YOUR KITTY OUTFIT SUCKS!

 

Attention trick or treaters, members of Cats, strippers, casino hosts and comic book characters.  There is a strong likelihood that your kitty outfit sucks. If Taylor Swift can’t pull it off, why should you? And almost none of them are memorable. For everyone who isn’t Ertha Kitt or Julie Newmar, we have provided the following guide to making your attempt at feline adornment less of a travesty.

Rule #1: Props are key.

A big cat is the best prop.

 

Extra points are awarded for matching your feline companions.

All points are lost for flagrant mismatches. 

If you can’t match the cat, dress as something the cat would like to play with. 

Rule #2: You are dressing as a cat because you would rather be cute than original.

No cat outfit is all that scary.

If you want to be intimidating, choose another theme. 

Rule # 3: Cat outfits can be enhanced through nudity. However, if you are resorting to nudity, you can probably skip the cat outfit.

Rule # 4: The whole kitty routine can be overdone. 

 

Rule #5: Cat outfits are easy to screw up.

Avoid black. Pointed ears are better than floppy ears.

Avoid talking about your weaknesses.

Rule # 6: No matter how well executed it may be, a kitty outfit is just a kitty outfit.

 

Conclave Noir (Fiction)

“It’s a Studebaker Sky Hawk.”

My answer sucked the air out of the room. My intention was to enlighten. But I had not answered the question.

The question was “Is this an exotic, fantasy or foreign?”

The ‘this’ in question is a three-inch-long replica auto, with an aluminum body, plastic wheels and computer guts going on inside. It’s a small, programmable, toy car, identical under the body shell to the some two hundred other such cars found here, parked inside automated rotating trays in three illuminated glass display cases.

They’re all the rage. You can buy them cities to rove around in. Or they will just drive around on your floor, making turns and sounding their horns, as if some commuter mouse man was attempting to navigate his way to work through your kitchen. Depending on what they “are”—and they are all the same inside—they retail for between $47.95 and $265.95.  

The Sky Hawk is currently parked in the palm of a black suit clad thirty-something, here fresh from some office job himself.

I haven’t helped. I should go back to my dusting.  The miniature car dealer behind the display case is a full-sized woman-sized woman. Right now I know her expression without looking at it. I have Biblical knowledge of this woman. Satisfied that the thirty-something is a non-buyer, she lights palms to the toy’s fore and aft and lifts to withdraw it. (Analogous to the method in which she ended my biblical study of her, and for the same reason.) He’s already bought two cars. I haven’t killed the mojo entirely. There are other buyers present. 

Dust, you nitwit. I have done something bad here. Our suit was probably out to buy three cars. The Sky Hawk caught his eye. He issued a multiple guess test, based on some factoring of preferences for useless crap. Answer one of the three options and there’s a chance of being helpful in the sale. Make something up and POOF. I have a stupid mouth. Dust the Hummel figures. Dust the Precious Moments. Dust the discounted Magic the Gathering Cards. Dust the pile of Beanie Babies taken in trade many, many moons ago. Dust the tin packaged nostalgic candy assortments.

Dust and clean it good, because I am here at the car dealer’s sufferance, because without all these little useless things, Conclave Noir falls down. Once I am through, I move to the rest of the shop, the majority of the floorspace, the uneven isles filled with larger objects. The collection is an idiosyncratic menagerie of twisted neon, pottery with vague animal outlines, motorized windchimes, painted fantastic plastic portions of the mundane.   Once labeled as art or sculpture or miniature installations or unique decorative accents, they are what Conclave Noir Artistic Studio Curios was created to purvey and promote. Having filled all the space possible on the floor of this pie slice shaped storefront and splayed themselves on windows facing two busy streets, they have remained here, gathering dust and no interest from decorators, art critics or any manner of human. Like the Beanie Babies there are no price tags on them, the tags having long ago been removed with previous cleanings.

I hold off on the vacuum. Sally seems to have moved it. And Sally still has customers. A balding fifty something is haggling. He’s buying a city. Or he’s ordering it. And he would like one of the little car charging stations in the form of a garage thrown in with the rest of his microscopic municipality. My thinking is that he’s more interested in talking to Sally than he is in making a deal. It’s not beyond reckoning that Sally is his taste in women or that he is attracted to women who might share his interests.  Sadly, none of Sally’s actual interests are on display.

I don’t know if he chatted her up or talked her down. My own concentration was broken by an utterance from behind the wall to wall giant bookless bookcases behind Sally. “Tell Nadia it’s the conductor.”

I’m not the only person who heard that. One of the other shoppers immediately looked at me. I wasn’t in full uniform, but the patent leather Red Wings and navy slacks with yellow pinstripe is disclosing.  I have no shame in what I do, as I have no shame in dusting.

I was about to dust the clock thing. The clock thing, a box made from stained glass with an animation cell for a face and wispy cat silhouettes dancing stenciled on its interior, is my personal contribution to the collection of economic still-life’s on the window. I was proud of it at the time. But it has not sold and it does not keep time.

The last of Sally’s customers has his receipt tucked into his bag and leaves, parting into the night with a boyish smile. At that moment I am feeling disgusted with myself, with my planned venture. It is bad enough that I am in Sally’s space. And I am not here to see her. I am here to see Nadia. And I am not here to see Nadia. I am here to brag through Nadia, to politick through her. I should be ashamed of myself. I am this low.

“I think they know you’re here,” Sally says without looking up from the rotating garage of cars she’s neatening  

“I’m sorry about that,” I said. “Please don’t jam a Beanie Baby down my throat and make me poop it out.”

“At last, a use for Beanie Babies,” she says. “What are you sorry about?”

“The car thing. I should have just shut up.”

“Now I know what the thing is. It wasn’t on their website. They’re recycling stock numbers.”

“You getting these things on spec?”

“Nooo. Historicals are a bridge too far, too. The distributor must have slipped up or slipped it in. Dovetails too close to die cast. I’m not going there.-- I think this whole thing is about to Beanie Baby on me.”

“Any new ideas?”

“More candy. Liquor candy. Candy in boxes. Candy that doesn’t require refrigeration.”

The door in the middle of the bookcases opens. Nadia appears. And Sally shuts up.

Sally becomes a still-life, her thin brown pantsuit bent forward over the case, her bowl of yellow hair fencing off her eyes. Nadia takes center stage. Does Nadia glow? She is a bundle of earth tones in a long wool jacket, a white muffler stuffed around her shirt, a jaunty beret nearly slipping left off her head. She is a mass of long brown hair and big brown eyes and full red cheeks and a broad brown haloed smile.

“Sorry. So Sorry,” she says. “Did I keep you waiting?”

A little over an hour and fifteen minutes. But what is time?

I think I’m smiling back. She doesn’t wait for my answer. She doesn’t seem to acknowledge that I have an answer. She twitters on “There’s been a thing. You heard? I don’t think we are going to have much time.”

Nadia makes a determined sway for the door. I take this as my cue to open the door for her. We are outside in the pre-Halloween night air, tinges of the nastiness about to sweep Chicago any day swirling about us.

“You heard the podcast,” she says, the matter of fact tone smothering whether it is a question or a statement. “This changes things.”

The two tickets for the art movie I don’t want to see cost $45. If we leave right now, we will be on time. Nadia is not moving. Am I slow on picking up some hidden context here? If ‘podcast’ is the clue, I am drawing a blank. I look about. No evident zombie apocalypse.  No Gamera landing.

Out of the Conclave’s door is Jerry, tall, imperial and thin. He should have his fist forever jammed defiantly in the air. His black stringy fuzz face in grim mode, he pronounces “The entire community needs to be alerted to this.”

He is then joined by Thing One and Thing Two, a pair of male trust-fund babies in Northern Face outerwear. They are not quite as tall nor quite as fuzzy as Jerry, but they are in the same idiom. Don and Stu and Jerry are the Conclave’s members currently. For the moment, outsized egos are allowing for close proximity. Something is up. They’ve summoned Stu, the one that owns a car.

Stu locks eyes with me. “Pancake house. You take Nadia.”

How magnanimous of him. I had other plans: for myself, for Nadia, for this night.

The glass blowing bender of neon tubes, the potter and the painter turn as one and trudge away in the direction of the car some realtor gave his third born spawn.

I am on my best behavior. I am not sure what my tone of voice is. “Nadia, this had better be good.”

“It’s not. It’s a disaster,” Nadia says.

In moments, we part. I veer off the sidewalk into the street. Nadia stays on the sidewalk and keeps going, maybe five steps before realizing I have left.

She turns as I am opening the driver’s door.  “New car?” she asks.

And it is new, too. The passenger door pops open. I enter. She hesitates for a moment, her eyes sweeping the car’s midnight exterior. Whether it’s courtesy or curiosity driving, I don’t know. Then she slides in over the black leather seats.  “What is it?”

“It’s a Lincoln Continental.”

“Smells nice. Seems in good shape.”

“It should. It has 210 miles on it.”

“Payments?”

“I paid cash.”

She appraises me with new eyes, but it is not the calculous I have conceived. She must think the Union Pacific pays more than it does, or that I am miserly frugal when not in her presence. In any case, I have entered the realm of sell-out. It is on that continuum I will now be judged.

The car is here to help me pitch my case through Nadia. Nadia is not biting. End of conversation about my fifty-five thousand dollar brand new car. Instead conversation takes an immediate turn to directions to a restaurant that I can find blindfolded in my sleep.

As for the impending disaster, it is the restaurant. No, not Golden Waffle. Golden Waffle is perfect. It’s a perfect place for the dreamers to spool waffles and sip bottomless coffees. Conclave Noir used to have its own set table, dating back to a time when we could smoke there. And its almost the same assortment of folks congregating there as Nadia and I arrive, some a bit longer in the face. No, the restaurant is ‘the restaurant’ as in a place in Willowbrook, the site of Conclave Noir’s signature achievement. From the sign to the awning to the neon torches on the walls to the mural painted on the bar’s wall, it is the singular showpiece of Conclave Noir’s house style in comprehensive flourish. As a venture, this French Sea-Food purveyor lasted about eight months. It has been shuttered for five years now. The disaster is that the space is about to be filled by an operator who does not want any of the work Conclave Noir installed and is ready to scrape the place clean of it.

Given that Conclave Noir was never given another commission of this scale, perhaps this is for the best. The idea of having a single house style running across several mediums is itself out of fashion. It was not well accepted, at least in Willowbrook. Time has passed. No one will note the destruction of this collection of works. If anything, it cleans the slate of reflecting negative impressions evoked in Conclave Noir’s direction. This is the truth. The consensus at Golden Waffle is 180 degrees from what I have stated. There is talk of protests, of physically blocking the demolition crew. Cooler heads prevail. There is talk of contacting the landlord and the new tenant, of seeing if something can be arranged.

Since it involves contacting real businessmen, or any function other than social networking, I am sure that nothing will come of it.  I feel no risk in offering whatever assistance the team may require.

I am an idiot. Two weeks later I am sitting on a ladder in a darkened alcove in Willowbrook, scraping stucco off a wall.  Nadia is beside me, doing the same. Other Conclave members and adjuncts and family are toiling about, putting down a primer coat, ripping up carpet, sweeping and hauling. The triad of Jerry, Stu and Don are wrapping the dismembered chandelier, awning and light torches in newspaper. The new renter has allowed Conclave Noir the use of a cloak room to store its artifacts, for as long as the cloak room continues to exist. The overall deal is that we are free to take our things with us, as long as bare walls and floors are left behind. And all its costing us is paint.

Luckily, the restaurant chain is not in that big of a hurry. We are told that we have three months. This turns out to not exactly be the case. The sign was bulldozed down before we started. And the interior demolition crew is beholding to none. While Nadia and I are painting and scraping, a demo crew is removing one kitchen and installing another.

I was not asked to chip in for the paint. I think there was some sort of Go Fund Me for that. All I am out are some precious vacation days, all taken to meet the schedules of a critical mass of people, most of whom do not work. We wind up running way behind schedule, missing benchmarks, skirting deadlines.

I would be annoyed, concerned, aggravated—especially on those occasions when only Nadia and I show up.  Or when the triad membership does nothing except appraise what is already in the cloak room.  But I am not anything but overjoyed, because these are dawn to dawn days spent with Nadia. I am her rebound boyfriend. If you can be the rebound boyfriend, by all means do so. It is two day doses, serial uncorking, wave after wave. Spaced out over intervals of weeks, it is exotic, thrilling, the essence of invigorating. In short, at what time the project went sideways is beyond my comprehension. Nadia and I were lost in our own world, painting away, happy as a pair of bugs.

I did make my pitch, partially through Nadia, partially through the occasional presence of my new Lincoln, partially in those instances when the Conclave members remembered that they were supposed to be friends of mine.  I will make it short. Some time ago I began composing puzzle books, crosswords, word finds and the like, all woven around a single story. Each puzzle built on an element of the story and the solution to all of the puzzles led to the surprise ending. The books were in themes, one for Christmas and one for Halloween.  I composed them on my computer. I did the art for the pages. I had the books printed in China and distributed to dollar stores through wholesalers on Lawrence Avenue. They sold so well that I was offered a tidy sum for the rights to what I had produced and a contract to produce an open number of additional editions.  It may not be enough to quit the Union Pacific for, but it is where the new Lincoln Continental came from. My editor suggested doing a detective type theme, somewhere muttering the word ‘Noir’ and I immediately thought of my pals at Conclave.

“Screw them. Do it yourself,” is what both Nadia and Sally told me. Both of them were given my most persuasive version of the pitch, too. My conscious intention is to somehow share my success with Conclave Noir. Sub-consciously perhaps my aim is to gain admittance to cool kids club, to be deemed something of a peer. The reality is that my publisher has an art department, and a fine one at that. Conclave Noir would have to come up with something spectacular in order for me to justify messing with the publisher’s in-house crew. Regardless, I pressed on, never clear of how much of the lip service Conclave Noir spouted translated to actual enthusiasm.

Three months in, Conclave Noir seemed to have lost all enthusiasm for salvaging their masterpiece. All of the components of the glass mosaic awning and other items were now crammed within the cloak room, but the white washing of walls was still missing in parts. There were holes in walls and swaths of carpet squares remaining. No one other than Nadia and myself had shown this time or the last. Although the demolition crew claimed we had left the area as good as could be expected, it was not at all what we had promised the tenant. I was now out of vacation days. Nadia was despondent over how much still needed to be done, how big of a mess we were leaving behind.

We could only do what we could do. After aiding in the field testing of the newly installed cascade of fudge with our tongues, we trudged off to destroy the one work which could not be removed. It was Nadia’s mural, silhouettes of Chicago Blues and Jazz greats, outlined in neon, each interior covered in notes from their most popular works. All of it was against a pointed trapezoid sunburst in the outline of Chicago’s skyline. This was the main wall of the bar. It was unclear if it was ever used as a performance space.

Nadia was a trooper. She put a roller to it without hesitation.

“A lot of murals get covered. You never know, maybe the next owner will uncover it. Chances are it will be restored,” I said.

The words had just left my face when a member of the demo crew came in and sprayed a dayglow ‘x’ over our whitewash. He explained “That wall’s coming down.”    

Later we watched the chain buffet’s sign light up for the first time, took ourselves a hearty last swig of fudge from the cascade and trudged our paint spattered selves back to my Lincoln.

“My place, tonight?” she said.

“But we’ve already broken all of my furniture,” I replied.  Despite my tone, I had a feeling we were entering the coda of this opera, the dead cat bounce.

I didn’t know it at the time, but Nadia had moved back in with her folks. She had an apartment above their garage with its own entrance, all of which seemed new. It was nice, if a bit small. I sensed some sort of compromise agreement in the environment.

We showered and settled down for a night of cuddling. At various points my eyes searched the room. Where were her sketchbooks? Where were the color swaths? Where was the screen press? No smell of inks. In pride of place was a laptop, a Toughbook. A bookshelf held grad school catalogs and primers on taking the LSAT.

Nadia was not the first woman I had escorted out of our world. First you do the conductor, then you get off the art train.  

I called Nadia the next week, but she was out of town. The week after, she was studying. Then it was first year of law school and you know how that goes. Poof!

Good for her. Get your own damn Lincoln Continental. She needs me for nothing.

As vacation days spent went, it was better than any all-inclusive journey I had ever been on. I thought about it every time I accrued another vacation day. My offer to the Conclave remained in the ethers and my life went on.

There’s this disheveled man who rides my current line, from Clybourne to Arlington Park and back. Webs of dirt run over his too tan face. His body is shrink wrapped in brittle sweat-clinging rags. Every day he shuttles six duct tapped large cardboard boxes in and out with him. The boxes are heavy, filled with something akin to paper. Without fail, people help him load the boxes in and take the boxes off.  We help him. It’s a speed drill sociology experiment, taking serial advantage of the kindness of strangers. 

I have seen him each weekday for a year and a half, but have never spoken to him. He stinks and has wild, staring eyes. No one so far has talked to him. We get a lot of people on this line. While people are willing to haul and help him, no one lingers to converse. At length I became convinced that this was the way he wants it.

We had just completed his return stop. It was pouring. A pom pom girl and a stock broker both took up boxes. We had done all we could to get him close to an awning, but he had chosen the wrong car. So we rush to get his hoard out and then he just stands there, no mind to the rain, no urgency whatsoever as he’s pelted on the platform.

The door closed and I’m mopping my face. My phone rings. I don’t recognize the number, but I answer.

“Did you hear the podcast? All hands on deck. This is urgent.”

          “Is this Thing One or Thing Two?” I asked.

“It’s Don.”

“Thing Two, I don’t get podcasts. I don’t get email.  I work on a train.”

“Is the conductor coming?” someone on the phone asks.

“Do you have Nadia’s number?” Don asks.

“No Nadia. Nadia is in Law School,” I said. “Is Sally kicking you out?”

“The restaurant. They’re going to throw everything away. We have to get there tonight.”

It’s been months. Did they have to wait until the April deluge, the dead of night?

I show and I am a sweetheart. We had to pull the stuff out of drywall wreckage. The only cross words came from the demolition guys, who had started removing the cloak room only to discover it filled with glass and neon shards.

All of the careful newspaper wrapping melts in the rain, the ink on the various asset tags runs off. By the time it is loaded into the U-Haul truck Stu rented, it is no longer a carefully curated collection of bits for reassembly (God knows where), but rather a lapidary of brittle masts and their equally sharp kittens. Stu then drives too fast. The load shifts.  What will it be when it gets where it is going?

Had I known the destination, I would not have showed up.

We were set to meet at Conclave Noir. Sally had the shop’s door open for us and was generally pleasant as Jerry and I stood shivering, dripping all over her carpet. If Jerry were about to spring something, he didn’t display any hint. Time was not on my side and I was wondering where we would be unloading our treasure from the restaurant.

Then the U-Haul showed up in the alley behind the shop. Without a word of notification, Thing One and Thing Two started carting things in through the back door, leaving a trail of glass bits all the way. They were heading up the landing, putting torches and armatures on the stairs leading up, in the hallway, crowding the door to the second-floor apartment. Jerry soon joined in, wedging a section of awning into the hall.

I didn’t know what to say. I had no idea what they were thinking. One of the doors they were blocking was the fire exit for the shop next door. People unaffiliated with the Conclave lived on the third floor. Sally’s apartment was on the second floor, but the Conclave had no claim to that either.

Stu then suggested that Sally head to the basement storeroom, to see if she could make more room. As I head down with Sally, I hear Stu open the door to her flat.

The basement is where Sally runs the mail order part of her business. It’s where she keeps her packing materials and excess stock. In neat rows on a table in the corner is where she keeps her dreams. Sally is a quilter. Not a tapestry artist, which is where quilting has been heading, but a historical quilter. She has been saving quilt-capable scraps of used fabric for years, each individual piece cut into eight inch squares. She has thousands of them, no two alike. Moreover, she has a business plan with a price point, $350 wholesale $600 retail. Anything less and it’s not worth doing, anything more and you’re pricing the consumer out. Artesian or not, it is bedding. She has the complete fixings to whip up three quilts right now, but she can’t because there is no place to display them, because the Conclave Noir crap never moves. And now more of it is coming, marching like fire ants over the common areas of her dwelling, up and down her stairs, into her cellar, into her home.

Sally loves these people. She’s very tolerant of them, almost to the point of disbelieving in their evident inconsideration. Sally is very bright and she does have a spine, but there is a delay in reaction, stimuli having to overcome a peaceful and loving nature.

How dare they. Even for an hour. Even for a day. Knowing the Conclave I fear that this is the final place for this stuff, that this crap will congeal in piles, never to move again, another imposition for Sally to navigate through. She may say something eventually. Inevitably she does have a breaking point.

The only harsh words I’ve ever heard Sally utter were directed at me. I deserved them. I broke her trust, squandered my standing with her. It is not my place to step in here. If I speak I face an immediate and well-earned blast of venom, a fast exit from any further interaction with her. I chance it. I turned to her, looked her in the eyes and said “This isn’t happening. I’ll take care of it.”

Maybe she’s stunned, but she doesn’t say anything. I might very well be off my mark here. I was willing to chance it.

In a blink I am at the base of the stairs, calling up. My mouth is moving. I had no idea what I was going to say. “Hey guys, I was thinking. I have some warehouse space we could use.”

The puzzle books required staging. The Arab wholesalers on Lawrence Avenue will say yes to anything, but they will only part with cash when they see a physical product. Once the books arrived from China, I had to get warehouse space for them. As sales proved the books, they walked off soon enough. But the shortest lease I could get was eighteen months. I had been making a little extra cash subletting it on an ad hoc basis to a food packager. But it was empty at that moment.

I had made quite a bit of money subletting it. This wasn’t without sacrifice. The moment I made Conclave the offer, I knew it would be utterly thankless.

It got the crap out of Sally’s hair. And it earned me a cut which required stitches and a tetanus shot.

Due to logistics and the nature of the crap involved, it took us several hours to scoop it entirely out of Sally’s store and into its new home, two stories up and five left turns down an emergency-lighting-only warehouse. No tools. No carts. No gloves. We are carting mostly broken glass. And it’s raining. Many obvious things happen. Thing One and Thing Two are oblivious almost to the point of playing in puddles dawdling. I have to be presentable and on a train at the crack of dawn.

I make it. I had to shower at the station and I am paranoid enough to have a cleaned and pressed uniform in my locker there. At 4:38 AM I am on a train, the world moving beneath my feet. I haven’t slept, but I am where I need to be. I have not failed Union Pacific. I am on my feet for the next ten hours.

Don’t ask me what happened the rest of the day. I didn’t eat, either—unless you count a mountain spring of Mountain Dew. I made it back to my place and collapsed.

The phone rang. It was somewhere in the cushions near my head. I rose, digging my hands into the couch around me. It was one of the assigned ring tones. I feared it was work. Did I fail to turn in the ticket record? Did I mess up the cash drop? Dread and frenzy seized me.

It was Sally. No relent. Here comes. Here’s where she chews me out for the final time.

“Are you still asleep? Did I call too soon?” she asked.

I am not reading anything in her tone of voice. I am not awake. But I lie. “Everything’s good here. Everything good by you?”

“I owe you, Mr. Marshland.”

Still not capable of fathoming anything. I go with “Oh. I hope it all wound up ok.”

“You know, I spotted a new sewing machine. Especially designed for quilting.”

“That would be good.” She’s going to sew me to a cross and then kill me.

“It’s used. I guess it was her daughter’s. She won’t ship it to me because she can’t lift it.”

“I’ll get a truck.”

“You will?”

“And a hand truck and packaging stuff.”

“It’s in Paducah.”

“The sewing machine is in Paducah.” I am now half awake. Look, I made a sentence. “Paducah is in Kentucky, unless someone has moved it.”

“Lot of cool things in Paducah.”

“I’ll believe you.”

“Monday good?”

“Monday is my day off.”

“Monday still your day off?”

“Yes it is.”

“Good. See you then.”

As revenge murder plots went, it seemed a little convoluted. That dawned on me when I finally got up later.

I have destroyed a few relationships. Most of them I have left festering, gurgling, spewing lava tar or lashing out pseudopods. Once I’ve broken them, I am at a loss for a method of repair. I’ve heard the words ‘penance’, ‘forgiveness’, ‘grace of God’ but I disbelieve.

What I do believe in is showing up where I’ve promised to, even half awake. Paducah was fine. She didn’t kill me. To be honest, the sewing machine did not require a truck, although it would have been difficult for Sally to maneuver alone. We made a day of it. We toured the Quilting Museum there. We had dinner at a place where they throw rolls at you. As outings went, it went fine.

I’m not sure what I was doing right, but I kept doing it. One outing led to another. We went to the candy show. We went to a store fixtures auction. It became the outing that has never ended. There’s a rhythm, there’s music to it. Two worlds in orbit around each other, keeping our own time. The music keeps playing and we keep dancing.

If I did not notice the many urgent events involving Conclave Noir, I have no excuse. I was in its midst on a daily basis, seeing all of their faces more than I ever have before. To me, it seemed as if the whole artsy commune thing was melting away. Even trust funders have court dates and alimony payments and growing children and aging parents and there’s only so much playing at the rest of the filigree of life that even the dedicated adrift can do. More of the Conclave’s stuff moved to the warehouse, based on the notion that warehouse shows were where it was at. I am not sure there ever was a show. Maybe I had become so ubiquitous that they didn’t think to invite me—or more probably assumed I was preoccupied. As the Conclave’s stuff receded, Sally filled the seceded space, first with frames for displaying quilts. The quilts sold like bakery items. Three could be made a week. Two could be displayed at a time. When displayed in pairs, they lasted hours on the sales floor. We began spacing their appearances out. At one point Conclave Noir decided to call itself something else, leaving the name to Sally and her store. The increased foot traffic in the store seemed to discourage the artists so much that they all started hosting these events at restaurants where they taught people the distinction between vapid and insipid. I think it was painting classes, honestly. Painting classes where people eat and then paint while the artist-facilitators float about garden sprinkling advice on how to live off your parents forever. Had no one mentioned anything I would have forgotten about the proposal I had made to Conclave Noir.

“Puzzle book project. We have a verdict,” Thing One informed me. He was just back from teaching a high tea how to play with acrylic mud.  Perhaps my description is somewhat off base. They have been going to restaurants and they are carrying less and less stuff with them.  And they’re all gaining weight and the stray Asian girlfriend.

Whatever they were up to they needed some me time alone in the store to podcast socially promote drink bong water estimate belly button lint. Sally had insisted that this time be granted. I opened the door for her and it was again nearly November out.

Down came the rain. Where did the year go? As opposed to bolting from me, Sally turns and makes mincing backwards steps. At that pace, we will go nowhere at all. She has her head tilted up, her wild blue eyes tracing circles in the air, a broad smile parting thin lips. I offer “Golden Waffle then?”

“Neef,” is her response. It’s the sound the little cars make when they can’t get around something. She doesn’t want to go anywhere. She wants to wait this out. Our dialog lights to the subjects of calligraphy and floral place settings and matching dresses equally repellant on women of disparate sizes and banquet hall food options. In less than an hour we have a meeting on these subjects with some professionally female rented navigator who promises to dream on budget.

The short awning above Conclave Noir’s window isn’t protecting either of us. Neither of us are melting, but I can fathom no need for getting watered. We are bathed in photographic light cast from the podcast studio behind the bookless bookcases on the other side of the glass. They have the shade down as Thing One interviews Thing Two. Between the rain and the muffling of the glass and the roll of cars passing, I can hear very little, although it sounds profound. Sally transcends the irritants of our current circumstances, buzzing happy, recounting reactions from showing off the ring I gave her. Her mood infects and I am lost in time.

We did not notice the podcast light go out. Thing One hails me from the shop’s door.

A fraction before entering, Sally shoots a whisper from her perch under the awning ten feet away. “Clifford.” My name. No discernable inflection. Only I heard the heel tone.

My standing orders for life, as it should turn out.

I follow the second son of the best real estate agent in all of Evanston through the swinging bookless bookcase and up the stairs and into what had been Sally’s apartment until two months ago. Now that we have the house in Lincolnwood, the renamed Conclave is free to use this space for whatever it is they take up space for. At least until the new sewing machine and mail order stuff show up.

Other than the stove and fridge, there is very little in this apartment. The boys have taken up seats behind school desks that Sally used as nightstands. We are all seated upon vintage 1940s diner chairs dumpster dived from the Golden Waffle. It’s an all-adult adult-free parent-teacher conference.  

I mention the setting only because I do not see any drawings or proposals for drawings. None of them have a pad of paper on their desks. None of them have a pen, So I already have my answer. 

I am smiling. I am not mentioning the fact that the owner of the warehouse has been leaving me voicemails day and night about the people I vouched for assuming my lease. Or that the only portion of his rant that I understood was the word ‘dumpster’. Because I am counting on these suckwads and their plus ones to fill seats and eat chicken kiev/chicken cordon blue come April in a hall I am about to dump two grand on reserving. I am remaining silent, in as visibly happy of a way as I can pretend.

          “Cliff, as you know, our organization is governed by strict bylaws,” Jerry begins. “We call them the three Ps.”

No. I wrote the bylaws. It’s the three Rs. The three Ps are Pierce, Peerless and Packard. The three Rs are renown, reputation and remuneration.

“The first of the Ps is prestige,” Jerry explained. “Does it add to our collective reputation to have our work appear in a crossword puzzle book?”

Ok, we’re paraphrasing. Probably because they forgot the bylaws, only remembering that they had them in reference to an excuse.  I don’t know where this is going. Right now their work appears in a warehouse, a closed warehouse. Keep looking right at them. Keep smiling.

“Irregardless of that,” Stu adds, using the ignoramus tense of regardless, “How many people would even see our work in a puzzle book?”

The standard print run is a quarter of a million. They make their living on forty percent sales. And the stuff changes hands and lingers for months. In short, about ten times the number of people who have seen your work so far. Please God let me look swayed by this nonsense.

“Finally, pazoozas,” Jerry says.

Pazoozas? I’ll admit remuneration is obtuse, but at least it’s a word. I wanted to go with the three Ms—moxie, mojo and money. Not that there’s ever been any money involved in this clam bake, although I was offering some.

May God keep and love these bozos. They never intended to treat my proposal seriously in the first place. I’m only getting this much because I’m in orbit around Sally. And my motives aren’t pure. I’ve spent the better part of a decade attempting to insinuate myself into their little art club, This excuse was the only creativity that I was likely to inspire from them.

To them, Noir is Art Decco in the darker floral tones. It’s swaths of blacks and tilted ladies hats. It’s moral ambiguity dressed as realism and relativism as religion. I think that spits the bit, sees the trees for the forest.  The seeming no-win choices, stark scenery and motivational ambiguity are decorations, style imposed on what is straight up classical tragedy. And in classical tragedy, your tragic flaw is your destiny.

Conclave Noir promotes noir, claims to give it tribute, has quested for a venue in which to triumph their take on the subject. Yet when they are offered a platform to do so, they decline it.

We all get what we deserve.

Our Rapt Attention (Fiction)

Summer school is not for the achievers in life.  It’s for folks who were deemed to have not been paying enough attention during the school year. I’m not sure how this lack of attention was quantified or justified. After some cryptic process which equates time spent in proximity with actual awareness of whatever it is that happens, by fiat it was determined that the summer school prospect  has failed to pony up enough of this attention commodity.  Thus the summer school student is required to make up this deficit. It is, however, a one size fits all make up. It’s 25 days, whether you were only partially goofing off, failing in an entire learning realm or flat out bong comatose during the entire previous school year. In return for 25 days of the early summer tacked on school time, the slacker may join his age specific herd the next regular school year.

It’s not a fun position to be in. I feel sorry for the kid who just barely qualified—usually due to absenteeism.  Get the mumps or mono or have your parents split up or, God Forbid, be dragged out of state so that a parent can tend to the needs of a near death relative—and you are in summer school, no matter how brilliant of a student you otherwise have been. (There were also a cadre of parent types who sent their kids to summer school essentially because they hated childhood.) I personally never just qualified for summer school. For me it was a question of how mandatory my participation was going to be. I was a typical attendee, given that I was a demonstrable scholastic non achiever. I was somewhat atypical, inasmuch as I was there every year. From second grade through junior high, summer school was how I spent Labor Day through the 4^th of July.

While everyone else was running off and playing rugby or mass soccer or exploring the swamp, I was doing time.  For some of us attendees, it would set a pattern for the rest of our lives. The great majority of the people you meet in summer school are the same people you will meet later on in detention and, if you still haven’t gotten the point, of the same general stripe that you will rub shoulders with in prison. (1) It does teach you how to do time, provided you are capable of learning at least that.

It is an introduction to the fine laws of limited recourse.  Nothing you do in summer school will improve your official lot in life. Ace it or get a D and it’s all the same. It’s 25 days, spread over about six weeks, with some of them half days. You can’t miss more than two days. Don’t get kicked out. That’s it.

There was actually more good than bad to it, at least for me. The bad parts are easy and obvious to itemize.  You are in with your fellow non achievers, largely—most of whom are behavior problems. You are sweltering.  At the time, summer school was held in the most central school that wasn’t yours. In my day, they didn’t bother with air conditioning. Since it was assumed that you weren’t the most social types, group projects were rare. Also somewhat rare was reading aloud, chalkboard work or any other form of public humiliation. They already knew you were tards. There was no point in riling you up. In fact, the environment was engineered to maintain a form of serenity not normally found in classrooms. The teacher, who was also sweltering, had very little incentive to expend energy. All they are asking you to do is something vaguely school-like and not make a ruckus.  Any sustained outburst of disruptive behavior gets you expelled. (2) Endure the kid who eats glue. Don’t sit by the bullies. Keep busy and quiet. And in 25 days it’s over.

I weirdly thrived in this sort of setting. It gave me time to explore the academic experience, unfettered from the need to buck up on my many deficiencies.  I found things I liked to do. And I did that. I read novels. I wrote. Most importantly, I learned to lose myself in the doing of a task. These inadvertently attained skills carried over to my real scholastic life and eventually to life life.

If only regular school had been this way. I should also mention that the summer school teachers seemed to not hate me. No slight intended to my regular teachers. There was something about me that caused a number of instructors to become infused with (occasionally murderous) rage after several months of exposure. In small doses I wasn’t able to trigger that sort of reaction. From what I can tell, if left to do my own thing, I’m something of a model student. At least for 25 days.

Mind you, my objective was to just get through it. The good stuff just sort of happened.  As a veteran attendee, I was adept at getting  into the swing of summer school. Midway through my career as a good-only-in-summer school student I had an actual life-lingering school experience.

There were twelve boys and six girls in the room. As per usual, there was no rotating classrooms. We spent the entire day together.  Eight of the boys (including myself) are mild to severe behavior problems. Four of the boys and the majority of the girls are special needs level learning disabled. Assigned to the classroom is a single instructor, a Japanese woman in her early twenties. During the regular school year she is a reading teacher, an art teacher and a gym teacher.

Some of the boys are taller than this woman. She’s at even weight with most of the boys.

She’s a quiet person. You have to actively listen to hear her. The classroom was sun blanched and humid, so much so that fans normally used for floor drying were brought in and every single window was open. Compounding the distractions, the widows faced a somewhat  busy street.

It was a challenging set up.  I recall the teacher asking for a change of rooms. At first I think most of us misunderstood her request.  As opposed to a room change, we thought she didn’t want to be with us.  It set a bad tone and the first two days were somewhat tense. Any road noise, paper flutter, or other distraction became some student’s cue to do something they absolutely should not do. It was not entirely out of control—for a pen of sweaty animals—but it wasn’t quite a classroom, even by summer school standards.

Day three the boulder appeared. I’m sure the boulder wasn’t the size of a bowling bag, but that’s how I remember it. It was a grainy, misshapen lump of red, tan and gold. The thing had the overall feel of fine concrete, although it did flake off dust.

From the moment the boulder appeared, every time there was some sort of disruption—environmental or man-made—the teacher would call on someone to move the boulder. It went from the desk to the counter to the rear book shelf and back several times a day. The boulder was heavy and cumbersome. Every time you moved it, you had to go wash your hands. (The classroom’s only amenity was a sink.) Sometimes the person being called on to move the boulder had been misbehaving, but more often than not the choice of movers seemed random.  By the end of the first week, everyone had moved the boulder several times.

No one asked her why. Boundary testing, even in summer school, has its limits. I think she had us unnerved. As it was, she was attempting to teach us Yoga and Ti Chi and Haiku poetry and various other cultural handicrafts, none of which seemed to be on our collective wavelength. On the other hand, she wasn’t screaming or calling for Dr. Death the principal, so if having you move a heavy slab around was her thing, so be it.

Mystification only lasts so long. By the start of week two, the animals had decided to assert themselves. Oddly, at that point, the boulder was on the teacher’s desk. I cannot recall the circumstances entirely, but the project involved paper Mache, a confluence of glue and newspaper. No sooner were instructions given and the stuff manufactured  when globs of it started flying about the room.

The chaos reached a splatter plopping  crescendo as the teacher drifted behind her desk. She held up one arm and glowered at us.  Then her wrist came down with a lightning flash, disintegrating the boulder. It popped, with a talcum mushroom cloud. A spray of fine sand spilled off the corners of her desk. Only coin sized nuggets remained.

She had our attention for the next twenty days.

The paper Mache lantern project was followed by a kite project and a general practicum in origami and calligraphy.  We were taught some basic draftsmanship. We practiced yoga in the parking lot. We wrote and read haiku poems. We made shadow puppets with biographies based on mythology. It may not have been on our wavelength, but that seemed not to matter. 

On the last day of class, the boulder reappeared. It wasn’t the same one. This one came with a twin. Both seemed to be equally grainy and similarly colored. One of them she let us pass about. She explained that it was limestone, actually sand compressed over millions of years. In its normal state this is like any other rock.

She retrieved the rock from us and dropped it on the table. It thudded. Then she held up its twin. “But if you soak it over night and let it dry out,” she said, letting it fall. It exploded in a flourish of dust. 

(1)    Summer school attendance does not necessarily lead to the lethal injection. One would hope that the majority of youths afflicted with an  inability to behave hop off the short bus to doom at some point. It is a graduated process with accelerating consequences, based on the concept that even sociopaths have a pain threshold.

(2)    Expulsion on the one strike rule wasn’t always enforced. It depended on what your reason for being in summer school was.  For the most part, the student is in summer school in exchange for not flunking a grade level. Therefore, if you flunk summer school (by being kicked out), you also flunk the grade level.  So there is a strong motivation to behave.

Lawless Sign Part Eighteen (Fiction)

The Stunning Conclusion of 

Chapter 25: Beyond Step One 

“Everything you’ve seen from the moment you woke up is literally true. And you are entirely accountable for your actions, whatever it is you style yourself as. Perhaps I am wasting wind assuming that you are anything resembling a rational actor, but I will ask you to reflect for just the amount of time it might take you to ruin things further. Certainly your rampage deserves a bit of a pause, even insanity requiring a moment to feed itself. I ask you how much whatever theory you are operating under makes sense. Does it add up? There must be some coherence to those cobbled together parts of yours. Maybe you are the Space Police? If you are, then what’s the charge officer? Where’s your evidence?

“You have evidence that we are running a hospital. You have evidence that we are involved in a great industry reclaiming beings from a civilization lost to a disaster. You have evidence that we are lawful members of the establishment, bulwarks of the single most just civilization on this planet. What you do not have evidence of is that we would be involved in the wholesale slaughter of peoples on another planet. That we can even get to another planet is not in evidence, nor can you contrive a coherent notion to substantiate our motive for murder on any scale. If anything, the demonstration of your senses proves that we are a force powerful mostly in our restraint. We rule nothing! We seek to rule nothing! And there is no evidence that we seek to rule rubble!

“All of your memories are lies. There is no planet of the dog people for the massacre to have taken place on. Our contact with the stars has been limited exclusively to the unfortunates stored here in this library. It is these people whom we have spent the better portion of our fortune and precious time attempting to rehabilitate. That’s who we are. That’s what we do. That’s what you are out to destroy.

“What we do have is a sinister alien enemy, an undead spaceman who has declared the library contaminated and whose sole goal is its destruction and the destruction of all who chance upon it. From the moment we discovered this place it has done everything in its power to prevent our humanitarian efforts. But we have pressed on, despite its malice, despite the hideous casualties it has inflicted to us. Take whatever dim view you may have of our motives, but search your heart. Whose cause is just here, Captain of the Space Police?

“The only other space ship you’ve seen since you’ve been here is a simulacrum of your own vessel. The only technology truly alien to you has been wielded by our enemy—Joe Blow, Sulfur. Our technology is all quite familiar to you, as it should be. Whatever you think you are is wrong. You are from here, from this library. Forget your memories. Trust your senses. Search your heart.

“You have been cheated, poorly used. At best, our enemy has chanced on a victim with a mechanical memory and jammed it full of lies. At worst, he has gutted you, destroyed your mind and grafted in a stick brimming morose nonsense. Entertain the idea for just a moment, Captain. You’re only a single instant of clarity from freedom. Press on and you’re just a thing.”

“Nice!” I yelled to him. “Too bad Sparky confessed.”

I have to give Popeye credit where credit is due. He was much better at using telepathy than I will ever be. Moreover, he was doing this entirely flat footed. It hadn’t been a blink since Sparky and I had Zoom Tubed into his domain.

Popeye was the aspect of Cole I had first met in the library, the one with half a head. In truth, he was just a much a victim of Sparky’s crimes as the people of Tiamore were. He wasn’t born with half a head. He had sustained that injury on Tiamore. His continued existence was more an accident than anything else. Thanks to the outlaw matter in this room, he hadn’t expired. Once Sparky discovered Popeye didn’t have the ability to jump forms anymore (and couldn’t leave this room), he let Popeye live. Besides, Popeye’s body was useless.

I had gained an altitude of about twenty feet. Popeye was on his stage, in front of his giant televisions. Sparky, for his part, was making a head-long run for the hatch in the dried pool.

Sparky wasn’t moving so well. He kept changing direction and stumbling. This version of Cole may have been forty or so and did not seem to have a complete field of vision. Black splotches showed through his blue overalls. I wasn’t sure if Farmer Cole was confused, clumsy or disabled.

It wasn’t about the body. It was the magic smoke inside that was shot. Again, I didn’t know this.

If Popeye so much as twitched from his podium, I was going to let him have it. I wasn’t going to give him a chance to rig up one of his little tricks. I think he knew that, too. So far, he had remained stationary.

The two versions of Cole weren’t paying each other any mind. I’m not sure I would have put any effort in if I was Popeye, but it seems blood was thicker than water, at least with him. Popeye was attempting to be as useful as he could—and had made a game effort with nothing more than words.

Our appearance here had come as a surprise to the three of us. Sparky thought he was heading to the tower.  Claudia had indeed jammed him up. Other than the hospital, this was the only place where I could trap Sparky. That said, although this place was in scab space, there was no telling what sort of things Sparky had here.

Without missing a beat, Popeye continued “The confession is a fabrication—and one without logical impetus. Like yourself, Colonel Nasus has emerged from a tube, his mind chock full of nonsense implanted there by the enemy. Sadly, you are not the first of our patients to have been so hijacked by this fiend. Please, before you do something irreversible. Think in the moment.”

I knew he was reading my mind at that moment. My plan was set: I was going to do him in and then Sparky.

I might have bought what he said if Sulfur had ever demonstrated one iota of technical competence.

Just then, the hatch at the center of the pool lifted. Out came Claudia, dressed in her picker slave leather smock and a pair of my gauntlets. In her arms was the Thomson sub machinegun she had been murdered with.  She leveled it in the direction of the stumbling Farmer Cole and shouted “Mister Cole, I have your bonus!”

Flame and thunder spat from the weapon’s muzzle. Riddled, Farmer Cole spun to the ground. Black streams arced over Claudia and cascaded in a cluster behind her down the revealed hatch.

Sparky’s body shouted “Popeye! Popeye!”

The choice was to fire on Popeye or Sparky. I went for Sparky. The helmet weapon cracked and crushed him. Whatever was left in those overalls sizzled and then popped.

Popeye disappeared, reappeared, disappeared and then jumped on Claudia. One moment they were both wrestling for the gun, the next it was Popeye alone with the gun.

I gained some more altitude and leveled my arm at Popeye. Nothing fired. The baton was jammed. (It took Rover over two hours to get it out. Repairing the arm took a full week.) I shouted down “What did you do to her?”

From my perspective Popeye was moving like a zombie. He took two large steps backwards, away from the hatch. The gun fell from his hand. He said “It’s an odd military man who cannot sense victory. You command the field.”

“Where is she?”

“Where she’s always been. You have control of the complex. The Old Man has given you the keys to shutting us down. The rest of this violence you contemplate is for your own satisfaction.”

“Sticking with the snow job? Playing for time?”

“When he had time to play for, yes. At the moment, I am split between a drive for self preservation and the noble desire to not have a race enemy loose in our environment.”

“I spared the Old Man.”

“The single one of us we were united in getting rid of! Who do you think hired Nedor Services? Are you out to meddle in our politics further? We protect the Earth. We own the human race. We’re from here. You are an alien.—And I have news for you, Captain. Sparky didn’t start the fight. General Alcibibiades didn’t choose the battlefield, nor fire the first shot. It was a war of succession. All Sparky is guilty of is having won.“

I said “And the people of Tiamore just got in the way. You’re not making much of a case for sparing your lot.”

“You precious Countess was merely out to brainwash them. Climb off your high horse, Captain. If the portal had never been activated, our battle would have never spilled to Tiamore.”

Popeye could have been making all of this crap up. But to this moment I have nothing to refute any of his contentions. Cause for pause though it may have been, I was having none of it. I told him “Back away from the hatch and keep going.”

He did, backing away with his hands up.

I touched down  at the hatch and asked “Does Sparky have any more bodies here?”

“You’ve strewn him all over the place. There’s not enough left of him to take a body. Show some mercy.”

“Does he?”

“There’s a distinction between surrender and sedition.”

Fair enough. I thought I caught sight of Sulfur at that moment. I dropped down the hatch, content to leave Popeye to Sulfur’s mercy.

Or I may have been just seeing things. Having dropped into the multi-gravitational chamber, I had a choice of heading in two directions: back to the fluid filled chamber or the work shop. Both had portals back to the real world. Either would have been equally easy for a disembodied ghost being to navigate. If I were Sparky, I would have chosen the fluid filled chamber. It would have been difficult for me to follow him there with any speed and it dumped out to a place with several bodies at the ready.

For a moment, I wasn’t ready to commit to either one. Then the door to the wing marked as a singularity opened and out came Sulfur. Beyond him was what appeared to be the interior of a space ship’s control station. Sulfur blinked at me and headed to the hatch to the workshop. We both flipped over and landed on either side of the door.

Sulfur was trying to warn me about something. Hallucinatory terrain ahead? He was referencing the running thoughts from the previous chamber.

I soon understood what he meant. We projected through the door and, as expected, were promptly slammed to our backs. All about us in the air were melon sized globes containing animated scenes of various sorts. Most of them were cityscapes. Intermixed were interiors. All depicted what I judged to be common events from everyday life on Earth. The globes filled in all of the space, from catwalk to catwalk and heading up to the ceiling. They overlapped and at points merged. The entire massive jumble of them was in constant motion.

A life-sized horse wearing bright silk passed over me. The figure of the gambler, still in his tweed suit, stood next to me with his hand extended down. I took it and came to my feet.

It was a very effective smokescreen--which is what I thought the intention was. My sensors were registering each of the scenes as being real, with real mass, motion and atmosphere. I could not see the actual buildings Royce Cole had here through it. Only the rocky construction debris at my feet seemed intact. Tracking the contour of the ground, I spotted one of the bobcat mini backhoes, clinging halfway down a mound of gravel.

“The odds do change, depending on the jockey. Not much. But they do change,” the gambler explained.

I said “It still strikes me as squandering money.”

“You brought a friend. Think he wants a mint julep?” the gambler said, taking notice of the rising Sulfur.

“He seems like the type. Thank you,” I said. And with that the gambler took one step left and vanished.

“More of a whisky sour man,” Sulfur said in a tone usually deployed by vacuum cleaners.

“You should have piped up when you had the chance,” I snapped. “Can you see through any of this?”

No, he couldn’t. He wasn’t even sure what any of it was. “One of the library’s functions, run amok perhaps?” he guessed between sips of julep.

I lost him and the gambler. I was soon blocked from them, surrounded by a forest of globes with moving scenes. I had no idea what any of it was, what the intent was.

A globe centered itself in my path and started to grow. In a moment, I recognized the area as being the kitchen from Claudia’s apartment. I stepped into it. Finding it as real as anything else here, I called out to her.

“Coming. In a sec,” she called, seemingly from the direction of where the living room should have been.

I said “I need to find the atorecs. I need to turn the atorecs off. Can you turn the atorecs off?”

She appeared before me, still in clad her leather smock, with her arms extended upwards. I let her wrap herself around me. She asked “What’s an atorec?”

“Atomic reaction chamber. It’s a tube, sectioned in chemicals with a DC current running through it,” I explained. With a glance I could tell that I had asked too much. “Are you alright?”

“Same old, same old,” she said, pressing her forehead against my blast shield.

“They’re on top of the buildings. The place where you were doing the picking,” I said, trying my best to avoid saying ‘The place where you were gunned down.’

“Oh, there. Right,” she said. Claudia slipped from our embrace. The globes about us parted. Fifteen feet ahead of her was the chain link fence that demarked the work shop’s compound.

Although I don’t recall passing her, she wound up behind me. The further I was from Claudia, the more dense the arrangement of globes became. From my perspective at the fence, I could see the edge of the roof, but not the atorecs on top.

The ground exploded beneath Claudia’s feet, gravel showering in all directions. I recognized the sound. It was the weapon from Toots’ under-hull. My guess was that the corvette was somewhere above us, shooting down at a forty degree angle. It fired twice more, flinging gravel somewhere far to my right.

“Missed me!” Claudia yelled. No, it hadn’t. Claudia was improbably floating above a fifteen foot deep divot in the ground. The Tommy gun materialized in her arms and she returned fire.

“We have to get to the roof,” I told her.

“Go then,” she said, letting loose with a long volley of fire. “I’ll be up in a sec.”

 I floated up, staying as close to parallel with the electrified fence as I dared. Even up top, the globes had crowded out the entire roof. I had to guess at where the atorecs started. My arms flailing outward, I made a progression of steps in the steady direction of the roof’s center.

It was only after banging my arm into a ceramic casing that I realized that I had no feeling in my right hand. I could not get the fingers to move. The mechanical arm was flat out shot.

I plucked Toovy’s tool off my belt. It sensed the atorecs. That was the good news. The bad news was that there was no central control for the array. And of the several dozen atorecs present, only two were the same model.

Atorecs aren’t set up to be shut down in the first place. Once fired up, they can go for eons. (We discovered the atorec as an archeological find.) Shutting them down meant playing around with each tube’s interface. That might take hours, if I could do it at all. What the Old Man had proposed for me to do required shutting all of the atorecs on this side down.

I leaned forward and sensed the atorecs’ power. Shutting off my vision, I came to the long table of my ancestors. Grabbing Windy’s talons, I pulled her through.

The escaping fumes around me scattered the globes and partially revealed the atorec array’s face.

“We could just blow them up. It’s not like we have to worry about clean up,” Windy suggested.

I asked “Blow them up with what?”

“It will come to you. I’m going to go get that corvette before it picks you off,” she said, gusting away.

“If he’s in it, stay away from him,” I told her.

 I noticed the corvette had stopped firing. It had not shot at me, nor anywhere near this building. As for Windy’s instructions, I assumed she meant the Charliq mine, which did not strike me as being all that good of an idea.

The Charliq mine didn’t seem to think it was a good idea, either. I had just plunked it from my belt when all sorts of warning indicators went off. Atorec detected. Do not activate in atorec vicinity. Do not dispose of in atorec. If near atorec, get away from atorec.

Not kosher on a cosmic scale, it seems. It was doing everything short of disowning me. Normally these things were fairly specific when it came to explaining the scale of  screw up you were about to make. I had previously been automatically threatened with demotions and loss of licenses. Apparently this was beyond that.  

“He’s in there,” Claudia said. She just appeared. And all of the globes around moved away. Her arms were in the air, so I didn’t know what she meant other than she wanted another hug. I put the Charliq away and obliged.

I asked “Where is he?”

“Am I good for you, baby?”

“You’re the best!”

“He’s under our feet.”

Other than a building, I wasn’t sure what was under our feet. I asked “What’s he doing?”

“First he got rid of all of the assembly lines. Then he pulled some cargo containers out of storage,” she said, first pointing beyond the building and then to the left. “Then he moved the cargo stuff there. And then he went into the room with the bunk beds and up the stairs. That’s where he is now, putting papers in a steamer trunk.”

“Papers?”

The whine of landing jets intruded on us as Toots descended to level with the roof. Windy had the canopy up. She asked “Where did the Earth woman come from?”

“Columbus,” Claudia responded.

“Windy, he’s in the building below. I need you to check out what he’s done just to the left of the edge of the last building. Some sort of containers. But stay away from him. If he shows, get out of there.”

“I’ve shut the remote off on Toots here,” Windy said. “The cannon is locked on the autorecs. Get it as close to the ceiling as you can and then let loose.”

“You sure you’re good here?”

“The containers are close enough to the barrier and the other atorecs,” Windy said, her explanation at the time making as little sense to me as it does to you. She then said to Claudia “Nice meeting you, dear.”

With that, she was off, I think. I had a problem climbing into the corvette. Without my arm functioning, my balance was off. I wound up spilling into the cockpit. It took me a few moments to position myself forward in the seat.

Claudia was belted in beside me. She reached up and lowered the canopy.

I could not settle in. Something was jamming my side, the side I couldn’t reach. I wrenched about in the seat and reached back. My fingers found an oblong package wrapped in a grainy, opaque film.

The handwriting across the film belonged to Toovy. The writing itself was my name. I did my best to undo the wrapping.

“Present?” Claudia asked. That would be my conclusion, also. The film was of  a type commonly used to wrap postage, at least in the Combine.

Inside the packing was a golden firearm: the matching side arm for the uniform I was wearing. My belt sprouted a holster and it attached itself.  I commented “If all of this is in my mind, if all of my memories are lies, then all of this is getting so detailed that it’s scary.”

Claudia seemed to concur. “Yeah. What you said. Happens to me all the time.”

I examined Toots’ controls. Having never sat in this ship before, I wasn’t aware of the specific configurations. Toots was both a jury-rigged wreck and a different model than Honey.

“Like it’s a Toyota, huh?” Claudia commented. I’m not sure if she was reading my mind or my body language.

“Perhaps. I only have one arm here, so I hope you can help me a bit.”

“That’s what I’m here for. What’s first?”

“Two toggle switches to your far right. Please flip those up.”

It seemed to me that her hand was moving in the direction of the switches before I had finished my instructions. Her fingers tripped the switches together—something I had forgotten to imply. Then she turned to me and said “I know this is very important and you’re busy and everything, but I was wondering if you could help me with something when you have the chance and if it doesn’t get in the way of what you got to do.”

“Of course I will. What’s our rule?”

“Claudia first!” she said, smiling.

Toots began rising through the air. We were parting the globes. I wanted to make sure we halted well before the cosmic violence at the ceiling.

“And that is always our rule, Special Spaceman,” I said.

“I want to call my mom.”

Odd request. I still had contact with Honey, so it wasn’t beyond probability. “Certainly. The moment we can.”

The layers of globes ended at an elevation about one hundred feet short of the ceiling. At this height, the globes were transparent. We could clearly make out the fence line and the outlines of the brick buildings below.

Rapid successions of lines of light sprayed from the gun in Toots’ hull, each ending in rosy mini flashes tracing the buildings. In seconds all of the atorecs had been reduced to glowing flurries of fine dust. We began our descent and the globes again swarmed us.

“Get rid of the mirror. I don’t like looking at myself when I’m talking to you,” Claudia said.

I raised the helmet’s shield.

“Lose pretty boy.”

Once I removed Cody’s face, she leaned into me and put her head on my shoulder. “That’s my square eyed creature feature.”

The work shop was now mounds of bubbling clay. We flew through a jagged hole in the wall and into the hangar. My intention was to land Toots beyond the distortion barrier and back in real space.

Windy was signaling me to land just past the wall. That’s where we touched down. Per the Old Man, it would take a few minutes for the library to become unhinged from real space. If I didn’t want to go into scab space oblivion with it, I needed to be on the other side of the barrier.

Emerging from the cockpit, I spotted the clock on the post right out of scab space. Its hands were moving backward, then forward. I didn’t have time to tell what, if any, progress the clock was making.

Windy immediately came to immerse me. She said “See that? Left. I don’t know what he’s done. A lot of that is sticking into real space. I don’t know what you want to do here.”

She was referring to an area where the dust seemed suspended in air. Whatever the invisible thing was, it was blocking our path. I would have slammed Toots into it if I hadn’t landed where I did.

We were in the aircraft hangar, two thirds of which was in real space. The various containers and assembly lines had been cleared away. Most of the space was empty as if it were about to receive an airplane for servicing. (This should have perhaps clued me in.) All that remained was Cole’s control array and the line of atorecs, which were lining opposing walls. The framework of tubes was about five feet from where I landed Toots. For a moment I checked over the tubes.

I said to Windy “If it stays after the rest of this place goes, we are just going to have to live with it, whatever it is.”

Claudia stood up in the cockpit and asked “Phone call?”

“We might get better reception on the other side of the barrier,” I said.

She instantly rattled off her mother’s number. I patched it through my helmet and handed the helmet to her, saying “It’s ringing.”

“I hope my mom didn’t change her number,” she said, slipping my helmet on.

“If she has a phone, I can get her number,” Windy said. Windy then said to me “I don’t think that’s invisible, whatever it is. I think it’s in scab space, another scab space. Did this other guy say how long it would be for the place to go pop?”

I didn’t listen in on the other end of Claudia’s phone call, but I got the impression that her mother thought she was dead. “Mom? It’s me. Claudia. Sit down. Sit down. Look, I have to make this fast. I wanted to tell you that I love you. I didn’t say that the last time I talked to you. I said some things I didn’t mean. I said a lot of things to you that I didn’t mean at all. I don’t know where to start. Can you forgive me? Thank you! No, you never did anything wrong. Not to me. I’ll forgive you but there’s nothing for me to forgive you for. You were saying things I wasn’t listening to. But it’s like you said, no love given is ever lost. I love you! I’ll see you when I can! Got to go. I love you, too.”

“Happy thoughts,” I muttered in response to Windy. “Windy, get past the barrier. If I can’t get Toots out cleanly, Claudia and I will just walk out.”

“No problem getting past the barrier,” Windy said, seemingly having slipped through to the other side of the hangar.

“Sadly, probably where Sparky escaped through,” I said.

“He’s still in there,” Claudia said, handing me back the helmet. “He’s smeared all over that trunk. Sliming his way up through the junk.”

“Then there’s no reason for us to stay here. Are you ready?”

Claudia and I sat down in Toots. She lowered the canopy. Toot’s treads grabbed hold and we began crawling around whatever was protruding ahead of us. We seemed to clear it and headed into the barrier.

As the barrier started to wash over us, Claudia leaned over and planted a smearing pink kiss across my blast shield. And then she was gone, nothing remaining but streaks of day-glow lipstick.

I halted Toots and popped the canopy. I felt Windy sweep into the cabin.

Looking back, I saw a pair of jet engines, looming ever larger and immediately converging, thunder and racing wind as their accompaniment.

I am certain that the impressively named A-10 Lightning Bolt Warthog deserves a better description than that, but the rather large running engines are all I can recall seeing at the time. I felt the heated whirlwind, heard the trembling cannonade, saw the engines and dove.

That’s what Sparky had in his scab space within a scab space: a fully operational and currently running armored fighter aircraft. It was a heck of a battering ram. Or  a  distraction.

All I knew was that no one was flying the plane. My dive ended at the edge of the control array. I can’t say how fast the A-10 was going, other than to say that it wasn’t fast enough for the thing to take flight. It was out of the hangar in under a heartbeat. Streaking hot fumes and booms,  it missed me.

I scanned the barrier.

Windy sped Toots out and took a sharp right once clear of the hangar. The metal plated A-10 hopped the tarmac and then spiraled into a ditch between runways, nose down. Neither Toots nor the A-10 ever occupied the same space, which is good.

A metal steamer trunk came skidding through the barrier. I saw a form. I triggered the belt and the helmet. Then I fired my new sidearm.

Whatever was beyond the barrier looked as if it had been dropped from some vast height. I heard it warble “The Space Police! I’ve killed thousands! Nothing happened! I kill a bunch of dogs and suddenly the Space Police appear? The dog people sent you? Really!”

I looked down at the sidearm to see what setting I had used. It was fairly ominous and it kicked. (No, this is not standard field testing procedure, even for me. I was still a little stunned. ) When I glanced up, everything was gone--the entire rear third of the hangar. I was looking out over a ditch. Beyond that was a field, then another runway and then another set of hangars.

Then I spotted Sulfur, in the doorway next to the hangar’s massive service opening. Maybe he was satisfied with this result? He wasn’t lunging to attack. Then the black figure disappeared, perhaps simply stepping aside, perhaps vanishing from all reality. With the library and Sparky now dispatched, he may have sauntered off in hopes of hunting down and sticking his scythe through the other survivors. I don’t know. Since this incident ended, we don’t talk. That was, to date, the last I have seen of him.

Drawing Toovy’s tool, I approached the steamer trunk, which was registering as being made of plant fibers and  containing plant fibers. Inside it was a collection of pictures, mostly photographs, but also some ancient looking drawings. They were of Cole’s children.

Windy’s theory is that this is the godhead itself, that the aspect that can organically remember who most of these people are is the real Royce Cole. I have my own theory, which is less wild sounding and also probably as wrong.

Windy came up to me as I was examining the trunk, saying “Time to go.”

“I was thinking maybe we should shut off the atorecs on this side.”

“I’m thinking that whatever you want to do, you have just the time until the first person notices the rest of this building is missing. Or the running jet in the ditch.  Or our spaceship.”

“Point taken.” I was about to wipe the lipstick from my blast shield, but then stopped. If nothing else, it was a good reminder.

You get into space because you are certain of certain things. Having mastered your ball, you approach the void clad in what you think are stilts. Once you become aware, you realize that most of what you were so certain about are anecdotal anomalies, connected solely by the incidence of your having discovered them. By blinks it dawns on you that the god and gods in their heaven and heavens can do whatever they please. You will never master their whims nor make thorough note of them--and that is not why you have been invited here. This is an invitation to adjust your perspective. You are here to have your stilts resized to toothpicks, your awe renewed. The pink lipstick is still there, months later. 

Coda

The gig at the hardware convention went better than I thought it would. Right up until the time we set up at the pier, I didn’t think it was going to go down at all.

I’ll spare you most of it. Miss Tomlinson’s life had erupted in a spate of misery. Her mother had fallen and was hospitalized in Topeka. Vrecky’s sisters had called and said, in parts, that her mother’s condition was grave. Or maybe they were just “guilt tripping” her and rubbing it in that Vrecky didn’t have the money, time or inclination to come to her mother’s aid. To cut to the chase, the issue was essentially money.

It took me more detective work to nail that down than it took to uncover Sparky. So I flew Vrecky to Topeka. In Honey. And then we flew back. And then we loaded our crap into her Delta 98 and made our way to this miserable gig at Navy Pier.

I didn’t know it at the time, but this my was last appearance as  Cody. Cody has continued to make appearances since then, mostly in magazine advertisements. He’s in crowd shots, in the vicinity of imbedded intergalactic navigational symbols. I have no idea who is trying to contact me and I don’t care. The people who can and should contact me have a method of doing so. So far Colonel Nasus has greenlighted nothing. As for me, I am currently walking about in a more age appropriate guise, a sad-faced cowboy.

It was also the last appearance of the Captain Meteorphone. The non-plumbing operational guts of this device are now housed within the depths of a base fiddle occasionally lugged around by my sad faced cowboy self.

These changes were affected in short order, but were not even in the ethers as of the Navy Pier gig. That gig itself remained in the ethers for a good hour after our arrival at the pier. No one knew who we were or what we were supposed to be doing. All dropping Reynold’s name got us was the continual question “What’s a Reynold?”

No band was expected here. This was a dinner reception. There was no band shell of any kind set up. Vrecky started making phone calls. Someone did come to shag us, so I am guessing one of her calls bore fruit.

Fruit was the operant term, since that’s where we were to set up: in the fruit and Jell-o section of the salad bar. The bar ran about thirty feet and was in the shape of a horseshoe. An ice sculpture of a winged naked woman—Victory, Freedom or the Hardware Convention’s mascot—stood in a brass brazier, Kool Aid shooting from her feet, at the open end of the arrangement. Our actual performance area was a ten foot square patch beyond that, right before the curved array of dressing bottles.

This left us no real room for the amp nor Vrecky’s chair. There was also a problem with the plugs.

I wasn’t going to let anything stop us. I convinced Vrecky to sling the keyboard and play it standing. As for the amp problem, I assured her I could route the keyboard’s output through the Captain Meteorphone.

At that moment, Vrecky would have believed anything I said. She has since lost that willingness. And to think I used all of my magic up to play a gig inside a salad bar.

People did soon appear, vast lines of them—all tracking their well dressed paths about us as they piled plastic plates heaping with salad parts. The mayor even appeared, with his entourage. He pointed at me and he and his fellows laughed at my spaceman suit.

Romanian dance music was played.

Show tunes were played.

An ice sculpture melted.

The End

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