Thirteen Specimens (33 page)

     Yet it was only the metal number, bronze-colored, that was fixed to the front of my door below its little window. I had seen it countless times, but it was as if I were seeing it for the first time, as though it had been affixed there tonight during my absence. But it hadn’t been, of course. It was simply the number of my house. I lived at 6 Mill Street.

     Still, I knew what this meant. As much as it was possible for me to know anything. Oh yes, I knew.

     This was DOOR 6.

     “All right,” I said to the door. Still calm. Grim smile again. “Okay.” But before I went inside, I used the claw of the hammer to pry that number off. With a savage tug, I dislodged it, and I heard it clatter down the steps behind me. Now, satisfied, I let myself inside my house.

     Grover still sat obediently in front of the TV, but the movie had long ended and rewound itself. With the VCR no longer running, the TV screen showed nothing but a bright uniform blue, like the purest of cloudless skies...Grover staring contentedly into it.

DOOR 7

     Then, it isn’t then. It is now, now.

     Did you know that Pam and I needed to have a repair done to our car, and we took it to the dealer where we’d bought it, and to kill time while we waited we walked down the highway in search of diversion, stores to browse through, but this obscure stretch of highway had little to
offer, and we walked and walked? And it was snowing lightly, and the snow that had accumulated over the night was thin but wet and clinging, it was like a glue poured over everything, it stuck to bushes that reached out toward us their branches thick with white blobs like the biggest pussy willows ever, and a man’s discarded glove at the edge of the road was coated so that it looked like a severed and bloodless hand. Further on I saw a child’s smaller glove that was only partially coated, and the blue color and flattened look of the glove made it appear like a hand of a child’s corpse blue with rot and deflated with decay, or is it better to say that the hands of corpses can sometimes look like gloves? Since corpses predate gloves we mustn’t put the horse before the cart, or the chicken before the egg. And at last we found a place that called itself a “spa”,
So-and-So’s Spa
, and it must have been some missing link between the drugstores of old with their soda fountains and the modern convenience store, spa apparently an archaic term because it was an archaic place, it was in a kind of time warp, we sat at the counter and ate hamburgers and drank coffee and behind the counter hung knickknacks like nail clippers and nonprescription reading glasses packaged on sun-faded cardboard with obsolete-looking art design as if this merchandise had hung there unsold since the early 1960s. And then we walked all that way back to the car dealer and later in our marriage it would have been unthinkable to spend all that time walking on gluey snow along a desolate backwoods time warped highway just for a greasy hamburger and bad coffee in a spa but it was the first year of our marriage and we held hands much of the way back and it would have been unthinkable even a few years later let alone now. And the blue glove makes me think that blue might be the color of decomposition more so than green even though green is the color we associate with rotten slimy things and even though blue is the color of the sky and the sea but green is not the color of death but of life green mold on bread and the scum on a pond are not decay but thriving life money is said to be corruption but money can make life prosper green money is the seed and the fertilizer and the crop all in one and they call money bread green with living mold fed to sea gulls clear and green hover and spin in the air on strings that go way way up so high I can’t see the fingers they’re knotted around but the puppeteer hand of God has manicured fingers and a Rolex watch and gold cufflink and a gold ring with a big green emerald.

     Time warp it is no longer then it is now. “Spa” is a time warped archaic term like “American factory” like “affordable housing” like “
til death do us part”. Time warped archaic book of medical curiosities with terms like “lipoma of the parietal region” and “sarcoma of the nasal septum” and “hypertrophic tumor of the scalp and face” and “epithelioma of the orbit” my tumor has now reached the size of my own head in double like a cell dividing into two like a thwarted clone of myself stillborn or am I the one who is stillborn while the tumor thrives? The mass growing from the side of my head would have tipped my head over so heavy it might have broken my neck except that it rests on my shoulder and supports itself there like a lover dozing against me.

     Some of my hair grows wispily on top of the tumor like an old man’s or infant’s thin hair and some parts of the growth are as gleaming smooth as a skull and others are as wrinkled and pendulous as a scrotum and there is a long valley that was a deep furrow that turned into a fissure at first I would slip one finger into it and finally my finger broke through brittle filaments like old dried-out rubber bands and my hooked finger would draw out a stringy mass
half wet and half crusted like silvery metallic snot. The next day I could fit all four of my fingers inside the fissure, all the way in. I touched more hard smooth things and wrinkly shifting things like elusive living animals inside...eels, tadpoles, jellyfish, a sharp bird beak that snipped at my fingers until I jerked them out and I haven’t slipped them inside my head cunt again. At least, while I was in there, I massaged something soft and malleable like a ball of clay, maybe my clone’s brain, and it soothed away some of the pain.

     My left eye is gone in the wrinkles if I close my right eye I can see a fleshy red haze through my left eye and a silvery pus drools out of the fissure I found an old diaper of Grover’s I mean Logan’s in a drawer and I opened it up and put it over the fissure to catch the pus and I used silvery duct tape to hold the diaper in place wrapping it around a bulging section of the tumor like a tumor on the tumor and on top of another bulge I put Grover’s red baseball cap and it stays on pretty well unless I bend over but I need to find another diaper because this one is sodden and heavy. Logan would laugh and laugh when I would imitate Grover’s high-pitched scream at Kermit the Frog “Hey frog-
gyyy
!” and I remember the mummified frog pressed into the new tar like a fossil. Green-green frog silvery-gray duct tape silvery-gray brain snot silvery-gray company car coming slowly down the newly paved road toward me I don’t remember leaving the house or walking out this far but I must have planned maybe my clone planned because I have the stroller and things inside the stroller.

     The car turns diagonally and stops with a dramatic little squeal of the brakes to cut me off but I keep walking toward it
undramatic little squeals from the stroller wheels and the driver opens his door and steps out. He wears a white dress shirt without a jacket and he has dark slacks and a tie and I know his face from a murky liquid-filled room. His eyes are even more penetrating undiluted now as he walks toward me “Hold up” he says. Though he is not underwater his words sound that way as they resonate distorted in the dolphin-head dome of my tumor.

     I hold up. I am smiling. He walks even closer right to the stroller. He looks down into it. Maybe I should have left the red cap on Grover’s head instead of on my tumor because he sees Grover’s blue fur sticking up from inside his too-soft baby blanket. “What the fuck is this?” he says reaching down tearing away the blanket so forcefully that Grover topples out I should have buckled Grover in what a bad father I am Grover lies on the newly paved black black tar like a crucified frog or a smashed turtle. Grover lies there. Sprawled there. And as the man kicks Grover off toward the side of the road I reach down into the stroller and pick up one of the things that was behind Grover and the man looks up from Grover and I thrust forward almost tripping over the stroller the long blade of the big knife Pam used to cut Italian and French bread which sticks him in his left eye and he doubles over slaps a palm to his socket says in his underwater voice “Uh...uh...Ga...” and he must be seeing a red haze through his left eye as I come around the stroller fast knocking it over and stick him stick him his hands flutter in flurries but I flash and dash and stick him deep deeper deepest. He falls. I kick him kick him kick him like Grover in the legs in the sternum in the gashed face and neck. The knife is all the way to the handle in the very center of his throat moving jerkily like a machine’s jammed black lever as he tries to speak fear or swallow blood or vomit the blade out his remaining eye lifts up to me drowning this time drowning at last then fixing in place.

     I go to Grover scoop him in my arms I cradle him soothe him I realize his fur is matted red on blue makes purple I promise him as I tuck him into the stroller again that I will wash him when we go back home. But first I push the righted stroller around the idling silver-gray car with its opened door and its opened driver leaving them there in the middle of the road behind me. Squeak squeak squeaking little white wheels trail little trails of red.

     I hope my actions and appearance don’t frighten Grogan I mean Lover but he knows not all of us monsters are bad. His favorite book is
The Monster at the End of this Book
which in fact is about Grover. I used to read him this story and imitate Grover’s voice and he would laugh and laugh. I hate to spoil the ending but it turns out that Grover himself is the monster at the climax of the story.

     On we squeak past trees festooned with fungus lace. Through the trees snakes the stream caked with lime green scum. And I spot something set back a little in the woods I pause and see a coyote standing there gazing out at me. I am not afraid for me or Grover. The coyote is made out of crystalline green plastic. I push Logan’s stroller onward again down the straight straight access road.

    Ahead the rusty chain-link gate blocking my way but open the links of rusty wire like the web of wires binding Marsha and her dog inside the shack that nurses at the huge white breast of the methane tank. The methane tank. Squeak squeak squeaking until I see the methane tank just ahead. Squeak through the gate of rust.

     I lift out Grover against my chest because I have to leave the stroller here the weeds are too tall and because I need to get the other something I brought that was hidden behind Grover a red plastic jug with a yellow cap I used to mow my lawn but lately the grass in my fraction of a back yard just a single mote of the town compared to the land
Odyllic covers is almost as tall as these weeds we wade through to get to the grate-like steps leading up to the shack.

     I pause on the steps because I have noticed there is something missing off to the right of the methane tank. The grassless land there is so flat and even it takes me a moment to realize the nondescript plant or warehouse structure is missing gone without a trace even the dumpster stuffed with insulation and cardboard. That large a building torn down and its foundation filled in and buried as if it never even existed there even though the last time not long ago at all I slowly circled the building now vanished as if I only imagined it.

     So they are trying to destroy their evidence but it is too late for that it is time for
me
to destroy their evidence now so I step inside the shack and I see Marsha is still there but altered.

     Marsha is now only a skeleton wired to the wall she looks like a spirit she is so sheer. Her jaw is a little open somehow all the bones stay together like a skeleton wired together for a science class rusty wires that now entirely cocoon the dog on the ceiling so I can’t tell if it’s a skeleton too.

     Reaching through some of the corroded wires that practically drip lockjaw I place the jug against the wall that hugs the side of the methane tank I have already unscrewed the yellow cap freed the genie vapors and stuffed in my knotted white scrap of undershirt that I soaked in the stuff before. My hand almost brushes green skeleton toes sorry Marsha so sorry.

     I light the end of the rag with a cigarette lighter or match or the hate from my gaze I’m not sure how but when I turn to get out of there my ankle catches on one of those wire web strands and I fall almost dropping Grover. I
scramble to my feet and out the door and down the steps the tangled weeds try to grasp hold of me but I tear through them and I have no time to retrieve the stroller I run and run with Grover but we are just short of the open gate when there is a terrific
whump
behind us. It throws us through the gate.

     There is an ocean wave that crashes over us but it is a wave of molten lava. Somehow I jolt to my feet and resume running as if I had never been hurled down. As I run and run however I see that Grover is burning the blue hair crisping black I smother him in my arms bat at the flames but my sleeves my arms are aflame too and they just catch Grover alight again. Still as I run I pat him and slap at him as best I can ignoring the flames that fly back from my head my head a giant torch. The fluid gushing bubbling down the sides of my neck and my back is also lava from the volcano of my Olympic torch head that streams flames that are strewn like seeds to the ground behind me gobs of liquid flame catching alight the grass and weeds and brush lining the access road its new black surface reflecting sheets of rippling fire conflagration immolation.