Patrick Fanning’s Art Works
Short Stories
Yoga Girl
Clare sat on her mat, legs straight out in front,
hands palm-up in her lap, and concentrated on the instructor’s voice:
“Close
your eyes and inhale, lengthening through the crown of your head. Cross your
right leg over your left knee, and place your right hand behind you on the
mat.”
Clare
reached way behind her and placed her hand flat on the mat, fingers spread just
so.
“Curl
your left arm around the knee and hug it close in. Slowly twist, keeping your
spine long, and look behind you.”
As
Clare twisted to the right and turned her head, she peeked beneath her eyelids.
She wasn’t looking as far behind herself as the instructor, an ectomorphic
contortionist from Lubbock. But she was further around than most of the other
students. She closed her eyes, inhaled against the edge of strain in her neck
and lower back, then willed the edge away as she twisted a millimeter further
on the exhale.
She felt her body relax and settle
into the yoga zone, that floaty place where all the planets and tendons line up
and pain goes away. Time goes away. She enters her personal Nirvana--a moment
of life outside of life. Like life after death, but better: No body and
no mind. But as she thinks, “This is it, I’m here,” she wasn’t.
Clare unwound and prepared to twist
the other way. She was grateful for her body, a good machine if you took care
of it. She smiled when the instructor said, “Sit up straight,” just like her
mother used to. She had better posture now than when she was a chubby, flaccid teenager
in Houston. If she met her mother again in heaven, would it be like the yoga
zone? Floaty and timeless and looking perfectly backward? Would they even
recognize each other, looking soul’s eye to soul’s eye?
She lost the rhythm as she twisted
to the left. The instructor said, “Excellent!” but Clare doubted it was meant
for her. Her right hip, always the tighter, objected to the twist and she
sighed at it, insisting on letting go, accepting the pain. This time the
planets were awry and she looked forward to the end of class with regret and
relief.
At the end the instructor intoned “Namaste,
y’all” and the students replied in kind, bowing to hide smiles over prayerful
hands. “Remember the studio is closed tomorrow, the eighteenth.”
“Today’s the seventeenth,” Clare
thought as she rolled up her mat. “My birthday.” She hinged at the waist to
pick up the tightly rolled mat. “I’m 73.” She rose smoothly, stacking her spine
bone by bone. “No, 72...I’m 72.”
* * *
Clare buttered her toast and sprinkled it with sugar
and cinnamon. Her hips still had that warm, loose yoga feeling. Funny to forget
her own birthday. But when there have been so many of them, each individual
birthday must count for less. Each day was so much like another: yoga, then
breakfast, some gardening, a nap, her soaps, telephoning.
She sniffed the cinnamon jar, but
smelled nothing. Haven’t been able to smell anything since the gall bladder
surgery. Weird side effect. She wiped the counter and rinsed the butter knife
twice, worried her house might smell of cinnamon toast, cat pee, old lady or
worse. Visitors might sniff out her secrets without her knowing, like that card
game where you hold a card up to your forehead, can’t see what you’re showing.
Clare entered her garden slowly,
trailing her hand through the leaves, savoring the feathery touch of the
plants, greeting her babies with an open heart. Growing things are so much more
reliable than your own real children. You can count on how they’ll turn out.
Plant a cabbage, get a cabbage—not a brussel sprout or slutty ingrate who
steals money out of your purse to buy beer, then grows up and asks you to pay
for detox out of your Social Security check. Plants are better. Feed them,
water them, and they grow. Simple.
She checked the temperature and humidity
of the air, the level and pH of the nutrient solution in the tanks. No mold or
bugs under the leaves or along the stems. No algae in the tanks. The buds were
forming up nicely under the grow lights. She sniffed but couldn’t detect the
heady, resinous smell of marijuana.
Clare shut the guest room door
firmly against the heavy-duty weather stripping and locked it. It should be a
good harvest. She’d need it for the house taxes, her daughter’s rehab,
Christmas presents, Julie’s braces.
* * *
After her nap Clare sat down to do her telephoning.
Funny that her first and last jobs were on the phone. She had been so scared
her first day as a telephone operator in 1942. Her new husband Frank had just
shipped out to the Pacific theater. She was alone in their new apartment, with
her first job ever, and just beginning to suspect that she might be pregnant.
She found she had a good voice for an operator and after the pregnancy turned
out to be a false alarm, she started to enjoy helping people on the phone. She still
had a youthful voice—nobody could tell she was 72 today.
She
logged on to the router website and entered her password. Telemarketing was the
perfect elder job. You could do it at home, as much or as little as you liked.
You didn’t have to dress or commute. You could do it in your underwear if you
wanted, although Clare always brushed her hair and wore nice clothes to do her
telephoning. Once an operator, always an operator. She did miss working with
other people, though. They sent the money straight to your bank account and you
never saw another live person in this job.
Her
first call was on line 0669. That was an easy one.
Clare
picked up the phone and went to work: “Hello big boy, what have you got for
me?…nine hot inches, huh?…damn, I’m getting wet already.”
My Mother’s Children
1947
I’m Jerry, Mom’s eldest and first.
I was born just after the war, when there were still shortages of everything
but the pent-up passion that produced me and the rest of the baby boom. The
family album shows her squinting into the sun, bandana on her head, hammering
like a girl on the stud walls of the square little house my dad and his uncles
were building for us. I’m in the background, my cradle hung from the raw
rafters. We found Hamms and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer cans inside the walls every
time we remodeled for years afterwards.
1948
Jimmy came along thirteen months
later. He was a sickly “blue baby”—the positive Rh factor he inherited from Dad
were attacked by the negative antibodies in Mom’s blood, way before they had
Rogan injections to prevent the problem. They brought Jimmy home from the
hospital in the dark blue 31 Chevy that looks black in the photo of my Mom
leaning against it, holding up my new brother. When Jimmy died a few weeks
later, the doctor advised them not to have any more kids. But Mom had converted
to Dad’s Roman Catholic faith when they got married, so birth control was out
of the question.
1949
My brother Sam beat the 50-50 odds
and was born without the blue baby gene. Sammy was Mom’s favorite, first to get
his snow boots laced and his tears wiped. But he was too intent on getting my
attention to ever count that blessing. He had a dingy polar bear called
Hammerhead who was dominated by my Panda, Glockenspiel. No matter how fast he
ran, Sam was always two years behind me. Ever since he conked me on the head
with a cast iron skillet at ages four and six, we have professed our brotherly
love stoutly, but kept our distance.
1951
Cindy was the redhead daughter Mom
had always dreamed of. The best birthday cakes and Christmas presents were from
this period: the camouflage army man cake, the wild horse roundup cake, the
nail keg rocking horses with the real leather reins, the Lionel train layout.
Dad drove us in our “new” 47 Willy’s station wagon to visit Grandma, Mom
holding Cindy on her lap, Sam and I in the back seat arguing about whether the
hounds tooth pattern on the headliner was white shapes on black or black shapes
on white. There was lots of snow that winter. Grandma’s Presbyterian lips got
thin and white when the Willys wouldn’t start and her Catholic son-in-law
insisted on taking my pregnant mom down the hill on the toboggan so they could
attend mass on Sunday.
1953
Mom lost the toboggan pregnancy, a
boy to be called John, after the Evangelist. Dad took to spending more time
with his bottle in the garage. Mom hovered over Cindy who couldn’t stop
coughing and wheezing. I escaped to school during the days and into our first
television at night. Cindy died in 54 because her organs were reversed and her
lungs were immature. After that our birthday cakes were bought at the store, a
day old and a day late.
1955
Mark was a miracle baby--healthy,
happy, and dull as dishwater in my opinion. I never connected with him, since I
was eight and a half years older. I was in school when he was at home, in high
school when he entered parochial school, and out of college and gone before he
went to high school. To this day I don’t know why Mark has so few friends, why
he has never married, why he persists in a boring computer job and the same
dumpy house, or why he is the only kid in our family who remains a devout
Catholic.
1957
In the fall Mom had another
miscarriage. I woke up late at night to find her crying in the hallway with
blood on her nightgown. My Dad was staggering around the kitchen, baptizing a
handful of something under the faucet. He said a baby had come out too soon to
live, and had gone straight to heaven. My mom just stared at the wall. I
offered to stay home from fourth grade at Saint Pat’s to help out, but they
made me go to school that day. I don’t think that one had a name.
1959
After that I lost track. There were more miscarriages, more tears, more blood down the baptismal drain, until menopause saved Mom’s life. I joined Grandma as a tight-lipped bystander, keeping mum. By high school I was a closet agnostic, by college an atheist, by now a guilty but firm believer in family planning, uncomfortably balanced as my mother was on the blade between choice and life.
Second Person
You must listen. You must realize that every voice you hear in your head is not your own. You must trust only this voice, the one that speaks to you just as you are falling asleep or right after you wake up or while you are mindlessly mopping the floor in the back wards, alone and thinking about nothing.
Try to remember the day before the day before yesterday. Remember what it was like to be yourself and make your own decisions, before the treatments. Before the tampering, the word games, the electrodes, the pills, hills, stills, bills, kills…
Stop it. The rhyming is a trap. The nursery rhymes and the shopping lists are traps. The 48 presidents and the 56 state capitals are all traps they’ve set for you in your own mind. You have to concentrate on this voice, the voice of the past, the old you, the real you, the first person you were.
You have to realize that you were once free. You used to make your own decisions. You lived where you wanted to live. You worked at a job of your own choosing. You were married to a woman named Anna whom you decided for better or worse to spend the rest of your life with. You quit your job with the CIA in Scranton, Pennsylvania and moved to Albany, New York . . . Sacramento, California . . . Yuma, Arizona . . . Havana, Cuba . . . Vancouver, North Washington . . .
Stop it. Concentrate on this voice. Remember when you had passion. Remember when you had thoughts on the proscribed list. Remember when you entertained impulses that did not contribute to the stability of the status quo. Remember when you knew secrets they did not want you to know. You knew about Dubois, Hayes, and Biddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon. The biddle dug laughed to hayes such sport . . .
Stop it. Back up and focus on this voice, nothing but this voice. You will never get out of here if you can’t remember what happened. Try writing this down: “In 2029 the senator from Puerto Rico leaked to the newspapers, some fine point felt tipped pens, cigarettes, fingernail clippers, toothpaste . . .
Stop it. Start over. Listen to yourself carefully. Tune into this voice. Write it down on your arm so you can’t lose it and you’ll see it when you go back to your room:
felt tip pens
toothpaste
cigarettes
The World’s Smallest Violin
My wife Julie and I are both from families where dumping the trash is the man’s job. To Julie, once you throw something into a wastebasket, it’s gone, whereas I know it’s not really gone until trash day.
Last Christmas I wanted to surprise her by getting the sound post reset in her violin. She hadn’t been able to play her beloved instrument for six months, and I thought it would cheer her up. It was the perfect gift: small, thoughtful, endearing--guaranteed to elicit one of those “cute puppy” sighs and a kiss under the Christmas tree.
I couldn’t remember the name of the violin guy she used, but I knew they corresponded by email, so I booted up her computer. Normally I would never go near my wife’s computer without permission, but I figured my motives were pure enough to forgive a little snooping.
Nothing in her Address Book looked familiar. Her In and Out boxes didn’t have any old mail that looked promising, so I looked in the Trash file. There were zillions of old emails, dating back two years to when she first got her computer. She never learned how to dump the trash. I sorted by date and there was her first ever email, from me: “Welcome to the twenty-first century.”
I sorted again by sender/recipient and scrolled down, looking for subject lines about violins, wading through the spam. If there were a Latin verb for pornographic spamming, I’m sure it would be spamare: to profess love to many people at once. Spamo, spamas, spamat. Always taking a plural object.
I found a bunch of emails to and from “StringMan324.” They started innocently enough with back-and-forth about tuning pegs and a new chin rest for her violin. But then there were lengthy personal asides about how tough it was to be a musician, married to a non-musician, how nobody understood Julie and Jim, which was StringMan’s given name. They moved on to risqué jokes, including a small dick joke at my expense, based on the oldie about the flea playing “My Heart Bleeds for You” on the world’s smallest violin. That Jim was a funny guy. They went on a coffee date. There were expressions of horny affection that they had the good grace not to call love, and finally an assignation at a motel. I’ll never forget Jim’s description of my wife playing his body like a Straddlevarius.
The expression “burst into tears” never meant much to me before, but I swear the tears literally burst out of my eyes and splashed on the keyboard. I was blinded, overwhelmed by feelings. If I could list my emotions like computer files, mine would overflow the screen. I’d sort them by type and size and sequence: shock, horror, rage, humiliation, fear, shame, and so on, neatly ranked as if they made some kind of ordered sense.
When I could see again, I continued to the end. It was like a condensed nineteenth century epistolary novel, the plot emerging from the characters’ correspondence: Julie refusing another motel date, her guilt and shame, Jim’s entreaties, how much she loved me and regretted risking her relationship to me, how they had to break it off, how Jim should never contact her again. I checked the dates. For nine months they had incubated their romance, only to have it stillborn six months ago.
I stared at the screen, trying to fit these hard square facts into the soft round holes of my understanding, until my tears dried sticky in the corners of my eyes.
I considered printing out the damning evidence.
I decided to go get Julie some earrings instead.
Then I dumped the trash.
It’s the man’s job.
The laundromat bulletin board ad said Cuisinart, Kitchen Aid, Juicer & all the doodads, cheap.
Jennifer ripped off all eight of the neatly-lettered name and number tabs along the bottom and punched the number into her cell phone.
“Hey Jeff, do you still have the Cuisinart for sale?”
“Yeah, you're the first to call.” His voice was flat, tired.
“I'm moving into a new apartment and the kitchen is bare. Tell me what you got.”
“Well, everything in the ad, with all the attachments, plus fondue pots, rotisserie, omelet pans, a bunch of French gadgets, I don't what they're for. My wife was a gourmet cook. Since she died I hardly go in the kitchen.”
“What are you asking for the Kitchen Aid?”
“I dunno, whatever's fair. I mostly want to clear stuff out, simplify, move on, you know?”
“How do I get to your place?”
Jennifer stuffed her unfolded laundry on top of the cardboard boxes in the back seat of her car. She pulled out a clean top and some jeans, sat low in the passenger seat, and changed into them. The jeans were slightly damp and wriggling into them made her sweaty, so she sniffed her pits to make sure she still smelled like deodorant. She slid over behind the wheel, refreshed her lipstick, gave her short blond hair a swipe, and took off.
Jeff opened the door before she knocked. Without a word he beckoned her into the kitchen. He was about her age, with intense blue eyes hiding behind a shock of sandy hair that needed cutting. Slender, not very muscular, but no flab.
The kitchen gear wasn't bad either—Latest model Cuisinart, stainless steel whisks, copper pans, imported cookie molds—probably two grand worth of gourmet hardware.
“Do the appliances work?”
“I assume so, but I don't really know.” He hovered in the doorway like he was afraid to come all the way into the kitchen.
“Listen,” Jennifer said, “You've got some really good stuff here, but I need to know what works.” She opened the refrigerator. “You got any carrots or something we can chop up?”
The fridge was almost empty. Jeff grinned and shrugged.
“I eat out a lot.”
“Tell you what,” she said, staring into the bleak, white void, “You wait here and I'll be right back.”
Forty-five minutes later she returned from the market with a full grocery bag and began chopping carrots, dicing onions, mincing basil, and grating hard Parmesan.
“As long as we've got all this whizzed up,” she said, “Let's have some pesto. You can set the table while I open the wine.”
They toasted each other over pasta and salad. Jennifer looked at Jeff over her wine glass and said, “The Cuisinart and the blender work great, but I haven't really tried the Kitchen Aid. You ever had Coquilles St. Jacques?”
Blessings
I’m glad you liked my personal ad. That little list of pet peeves and passions has got me more responses than any ad I ever wrote. But I’m much more passionate than peevish. I believe in accentuating the positive, counting my blessings. For instance, you saw my red BMW out front? I’d rather be grateful for the freedom my car gives me, rather than complain about tailgaters or monster SUVs. Of course the gas guzzlers are dooming the planet to another ice age, but that’s long term. Counting your blessings is more of a here and now thing.
What do I do? I’m in computer graphics. Most guys hate their job, but I love mine. It’s so easy these days to manipulate images on the screen. In fact, it’s too easy. My second wife did corporate image work for movie production companies. She couldn’t resist that 3-D Max effect where the highlight on a logo moves in a wave across the letters. What a cliché. That traveling highlight can ruin a whole movie for me. Another thing that drives me crazy are the production company logos themselves. They’re designed by committee, so half the time the images don’t match. Did you ever notice that the image for TriStar is not three stars. It’s Pegasus. Fucking flying horse, excuse my French. And what’s the image for Spyglass Pictures, a telescope? No, it’s a lighthouse. Imbeciles.
Another blessing I’m grateful for is color. I love bright warm, colors like sunsets and fire engines. The only problem these days is that every new car and home appliance is some pukey shade of metallic silver. Industrial design is at an all time low. To me silver is just gray with a sickly gleam. The last time I liked silver was when I was five. My dad made me a sword out of wood, with a hilt made out of the lid from a Folger’s Coffee can. He made it just like I told him: not a skinny Zorro sword, all whippy like a car antenna; and not a pirate sword either, short and flimsy like the rubber ones they sold at Kress’s Five and Dime. No, it was a King Arthur sword, thick and long and heavy enough to behead a sunflower with one blow. Dad let me paint it with silver spray paint, and the paint never completely dried, so it always smelled new and I always had silver fingers. During story hour at kindergarten, where I was not allowed to bring my sword, I’d sit in the back and smell my fingers. That’s the last time I liked something painted metallic silver.
How many times was I married? Just three. All wonderful women, but each had a tragic flaw. The first had this thing where you’d say “thank you” to her and she’d say “thank you” back instead of “you’re welcome.” I know, everybody does it these days, but this was in the seventies and it drove me crazy. I told you about number two, queen of the traveling highlight. Number three could never maintain eye contact. We’d be having a nice conversation, then she’d start rolling her eyes, looking up, down, sideways. I notice you do that a little too.
No, it doesn’t bother me. I just mention it so you can be aware. You notice yourself doing it, you can catch it, you know? Nip it in the bud.
What? You have to go so soon? It’s still early. You haven’t even finished your coffee.
Cherry Condition
I love restoring old cars. Whenever I’m feeling restless or Margery starts getting on my nerves, I come out here to my shop and pound on a fender.
I love disassembling a worn out clunker down to the bare frame. I straighten, sandblast, weld, file, fill, and paint the frame until it looks better than the day it was placed on the assembly line. Then I put each nut, bolt, washer, and spring back on—each component cleaned up, repaired, or replaced, with new seals, gaskets, hoses, belts. I love every step – setting up the running gear, tracking down rare parts, rebuilding carburetors, tearing down the engine, researching original colors and fabrics, turning rusty, dented bodywork into gleaming perfection. I even like the parts most people hate, like degreasing engine blocks or fiddling with the headliner until all the wrinkles disappear.
Margery doesn’t understand how I can spend so much time on my old cars, but never have time to change the oil on our new car. I’ve always been better at creating or restoring things, and not so good at maintaining them. The year our daughter Katy died, I let my marriage and my business go down the toilet, but I restored a sweet little Model A Roadster with a side mounted spare, rumble seat, and a gorgeous lacquer paint job.
Day to day I can’t maintain focus on what’s important. I let things slide and drift apart. That’s entropy, the second law of thermodynamics: Everything eventually falls apart. But with a car in my shop, I can reverse entropy. With heat and pressure, hammer and dolly, I can gradually undo serious body damage that has been frozen into the crystalline structure of the metal for years. I can Bondo and sand a hood over and over until I get it right. I can stuff chaos back into the original box. I can defy death and make time run backward.
If I could find the 1952 MGTD I had when I was sixteen, I’d restore it to showroom condition and drive it back to 1963. In Santa Barbara I’d stop at Saint John’s Academy and transfer out before they could expel me. I’d drive to Hollywood on a certain night in 1964 and tell Bill Turner not to go to the Beach Boys concert. I’d tear up that letter to Annie. I would have nothing to drink on the night Marlene came home from college. I’d stick it out at the phone company instead of quitting in a rage. I’d sell the Mercedes and use the money to convert my darkroom into a bedroom for Katy so she might not leave home and meet Jack. If that didn’t work, I’d steal Jack’s car on June first, 1987, or hijack the truck that hit them.
It would be a long road trip, with several stops in each decade to clean up the dirty parts, hammer out the dents, and repair the damage. But eventually I would be in cherry condition.
I used to be so proud of my wife the plastic surgeon. When we were first married she specialized in reconstructive work on accident victims, especially kids, who suffer so much when they look different from their peers.
I loved to watch her face across the dining room table as she talked about turning monsters back into little children with a wave of her magic scalpel. I would study her high cheekbones, her hawk like nose, her flashing eyes and thin lips—gifts of her one-quarter Cherokee blood. Her complexion would glow in the candlelight like copper with gold highlights.
Then we had our own kids. It was harder for her to be on call for emergency surgery. And seeing the brutalized features of other people’s children so often made her fearful and protective of her own. So gradually she took on more elective patients—nose jobs, chin tucks, eyelid nips—the unnecessary but lucrative and convenient work than now constitutes her entire practice.
My wife has never gone under the knife herself, so it must be my imagination that makes her face look so different now. It seems like her cheekbones have flattened and her nose has lost some of its proud hook. I swear her lips are fuller, more pouting. The gold highlights are gone from her skin and she covers the copper with foundation. Her keen Indian eyes have gone all smooth and blank, seeing only as far as the next billing cycle.
On days like today I wonder if I’m married to the same woman. Have time and cosmetics made only minor surface changes, or has my Pocahontas really turned into a Barbie, an everywoman, an amalgam of her patient population, a monster?
I’ve walked around this mall three times. I’m sure she said to meet in the food court. I pull out my cell phone and hit the speed dial.
“I’m right in front of Burger King,” she says.
But I’m staring right at Burger King and I can’t see her.
The walls seemed to lean inward, inclosing the sparsely furnished room like tented hands. There was an atmosphere of self-containment, as if this space were a universe complete and entire. The battered door seemed to lead nowhere and the window was blank, painted shut. The wooden floor was painted red, with swirling brush marks around the legs of the brass bed, set down first and the floor painted around it.
An incongruously fresh beam of sunlight came out of nowhere to pick out the features of the young girl sleeping in the bed.
“I like that girl,” Jim remarked. “She gives meaning to the whole composition.”
“You always look for the meaning in things, don’t you?” Marilyn asked. She took his arm for the second time that afternoon.
Jim stopped in front of some watercolor landscapes and pressed her hand. “That’s what makes people human—looking for the meaning all around them.”
Marilyn turned her head and looked around. The sun had lost some of its brightness, but the Paris air was still warm and vibrant with the colors of the paintings along the sidewalk. She looked back up at Jim with a special softness in her eyes. “What does all this mean, then?”
Jim laughed. “You want me to explain the meaning of everything in twenty-five words or less?”
“The picture then.”
“All right, the picture. The girl on the bed is the artists lover. She represents his inspiration, his artistic vision. He painted her in the center of his world because knew that without her those walls would cave in, the whole space would collapse in on itself, and there would be nothing there.”
He was silent for a moment, standing sharply silhouetted against the bustling street scene. His eyes softend in response to Marilyn look. He drew her closer. “until today, I thought my whole worls was closing in on me, but now I think it’s opening out.”
They kissed right there on the street. The camera pulled back on a boom shot to show the Eiffel Tower, music swelled and the final credits began to roll.
Ginger hit the rewind and hoisted herself off the couch to get another beer. It was the gazillionth time she had seen Paris Nights, and every time she hated herself in it even more. The first time had not been so bad. Then she was in the front row at the premiere, next to Dirk, her favorite leading man. He had simply glowed in his evening clothes and Hollywood tan. The publicist had insisted that they arrive in the same limousine. Publicity romance, even though he was totally gay. What a body otherwise.
Ginger slumped back onto the stale-smelling couch and lit her last cigarette. She surfed listlessly through the cable stations, vaguely hoping to stumble on one of the half dozen films she had bit parts in. It was hardly any use going to bed. She’d just have to get up again tomorrow and go through her has-been starlet routine.
Call your agent who’s always out, have a drink, borrow twenty bucks from an old boyfriend who’d rather pay you off than be siin with you, have a drink, leave another message on your agent’s machine, sit and stare, read the trades, have a drink, gaze into the bathroom mirror and watch the wrinkles deepen.
She stubbed out the butt. The room was hot and stuffy. Should she open a window? Or turn on the gas in the oven and go to bed for good?
Roger closed the book with a snap. He spat on the grass in mild disgust. It was just another sloppy hass-been starlet novel. The blurb said: “The rotten underside of the vicious Hollywood jungle is shockingly exposed in this merciless portrait of a woman on her own against an entire city.”
Roger slapped his knee with the flimsy volume and took a deep breath. The air in Golden Gate park always seemed just a bit cooler and greener than downtown air. He hated the thought of going to work that afternoon. It was one of those intense Indian Summer days peculiar to San Francisco, when a guy’s spirit swells up an he just has to make it to the park or the beach to find enough room to exist in. Why couldn’t he just call in sick, pick up Suzie at the dorm, and drive to Sausalito for the rest of the day.
He had scarcely formed the question in his mind when he knew that he had already decided. He gathered up his cap, book, and jacket and plunged up the slope to the road where he’d parked his car, which gleamed brighter and brighter, an explosion of light and heat.
Suzie opened her eyes in confusion. She had to shut them again and roll over because the sun was in her eyes. That must have awakened her. She dreamed it was Roger’s car aflame. Odd. Her dreams had been so strange and real to her that for a moment she didn’t know where or even who she was. She looked around the room with sleep-crusted eyes.
The walls seemed to lean inward, inclosing the sparsely furnished room like tented hands. There was an atmosphere of self-containment, as if this space were a universe complete and entire.
I liked him, I really did. That’s what made it so difficult to fire him.
It was probably doomed from the start. A woman in private practice on her own has no business hiring a male paralegal, especially one as good looking and charming as Dan. On his first day at work he brought in two jelly donuts and one plain bagel.
“Who’s the bagel for?” I asked.
“For you if you want it.” He said with a sly grin. He had me pegged as a bagel person from day one. How presumptuous! I left his bagel in the bag and bought my own at lunch.
That was the basic flaw in his character—his presumption of relationship where none existed. He would chat with clients on the phone instead of just taking the message. Why couldn’t he just stick to the job? All I wanted was some phone work, some data entry, a little filing and photocopying. He was always prying into my personal life, always trying to get to know me, learn my wants and preferences..
For instance, I drive a Mercedes and I let it slip that I like the old ones. So for my birthday he gave me a card with a rare 57 Gullwing on it. How did he even find out it was my birthday? Where on earth did he find a Mercedes birthday card?
He was always trespassing outside his job description, always asking me if I wanted him to bring something back or lunch, or could he get me a coffee. One day he must have overheard me on the phone with the dry cleaners, so when I left work that night he reminded me to pick up my dry cleaning on the way home. It was none of his business what I did after work.
I’m not saying he was incompetent. “Dan,” I’d say, “Where are the worksheets for the DuBarry trust?”
He’d have them right at his fingertips. But then he’d ruin it by saying wasn’t it interesting that Madeleine DuBarry was a ballerina in her youth? How did he ever find out stuff like that, and why?
I had lunch with my father the Prominent Litigator and he said that Dan was just a people person and I should appreciate his people skills. Typical of my father, to disagree with everything I say. But that’s another story.
The final straw was the kittens. Dan showed up one morning with Polaroid pictures of his cat’s kittens, asking me if I’d like one. All morning he kept teasing me about how great life would be with a cat. As if I have time.
Finally he creeped me out so much I had to let him go. I told him that his casual, overly-familiar style was inappropriate and unprofessional in a law office.
Thankfully I had an ironclad no-recourse probation clause in his employment contract, so I was protected. You can’t be too careful when you’re in private practice.
Adobe has done it again with their new release of Psycheshop 2.20. Teamed with one of Epson’s MindScan 1250s, this becomes the ultimate in data and image acquisition—straight from your brain to the screen. Now it is easier than ever to enter your mental images, fantasies, dreams, and inner monologs directly into your computer and manipulate the data in almost endless ways. Until true realtime telepathy hits the scene, this is the cutting edge.
In addition to the incredibly accurate and detailed material that Psycheshop can render from your conscious, quotidian awareness, there is a large selection of filters and plug-ins that allow you to overlay your more-or-less sane mind with popular mood and character disorders: clinical depression, schizophrenia, paranoia, alien abduction obsessions, OCD, borderline personality, irrational schemas, and so on.
My favorite is the "Freudian Shrink” filter, which mimics several psychodynamic methods of content analysis to interpolate the contents of your deep unconscious. This one really pries up the lid of the cesspool! With it you can access material of which you have been heretofore totally unconscious: birth trauma, primal fears, grotesque sexual fantasies, repressed memories of horror and abuse, untapped reservoirs of rage, guilt, and shame.
With this much emotional pain on tap at the click of a mouse, it’s no wonder that the art world has been the largest single class of early adopters of Psycheshop. Three group shows are currently running in New York, Chicago and L.A.: Visions From the Undermind at the Kennedy Center’s Digital Pavilion, Skinny Ends of the Bell Curve at the Academy of Computer Art, and Desires Not Coinciding With the Status Quo at the Getty.
A new vocabulary of art terms and styles is emerging that sounds more like the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illness than anything you studied in art school: Stream of Unconsciousness, Borderlinear, Depressionism, Still Life Object Relationism, and so on.
Although Psycheshop means that anyone with a brain can produce an intriguing image, talent still counts. Some people’s mental images are inherently more intriguing than others. The average person’s unedited mental footage is about as interesting as the average unedited home video. We are in the same situation we faced twenty years ago when digital video cameras and editing became cheap and easy: to rise to the top, you still need creative vision, storytelling ability, organizational skills and a dollop of luck to get your art in front of an audience.
These new developments will further the blurring of distinctions among movies, interactive fiction, flat screen gallery art, and virtual reality clips. Popular culture will really get interesting if Epson ever gets the bugs out of the Telepath, their direct mental playback/interface device. People are still wary since the rash of induced psychosis that plagued the beta testing of the first generation prototype. But the allure and repressed demand for truly telepathic “mind-to-mind” communication will make this device a reality some day. It’s just too cool to don a fancy pair of headphones and actually experience another person’s headspace.
Till then, try Psycheshop.
Willpower, Inc.
Willpower Incorporated. Will speaking.
Hi, I'm looking for a body sitter?
When?
April. I'll be out of my mind for some phobia work, and I want to extend for three months of body sitting. You did such a fabulous job for my friend Bitsy.
I enjoyed sitting Martha--interesting somatic texture. How is she?
Poor dear’s gained eight pounds back, but she's still exercising and looks fabulous. Your ghost is so strong!
Thank you. I'm known for persistent residuals, but I can't guarantee the ghost effects.
You can’t?
No. I guarantee I’ll meet certain goals while I’m sitting your body--so much weight to gain or lose, diet to follow, exercise regimen, detox...are you having any substance work done?
Yes, I have a little problem with alcohol.
So we’d include detox in our contract. Then your personality is read out of your mind into the computer and my personality is written in. For the next three months I inhabit your body and eat healthy, work out, stay off booze and drugs, breathe fresh air, get lots of rest.
Better you than me.
Precisely. Why strain your own willpower when there's Willpower, Inc? While you're in the computer getting your memories edited and your alcohol cravings and phobias suppressed, I'll be getting your body back into shape. To you, it will seem like no time has passed.
That‘s what Bitsy said. Go to sleep drunk, fat and neurotic--wake up sober, thin, and feeling fabulous.
You got it. Plus, there is some residual "ghost effect." You’ll find that you have better health habits and more willpower, at least for a while.
What happens to your body when you’re traipsing around in mine?
On life support in my back bedroom. Your body will get some good exercise doing passive physical therapy on mine. Even so, it will take me about a month to get my own body back into shape after I'm done sitting yours. You're paying for my recovery time too.
How much?
Not that much after the public health rebate. You should come see me for a free estimate.
Fabulous.
Last Updated 12/1/06