the first bag unceremoniously down the stairs with his hook. I followed, giddy with some crazy, wicked, sense of desolation and havoc. I tossed my bag up onto my shoulder-feeling like an evil Robin-Hood-Santa-Clause. It must have weighed fifty pounds. Together we trudged down the street. After four blocks the bags grew fairly heavy and Belf bore down on the _Dunkin Donuts_ with all the serious intent of a sailor coming home to the best brothel in town after a year at sea. Slinging the bag inside the door, kicking it across the filthy, smooth tile floor. Groaning or sighing he sat down on a stool and pulled out a cigarette. "I'm going through a lot of trouble to get this dimwit out of my house," he shoved the cigarette into the corner of his mouth and lit it with a loud, expensive looking, silver lighter, "If there were justice in the world, _he_ would be carrying this trash down and throwing it in the river." Two seats down from Belf sat a hacked old woman in an official looking black coat specked with shiny silver buttons. She was short and disheveled, her stringy black hair fell in her face as she alternately pulled at a tired looking cup of coffee and chopped a cream doughnut with widely spaced teeth. I thought at first that she was a cop, an undercover cop or something, but then I realized that she was a crossing guard, a ridiculous octagonal hat lay on the counter in front of her. Her face was beleaguered and lined. She looked straight ahead, through the walls. Belf rapped his hook on the counter and ordered coffee. Which was brought to him by a blue-lidded fifty year old waitress with a beehive hairdo. She didn't look twice at his prosthesis, but instead turned wearily to me without saying a word. "Coke," I said, "and a Boston Creme." She scowled at me and languorously promenaded off on flat, white shoes. Somewhere under all that makeup there lived a sad and tormented soul, who had long since come to grips with the damp and cheerless realities of the world. She realized that she would never be a princess or a beauty queen. She would never be an administrator, or even a seller of used cars. She couldn't be a secretary because she lacked refinement and conversational skills-and besides that, she probably couldn't type. Belf stirred his coffee with his hook. "Bout time ta get goin'," said the Beehive to the crossing guard, passing a wet rag across the counter in front of her. "Uh-huh," said the crossing guard. We drank our beverages. I gnawed on my doughnut while Belf jabbered on with a continual stream of seemingly unconnected thoughts on circumcision, computers, weather patterns, angels, ice sculptures, and the mysteries of mezzanine floors. These he tried to tie together with the crazy idea that he had been Galileo in not one, but several past lives, all of which left me very confused. This was one of the hazards of knowing him. He fell silent and stared forward for some time, lost in himself, then he turned to me, his thoughts completed I supposed. "Lastday," he said caustically, looking down into his open palm. "Huh?" I said. He showed me his hand, it was clean and young, traced with faint pink lines. "Lastday," he said again. "What the hell are you talking about?" He looked down into his palm again. "Yesterday it was red, now it's blinking." He looked back up at me, "Let's get out of here." He aimed a finger out the window. "Sure," I replied, dropping the remains of my donut on the napkin. "You're a nut," I told him. The crossing guard looked at us and then at her watch. "You don't believe what I was saying?" asked Belf as we again lugged the bags down the sidewalk. "No, that's not it, saying about what? I guess I'm ... aw hell. I forgot what I was going to say. I don't know." "Open the pod-bay doors, Hal," said Belf, shining his teeth like whitewashed fenceposts at me. _Across from us, school is out, and there is a group of kids waiting to cross, standing on the curb and watching the traffic on 322 pass in front of the middle school. The traffic is pretty heavy, and as far as I can see are cars in both directions. One of the kids, who looks about thirteen, is wearing a new denim jacket and stomping brown work boots. He looks pretty antsy, like maybe there's a good baseball game on, or he's going to meet some girl behind the library. He's looking left and right, up and down the street, and instinctively my eyes follow his. Finally there comes a small break between cars, maybe twenty feet and he runs out between them. The instant that his foot hits the pavement, I know he isn't going to make it. "Look!" I say, and point. Suddenly everything is noiseless and calm, as though one universe ended as I said those words and instantly, another began. Belf follows my arm just in time to see a car-it all happens so fast now that I don't even remember what kind of car it is-smack into him. He folds almost in two, like a carpenters ruler at an awkward place in mid-leg, somewhere around the knee, but I can see that it is in an unhealthy direction, then he recoils from the car like a bullet from a gun, he flies up into the air and somehow his pants came off, completely stripped off, and before he hits the ground I can see one of his boots flying through the air. It must go thirty feet, I watch it and see it land in the street. There seems to be nothing in the world but me and that boot, now sitting upright and untied on the pavement, looking unassuming and perfectly normal_. "Knocked his pants off," I heard Belf say, his voice was loud and seemed to punch through a sheet of silence which had been stretched tight between me and the rest of the world. Suddenly, although I didn't know that any time passed, the street was filled with people and flashing lights and the traffic was stopped. We picked up our bags and kept on walking, slowly, trying to get a quick glimpse of what was going on without looking like rubberneckers. A short, fat woman, with a recessed face and large protruding necks, plastic rimmed glasses, dressed in pastel green, polyester, bell bottoms and a tight white sweater, was lumbering from the accident to my side of the street, swinging her heavy arms in order to lift her feet. I heard her call to someone behind me: "Both his legs are broken!" The kid was laying on the cool asphalt with two or three blue-jeaned people kneeling over him. From the quick glance I got between squatting bodies I could see a broken bone sticking through the flesh of his leg, red and white and painful. I looked away, back up the street, and as I did, I saw the crossing guard, the one from the donut shop, and she was running down the sidewalk really fast, holding her hat in front of her, clutched to her chest with both hands and her hair was streaming out behind her. I could see then that she was short and a little over weight. There was a look of absolute terror on her face; I knew that she could see the flashing lights, and see the people. I knew that she knew what happened and I felt sorry for her. "Look," I said to Belf, pointing again, then almost wishing I hadn't. "Bet she feels like shit," he said. "Yeah," I replied quietly, "yeah, I bet she does." We lingered a couple of seconds longer but Belf wasn't interested and he started reciting the laws of robotics, complete with corollaries, and poking me in the arm with his hook. We walked on down the road towards the spillway where the ground dropped away on one side. I looked over, it must have been a mile down. Tiny, great, crashing, furious, ruinous, clouds of water splashed into the basin below with a distant roar and a cold spray, like a vaporizer. "Say goodbye to Elvis," croaked Belf with an air of melodramatic sentimentality, his springy hair doing crazy pirouettes in the wind. It was kind of noisy where we were standing. "Do you think we really ought to? I mean, these are his worldly possessions..." "Ought to? Do I think we _ought to_?" he looked at me for a brief interval, as though I had an enormous pimple beneath one eye, and then he shouted: "_Into the drink you foul reeking Pig-God!_" hurling the bag as far as he could over the side. We both leaned against the stone wall and watched it fall. It fell slowly as the wind wafted up from under it, spreading it out like a parachute. It seemed to take ages to reach the bottom where it made a far off "whumph" and vanished in the churning waves. It rose up a few seconds later and was instantly sunk again. For some time it was gone entirely and our eyes eagerly searched the water until it appeared ten or twelve yards away in the calmly swirling water, barely floating now, an oil slick upon the surface. "Now you," said Hershel, looking over at me and closing the collar of his coat against the cold air with a thin hand. "Elvis Hemingway: In the name of God Almighty, I drown thy fleas!" I lifted the bag up with some gleeful recklessness and set it on the white wall, looked cautiously, left and right, for police, and pushed it over the side. It opened on the way down and his clothes began to spill out. They scattered, and the bag landed upside down, thrashing on the churning waves. After a few minutes the bag floated limply out of the maelstrom. "Look," called Belf, pointing. I followed his finger and could see one of Elvis' shoes bobbing lazily on the surface of the water. We watched it for a while, until it was out of sight around the bend. Then Hersh said: "I talked to my dad on the phone yesterday. He called." "Oh yeah? Really? What did he say?" "Not a lot. He asked how I was doing, you know; if I had fleas, if I'd got a job yet, if I'd written anything, was I still eating oatmeal three times a day." "What did you tell him?" "I told him I'd written another book, and that it was called _Badmetafiction_ and that it was going to blow _Christ & the Ceramic Belt Hammer /r_ right out of the water and that it would be on the shelves any day now. I told him it was being reviewed by Saul Bellow in the _New York Times_ book review section, and that I'd sold the movie rights to Steven Spielberg and that I'd be rich and famous inside the year." "Did he believe you?" "No. He said: _If a schlemazl like you sold umbrellas; it would stop raining; if he sold candles; the sun would never set; if he made coffins; people would stop dying_." "Some dad." "He's got faith in me, yeah." Belf sighed and we walked back towards our apartment. _____________________________________________________________________ CORE is published by Rita Rouvalis March 1993