Warren
Peace was standing at a pelican’s length from the Time Wasting Device. It was
hard for him to see where any of this was going, but his mind was set to the
task, and that was all that mattered.
“Oh.
Are you famous?”
It
was a little Promethean fellow named Cutter. It wasn’t clear at all who Cutter
was speaking to, or if perhaps Cutter was just speaking to himself. Warren
answered anyhow.
“Apparently
not, if a highly astute individual such as yourself doesn’t know who I am.”
‘Don’t
you go on worrying about me,’ thought Warren. ‘I’ll be myself in no time.’ Then
he said, “Botched!” He had no idea why he’d said it. But there was nothing he
could do about it now. Life, for some reason, went on.
Cutter
said this: “I am not what you’d call a tulip-of-a-guy, you know?”
Warren
pretended to not be having a conversation with anybody at all. He stared a bit
more penetratingly at the Time Wasting Device and shuffled his feet in the
metal shavings on the floor. It was a sawdust effect these folks were going
for, and, for now at least, it was working, or so Warren hoped.
“Today
is not your tomorrow just yet,” ventured Cutter. “Remember that the next time
you have a not-so-incredible orgasm or when you’re dumping the trash.”
“Dumping?”
“Yes.
That’s right. That’s it. Got it now?”
Warren
was less confused than he’d ever been. He wanted pancakes with tiny specks of
silver in them. The harm that it would cause seemed minimal to him. There were
elephants at the beginning of the rainbow, and that was plenty of something,
and then perhaps some more.
“Mr.
Peace? Hiya! Mars to Mr. Peace! Everybody home?”
The
gravy stain on the back of Warren’s shirt collar was in the shape of Venus de
Milo. Cutter, of course, had failed to notice or note this. Instead he was sidetracked by such thoughts as, ‘Why in heaven’s sound are my hands so
damnably cold?’
A
drop of lime soda was the pinnacle (or would that be acme?) of understanding
justness. Or so it seemed to Warren Peace just at this evened-out odd moment.
He genuflected, mildly, and said in the direction of the Time Wasting
Device:
“I
am substantial, and I can have good things and bad things, and being happy is
not as rich as being sad. Oh, do not marry my current culvert of dissatisfaction to The Seesaw Girl.
“I
want a soundproof chamber for my soul. It doesn’t need noise, but maybe
windows. Claws perhaps. But never gloves. Somewhere it might happen upon a
fumble or a dropped nickel. Get it a new set of wheels. Give it a Scantron test
about birds. The hours leak away, and it’s cold, and my soul’s got it too loud.
Weeded with blind luck, if there were a garden at my disposal. For now, it
rides the bus and coughs into a cold fist.”
Cutter
watched a flock of flying cockroaches wing and flutter, dive and pitch, crest
and moan, and finally settle into the low distance of what was left of the
sky’s expanse. It reminded him of diamonds being crushed by bulldozers on beach
sand.
“I
am the régisseur of all things minimal!” (Mr. Peace said that.)
Cutter:
“You are not sure what considerations to take. You are not at peace, yet. So,
keep breathing.
“Do
not oppugn any of what I have yet to say. Like this: The hills are dead with
the touch of silence.”
Warren
Peace stood up, trotted quarter-heartedly to the Bill Paying Station, folded
his hands over the Pay Nodule, thought about freezing to death, pretending that
one leg was a few inches shorter than the other so as he’d have an excuse (if
only in his mind) for being constantly teetering back and forth with faked
shivers, cried, didn’t pray, and then paid his fine for not being resilient
enough in connubial (not to mention concupiscent) matters. Then? Well, then he
reached in his pants pocket and found a gum wrapper there, and he threw the
before-mentioned gum wrapper on the floor where it joined the metal shavings.
Warren thought about how nice it was to be rid of things, and he looked at the
shiny foil of the wrapper there among all the silvery metal shavings, and he
thought, ‘That’s nice. Real nice.’ He walked away from everything.
Cutter
watched all of this from a safe distance. The moon glowed turquoise. Cyanide
was in all the 7-Up cans. The air grew chunky with Baby Ruths and Caramellos. A
high Rubik’s Cube system funneled in from the northwest. Cutter grew antsy as
it sprinkled Mountain Dew. Nobody was whistling.
Cutter
watched Warren Peace walk away, seeming to stumble a bit as if his equilibrium
were greatly disturbed, as if he were feeling the actual rotation of the earth
in his gut and couldn’t shake it, which perhaps (another perhaps) he really was
feeling, that innards-twisting wrench and lunge of pull-pull antipodal
struggle.
Cutter
grew sad. He began to sing:
“The
old man’s asleep in his tiny booth of keys. He’s got eyebrows that look like
they’re about to get up and shimmy away from his face while he snoozes on
unaware. Take the mountains, go on and take them all away. Stand here. I’m all
out of courage, for now. The coffee guy’s taking up sneezing as a hobby. Too blue
to go. The grass grows yellow just like her hair. I’m not dressed for the
artists to be taught to create. I’m not over what I want or under what I
ain’t.”
Cutter
thought, ‘I’ve really got to stop singing all the time,’ but he knew that he
wouldn’t.
Cutter
wrote this: “I am loafing through the pages of being me when I should be
leafing so new to sap tree-like instead, but the iron’s hold is rust’s only
bond, and I am out of STOPs for the red light’s dawn. Damn my sense of harmony
and distance. I will watch others for signs of recognition-- a Dürer's
Rhinoceros of hope, or perhaps just another perhaps, perhaps. Railroad.
Buffalo. STOP. That is not all…”
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