Read The Orange Eats Creeps Online
Authors: Grace Krilanovich
The Orange Eats Creeps (8 page)
One summer I caught an evil little pet. I caged it but it ditched me. No problem. After it left me I made it do my bidding from afar. Now I have remote control over its doings, ties I hitched over endless indelible months of putrid wandering. Walking lost, my body boiling like water until all the thoughts in my head just evaporate. The swath of vapor in the sky infects your lungs and forces me into bubbles in your brain with every predictable breath. That summer I was a teenage carnivore. On hot nights I dug up little things here and there that I found buried in holes. Creeping around under steel overpasses downtown I lived with my eyes to the ground, struck by how many gutter punks, panhandlers, dumpster divers, gakkers, vagrants, and romantic tramps would never even fuckin get it: the fact that we have to dig for stuff we don’t understand
cuz we live in a past we don’t understand
. I found a videotape in among some other stuff. It was of some kids partying in an apartment. They were all high on speed, tattooing each other while the girl held her cat to her chest, drunk, lying down on her living room floor. She looked absently at what was going on around her, a bit bewildered perhaps but casually luxuriating in her drunken nonchalance. She flipped through religious pamphlets in the dark. I identified with that girl on the tape, her predicament leapt right out at me from her crooked mouth. She looked at me but her bangs hid it all.
cuz we live in a past we don’t understand
. I found a videotape in among some other stuff. It was of some kids partying in an apartment. They were all high on speed, tattooing each other while the girl held her cat to her chest, drunk, lying down on her living room floor. She looked absently at what was going on around her, a bit bewildered perhaps but casually luxuriating in her drunken nonchalance. She flipped through religious pamphlets in the dark. I identified with that girl on the tape, her predicament leapt right out at me from her crooked mouth. She looked at me but her bangs hid it all.
Passing by the Anarcho-squats between Salem and Eugene I couldn’t help but absorb the longing of all the people lodged in every conceivable corner, suctioned into seams in the rafters. Their overwhelming sense of self-satisfaction warming the whole cavernous space like a great growling pot-bellied stove. They read to each other by the light of a bare bulb burning on the side of an adjacent building. The room glowed brown with the dim orange light. Their bodies were wrapped and bound like cheeses and, as it happened, their skins looked and felt like a salt-basted exquisite cheese because they never left the brown light. They had money — why didn’t they use it?… Thoughts of escape were suspiciously absent. They enmeshed themselves snakelike with others in proximity and groped long and poignantly, their minds jogging through the detailed process of making bombs out of ordinary household materials. Longing to be true fugitives, for true disaster to strike; they wanted to scrape crumbs off the floors of cops and judges and county supervisors’ homes, to gurgle their tap water after the inhabitants have torn themselves strangled and conflicted from this world. With great effort they pre-wrote suicide notes for each of the prominent robots they had scheduled to die. Cops had no clue, no intelligence on them. This was strictly a subliminal war, fought behind the eyes drowning in blood, scoring flesh with acid, sputtering out of a bubbling vat of gruel on the stove. They shared one giant body. It was hungry all the time because it was just a baby.
In the diner a few of them sat there and distracted the server while others dove into the back and stuffed their pants with dinner bread. “You pieces of rat shit,” we said to them, “this isn’t Europe, you know!” Anarchists! Never a surprise there. “Look at them groping each other under the table. You’d think they were conducting a symphony down there — ”Josh stood and threw a cup of ice in their general direction, “Thatch my roof, asshole! Turn my bucolic windmill!” Now it was getting redundant, “Strangle me with your extra long eyelashes! With your high quality beer and cigarettes — !”
Rising before dawn we went out to some yard sales in town and the people looked at us like we were friggin nuts, but it was all the other people who were drunk and falling all over their stupid shit piled in their front yard. I’m like, dude, stop spilling your beer on me and get away from me with your shitty beach-ball… It’s a little like shopping on another planet. The scene is populated with a whole subterranean world of people, most disproportionately single middle-aged men with grizzled beards, Hawaiian shirts, and windowless vans, who make a meager living buying repossessed storage units at auctions, then selling the wares at swap meets. They live fast and loose, existing parenthetically to mass society, usually buried in much of the crap they are trying to sell but haven’t been able to. They’re a dying breed. Their lives are full of shit and mystery and intrigue, with few redeeming qualities, personality-wise. We discovered evidence of human activity from a long time ago at a limekiln in the woods that had been abandoned 175 years ago. We sensed that horrible tragedies were inflicted at this site. Maybe a killer hid out. Maybe a guy was chained to a bed in the 1910s. Maybe a family of desperate teens in the Depression starved to death in the creek. We followed the tiny fossilized footprints of history’s small adults — the marks of a past race of dapper children, animal children with no decipherable language. We found a shoe, a man’s fossilized cigarette butt, a cat skeleton. Excavating, digging around I began to find objects both strange and familiar, telepathically guided by horrific artifacts projecting a tone from feet below. And I can’t help but think of all the other stuff that’s lying in wait in storage units all over the country. Panting, sweat beading up on their Mylar shells, waiting for the door of their enclosure to open up and let that strange light in. All over the country storage containers sat full and silent on the ground. Alone in the dark; issuing forth negative energy, the kind only stored objects can bring out. Throbbing in the dark.
When we got to the check cashing place it was almost three a.m. and the place was empty. Then we noticed a pair of eyes peering over the counter. The guy who worked there, I guess, but it seemed strange, like he was doing something back there. We walked up and noticed that he was crouching but that he was only four feet tall anyway. He stared at us and made pained wincing noises, as if for him breathing was something both precious and jagged. He looked like Evangele, except his skin was grey with spots and his hair looked like it was on backward. When he started talking it was like someone had pressed his button. A voice came out of a crack in the check cashing counter. “The Aspirin Man: His Story,” he announced.
“What?” Josh said.
“I’ve been waiting, you know — ”
“Can I have cigarettes?”
“Come a little bit closer so you can hear better. Lend me your ears, children.”
“Somebody turn him off, seriously.”
“You kids on the run? I was too when I was your age.” We didn’t answer, and yet he continued, “It’s rough in the trenches. I won’t deny that, but it’s no bed of roses here either!… You boys have been wounded? That’s fine, but I’m absolutely destroyed. For two years I’ve been on night duty. Do you know what that means? Exhausted! Worn to a frazzle! Oh my God!” He spoke so loud, like he was shouting over a black river at us on the other side: “At night I nap lightly at the end of a drawbridge under a box of industrial-strength Anacin tablets. The situation behind supermarkets is desperate, with all sorts of desperate people, desperate animals, and desperate things sniffing around the other side of the drawbridge. The opening in the building is exactly the same size as the truck that comes to leave its food inside. It pulls up and all the goods can roll off into the giant storeroom. But before the truck can pull up there’s the drawbridge, and that’s where I come in. I’m the lever-puller, the switch-thrower.”
After a silence where he even closed his eyes, he continued, “Industrial strength Anacin keeps me going. I have no use for the food that comes off of these trucks. No need for anything else to animate me — just that sour white ore pulverizing my limbs… My stomach hardened into a big white rock a long time ago. My eyes are two ping-pong balls filled up with sand, tap water runs through my veins — but my hand is still wrapped around that switch, ready to pull. I am the chiseled switch-throwing Anacin Man; pass by me and reach the warehouse of your dreams! My bed is made up in the destroyed cab of a Mack truck — that deadly incubator of mustachioed evil. Upholstered in lizard skin, sugared water glass, an enlarged growth where the steering wheel had been… I puff myself up and settle into a palette of cotton swabs in the back and watch a little TV set I have in there, licking my paws and wetting my ears as I watch my little TV set and dream Anacin dreams of white deer circled by moons as big as the sky itself.”
Outside the convenience store, at a spot in the sky, blacker than a storm winding its way through heaven, was a crack in the clouds. My eyes filterless, I watched the ribbon that wound and curled inertly in the twilight. Late at night I got lost inside… I remember sitting in the kitchen with Kim and she turned to me slowly and said cryptically,
I can feel the wind that’s starting at the center of this house!… it’s turning and turning and turning, kicking up a wild frenzy. It’s turning and whipping around, turning me into something that I always wanted to be — my organs are crystallizing into gems
. She sat straight up, staring at the wall behind me. I said Kim, Do you feel the ESP? Is it coming for you? She answered Yes, I feel it —
I can feel the wind that’s starting at the center of this house!… it’s turning and turning and turning, kicking up a wild frenzy. It’s turning and whipping around, turning me into something that I always wanted to be — my organs are crystallizing into gems
. She sat straight up, staring at the wall behind me. I said Kim, Do you feel the ESP? Is it coming for you? She answered Yes, I feel it —
Do you feel the storm too?
And I said No. I can’t.
She always seemed kind of embryonic. Reverting back to some liminal state launched into motion when she left the house, as if the building itself was keeping her on an upward path, evolving into a real person. Running away she seemed to just start sliding back down. She fell and collapsed at the bottom of the food chain somewhere in the spring… In this secret room with no doors there is a golden wilderness, where everything is priceless and wild. I coveted a scrap of bone said to be from the Donner Party, incinerated with marks of butchery visible to the naked eye. Other pieces turned up in the dirt along the way. Pieces I couldn’t quite place: bits of china, a petrified crust of bread, dice, a wad of Scotch tape folded into a flattened ice cube. Other objects that weren’t recognizable but still clanked around in my pocket, bits of wood, glass. Taken together they were my Locating Deck. I jiggled and threw it out onto the table and read it. The lost pieces led me like a ghost guide through the forest and through towns and through parts of towns that reeked of death and fresh, urgent things I couldn’t put my finger on.
I knelt down to where a patch of clover stood against a moist retaining wall. Father son holy ghost I said as if I knew and tapped each nodule on the clover’s head. I grew feverish at the thought of tearing one of the leaves in half, making four leaves, as if sinking into a realization of what that meant for the first time. Connecting the four leaves with the stem, and the dreaded five-point cross — the pentagram — popped out. What did that mean? I drew sketches in my mind of each possibility and its number. I thought of the little bag of bones resting these long winter days and nights in my apron pocket. I counted them out and muttered the names and origins of each as I wound my way around the dirt paths this side of the Northwest Rainforest. I dreamed of wheat. Bushels of large well-kempt tubes of flaky stalks. Strange, because I had never felt or been in any proximity to wheat and wondered why I would dream about a grain of cosmic significance. I saw little brown birds shaking at the ends of long tufted heads of wheat. Were they one and the same? A rustle of feathers hewn by the scythe; a pulpy bushel of flaky stalks?…
Please stand clear of the lady’s shadow
I heard out of the corner of my sight, and awoke. So the wheat was a person then? A human mother? Angel lady come to save me? Late at night at my old family living room I woke up and sat in the middle of the couch. Plastic dust rose off the hairy blue carpet like a quiet and perilous vapor. The cat rooted around under a blanket until it found some lost remnants of old food on the floor, maybe nothing more than a salty patch from who knows what source. Against what I would have considered to be an animal’s best judgment he licked at that spot on the floor for a long time. I pulled him away with his tongue still stuck halfway out of his mouth. But cats don’t really have mouths; they have what’s more like a compact little salty bear trap. Outside it was brighter, orange street lamps banishing all life on the street below. The spotlights’ hard beams fastening down a deadness out of the dead of night. I found myself outside, towering over the worms that turned up this time of night on the street, unaware of their fate at the hands of a daylight world they didn’t own. I began to feel some measure of guilt for not cluing them in. They’ll just fry like the rest when the sun comes up, like all the worms of history; they shouldn’t be any different. And perhaps they would come to know this site intimately after all. By being sizzled into the surface the worms would become it, in a way, like nothing else could. I stared at nothing in particular and felt my eyeballs boring holes through their soft pale skin. Do they deserve this? I walked up to the rainwater barrel behind the neighbors’. I steeped an unrefined tea out of assorted blooms, sticks, and pebbles surrounding one of the gravesites on the hill. I walked back down; an air of predictability pervaded the driveway; juices ran down in among fissures and pooled in dark reservoirs at street level. Microbes living on the little pebbles are supposed to make you psychic — if they don’t lock you into the static scaffolding of your own goddamn skeleton first.
Please stand clear of the lady’s shadow
I heard out of the corner of my sight, and awoke. So the wheat was a person then? A human mother? Angel lady come to save me? Late at night at my old family living room I woke up and sat in the middle of the couch. Plastic dust rose off the hairy blue carpet like a quiet and perilous vapor. The cat rooted around under a blanket until it found some lost remnants of old food on the floor, maybe nothing more than a salty patch from who knows what source. Against what I would have considered to be an animal’s best judgment he licked at that spot on the floor for a long time. I pulled him away with his tongue still stuck halfway out of his mouth. But cats don’t really have mouths; they have what’s more like a compact little salty bear trap. Outside it was brighter, orange street lamps banishing all life on the street below. The spotlights’ hard beams fastening down a deadness out of the dead of night. I found myself outside, towering over the worms that turned up this time of night on the street, unaware of their fate at the hands of a daylight world they didn’t own. I began to feel some measure of guilt for not cluing them in. They’ll just fry like the rest when the sun comes up, like all the worms of history; they shouldn’t be any different. And perhaps they would come to know this site intimately after all. By being sizzled into the surface the worms would become it, in a way, like nothing else could. I stared at nothing in particular and felt my eyeballs boring holes through their soft pale skin. Do they deserve this? I walked up to the rainwater barrel behind the neighbors’. I steeped an unrefined tea out of assorted blooms, sticks, and pebbles surrounding one of the gravesites on the hill. I walked back down; an air of predictability pervaded the driveway; juices ran down in among fissures and pooled in dark reservoirs at street level. Microbes living on the little pebbles are supposed to make you psychic — if they don’t lock you into the static scaffolding of your own goddamn skeleton first.
Poor little girl, ran away for good; ran across a revolving path of gravel, concrete, and asphalt, in and out of towns and subdivisions, until on the fourth day she fell down near the county line. Happening upon a vacant mortgage office in a woodsy area she managed to creep inside, licking her wounds. There were other outlaws already inside and they immediately jumped on her with sedatives in hand. She was out of commission for a week after this incident, abandoned when the other kids caught a rail car out of town. No one found her for days afterward even though her feet were sticking out of a closet door, but she escaped again, wriggling out of a headlock and running down the street. Luckily, there was no shortage of vacant couches in the neighborhood. She chose one couch, probably the wrong one, because for a week she lay there without a sound. Bound up in this silent house she sensed that it had always stood there, surrounded by parking lots on all sides, electrically pulsing all like-minds into its thrall. Lying there, aware of human movements traced over walls, but no sound. It seemed that people were everywhere, shadows tickling and prodding at her sight. In this room there had never been day; the afternoon died with her capacity to throw up toxic vomit on cue to melt the door handle to escape. And what about these Night People who kept her captive for all this time? Who gave her nothing but fluids and straw; who ate away at her fingernails and caused the sun to rise and set on her at will? They kept whispering in her ear that “the middle of the night is inside,” but she could still barely hear it. Hibernationalists, they tried to take her down with them for the season, but her mind wouldn’t shut up, so fretfully it ticked the days away. Learning to become alchemists they returned one day with fluids for her, a sugarwater blend that had her lost for hours in a haunted crevice of the couch. One day, feeling like I was getting close, I edged cautiously around the corner in my mind. She spoke to me in a dream about some guy she met who unlocked her psychic potential to the extent that she was able to wrestle it out of where it lay to hand it over to me, emphatically adding that what I was looking for was buried “a little off the tracks in Salem.”
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