Erzählungen

 

Peter Cherches ~ Gretchen A. Van Lente ~ Peter Wortsman

 

 

Peter Cherches

Insomnia in Excelsis

 

“Tell me, Anthony, what are you going to do with a gross of blackhead removers? I don’t mean to pry or nothin’, but I’m curious. … No, baby, I didn’t tell the mailman nothin’. … Wait a minute, honey, you don’t have to talk to me like that, I wouldn’t do anything to … No! Anthony! Please! Stop!”

 

Weird shit TCM shows in the middle of the night. “One Hundred and Forty-four Blackhead Removers,” starring Shelly Winters and Richard Conte. Low-budget film noir. Or perhaps I should say tête noir.  I have to be up at six. It’s almost four now, and I can’t sleep.

 

“Where’s Paparelli?”

 

"He ain’t here.”

 

“You ain’t holdin’ out on me, are you, sister?”

 

Click, click, click.

 

“Reverend Bascomb, what are you doing?”

 

“I must have blood, ten thousand more pints, if our work is to continue.”

 

“Curse of the Vampire Evangelist,” starring Earl Holliman as the evangelist.

 

“I’m sorry, Mr. Cherches, but the X-rays reveal an eight-piece serving for four in your left lung. We’re going to have to operate.”

 

“What are my chances, Doc?”

 

“Poor. Very poor.”

 

“Give me percentages,” I say, trembling. Wait a minute, I’m not trembling, I’m having an orgasm. The nurse is giving me a blowjob as the doctor delivers the bad news. I pull back the sheets. The woman with my cock in her mouth is Maria Ouspenskaya. I shoot my load and I hear a Bach fugue.

 

The nurse is now at the harpsichord. “I am not Maria Ouspenskaya,” she says, semen dripping from the corners of her mouth. “I am Wanda Landowska.”

 

Now a cop is handcuffing me to the hospital bed.  “Hey, what gives?” I ask.

 

“You’re under arrest for child molestation,” the cop says.

 

“Child? This woman is as old as dirt.”

 

“The only dirt in this room is you, my friend. This girl is eleven years old and you are a very sick man.”

 

I take another look. My goodness, it’s not Wanda Landowska or Maria Ouspenskaya at all. It’s Patty McCormack, straight out of  “The Bad Seed” in an inappropriately sexy nurse’s uniform. Patty is throwing a tantrum. “He made me do it! That bad man made me do it!”

 

What’s that I feel now? Damn, the doctor is poking me with a fork.

 

“Feel anything?”

 

"Nope.”

 

Now he’s cutting me with a steak knife. “Anything now?”

 

“Nope.”

 

“Now?” he asks as he pours Tabasco into my lacerations.

 

“Yes,” I say, just to get rid of him.

 

But he doesn’t leave. He starts licking my wounds. But wait, it’s not the doctor. It’s Agnes Moorhead, and I’m in the hospital ward of a women’s prison.

 

Wow, I guess I fell asleep after all. Good. I need all the sleep I can get. I want to be ready for that audition tomorrow. Tomorrow? Today?

 

Do I really want that job? Before I saw that ad I never even knew such a job existed. Corporate crooner. It’s part of the spiritual wellness program at a too big to fail financial institution. When the bankers and brokers need a break they go to the lounge and make requests of the crooner. According to the ad, the job requires a broad knowledge of popular music of all styles and periods. That’s me, for sure, but do I really want to be a karaoke mascot for the one percent? The money is tempting, though. Eighty grand.

 

“As it is written in chapter 7, verse 11 of ‘Ecclesiastes,’ or is it chapter 11, verse 7 of ‘The Book of Job’? Or perhaps it’s the twenty-second psalm, or the fifth commandment, or the fourteenth amendment, or the eighteenth hole at Inverrary. Maybe it’s the last game of the ’55 World Series. Or position 247 of the Kama Sutra. Damn it, I just don’t know. I don't know! I don't know! What do you think of that, you fucking assholes?”

 

Wow, the minister on “Sermonette” is having an on-air breakdown. What the fuck? I thought they canceled “Sermonette” years ago.

 

Click, click, click

 

“…Then I’m doing two weeks at the Hattie McDaniel Room of the Best Western Biloxi, and after that I’m booked for a month at the Golden Chili Dog in Chickasha, then I’ll take a few days off to catch my breath before I’m off to the Tennessee Williams Festival in Zagreb, and my baby’s due in April, and on May 17th I start shooting a TV movie called ‘Superficial Two-Step with an Indelible Cataract.’”

 

“Will that be a comedy?”

 

“They haven’t decided yet.”

 

Click, click, click.

 

“Nothing gets out stains like new Bizz, with hydrochloric acid.”

 

“Hydrochloric acid? But Marge, isn’t that dangerous?”

 

“Nonsense. You’re soaking in it now.”

 

Click, click, click.

 

“Tony, you’ve got to find me ten more teenage girls with lousy skin.”

 

“But boss, where am I going to find them.”

“Same place as always. St. Vitus Tap Dance School for Girls.”

 

“But boss, Sister Philomena is getting suspicious.”

 

“You just take care of the girls. I’ll take care of Sister Philomena.”

 

I have to pee. Real bad. But I don’t want to get out of bed. I don’t want to get out from under the covers. It’s cold out there and I’m exhausted.

 

I’m ten years old and I’m watching my mother vacuum the living room carpet. She’s singing in a foreign language I don’t understand, but the melody is “Melancholy Baby.”  Then, after a while, she departs from the melody and goes into a Schoenbergian sprechstimme, now reciting the English lyrics to “Melancholy Baby” in a high-pitched shriek.  And her housedress is made out of teeth. Suddenly she puts the hose of the vacuum cleaner to my head and it sucks out all my hair, and now I’m completely bald. I start crying, and she lashes out, starts scratching my arms with her long fingernails, draws blood. Then, all of a sudden she starts singing “Auld Lang Syne,” only it’s not my mother any more, it’s Agnes Moorhead and it’s New Year’s Eve in a women’s prison.

 

And when I wake up I still have to pee.

 

Click, click, click.

 

“…and lift and stretch and bend and lift and stretch and lift and stretch and lift and bend and stretch and bend and lift and bend and stretch and bend and stretch and lift and stretch and lift and stretch and bend and lift and … exhale.”

Click, click, click.

 

“Where are you taking me, mister?”

 

“To a very special place where they can cure even the nastiest case of blackheads.”

 

“Even mine?”

 

“Even yours.”

 

It’s been six months since I’ve had a paycheck. Six months since I was fired from my legal proofreading job at Four Dead WASPs. Fired for insider trading. I had passed on info gleaned from my wee hours proofreading sessions to my brother Bart. The one they got us on was the National Rendering takeover bid for Superior By-Products. They promised not to prosecute if I resigned quietly. My money’s running out. I’m in a bad way.

 

And I still have to pee. I can’t hold out any longer. I get out of bed and start walking toward the bathroom. Just outside the bathroom I see a cockroach. I’m about to step on the bug when I hear a tiny, high-pitched voice. “Please don’t kill me, Mr. Cherches!”

 

“How did you know my name?” I ask the roach.

 

“This is your apartment, silly,” the roach replies. Then he says, “Follow me, we’re having a party!” So I squeeze through a little hole in the wall, after the roach, and inside hundreds of roaches are dancing and munching on familiar-looking crumbs.

 

“So,” I ask my roach host, “what are they dancing? La Cucaracha?”

 

“The Mashed Potato,” the roach replies.

 

The music is very faint, but yes, indeed, it’s Dee Dee Sharp singing, “It’s the latest, it’s the greatest, mashed potato, yeah, yeah, yeah…”

 

And I wake up and I still have to pee. I go to the bathroom and I take a leak, finally. I piss for like twenty minutes. When I’m through I return to the bedroom and get back under the covers.

 

“That was some racket you had going: smuggling dope in blackhead removers, child prostitution, insider trading, covert operations for the CIA. But it looks like the party’s over.”

 

“Don’t count on it, copper.”

 

Six AM. I turn off the alarm before it has a chance to ring. I hop out of bed, shower, throw on my three-piece suit and take the subway to Wall Street.

 

I had arranged to meet Lee Feldman, my piano accompanist, in the lobby of the office building. He was already there when I arrived. “Everything OK, Lee?” I ask. “Sleep well?”

 

“Great,” he replies. “I slept like a baby.”

 

Bastard.

 

We take the elevator to the 40th floor, the bank’s executive offices. “I have an appointment with Mr. Lusk,” I tell the secretary.

 

“Have a seat,” she says. “I’ll tell him you’re here.”

 

Two hours, three issues of The Economist, a coffee-stained copy of the Kiplinger Newsletter, and everything I ever wanted to know about Lee’s kids later, a large man in a gray suit comes out to greet me. He’s incredibly tall, close to seven feet, and his head and hands are disproportionately large. I suspect he has acromegaly, like Andre the Giant.

 

I stand up.

 

“Mr. Cherches?” I nod my head. “Will Lusk.” He shakes my hand. I suppress a scream. “Follow me.”

 

Lee and I follow him into the lounge. It’s like a mini-ballroom. Curtains all around, chandeliers, and a white grand piano with a candelabra. “Here, put this on,” Lusk says, tossing me a jacket. It’s a sequined white dinner jacket, Liberace-style. I replace my suit jacket with this one.

 

“All right, Mr. Cherches,” Lusk says, “are you ready?”

 

“Yessir,” I say.

 

Lee sits down at the piano, spared the indignity of the sequined jacket. He feeds me my intro, and I start to sing: “Money makes the world go round, the world go round, the world go round …”

 

 

Peter Cherches' new short prose collection, Lift Your Right Arm, available now!

 

 

 

Gretchen A. Van Lente

The Uninvited Guest

 

            At present they do not know I exist.  But I would like to make them care at least, and the only way I can wake them from their indifferent stupefaction is to make them afraid of me.  They spend so much time posturing, pretending not to be afraid of anything, this family of mine which grows so large and fast that even I don’t know how many babies will be born this year to inherit their snobbery.  Already there is something wrong in our genetic make-up, to make us procreate like rabbits.

            So you see, I do have reason to go to extremes, morphing into something else each time they neglect to invite me to a wedding, a gathering, a funeral, a Christmas celebration of the magical Christ who turned the other cheek—a picnic in the grass.

            By now the locals think there might be a family curse. Small towns jump to that conclusion. They think the devil has some standing invitation to all our family gatherings.  But it is only me, the one no one can remember to invite, the black shadow that fills the church at a funeral, draping the coffin and giving off a stink that wilts the flowers.

            They scatter, my family, leaving their precious picnic things behind to be flung around like garbage.  The locals revive the old legend of a swamp monster, a slime being rising up from the water at Half Moon Bay and lumbering toward the beach, but it is only me, crying out for an invitation.    

            I have a way of dooming any wedding.  No one likes the uninvited guest on that blessed occasion.  But as I wait for my invite to arrive I begin to seethe, so that by the time they are gathered, the  first I do about to be said, I am already, well, reactive, creeping like a cold wind of foreboding through the cracks in the doors and windows, leaving a white cloud like frozen mist in the air.  I cover the guests in a white foggy shroud.  Then all the pretty dresses must be covered in old shawls and worn out winter coats, and those unprepared, perhaps the clueless new in-laws, must stand and chatter and shiver until their painted faces turn blue.

            Maybe I should not have been there at all during the christening.  Maybe I was truly out of line.  I am only a small seed in their minds, if I face up to it.  Still, when my own sister Madeline got to hold the child Christopher over the baptismal, I said to myself, what were they thinking?  She, a Godmother?  My sister who still smokes cigars?  Why, she cannot even hold the baby without help!   Look at her withered arms draped in white tulle, as if she were the new born baby!  I thought such jealous thoughts as I hid behind the red velvet of the confessional curtain.

            What am I, if she is so great for having lived a century?  Why, pray tell, am I to be ignored by the whole town if she is their symbol of something grander than longevity?   Oh, and longevity!  I will live so much longer than she!  Oh, a christening on her 100th birthday!  As if she were the guest of honor, not the baby, not Christopher, who, I think, would have come to like me if he had ever heard of me.  But no, Madeline had to take up all the space in the universe reserved for old dames, and so I had my reasons.  For turning the fountain water into ice.  Black Ice.  At her touch.  

            And so what if Madeline froze?  Not just from fright.  Ice-cycles drooped from her nose and eye-lashes like a lyric in a song.  Black clouds filled the sky.  Lightening streaked and thunder rattled the windows as I blew out the candles and left them standing in darkness—the entire town, come out to see an old woman become Godmother.  The very woman who stole my tortoise shell brooch at the Cotillion Ball, that very first year of our coming out.  Why shouldn’t they know the story of her black heart? Stealing my tortoise shell brooch, and then stealing that first dance with the man who couldn’t decide between us.  I filled the air with visible black gloom, God help me--a sour dark exhalation that made them all invisible to each other in the dark.  The entire town, not just my family, forgets an old woman.  Just as he once forgot me.  They had it coming.  I enjoy my own repugnance in this.

            So you see, I do have something with these people, my family, and consequently with the town that idolizes their penchant for overpopulating the world in some nostalgic notion of what an innocent world used to look like.  I have their fear, if not their attention.  If they suffer fear in this town, do they not know, at least subliminally, that it is me on every occasion?  Perpetually the party crasher?  The uninvited guest?

            Perhaps they are curious now, and only hoping for an invitation to the Grand Families Doings, but some day, the town people will know enough to stay far, far away from my family on their special occasions.  They will know that trouble comes without asking.

            And maybe someday my own family will know. They will figure it out.  Perhaps as they die they will glance back and see, in the act of their departing, a scene of me, beside the shore of Half Moon Bay, in a small hovel, more mud than shack, where I live in isolation among the remnants of this cheap flimsy casket which was never meant to keep me for an eternity at rest.  They will see me in my hovel pawing their pictures with my green talons, then tossing them aside like the detritus of the shore.  They will see the dark clouds and the white mist settling down around me to make for me a bed, a pillow, an arm, and embrace.

 

Gretchen A. Van Lente studied with Tobias Wolf and has published over 20 short stories published in The Harrow, Midnight Lullabies, Black Petals, Femme Fatales of Fear, storySouth. Blood Lotus, and In The Mist, to name a few. Her mission in life is to create a monster as big in our imaginations as Mary Shelley's monster, and since she is aquatic, it has to be a swamp monster.

 

 

 

Mynona

The Art of Self-Mummification

Translated by Peter Wortsman

 

            My house burnt down and I had no insurance. When I went to my bank, an imposter had already withdrawn and pocketed my entire life savings. Three telegrams were waiting for me at the post office. The first reported the death of my best friend. In the second my great uncle announced that he was disowning me, as he was remarrying, which, incidentally, most likely meant the eclipse of my last chance to inherit anything from anyone. In the third telegram I learned of the sudden death of my betrothed.

            Since I had long ago lost my parents and siblings, my friend had just forsaken me, as had my beloved bride, and I cursed my great uncle from the bottom of my heart, I now stood all alone in this world. It happens to plenty of people. But things had been going well for me: I’d grown accustomed to the comfiest, coziest kind of life. And now? All I owned was what I was wearing; in my pockets were five Marks and a few pennies. On top of which I had debts hanging over me and I was not the least bit inclined to fight for my survival. I was, moreover, a stocky, handsome, blond man with the face of a bon vivant, and my innate sense of style forbade the mimetic expression of despair that was now threatening to get the better of me. Some inkling of it must, nevertheless, have been evident, as the following will reveal.

            I decided to indulge in a kind of death row last meal, and so as to make do with my last reserves, selected a middling restaurant. No sooner was I served a bowl of soup than I felt a strange gaze fastened upon me. I ate extremely slowly, pausing to ponder in between each spoonful. Perhaps this caught the eye of the lean and haggard man with the scholarly face seated at the next table over. In any case my gaze met his, engulfed, as it were, by the look of his strangely piercing pupils that seemed to drill into mine and ensnare me in their optical grip. In course after course our gazes crossed more and more frequently like oddly dueling blades. Until—what did I have to lose?—I grew tired of it and blurted out: “What do you want from me?”

            Wincing and clearing his throat, he emitted an apologetic laugh: “It’s not so easy to explain. Would you permit me to join you at your table? Or may I invite you to join me at mine?”

            The fact is, I welcomed this intrusion: it served as a beneficent distraction from my fruitless brooding. Since it was not I who wanted something of him, but he who appeared to want something of me, I invited him to have a seat at my table. He approached me, grasping a glass of wine in a somewhat trembling hand, sat himself down facing me, sipped at his drink, but still held back from speaking his mind. We spent a few minutes in silence, swishing around what we had in our mouths. Finally I asked him: “Do you find it so difficult to reveal what it is in me that interests you? Speak up, man!”

            “No,” he replied, “but my interest derives from a singular, indeed a somewhat delicate purpose. I find it by no means easy to set aside my natural reserve. It seems pushy, indeed impertinent, of me to confess that I not only feel a profound empathy, putting myself in your place, but also that I should dare make so bold as to confess an intimate knowledge of your mental state. I have a very particular, I might go so far as to say…material interest in my fellow man which I will presently reveal to you. But first of all: You’re practically at your wits’ end—oh, forgive me! But I saw it right off, I could read it on your face.”

            “You can only imagine,” I said, sullen and resigned to my fate, “unless perhaps you were aware of certain circumstances and knew me without my knowing you.”

            “My word of honor, nothing of the sort! My declaration is based on a keen knowledge of physiognomy, or more precisely, pathognomy, a natural consequence of my interest, in which I am never mistaken.”

            “Very well then…what is that interest? Don’t be afraid of hurting my feelings. I can say with the poet: Whatever comes, things couldn’t get any worse.”

            “I immediately knew it from the look in your face, from your posture, no doubt about it.”

            “Is that so! As a matter of fact, I don’t believe I am inclined to wear my heart on my sleeve; I take great pains to keep my private affairs to myself.”

            “It is precisely that restraint that’s a dead giveaway—at least for me!”

            “Better let the cat out of the bag. Speak up, man, or else I pay up and go.”

            This threat hit home. He came out with it: “My gaze is particularly attune to people on the verge of an involuntary or intentional death.” His piercing look burned into me, it gave me the creeps. At the selfsame moment I suddenly fathomed that I had darkly decided to commit suicide. I completely lost it and let down my guard before my ghastly interlocutor. I reached for his hand, pressed it, and albeit disgusted with myself, spit out the question: “Will you help me?”

            “To a certain extent. Listen up! I propose to provide you with a means of maintaining yourself…self-preservation. You understand. Your body will not be destroyed. You will enjoy the privilege accorded august individuals. Just think! In the prime of life, with, if you manage, a smile forever plastered on your gracious mien; pliant, in whatever pose you please; and I can assure you, perfectly preserved in heated rooms—you will hold careless court like a god of antiquity. Your being, at least on the outside, will survive inviolate unto eternity.”

            What’s the use? I thought, after letting this seemingly ludicrous outburst fall upon my dead ears. So my supposed savior turned out to be a raving a madman whose drivel I didn’t understand. I resolved to pay him no more mind and disappear as soon as possible. But he removed a red packet from his breast pocket which he proceeded to open. What was in it? A tin can in the form of an urn. He twisted off the top and let me look in. Inside it I saw a violet colored powder. “What am I to make of this?” I asked.

            “It is a poison that kills instantaneously, but has the astounding quality of immediately mummifying any living being who absorbs it, to embalm him, to preserve him, to render him incorruptible, indeed incombustible. Unfortunately, since it is a deadly poison, I cannot apply my patented method to people, unless of course I sniff out presumptive suicides who would prefer self-embalming to crass manners of bumping themselves off. My clients, by the way, include a few monarchs (clandestine royal suicides are alarmingly on the rise), whose discreet testimonials I would be glad to show you.”

            Such lunacy almost brought a smile to my lips. I resolved to force him into a corner: “Why do you characterize your interest as material? Do you think perhaps that I can offer you a fortune? I must disappoint you.”

            “Rest assured,” he said, “that is no disappointment—quite the contrary! That makes you an all the more likely prospect. I myself am very rich. My interest is nevertheless of a material nature, because I am a connoisseur. A corpse collector. The keeper of a splendidly assorted museum of the perfectly preserved corpses of suicides. Would you like to come look? Yes? Would you like to designate your own pedestal, or seat, or even your own hook to hang from? Would you like to select your attire? Or the pose you will take for eternity? I am throwing a little party, the crowning moment of which will be your self-embalming by swallowing this powder diluted in champagne. Until then you will be my protégé, I will see to your every need with a fatherly solicitude up until the time of the party the date of which I will determine.”

            “And your stipulation?” I asked, already swayed.

            “As I said, you bequeath me your corpse for display purposes.”

            No sooner said than done, he had already spread out before me a printed agreement. What else could I do? I filled it out precisely, line for line, and signed it. He slipped the form into his briefcase.

            “Now you belong to me,” he cried out in jubilation. “Please permit to immediately assume my role as your protector.” Whereupon he paid both our bills, slipped my arm in his, and sauntered merrily along with me to his house, also the site of the museum. There were some six halls full of dead life, arranged with unimaginable refinement in various tableaux vivant. “Splendid mise-en scène—don’t you think?” the old fellow praised his own handiwork. He had reason to be proud. The first hall was peopled with guests at a fancy dress ball, all dead, from the youngest bucks to the oldest geezers, wallflowers and all; as well as butlers and ladies in waiting. The second hall reenacted the scene of a variété with ravishing arrangements: a lovely little stripper to die for. The third hall comprised a collection of proper middle class folk of every description gathered in jovial little circles. The fourth contained all sorts of proletarian types. The fifth comprised children from ages six to sixteen; they appeared to be playing, some graciously and in elegant fashion, others plainly and simply. Finally, the sixth hall contained a bacchanal, an orgy with intimate details borrowed from bride’s trousseaux and horror cabinets. Never had I seen death animated in such a lively fashion. It was the polar opposite of a cemetery. “So!” said the old gentleman and put his arm around my waste: “Today is August 10, 1917. Our next gathering (we are a registered club) will take place on September 16 anni currentis. Until then you will live in comfort in my house, and you may take your time in selecting your scene, your attitude, your attire. You fit best, I’d say,” he scrutinized me thoughtfully, “in my varété, wouldn’t you agree?”

 

 

Mentioned in his day in the same breath as Kafka, though since then all but forgotten, Mynona, aka Salomo Friedlaender (1871-1946) was a perfectly functioning split personality: a serious philosopher by day (author of, among other books, Friedrich Nietsche: An Intellectual Biography, Kant for Children, and his magnum opus, a study of Schopenhauer, titled Creative Indifference) and a literary absurdist by night who took the penname Mynona (Anonym, the German word for anonymous, spelled backwards) to compose and publish black humored tales he called Grosteske, or grotesques, the form for which he is best known.

 

A man of multiple modes, Peter Wortsman is the author of a book of short fiction, A Modern Way to Die (Fromm Publ. Int'l, 1991); two stage plays, The Tattooed Man Tells All, 2000, and Burning Words, 2006; a travelogue/memoir, Ghost Dance in Berlin: A Rhapsody in Gray (Travelers' Tales, 2013); and a short novel, Cold Earth Wanderers (forthcoming in 2014 from Pelekinesis). His numerous translations from the German include: Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, by Robert Musil (now in its third edition: Eridanos, 1986; Penguin Modern Classics, 1995; Archipelago Books, 2006); and most recently, Tales of the German Imagination: From the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann, an anthology he also compiled and edited (Penguin Classics, 2013).

 

 

 

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