Nocturnal Emissions (17 page)

GHOST IN THE AIR CONDITIONER

She invited me into her apartment

I thought, soon into her body

Her life

At work we’d wrestle and tease

Play

But in her apartment in silence

Right around the corner from work

We’d just watch the TV play

While I teased and wrestled myself

She was wild and alive

Then sober and unhappy

And I was afraid and lustful

And wondering if I loved her

Or just wanted release

And a confused person to be strong for

So I could feel strong

That in helping her find direction

I would find mine

Do lust and protectiveness

Walk hand in hand

Is that what makes love

Is that what makes a man?

She thought her apartment was haunted

Knocks on her narrow bedroom’s walls

And strange sounds from the air conditioner

A poltergeist—or “noisy spirit”

A restless being, a hungering soul

Reaching out to communicate with her

So I went there to listen for it

But the ghost never came

And as it turned out

It was only birds that had nested

Inside the dead air conditioner

A mother feeding babies

There was no ghost

Just a rusty machine

With hungry animals hiding inside.

THESE CRAZY TIMES

A Viking ship washed up in a street of Manhattan At Summer noon with its ocean-deep heat

Macy’s
no
Valhalla
for these blond-bearded heroes They disembarked with war cries to take to concrete Thor hammers pounded on briefcase shields

They plundered, pillaged, ravished sophisticates sweet Then charged down the hell of awesome Penn Station Cut straight through the mobs to find someplace to eat Four gargoyles in
Paris
murdered a priest

Crawled through his window and crept into bed Woke him to mock him for putting them up there Then stripped him and pinched him and loved him ‘til dead A fossil skull leapt off its high dusty shelf Gripped an old curator firmly by the throat

In Ireland Japanese tourists took photos

As wet rusty knights reared from a dry castle moat Jesus pulled Himself down from a cross

Swore as He ripped those damn nails from His hands Shoved nuns aside as He stomped from the church Two thousand years in one pose had got bland

He bought a MAC 10 from a black market dealer Ventured out into the malls of His new Promised Land Robbed stores for CDs and hip rock group t-shirts Then hijacked a plane to take in
Disneyland

Channel 7:

Star est

control

M. Prague wasn’t required to paint his toenails the same color as his fingernails, but he believed that his attention to such details was what had earned him his rank at the Registry of Faces in the first place. His fingernail color—dark brown—was a visual indication of that rank.

With his recently acquired promotion and increased salary had come his decision to move out of his one room in a boarding house for men, and take this two room apartment instead. At least his new apartment had its own toilet.

That was the second room. The first was a combination livingroom/kitch-enette, the two sections being partly partitioned by a counter top. His sofa folded out into a bed. It was on the edge of the bed that he sat with cotton balls between his toes, the smell of the nail polish seeming to shellac the interiors of his nostrils. It was giving him a deep and intensely focused pain just behind his right eyebrow.

To exacerbate this headache, there was a lime green light flashing at him from the corner of his eye in a kind of fluorescent semaphore. He looked up at it directly, in annoyance, to see what was silently clamoring for his attention.

Prague
’s flat was made more affordable because it featured advertising screens on much of its available wall space. One entire wall was a single great billboard, but most of the other screens were smaller, generally rectangular in shape but with a few squares and ovals. These banners were ranked one above the other, and end to end, from floor to ceiling. There were none on the ceiling or floor, though his landlord had shown him one of those flats (even more affordable, but
Prague
had felt vertiginous and vaguely guilty walking across the huge smiling face of a pretty girl advertising colored eye dyes).

His landlord had advised him not to block too many of the banners with an overabundance of furniture, but
Prague
only had his couch/bed, one worn armchair, and a small kitchen table with one chair, in any case. He had positioned the armchair, kitchen set and even the sofa away from the walls. He had been instructed that he could hang no picture
s of his own over the advertise
ments, and was prohibited from hiding them with hangings or screens. His landlord had reassured him that when he went to sleep at night, a sensor would take note and the banners would be extinguished.

Some of the banners remained fixed in content, while others were animated or alternated their subject matter on rotation. The large billboard ran a continuous loop of a pretty naked couple running across black volcanic beach sand and falling down together laughing noiselessly, close to the camera. Then some type appeared, promoting Rantac, a popular mood control medication.

But the lime green that spiked
Prague
’s skull and turned his eye was an oblong banner close to the ceiling, near to the kitchen section. That color was atrocious—too bright, too unnatural. An invented color, not one evolved in nature. Lime was just the best he could think of to describe it.

Against this green flashing field were simply the words, in bold black caps: IT’S OK TO EAT!

A public service announcement, he decided…probably against excessive dieting, or fast-paced workers not taking the time. Or maybe it was an error, an incomplete message, a broken loop for some restaurant. He had seen glitches in the banners before. One banner for dog food that had previously shown a dog running got stuck so that the dog seemed to be twitching in one spot in an electrified spasm, his tongue hanging out. And one morning just as
Prague
awoke, and the sensor turned on the light and color in a riot around him, an overly-amplified voice had boomed out from one of the screens. The voice had shouted, “Velvetdew—because you both deserve it!”

He had been shown, but declined, an even more affordable apartment where the advertisements took turns speaking and playing music. But he had not complained about this isolated episode to his landlord, as it had not been repeated, and M. Prague wasn’t one to readily voice complaint, anyway—another reason why, he felt, he had been given his promotion at the Registry of Faces.

««—»»

The light of the morning sun, however diffused by the gray winding sheet of the sky, made M. Prague squint when he emerged from his tenement building to walk to his bus stop. He tucked his chin to his chest against the morning chill and started on his way. He wanted to be early. He had never been late. He was terrified of being late. What if the bus came too soon and he missed it, or not soon enough, and he arrived tardy at the Registry of Faces?

He quickened his pace.

The city reared around him in a forest of black stalagmites. Chimneys stout or slim jutted, loomed or tottered in profusion. Indeed, the leaning tapered buildings themselves seemed like the immense crumbling chimneys of vaster structures unseen beneath street level. The gray sky rippled with invisible vapors from the many lofty openings, as if a multitude of souls escaped from a ranked army of the dying.

A white form snaked between
Prague
’s legs as he darted along the warped sidewalk. He almost stumbled. The sensuous coiling of a cat, he thought. A white cat. He shot a look over his shoulder, saw it hadn’t been a cat. The ghost of a cat, maybe: the luminous white form was lifting into the air, wriggling eel-like, a tatter of ectoplasm.
Prague
faced front again and walked even faster.

As he approached a street intersection, nearly at his stop now, more of those white swimming forms emerged from around the corner, directly in front of him. His pace faltered, but before he could duck into a doorway or cross the street to avoid them, the glowing fish-like shapes swarmed around him. They were more like fish skeletons than fish—bare, plucked things. He realized, then, that they were words. Holographic ads, sent out like carrier pigeons. Were they meant to flock together like this or should they have dispersed? He blinked, batted at them, though of course he made no contact. An attractive woman with a blood-red kerchief framing her face smirked at him in a way he didn’t like, but he averted his eyes from her and continued on his way.

Only a few of the ghostly ads, rippling like flags, persisted in following him, harassing him, now that they had his scent. He did his best not to give them the satisfaction of a look, but at last he glanced at the nearest of them and took in its message:

STAR EST CONTROL

It took him several moments to digest this. He might not have interpreted its meaning, had he not been familiar with an extermination service named Star Pest Control, not far from his office. A closer inspection of the other floating banners behind and around him confirmed that all of them were similarly defective, maimed, missing the “P” in “
Pest
”. Was nothing ever whole, untainted?

Prague
had rounded the corner now, and lost all but one tenacious banner, luckily falling behind him. He saw his bus stop ahead. The bus wasn’t there—was that good or bad? Nestled up to the curb almost in the bus’s space was a truck that carried a trash dumpster on its back—either picking up a full one or dropping off an empty one.
Prague
was distressed; was there room enough for the bus to pull in? He should see if a constable were about, and complain.

The dumpster was painted a vivid red, and it had an opening at its end, which faced
Prague
. A tarp was pinned over the opening, hanging down a bit in the middle so that over the top of it he could see the black of the metal box’s interior. The sagging tarp was colored the exact same red as the metal body of the dumpster—thus,
Prague
had at first mistaken the rumpled tarp for a badly damaged metal door, crumpled in some terrible impact. The illusion didn’t trouble him much, but the color was a bit offensive to him—too loud, too strong.

But even as he approached the truck, it gave a hiss and a rumble and pulled away from the curb, entering into traffic. Taking his spot of sidewalk, the precise spot he claimed every morning, he watched the red dumpster wind its way amongst the smaller, darker, beetle-like vehicles of other workers on their morning migration. Why must a dumpster announce itself so garishly?

That red was appalling.

He waited ten minutes for the bus. It came on time.
Prague
’s bunched shoulders lowered ever so slightly. While waiting, he had alternated between glancing at his pocket watch and stealing peeks at a young couple waiting for the bus beside him. Well, perhaps they weren’t a romantic couple, maybe just co-workers. Both wore charcoal-colored baggy suits. Hers looked a bit frayed, like her hair. Bottom rung clerks, he inwardly sneered. And he flicked his eyes to the fore again when the man touched the woman’s arm in the midst of their conversation. Very unbecoming, such obvious flirtation.

When the bus pulled up with a great belch of wavering invisible vapor,
Prague
checked to see if the solitary banner still hounded him. No sign of it.

Relieved, he boarded the bus, mounting its steps directly behind the woman in the worn suit. He took a deep inhalation, and caught the scent of her jagged hair.

««—»»

The black beach sand clung to their pale, youthful flesh with its sheen of healthy sweat, like obsidian pulverized to powder, as if the young naked couple lay embracing in the ash of a vaporized city. This city. They laughed noiselessly as the huge banner screen superimposed text over them which advertised RANTAC—TO KEEP YOU IN BALANCE.

Though he lay in his fold-out sofa-bed, beneath the covers, the banners had not yet extinguished themselves because
Prague
was not asleep. His hand worked rhythmically under his blanket, so that it looked like the rolling waves at the edge of that obsidian beach. His eyes were more fixed on the girl tonight. Sometimes he focused more on the equally perfect young man.

Before the laughing, embracing couple could actually begin to make love, they were gone…only to appear once again on the horizon, running toward the camera—toward
Prague
—hand in hand. Her breasts bounced. The man’s member flopped.
Prague
’s eyes and mouth were open like a dead man’s. Only his hand moved.

But soon enough he turned away in disgust, closed his eyes against the screen and the profusion of smaller banners, curling himself in a fetal position and drawing the edge of the blanket over his head. Until he actually fell asleep, the banners would glow, and their glow kept him from sleep. He wished he had a button to shut them all off. He felt their colored gaze on him.

He heard the soundless laughter of that too-perfect, too-happy couple.

««—»»

His new desk at the Registry of Faces was inclined slightly like a drafting table, with a strip of buttons and dials along either side of a large monitor screen set in a circular frame of glossy cherry wood. His desk was in a cubicle like a tiny apartment flat without a ceiling. Its walls were empty but for a few memos; he frowned upon the unprofessional decor in his neighbors’ cubicles.

One woman had a calendar of naked men with dogs’ heads superimposed onto their necks. This woman had an irritating laugh, and talked too much, and
Prague
wondered how she had ever achieved her status. She didn’t even paint her nails with the color of her office rank, used a lurid blood red instead.

He tuned out her chatter, and the loud coughing of a man in one of the cubicles that were suspended from the ceiling and accessed by a complex catwalk system. (There were three levels of these suspended cubicles; Prague was afraid that one day, the cubicle nearest to the high ceiling would tear free, and crash into the one directly below it, and so on, sending a whole train of cubicles down upon his head.) He blocked out all else, kept his eyes focused on the circular monitor, watching a succession of photographed faces. Each visage lingered before him for ten seconds unless he altered the rate or paused it entirely.

Because he was presently viewing a succession of Oriental women, the Caucasian woman took him by surprise. Not that he thought all Oriental women looked the same. One’s face would be narrow, the next one’s broad, long hair, short hair, but there
was
a sameness in that they were all female, all dark-haired, all almond-eyed, so that sometimes it seemed it was one single Oriental woman whose head was pulsing and undulating, ceaselessly molding itself.