John Duncan Talbird

Three Tales

 

 

Kapaya!

 

Jason yells in the midst of the party, silencing everyone for a second. He’s young, in love with his masculinity, is compelled to shut everything down through his big noisy presence, yearns to create chaos whenever and wherever possible.

         

Of course, this is just a photograph, two-dimensional, stationary and silent, so we must imagine Jason’s exclamation, the sudden silence of amiable conversation. This is what you do when someone dies: You go into his house as if you lived there, sift through his belongings, his memorabilia, and sell the salvageable or give it away, throw the rest in the trash.

         

Ambrose Bierce said that the photograph is a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art. He wrote that in the early twentieth century when the movie wasn’t much more than a vaudeville trick. This was a lifetime before CGI, 3D, digital sound.

         

Jason died suddenly, tragically, with little money, with not much more than the clutter we find in his dingy one-bedroom house. Against regulations, he tried to stand up on a roller coaster and his arms were ripped off. His sister, next to him, was splattered with blood. “I’m so cold” were his last words, seconds after being removed from the car and laid out, bleeding like a horror movie victim on the blue wooden boardwalk. Apparently, his sister has one of those photographs they take of people on roller coasters, snapped seconds before the accident, Jason whole and happy, arms raised, forever frozen in obnoxious vitality.

 

 

 

The Love of a Son

 

You came down the aisle of the subway car toward me, change rattling in your tin cup, the look of a bad man. There was a smear of what appeared to be blood on the sleeve of your filthy, blue work shirt and you reminded me of the Marvel Comics character, Odin, father of Thor, God of Thunder. Removing a handkerchief from a shirt pocket with one hand, you blew your gigantic, red nose. The network of veins crisscrossing your face were hieroglyphics telling the self-destructive tale of your life.

         

The train burst from the tunnel and raced across the Manhattan Bridge, speeding across this latticed artery of modernization connecting downtown Brooklyn to the guts of Manhattan. The harsh, natural light that flooded our car filled me with uneasiness and I got up and moved in the opposite direction. I pushed through the door which was, thankfully, not locked, and went into the next car. I was moving in the opposite direction from which we were traveling as if I had changed my mind and wanted to turn back home. As I ran from the postmodern architecture that had sprouted up like mushrooms in Lower Manhattan, I felt like Frederic Jameson, suffering malaise in the Los Angeles Bonaventure Hotel.

         

Shadows reached into the car as we hurried toward the skyscrapers of Manhattan, as you drew closer, your breath wet against the back of my neck. You cornered me at the end of the last car and here, for the sake of my readers, I’ll dub into English what you said then in your thick Nordic tongue: “Why do you run from me, my son?” You stared with what I can only describe a father’s love. Despite what I had taken for a wild mane of hair, there was a meticulously straight part down the center of your head. The scalp there, nearly translucent, vibrated with a fragility that let me know that you were dying. You reached inside your jacket and offered me what I, at first, thought was a child’s valentine made from red construction paper, but it turned out to be a real human heart still beating in the palm of your hand. Like you were performing a magic trick, you waved two fingers extended like a peace symbol over the pulsing muscle. “This is the new, updated version,” you said in a tremendous whisper. The train had started to slow as we approached the island of Manhattan, the world was slowing down. No one on board seemed to see what was going on between us, they said nothing. As the doors opened in the next station, passengers pushed past.

         

“Please explain this to me,” I asked.

         

I’m trying to reprise this experience, capture its essence more than its factuality. Memory clashes with the words I speak, the making real of the thought. But what I want to know is could you sense the love buried deep down inside my fear?

 

 

 

We Are the Video Game

 

England’s been making breakfast a long time.

 

“We don’t have all fucking day!” shouts Albany at the TV for the third time this morning. He jabs the controller button and shotgun reports vibrate the speakers. Albany has wired the Playstation into his amp and the sound of violence is deafening. England bangs frying pans and plates in the kitchen. I can smell singed batter coming from our brand new T-Fal Sandwich/Waffle-maker. The flat-screen TV glows in the darkened room, as does the VCR blinking midnight. “Hey, Sedona,” Albany says to me without looking from the game, “see what’s taking him.”

 

“Next time,” I mumble, stumbling to the kitchen, “we go to Denny’s.”

 

Despite the greasy chaos of sizzling breakfast foods, the kitchen appliances—toaster, mixer, aforementioned waffle-maker—gleam. England has his pointer on the print of the instruction/recipe book that came with the mixer. I can feel the audio from the video game in my body: gunshots throb the back of my skull, death screams squeeze my sternum. An electric trill—the sound the game makes when it ends, when “your guy” dies—thumps down the ridges of my spine. Albany’s big feet pound the floor toward us. “Did you tell him?” he asks. Despite his heavy breathing, sweating forehead, and stench of insomnia, Albany looks almost pleased when I shake my head no.

 

England pries a too-brown waffle off the top half of its maker with a fork, upper lip dotted with sweat. Turning, forked waffle in hand, there is a dazed look on his face, then a knock on the front door and someone shouting, “Open up, police!”

Without a change of expression, Albany says, “Keep cooking.” Albany and I rummage through the box of guns; I choose a Model 99 four-sixteen caliber, and he the classic 44 Magnum. “She is a beauty,” he says caressing the long barrel. “Don’t point that at me.”

 

I slide my lips around the mouth of the barrel, then say, mouth full, “Just having fun.”

 

“Maybe I should eat an apple.” He rubs his belly, thoughtfully, licks his lips with anticipation.

 

There’s a weird mechanical clicking coming from the kitchen and England shouts, “Shit!” as if in pain.

 

“I love apples,” Albany says, then, “I haven’t had a good dump in a week.”

 

England comes from the kitchen, arms loaded with plates of food: scrambled eggs, a stack of waffles, dark brown sausages, a wobbly tower of toast, plate of sliced citrus so orange it hurts my eyes. He feverishly folds napkins and positions silverware at each of our places like a good boy.

 

“That kid kills me,” Albany says.

 

“That’s what I’m talking about,” I say.

 

Albany is serious again: “Get the ammunition.”

 

“We didn’t get any, I don’t think.”

 

“I guess it’s not that important.”

 

“Didn’t we get a mess of ammunition?” England asks, charming Brit accent, digging something out of his navel.

 

“Get back in the kitchen, college boy,” Albany says.  

 

England’s eyes are dewy like he’ll cry, the chastised Eve.

 

“One more game, then breakfast, Sedona; we’re tied eighteen-eighteen.” Albany presses the button on the Playstation and raises his gun. I’ve got my Model 99 cradled in my arms like a big metal baby, a hard and heavy phallus, and we’re speeding toward the front door of our shitty little apartment so fast we’ll smash right through and out into the day, guns blazing.

 

“By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return!” I shout citing Genesis 3.19.

 

How can you measure a moment’s duration? How long does it take after your girlfriend Joan says, “I think it’s not working out,” until you’re single again? The space between yellow viscosity and something one might eat hot off the skillet? That lucky shot that puts a bullet between the eyes of your opponent? It’s all a fight, from one moment to the next we bleed our animal purpose.

 

 

 

John Talbird is the author of the chapbook, A Modicum of Mankind. His fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Juked, The Literary Review, Ambit, Literary Orphans and elsewhere. He is on the Editorial Board of Green Hills Literary Lantern and a frequent contributor to Film International. An English professor at Queensborough Community College, he lives in New York City with his wife.