Mechanical Jellyfish: September

Saturday 9•1•12

It is colonial times and I’m a private in the continental army. I wear a blue uniform when I march in perfect unison with my fellow soldiers. We are on our way to a little town in the east. My CO says that when we arrive we will exact revenge on a British officer for executing an American captain in a dishonorable way. We find the officer and his company of redcoats at a train station, relaxing in hot tubs along the station platform. They are each in full uniform as they soak in the water. We shoot them at point blank range with our muskets, leaving the tubs frothy and orange with blood. I notice a pay phone as we leave and think to myself that there aren’t supposed to be telephones in this era. Perhaps I’m in a movie.

Sunday 9•2•12

Even though I already have a bachelor’s degree I decided to go back to has school because someone told me it would retroactively boost my GPA. My old school has changed a lot since I left Texas. The building is now four stories high and doubles as an international airport. There is a food court in place of a cafeteria. The tarmac is visible from the classroom and the classes themselves are incredibly easy. Because I am an adult I appear to be immune to the pressures of the social atmosphere that my classmates have to deal with. I stop in the lounge and buy myself a Killian’s which I take to class with me. I’m not really thirsty but it gives me superficial joy to know that I can have a beer whenever I want and the other students can’t.

Tuesday 9•4•12

It’s my turn to watch Ryan today so I took him over to my aunt’s house. Ryan is an infant this time, but he doesn’t cry or soil his diaper so long as I let him watch the movies. The film we are watching today is a sci-fi drama about a man and a woman trapped in a futuristic maze. They are being hunted by a monster with the body of a man, metal claws for hands and a giant key for a head. The monster stalks them through the maze until he finds the man and the woman at a dead end. They are tunneling through a wall. There is digital green light on the other side of the hole.

Friday 9•7•12

In preparation for a major event (a friend’s wedding, I think) I decided to hire a professional jeweler to polish my favorite ring. The jeweler arrives at my house and assures me that the ring will be ready within the hour. In the meantime I decide to iron my tuxedo and clean myself up. When I get out of the shower the jeweler is right there in the bathroom, waiting for me with a sad look on his face. He’s made a mistake, he tells me, and now my ring is ruined. It is so misshapen that it will no longer fit my finger. There are thousands of little scratches and the metal appears dull. There’s even what appears to be blood embedded inside it. I have no idea how he managed to destroy my favorite piece of jewelry so spectacularly. The ring is made of tungsten steel which is supposed to be scratch proof. I’ve been wearing this ring since I was seventeen years old and now I’ll never wear it again.

Saturday 9•8•12

It was a nice day so I decided to walk downtown to the IRS building on the square. It’s a skyscraper with big glass windows and a waterfall in the lobby. This is where I go to read short stories. The first story I read was about a pair of roosters, cousins in fact, walking down an old country road. The second was about a girl who lives at the bottom of Lake Minnetonka. I haven’t read anything in a long time.

On my way back home I started feeling tired. There was a car parked on the side of the street with its doors unlocked so I crawled inside and slept in the back seat. When I woke up there was a thick fog. The streets were empty except for a few homeless people warming their hands over a pile of burning bicycles across the street. A lot of stores in this area are closed. Even the grocery store across the street from my apartment has its windows covered in plywood. I just shopped there the other day. This used to be a nice neighborhood.

I decided to take the stranger’s car and go look for a new place to live. The fog broke up as I made my way through the city. There are no other cars on the road. Without thinking I ran a red light and a motorcycle cop pulled me over. The motorcycle had a sidecar on it where the officer’s partner sat. The officer in the sidecar was carrying a three-toed sloth. He was holding the animal like a mother burping her baby.

Tuesday 9•11•12

When I was thirteen my favorite aquarium was the one in the basement of the Mall of America. I didn’t like it because of the conveyor belt tunnel, where the whale sharks and man-eating sea turtles swim overhead. Every aquarium worth its salt has that. The reason I liked this one so much was because it had the best gift shop of any aquarium I’d ever seen. The floor is a scale model of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Behind the cashier’s counter in glass cases is a collection of stuffed tropical birds. But my favorite part by far is watching the mechanical jellyfish.

There are hundreds of them floating through the air overhead. The ceiling is painted to look like the night sky, complete with comets and quasars drifting like plankton. The jellyfish are on sale right now, two for the price of one. You can see the gears spinning wildly inside their bells through their translucent skin. Their lights flashing purple and yellow, blue and green while their tentacles trail listlessly behind, snatching frightened asteroids from the space around them.

Wednesday 9•12•12

Rodney* stopped by to visit me in Hawaii. We were drinking at a table near the pool and watching the girls swim. They were like mermaids with the fins of Siamese fighting fish. Rodney suggests that we go golfing. His eyes are black and he has a small hole in his left cheek. I think he is going to die soon but I don’t say anything. The two of us go down to the gift shop to buy some golf clubs and tees. The gift shop is in the basement. There are dead insects on display by the entrance. A pair of wasps are in a man-sized glass case by the cash register. Each wasp is the size of my arm. I can hear my alarm clock. Just as Rodney and the wasps and the cashier and the world around me starts to move out of focus.

Thursday 9•13•12

Jared* and I are in an abandoned house in the bad part of town with a pair of girls we picked up at a party the night before. We had spent the night having sex like the world was going to explode. At one point I was fucking a white girl with green hair on an oil-stained carpet. There was a centipede painted on the tattered wallpaper by the outlet. It came to life with each cry she and I made. When she climaxed the creature raced to the ceiling and hissed at me. I got up from the floor and climbed atop the sofa. When I stood on the tips of my toes I could just barely touch the centipede, but by then it had already turned back into paint and plaster. Nobody else seemed to notice.

It is late in the morning now. Jared and the women are smoking Indica in the living room. He showed me the nuggets before he ground them up and put them in the hookah. The leaves were mostly green with some gold around the edges. You could actually see the crystals of THC on the leaves like frozen dew. The windows are covered with tin foil and the only light in the living room is from the propane heater on the floor.

While Jared and the girls are smoking I am up in the attic tending to the chicken and steaks on the grill. I leave the grill on low-heat so the meat doesn’t get scorched. Jared comes up and wants to take over the cooking. He turns the heat all the way up so it will cook faster. I tell him that the chicken won’t be cooked all the way through if he sets the heat too high, but he doesn’t listen to me. This is when we fight. I don’t want to hurt my friend but he is ruining the food. In our struggle I break one of his ribs and he knocks out a few of my teeth. We almost knock over the grill more than once. Eventually I manage to pin him to the attic floor at which point he turns into a female mannequin.

Saturday 9•15•12

I’ve been staying at this inn for two days now. I was downstairs sipping coffee with my continental breakfast when this elderly couple came in with their three grandchildren. There was one little girl and two young boys. The boys both had large holes in their heads. The older of the two had a medical device attached to him that expanded and contracted, pumping water and detergent through plastic tubes into the hole. When he walked by my table I could see the wrinkled gray matter of the child’s brain through the plastic cover. I asked the grandmother about the device and she kindly explained that the boy’s brain was infected with black mold and the machine was designed to clean it. The children were very playful but their head wounds made me nervous. I decided to take my breakfast upstairs.

Sunday 9•16•12

I kicked and screamed and cried until my eyes were red, but whether I like it or not I’m spending the night with my grandparents while my mom and dad go to the city to see a show. My grandparents live in northern Minnesota. Their home is a little white cottage by the lake under the shade of pines and willows. The mosquitoes swarm around the driveway, their abdomens flashing like lightning bugs when they bite you.

It never occurred to me that Grandma Rita had actually died and her ashes were buried above her parents’ graves. She is alive when we arrive, smoking a cigarette and tending to her garden without a care in the world. When my parents leave she holds me in her arms while granddad sings an old German tune. We climb the ladder to the rickety platform they had built in one of the willows. Grandma and I take a seat in the bench-swing and watch the loons on the lake. There is a record player on the little table playing “Dear Prudence”. I watch the white ashes falling from the tree blossoms while Grandma explains the rules of Mahjong. When the song is over Granddad takes me for a ride in his golf-cart to his friend’s mansion, up the hill. The grownups sit around drinking beer and talking about golf while I explore the house. The fireplace is shaped like the jaws of a Chinese dragon. The garage would be big enough to hold a jumbo jet if the ceiling weren’t so low. The floor is littered with thousands of microwave ovens.

Monday 9•17•12

Once upon a time, in a quiet house in a pleasant little neighborhood, there lived a little boy whose parents were cannibals. To the rest of the neighborhood they appeared to be a model family but behind closed doors the mother and father did everything they could to turn their boy into a cannibal too. His mother prepared nothing but meat for breakfast, lunch and dinner. His father whooped him mercilessly with his belt when he caught the boy sneaking cauliflower in his pillowcase. And at church the first Sunday of the month took on a perverse new meaning.

All seemed hopeless until one day the boy developed a plan. He told his mother and father that he would eat meat from a human body if they first let him use the cannon that they had secretly built into their back patio. The parents agreed. The mother roasted a cadaver in the charcoal grill while the father explained the basic mechanics of artillery. The boy took aim at a little blue house in the valley below. The golden sunlight shimmered through the clouds like pine needles. The mother looked up from the grill, her face beaming with pride. The father placed his hand on his son’s shoulder and told him how proud he was.

The boy said, “I love you, Dad.”

The father had tears in the corner of his eyes. “I love you too, son.”

At that moment the boy pointed the cannon straight up in the air and fired a single shot. The father snatched the boy from the ground and told his wife to run, but it was too late. The shell came screaming down from the sky. The house, the boy and his mother and father were all submerged in the jaws of rubble, soot and fire. When the dust had settled all that was left of the house were the jars in the basement filled with teeth and jewelry; trophies from the cannibals’ many victims.

Decades passed and the pleasant neighborhood turned into a slum. A dingy old tenement building was built where the little boy’s home once stood. One of the tenants of that building, an elderly drag queen with a blonde wig and a pink dress, invited me and some of my friends over for a dinner party. The place looked like an old mansion, like it used to be a nice place before the agonies of time stripped the bricks and the molding of their luster. In the middle of the first course of the meal the angry spirits arose from the jars in the basement and seeped up through the floorboards like smoke. The chandelier lights began to flicker and the silverware began crawling around the tablecloth.

Friday 9•21•12

The convention was being held at a stadium the size of Oklahoma. There were throngs of people down there, but my friend Leonard* had a private suite that his family had rented. One side of the suite was a wall made of windows through which we could see the mass of people walking hither and yon while storm clouds and zeppelins hovered in circles above them. On the other side of the suite was a glass door that led to a little patch of woods filled with pine trees and ferns and animals native to the area. Through the glass door I could see a white-tailed doe drinking from a little brook. I asked Leonard if he would like to go for a hike through the indoor outdoors but he told me it was against his religion.

Saturday 9•22•12

I’m on a road trip with two of my female coworkers from Deadhorse Camp. Marianne* is driving. She is in her early sixties and tells off-putting jokes about yoga and sex. Needless to say she is one of my favorite people to work with. Sarah* who is the same age as me, just twiddles her thumbs and sighs, she is used to Marianne’s antics from working with her in the kitchen almost every morning. The three of us drive south toward the mountains until we arrive at a little town in the snow. The women put on their snow shoes and trudge down the sidewalk to the shooting range. I go into an antique shop to buy myself a suitcase. The cashier is an elderly man. He’s smoking a cigarette and watching the news on a portable black and white television, the kind that you have to turn a dial to change channels and a green vertical line moves across the screen. He shakes his head and takes my money without looking at me. As I leave he mumbles something about a storm on the horizon.

Tuesday 9•25•12

I think I’m in West Texas. It’s hard to tell because I’ve only been in this part of the state once while on a road trip with my grandparents when I was twelve. I’m on the shoulder of the highway, unloading packages from the trailer of an eighteen-wheeler. There’s nobody here to help me, but I don’t mind. There is something meditative about this type of labor. The place is very dry, but thanks to the clouds it isn’t hot. There are little shrubs and cacti here and there but mostly there is just sand and rock. When I place the final package neatly in the dirt the rig lifts of the ground. I take a seat on one of the sturdier cardboard boxes and watch the semi-truck fly away, spinning silently into the clouds.