Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, "Found" Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts (24 page)

Starting Bid: $9.99

Original Copy of Toast from the Banks–Skyzwack Wedding Reception, Orange County Country Club, July 16th, 2006. Paper is Slightly Yellowed (Time) and has Large Merlot Stain in right bottom corner. Legibility of text remains unaffected.

I should state here that it wasn’t just me that was against the Banks–Skyzwack union, but rather that the group of friends that I had known from my time in the Midwest found this merger so unsavory that many of them actually
boycotted
the event, and that in accepting my role of Best Man there were two starkly different demographics pressuring me with their agendas, the first of these being the aforementioned friends, and the second The Bride and Groom. While I did and do admit to a predilection for spirits, the latter party’s selfishly exaggerated concern in regard to this issue translated ultimately to me being forced to sleep at the foot of Kyla Skyzwack’s childhood bed, The Bride and Groom inches away, snoring in tandem on the spring-coiled Serta twin so as to keep sober the night before their big day. But let me back up: Tyler Banks, once punk rock dishwasher, was now a porn mogul, having landed in Chatsworth at just the right time to be a part of smut’s jump into cyberspace. Everything wrong with America is dreamed up first in LA.

Tyler found me through my place of employment, my name listed on some page of the MTA’s website. I tell myself I flew west out of loyalty, though I know it has much more to do with a dysfunctional lusting after things long passed. Arriving at John Wayne, I found my former friend and his bride in baggage claim, tanned and dead inside. The subsequent days only brought proof of this claim, the wedding party dining at a Cheesecake Factory in Brentwood, where Kyla, an employ of Tyler’s Tens (in addition to a multitude of other pay sites), flashed her enormous fake breasts to a group of Japanese tourists, who in turn held up their end of this tasteless cliché by taking copious amounts of pictures with their digital cameras. Tyler’s own parents sat smiling, Midwestern and horrified. Kyla’s family was Armenian and devoid of moral pretense, caring less about what their daughter did than making sure she in no way could be viewed as lumpen: that the millions would keep coming, never mind the source. The last straw was the procurement, by Tyler, of an entourage of mid-tier adult stars, from which I could pick as many or as few as I wanted to have my way with. This wretched attempt at gift occurred in a private lounge in a West Hollywood nightclub, Tyler producing a key to a suite at a nearby hotel. I chose a single female, had the taxi drop her off a block away, and went to the room alone, where I wrote the below speech in full:

A toast then, while we can, while youth graces us, while our faces shine, while our hair is coiffed in a manner that inspires true envy, while our fingernails possess no chips, nothing hanging, while our organs are determined and hearty, while our good teeth remain intact in their gums, need not root canals, need not extraction, need not to be worked on while we sit in a chair that has been reclined mechanically, trying to think of something better to think about, the birds lighting past the window, the dental saw whirring; while we wake without tingling in one of our limbs, before our blouses and cap toes and cuts of our jeans plunge inevitably toward obsolescence, prior to the consideration of vitamin supplements, prior to repeat excursions to outlet wholesalers because
the thatched Javan magazine rack is backordered
; while there’s a tap in our toes, a cut to our jib, while vibrancy still speckles the iris, while beds go unmade and floors function as hampers and we know all the songs on the radio, and our skin is not squamous from the aging of cells, and we do not lurch down the hallways of rest homes, before ducks in neat rows and the long gloam of August, before the cold front, the squall line,
the wind shift
, a lifting of glasses, a jubilant hoisting, because we have made it this far mainly intact, because no act has crushed us to palsied, because it’s 6:32 on a June night in Tustin and the back room of this hall is ours for the full of the evening, and for a short time we will not be hurtled toward loss, toward our own peculiar miseries, will sit here with wine and not age and not die for we possess
immortal capacity
, something better than hope, because hope is for the weak, is for the needy, is for middle-aged dads six months past divorce, is for the octogenarian who prays before bedtime that her SSI checks will outlast her, will not expire before she does, these people need hope, that gold, hollow thing, and we, while here, while dining, need nothing—need only for our drinks to be freshened up, need only to have the food keep coming.

Because we had been promised that the food
would
keep coming, were assured by a bevy of antediluvians (whom we did or did not cast our votes for), that the shelves would be full, that the taps would run clean, that there would be
unending smorgasbord
, as this country, while we were still glints in the eye, still tears in the condom, had chosen McDonald’s, not McGovern, had fueled oiled and lubed the corporate machine,
had cared more about product than service
, and so then new odes: to the plasma tv, to the next batch of modified food additives, to pay sites devoted to horny young teens and updated daily; to bugs in the code and thus data corruption, to Diebold’s firm grasp on Ohio, to the image, long passed, of Saddam in beret, grasping the hilt of a saber, gauging the weight of the gold-handled sword per a series of terse chopping motions—Saddam is testing a weapon—to a long list of lies that we’ll be left to explain to our children and then to our grand-children, should we not die on the roads, in the air, from disease—to tunnel-vision, because as long as we can keep both eyes on the road, we do not need to look at the landscape, and as long as there’s gas and asphalt and rubber trees, we can keep driving without
destination
, a word we know not what to do with, a word and idea, we’re really pretty sure, that somebody else was supposed to take care of, while we leased SUVs and ate maki rolls and attained thorough knowledge of Wall Street’s big gainers, and since we know nothing, since the directions were lost, since all manner of order was tossed out the window, as we enter this century grasping at straws and pointing with fingers, I urge, while you can, listen less and see more, before what lies ahead turns to dots in the rearview, before life is a marker long passed and well gone—steal these candlesticks, fill your coat up with forks, and hurry along into the night; do not let this world catch up with you, ever, and if it does knock, do not let it in.

Speech was read once in its entirety. A second reading was halted by the disc jockey, a for-hire guy by the name of Lenny Tarveck who, as it turns out, was also from Buffalo, and grew up not all that far from me.

Starting Bid: $1

29

Discarded Notions

Matthew Williamson

30

Star Lake Letters

Arda Collins

RE: MS #04-2683; Epiglottic Haematoma: An Unusual Complication of Foreign Body Ingestion

Dear Dr. Fukushima,

Thank you for submitting the above-referenced manuscript to the
Annals of Otology, Rhinology, and Laryngology
. Two experts have now reviewed your paper, and we have decided that you live somewhere extremely far away, and every time we try to picture you, we come up with nothing, and revert to an inexplicable image of a kitchen cabinet under the sink at home, the inside and the outside of the cabinet, and some of the surrounding kitchen. I keep some cleaning supplies under here, brushes and sponges, but it isn’t a dirty space. I understand why this might not be what you would imagine your name and manuscript title to connote. However, if you were to respond to my admission about you, I would ignore you by sending you the following letter:

RE: MS #04-2683; Epiglottic Haematoma: An Unusual Complication of Foreign Body Ingestion

Dear Dr. Fukushima,

Two weeks and you will have an editorial decision. If you believe that, I can’t help you. I actually couldn’t help you if I tried. I’m picturing you enraged and maybe in tears somewhere in Japan. I don’t know what Japan looks like. I like to think about rural Japan a lot though. I picture small, snowy villages in Hokkaido. In the summer, I imagine calm, sweaty farmers eating noodles with a cucumber. I am looking at the cover of a plastic sheet-saver or whatever, that has a painting of a magical looking pagoda leading down a cliff to a waterfall on the cover. It reminds me of something I might have seen in a restaurant. Is there a restaurant somewhere in you, is that what I’m noticing? Obviously, I don’t want you to answer that, not because I don’t genuinely want to know, but because you know I never want to hear from you.

RE: MS #04-2706; Cochlear Implants and Malformations of the Inner Ear

Dear Dr. Olthoff,

I apologize for the delay in responding to your email. Your manuscript means nothing to me, and although there appears to be a complicated network of people for whom this is not the case, I have such a hard time picturing them that mostly they exist as a notion of voices that I think I remember hearing when I was in a car accident on the highway as a child; or when I am lying in the dark in bed and catch myself turning into an elusive, forgotten interlude of humanity; or when the living room light is still on in the middle of the night. I want to talk about the word “cochlear” though. It reminds me of the beach, because it makes an association with a conch shell. But that would be on a romantic, tropical beach, or one where a man and woman with their young child first learn that they are expecting once again. I am thinking of an autumn beach, someplace cold, like Maine or the Arctic Circle. I don’t have many feelings for you, but I think that something we could do together would be to ride in a dune buggy across the tundra. The beach in the autumn is how we know who we are, the way that everyone’s reaction to velvet curtains, clothing, or furniture is similar, but there are things that have to be explicit.

To: Oto Dept.

From: Annals

RE: Office

I am writing in regards to my office. I seem to be placed at the end of a hall near the fire door, which is fine. I enjoy pretending to be alone at all times, and not existing at all for large portions of that time. However, on that note, I have to bring up the office next to mine. A man in pleated pants who is either German, Danish, or Belgian is working next door, and he is working in conjunction with the story
Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates
at all times. It would make more sense if he was Dutch, but I doubt he is. He enters and leaves his office with a look of unending devotion to misery. One time in the winter I saw him changing his shoes before he went home at the end of the day; even though he wasn’t changing into ice skates, it was implied. It is impossible that he doesn’t have secret wishes. The reason that this is harmless now but dangerous in the long run, is because it raises the possibility that the presence of the story
The Red Shoes
could enter the Oto department, if it hasn’t already. I am sure I don’t have to explain why this would be a problem. Immolation in a public building can cause real harm. The sprinkler system in the ceilings in the hallways would go off and all the sheetrock in the hospital would become meaningless. It is a ballet shoe equivalent to
Carrie
,
Firestarter
, or
Cujo
. These are stories from our past that we should learn from in our present society. No one wants the hallway to be immolated.

RE: MS #04-2305; Fixation of Soft Tissue Surrounded by Bone Using Microwave Irradiation: Electron Microscopic Observation of Guinea Pig Inner Ear

Dear Dr. Goding,

We haven’t spoken. At least, not for a while. I recognize your name and your manuscript number, but not the title. However, it makes sense that you are not one of the ones who writes about vocal folds, but about the inner ear.

Doctor, if I may, I feel that if we knew each other, things would be very different for both of us. We would be together in Dusseldorf, in an apartment by the river. For the first time, I would like wall-to-wall carpeting; we would have a glass-topped dining room table, and I would wear expensive blue eyeliner. You would be my valentine and a giant box of chocolates would come from somewhere; one of us would bite all of them—pink, white, caramel, raspberry gel, granular chocolate—all over the living room, while the other one would wear my seashell-inspired bra and underwear set, even if it made me think of mustaches and doorbells to see you in it. Goding, I’m not going to lie to you. You, and I think you know this, break into my silent stream and make the fluorescent lights turn present instead of ongoing. In the end, Goding, as observed by the saints I have seen in paintings in museums, positioned in infinite configurations of hats and outfits, in settings that include baby lambs, calves, and foals; pastures; naked violence; and feasts of fruit and meat held in dark cathedral vaults, I have found that you are still transformed into a medium-size planter in a hotel lobby. The transition into this feeling happens over the course of the afternoon. When I leave the hospital around four or five, when the light is turning in the cold outside the parking garage, I feel empty of plush desires and the thrill of never speaking to you. You open the door to the possibility that speech originates outside of any particular person or plant.

RE: MS #04-2578; Laryngeal Thrush

Dear Dr. Sulica,

I have two words for you: “Laryngeal Thrush.” Hands down, this is my favorite manuscript title. The obvious pornography is subtle. I also love your name, and that it goes with the title. It is as though otolaryngology is its own language, and if I were to translate “Laryngeal Thrush” into English, I would translate “laryngeal” as the word for “river” and “thrush” would be like “rush” so it would be “rushing river,” like the Old West or China, but much more beautiful, because “thrush” also means “vanish” and “thrust,” so it is a river—a “throat”—that does all of those things at once. Modified by your name, Sulica, it does these things slowly, because you cannot say Sulica fast. It is like the word “sluice,” which you also wouldn’t say fast. All together, it is a river, a sluice, that vanishes slowly, with the velocity of rushing and thrusting, which gives it the obvious sexual symbolism that makes a person feel as though they are looking up close at a giant rock face trying to spell their own name.

RE: MS #04-2632; Seasonal Variation of Rhinocerebral Mucor Infection

Magliulo,

Remember the time on the rocks? When we both imagined you drowning me in the inlet? What was needed was succor, not mucor. But that is what it is like with you, one misunderstanding after another; this is what we are supposed to do, make obligatory half moons together in order to maintain the dimension of existence that stores low-grade failures, and I am trying. The dark ocean where there is a cavern of particles from this category of possible enactments is behind one of my organs, and in one of the emotion particle sacs at the base of my skull. If you tested it with your hands it would feel like a raisin made out of a dark ocean.

On the way home, it rained very hard and I wasn’t afraid. Sometimes I mistake Sunday for other things. A hot afternoon that disappears without any desires in it has a place, but I don’t like that aesthetic of reality; maybe it could have a number or a name, and then we could establish for ourselves in life what qualities of reality we wanted to avoid, or if we couldn’t or shouldn’t avoid them we would be prepared because we would recognize them. We would know, for example, that qualities of fear are an established part of a certain kind of sunny day in January, but that it is not fear to be avoided, they are fears that we can possibly become inured to as we get older and find other value in it. Since January is written in muted white cursive letters with a gold tone in the background to indicate waning light behind it, this aesthetic might be called White January Marigold 001 for children, when the fears are new, and for an adult stage it could be White January Marigold 004, to indicate that at least three stages of thought, experience, and subtlety in this category had been traversed. A high level fear would be an inquiry, and this one could be White January Marigold 478: Where Is It? I have the sense that I know, the way sense and know can become snow, but that won’t be how this works.

RE: MS #04-2563; Clinical Significance of Middle Frequency Sudden Deafness

Dear Dr. Filho,

There is a pile of empty cans and being in a junkyard stringing some of them to the tail of a dog, and in another part there is a movie about a wooded area.

You are never there when I think of you, and your absence is large and delicate. I have wondered if the shadows in my discriminating faculties are the reason I detect you, especially since the record of your manuscript in the database shows that you are unavailable at this time.

This has left a problem about trains that people have lost interest in. We felt close to them through myths of the West and the Civil War, but train tracks in the daytime in the summer are dreary and meaningless and they have to be addressed. I would rather be bitten by a dog than look at them, but as I am saying this it seems like they are the same thing.

RE: MS #04-2571; Acute Laryngeal Abscess: A Rare Entity But Life-Threatening Disease Revisited

Dear Dr. Eliashar,

Your manuscript, “Acute Laryngeal Abscess: A Rare Entity But Life-Threatening Disease Revisited” exists. Your name in my handwriting on a file folder though is its true incarnation. To say “revisited” actually refers to many people’s bad habits. I don’t know why you would bring up something so unpleasant, when clearly you are hoping to have your paper published. As for things here, they’re going well. I have been getting your emails, I am sure you have been wondering, but as you know, I don’t care, not because I don’t actually care, but because the physical actions that are part of this have to take place through the conduit of my office, and then I feel gray about us. I feel so sad when I think of us, the sense of hopelessness is overwhelming. Is that what you mean by “revisited?” I hope that things with you and your wife are better, and the sleeping pills. Sometimes I think of you chewing through the pillow in your bedroom in the middle of the night while your wife is lost in her nightgown. Most of this must be soothed by the early breakfasts you share in what is generally the best part of the day. Even though you have shitty sleep, the minutes after you pull into the garage on a night when it first seems like the end of winter and listen to the car cool to the memory of a former shrub, is a gentle, dark pantomime. Even if you are forced to remember the past, you don’t have to finish your thought.

RE: MS #04-2649; Purulent Chondritis of the Laryngeal Framework Cartilages

Dear Dr. Ewend,

Where do we start? Your sister’s white Romanian sneakers have been in and out of the hallway door for a month. She has had her hair highlighted, and the tired problem and the laundry seem better. In America, people would be worried about Epstein Barr but for her, it is probably Chernobyl. I also saw yesterday before it rained, the outer borough patio of the comptroller’s wife. She tried to commit suicide two years ago, and even though I have passed her house again and again I have never seen her. It is wrong to feel sad about someone else’s private, abominable pain that I did not have to experience. The geraniums and plastic white outdoor chairs that I have seen only in that way were showing between the slats of the wooden enclosure they have on the side of their house facing the sidewalk. I don’t know what things are for in their specifics, but I have an overall sense that no work is wasted.

RE: MS #04-2674; The Anterior Laryngeal Webs

Lijie,

Lijie. I don’t know what to think about that. Are you like a tongue? A pre-historic animal making infrequent sounds lost in the advent of Phanerozoic miasma in a plant landscape? You open the door to the possibility that speech originates outside of any particular person or plant. You extrude that from life.

RE: MS #04-2812; Unusual Case of Accessory Nose Associated With Unilateral Complete Congenital Choanal Atresia

Dear Dr. Ou,

You are my mind. Not you, and not your mind, but you as the unidentified physical components that are assigned to your spatiality that includes limb thoughts and organ thoughts. Maybe that is the total wrong direction. Endlessness is happening right now, and lions and grass are part of it. The problem is not that there is no one in our soul, or that it’s invisible. It in this life is so visible it’s up close to us every minute. If you had a beautiful animal so close to your face that you were gazing into its eyes every minute so that you were in motion with it in time through its relation to the black cosmos, your perception would be affected and other things about the world and the particulars of creation might be obscured. A commercial that my soul gives me is a sprinkler in a garden or grass area. I understand why it likes this, but I only like it because it likes it. When I see that image, either on the inside or the outside of my mind, I know my soul is activated, and is conveying its participation in the present tense in a mainstream way.