I took a nap and returned to the living room of my childhood — a house of two electrical outlets where every appliance’s electrical cord was pulled to its maximum tension, as if a network of trip wires were teasing us with the impossibility of escape. Small lumps of fur lay slowly bleeding on pieces of newspaper. My house mom busied herself making wire armatures, fastening hardened strips of yellow plastic for beaks and pressing seeds into the heads for eyes. Various concoctions boiled away on the stove and whenshe was ready she dipped the forms into each vat in succession; they gradually grew in size and mass with many fine layers that dried into a flocked hide, a new skin wedged into dusty pleats over muscle forms… Bodies of birds and small animals lay resting on pieces of newspaper. House Mom built small birdlike frames that were motorized out of wire, string, and bits of clay. They shot up into the rafters and stuck there, dripping paste, shedding hairs and tiny springs. Pelts lay drying on wooden forms, pressurized bladders of hot water covered in fur, bird skins wrenched inside out, dusted with cornstarch and arsenic. Fine chisel scrapings on green bone, skulls scooped from the inside. Deer skulls pitted with bleach rot. Stinking hollow shells of water bugs, green beetles, stale meat, tiny stains of black oil footprints running in decorative seams up and down the tablecloth. House Mom had things stashed all over the house. She hid what bothered her. Running around in her black dress with white apron — You are overreacting, obsessive! House Mom said to me over and over. All I could see was my unwavering vision of me riding on her back into oblivion. “Obsessive.” Oh Mother! She piled on more and more clothes because the human body exposed below the jaw was obscene (her body below the jaw was strictly off-scene and her waist was cinched tight with bandage wrappings in such a way as to suggest a kind of perverse, stylized fertility). Her manias were cyclical in nature. When she wasn’t practicing taxidermy, she lunged at the source of grime, shaping and changing it, extracting things that lay open or uncovered on the floor. Still, she had found new and industrious ways for keeping the storms at bay. She drew beautiful lacelike fans with pencil over the nude figures twisting around the fireplace, dipped photographs in ink, masked off baby pictures on the fridge with little imaginative pants and jackets. The man on the cover of the magazine wore a suit of Wite-Out. There was a book, a chronicle of the conversion of the Costanoan Indians by the Spanish missionaries, that she had screen printed with a new cover. The Spanish braced themselves against small, ornately costumed Ohlones and Miwok, wrapped in the most meticulously crafted crepe gowns. Even the dead lay under heaps of baubles and many-layered finery, tiny die-cut outfits as weightless and impossible as a paper love letter.
Seth and I chased each other, running like stoned dorks into the “mini desert” of open space stretching from the back of the shopping center to city limits — to the small, abandoned airport out there. The runway ended where a wooden electric chair, as big as a house, stood at the top of a mound of dirt. Ten people could have played around on that thing, and by many accounts they regularly did. It was an old art project from a different time, soaked with beer. Squirrel skulls lodged in the cracks of the bowed planks. A shaft of light beamed down on the electric chair from the sky and illuminated it against the dust till the whole world appeared yellow, creamy, and ashen around it. We raced each other to the electric chair, who will win? I don’t know it’s a race. Who will win?… I turn around and see sparks shoot out of your eyes. Birds fly from your mouth. Without a sound. I caught you as you fell and we fell silently together, almost like falling asleep, each pulling the other down, grabbing at whatever you can… I spent the whole night with him without actually looking at his face. I couldn’t do it. I was afraid of what I might find if I looked. In his eyes I saw stars fixed upon me — I had read too much already, no more looking. His mouth was the hottest place on his body and I sought it out like a little girl… I could recall the tiny pitter-pat of a radio playing quietly late at night and imagined I could be in the same room as its source, at the site of the song’s origin — and the oppressive moistness of it all. Now its vastness played in my heart as the small, barely discernable sounds coming out of that box, and it was one of the saddest sounds “He’ll capture and hold you with his stinging velvet arms.”… He’d dug up a large beet out of a neighbor’s garden.
“I chose it because it looked like a heart, an anatomical one,” Seth said. “See?” he sawed at it with a serrated knife. “It bleeds just like we do. The only plant that’s truly alive.” We stewed the pieces in a pan on the camp stove. I feel flesh and marrow in my mouth. “There’s a reason heavy metal is pre-occupied with meat and blood,” he continued, toying with pieces of it in his fingers, “it’s because they’re warning us not to forget where our flesh comes from — ”
“But they try to shock us with blood. How could it be that waving a scrap of meat around on stage is going to make us feel sympathy for the animal?” The sound of him cartoonishly sawing at his own arm made us both laugh and we shelved the discussion for now.
“I always wanted to be the kind of person who likes that band,” a guy in the audience said. The guitar player bore down hard on his Big Muff, one of a dozen effects pedals hitched to a piece of plywood at his feet. The drummer swished up his blond bangs when he reached up to hit his ride cymbals. Let me in! Let me in! Sight lines burned across the venue, fastened to the band members. They returned our gazes. The drummer stared at me absentmindedly as he hammered away. It was a small venue and I happened to be standing right in front of him. I wasn’t sure what to do. This was one of the first shows of Hibernation Spectacle, a Vulgar Marxist doom-psych band that Evangele was involved in somehow. It wasn’t clear if he was their manager or just a hanger-on. Either way, the band was a good sport about it, letting him hang out on stage while they played. Evangele peering down at their set list with his arms crossed behind his back, or waving them around like a maestro during the loud parts.
All around us the town was falling apart, dissolving back into its prehistoric state. Dactyl had started sending the papers a series of antique postcards typewritten with his personal philosophy laid out like a rhetorical dialogue. It wasn’t funny and it wasn’t cute, but people still laughed and forgot themselves. He wanted to let us all know that he was still dating, and that, more importantly, he was in love. Cops are out in their choppers tonight, looking for large groups of headlights traveling in clusters up in the hills: tip-offs of the local kids’ pathetic house parties. I fell to the forest floor, my eyes moistening with emotion, digging at the place in front of me to be released somehow. “Was there ever a time you could take all your shit down and party at the beach in a huge crevice in the sand?” Josh cried, “Are those days over?”