Markers. Ants. Tectonics. X. & Pain. & Illness.

I find him in bed in the dark, his red curtains drawn against the Mississippi afternoon light, the red light painting his blue walls to make a deep purple.

“Plum,” Uncle Stephen says, when he sees me looking at the walls.

Then he gets up from the bed, his thin legs poking out of his boxer shorts and walks past me, not hurrying, but not slowing, into the bathroom, where I can hear him vomit.

Migraines.

“Bruised,” Uncle Stephen says, when he returns.

And when I look at his face, he says, “Under my eyes, don’t think ‘bruised,’ it’s a cliché, if you’re ever going to be a writer you have to avoid, ‘bruised eyes.’”

He leans back against his pillow, and I think maybe he’s asleep when he says, “Tell me.”

There’s always something. I hoard things for him.

“Today, in line at the cafeteria,” I say.

His head moves down and then up again, so that I know he’s listening.

“There was a long line, I was buying lunch, sushi in a box, the spicy,” I say.

But Uncle Stephen holds up a hand.

“I’m sorry. Sushi in a plastic box might be too much for today. Skip to the end.”

He’s pale against his pillows and his sheets, the skin under his eyes not black, but translucent, and I can see that there is a skull there, inside him, and so instead I look at the tiny slice of light creeping into the room through the curtains. Outside, it’s nearly a hundred degrees, but inside, with the air-conditioners on and the fans blowing, I’m chilled.

Uncle Stephen is only wearing the boxer shorts. His bare chest rises above the sheets where’s he’s propped himself. His ribs are there, and I find myself wondering how the abdomen came to be known as the washboard, when Uncle Stephen’s ribs could serve as a washboard, his skeleton.
He fingers a plastic bowl he keeps because sometimes the nausea hits so hard and fast he doesn’t make it to the bathroom. It’s empty, but still damp from the last time he walked it into the bathroom and rinsed it out.

Deep in the room, under all of the other smells, it’s there, bile.

“I was in line, this long line moving like we’re entering another country and have to have our passport’s stamped.” I say.

“That’s a long way to go to avoid using ‘slowly,’” Uncle Stephen says.

He knows I’m on a thing about adverbs.

“The line’s moving fucking slowly,” I look but Uncle Stephen’s eyes are closed. Sometimes he chides me for my language.

“And when I inch up to the checker, I see why.” I say.

“She’s flirting with some guy.” Uncle Stephen says.

I hate it when he does that. He specializes in endings.

“That’s not the point,” I say, though it almost was, “the point is he’s flirting with her about having kids.”

“That’s serious flirting,” Uncle Stephen says, “I never tried that, straight to the kids.”

“And the guy says, ‘I want to have kids,’ and the cashier says, “‘You don’t know the first thing about kids.’”

Uncle Stephen turns his head to the bowl.

His body twitches, but nothing comes up.

He smiles, the corners of his mouth cracked.

After my story, I have to make him drink something.

“Go on,” Uncle Stephen says.

“‘I know about kids,’ the guy said, ‘I want to see them grow up, so that maybe one day, they’ll say something, you know?’”

Uncle Stephen nods.

He knows the rest, or can guess. How the cashier laughed, and said, Oh, you’ll hear more than you want to hear from your kids, you better believe it, and the guy said, No, not like that, not like normal stuff, but the stuff only they’ll know. He straightened up, looked at us all in the line. One day, he said, some kid of mine is going to say something that nobody has ever said before.

And I paid for my sushi.

And I wondered if any kid ever does that, or if they all do. And I looked at us all in our line, not quite kids, not quite let loose on the world, and I remembered that we were still kids, somewhere in there, close to it, and that maybe that thing, that thing that nobody has ever said before, waits.

Uncle Stephen used to take me to Wal-Mart.

He was trying to make up for what was a lack of toy selection when he was growing up.

“There was Fred’s,” he said, “which had nothing.”

We were on his front porch. I had taken to having the school bus drop me off at his house, and then walking back to grandmother’s. It was only a mile. And as long as I was home before pitch darkness, she didn’t mind.

“There was TG&Y, ” he said, “which at least had guns with small rubber darts .” He drank from his Coca-Cola. “We were always looking for ways to shoot each other.”

“You,” he waved his can at me, “you like puzzles. Notebooks.”

“Pens,” I said.

“Pens.” He said, “I’m sorry to cut off your supply.”

“They’re just urinals,” I said.

“They automatically flush,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, “it saves water.”

“No,” he said, “it doesn’t save water. Think about it.”

I thought about it. How the urinal flushed of its own accord sometimes. How the whole line of them would flush if I walked too close to them.

“OK,” I said, “it’s more sanitary.”

“Sure,” he said, “I’ll give you that one.”

“Certainly smells better.” I said.

In response he finished his soda, dropped the can into a brown paper sack on the porch. From one cooler, full of ice, he pulled a few cubes, placed them in the bottom of a shallow glass, and then he took a fresh can from another cooler where the Coke nestled among ice water and melting cubes, he popped the tab and took a long pull straight from the can before tilting the glass, and pouring the soda over the cubes. Despite his caution, the soda foamed anyway.

“Damn.” He said, “at least I got that first sip.” He set the soda down beside him, with easy reach. It can gave him two small glasses full of soda, “And I’ll agree that their bathrooms smell better.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t like to be watched while I piss, it’s as simple as that.” He said.

“It’s not watching you.” I said.

“Then what’s it doing?”

“It’s, you know, waiting, using, like, heat.” I realized I had no idea how the urinals worked. Something was, well, watching.

Uncle Stephen handed me my own Coke. I didn’t need the little glass, the ice cubes. But I did share his love of the first sip.

The way the can cracked open.

Uncle Stephen had told me that when they broke into Egyptian tombs there were often flower petals scattered on the floor, the last things dropped before they sealed the tombs. That’s what he thinks about when he takes his first sip of Coca-Cola. If mummies could sell soda, Uncle Stephen would be Coke’s prime salesman.

The night deepened.

“You should be starting home soon.” Uncle Stephen said.

But neither of us moved.

“And after I realized the urinals were watching me, I thought about those smoky black plastic domes in the ceiling.” He said, “Those are full of cameras. 360 degree view.”

“Those are for shop lifters.” I said.

“Sure,” he said, “and maybe they’re connected to the urinal cams.”

“Why,” I said, “would Wal-Mart want to watch us piss?” I said.

“Shit,” he said, “if I understood why Wal-Mart does have the shit they do I’d either be rich, dead, or working for the government.”

“Those are the only choices?” I said.

“When you live in a world of watching urinals,” he said.

The gravel and dust that was his driveway flamed in the dying light. To embers. The last of the light. It was my time to go.

“So no more Wal-Mart?” I said.

“I can wait in the car.” He said.

“Bring a book.” I said.

“Sure,” he said, “and one day you’ll grow out of it.”

“Or they’ll build a Target.”

“We can always hope.” He said.

Uncle Stephen has his bedroom walls painted a deep, bottom of the ocean, blue.
“I read about it in a book,” he said, when I asked him about the color, “Charles Bukowski said it helped with his headaches. Hangovers.”
“You don’t drink,” I said.
“Whatever.” Uncle Stephen said.

He retreats to his bedroom when his head hurts. When he thinks too much. When it’s too hot, or cold. He lies in bed, propped on pillows, in the dark, and I sit in a chair next to the bed.

Uncle Stephen cracks the windows, winter or summer, so there’s always fresh air, but when he gets in one of his moods, under the fresh air is the smell of sweat and dust, a musty smell that permeates his house and makes me think of the families that lived here before Uncle Stephen, and the families before them.

Uncle Stephen talks and I look at the floor, painted battleship gray. Uncle Stephen says that a lot of the homes were painted with battleship gray, as after the war there was extra gray paint, billions of gallons of it, and it was bought by every poor person in the South to use on their floors.

In his house, the gray is under a deep brown color wich is under a layer of white, and his feet and the feet of other families have worn the layers through, revealing each strata of color and when I was smaller I didn’t sit by his bed when we talked but on the floor, picking at the edges of a layer, pretending I was an archaeologist, while Uncle Stephen watched me, sometimes asking me what I was finding, but more often, those were afternoons of silence.

The school bus dropped me off at the cross roads, where the cinder block Church of God, sits with its tin roof, and beside it, a half dozen graves. The few marble headstones made me more aware of death than the hundreds in the larger cemeteries. The death of twelve people I could understand, could feel. The death of hundreds, all blended together.

On the way to Uncle Stephen’s house, I touched the top of one headstone every time, the last name: Ponder.

Nowadays, I drive to see Uncle Stephen. The graves pass by and I don’t stop, but notice as the plastic flowers are renewed, the Mississippi sun bleaching them of their color and when they’re pale imitations, pink and white as the bones of the deer carcasses left in the ditch during hunting season, new ones appear.

If Uncle Stephen isn’t on the front porch when I drive up, tilted back in his chair, the red cooler beside him, then I know he’s probably in bed, surrounded by his blue room. His bedroom has three giant windows, no curtains, and even on the brightest days the light hits the blue walls and sinks in.

“I textured the walls,” he says, “not sure why.”

He used dry-wall mud, and the walls, made of vertical tongue and groove pine boards, have shifted, cracking the texture, and now the blue of the walls has slender white shot through it, like wires or bars or the warp threads of a loom, through which Uncle Stephen’s voice weaves, wefts.

Today, he’s off again on the government. He’s sitting in the shadow side of the bed, his back against the shelves that hold his drawings, a floor to ceiling flat file system that he says is for collecting dust.

“The government has a new drug,” he says, “for torture.”

On the floor, in the patterns of picked paint, I can trace the history of our bed room conversations. Of his dark moods.

“Humans are slow,” he says.

A fly circles the room. We both watch it. Even with the windows open, there’s not enough air, so Uncle Stephen has a fan on a pole, oscillating and shifting the air. Whenever I’m in this room, I think of how when I inhale, most of what I’m inhaling is my last breath. Used air.

“Try and catch that fly,” he says.

I watch it. It’s a big one, slow, a horse-fly, most likely trapped in his house. The few times I’ve smashed them, they’ve been bloody, and of the blood I want to ask questions, separate the cells, track the fly’s victims.

“You can’t,” he says, “because you’re slow.”

It’s summer, and outside, the trees are heavy with leaves, and the wind catches the leaves and twists the branches, bending the trees low to the ground. Each leaf a sail, each limb a boat, each tree an armada.

“The government has a drug,” Uncle Stephen says, “a drug that makes you slower still. That stops you.”

“Time travel.” I say.

“Yeah,” he says, “one shot and your metabolism, your brain speed, your perceptions, turn superhuman. Your version of the world, stops.”

“You could catch a fly.” I say. Some days, I’m with Uncle Stephen on these journeys into paranoia, other days, like today, the blue room, even with its fan, seems frozen. Both of us already drugged. Stopped.

“Very funny,” he says, “but you’re right, you could catch a fly. But what if you’re pushed out of an airplane?”

He knows I dream of flying. He knows I can’t go near high places because I want to jump.

“That would be a long fall.” I say.

“A fall that lasts, from the drugged person’s perspective, forever.” He says.
“But from outside, still, splat.” I say.

“Or what if you’re punched, the air knocked out of you,” he says.

“Then you would feel as if you couldn’t breathe, trapped between breaths.” I say.

“Fucking government,” Uncle Stephen says.

With my shoe, I pry up a loose edge of brown paint, and there is the battleship, waiting beneath it.

for m.a.m.

What, with the distance and the cost of gasoline, we weren’t seeing each other.

At least, not enough.

But there was the phone.

So we tried.

Though neither of us had much experience, and like many first timers, it was more confusion and laughing than satisfaction.

But we tried.

Weeks passed.

I have two phones.

An upstairs phone.

And a downstairs phone.

The downstairs phone I don’t use much.
It’s under the bed. Hidden. More for emergencies. Laziness.

And that one time, the phone sex.

I came home, and the downstairs phone was in the middle of the floor. Blinking. Lumpy. Flopping.

I nudged it with my foot, and it blinked at me. Flopped under the bed.

Later, there was a tiny trill of a ring.

I lay on my stomach and looked under the bed into the darkness of cardboard boxes and gray dust and there was the phone and its baby.

Or something. Still connected to the handset by silver wires, a small blob of plastic with a shining face and one blinking number: 2.

I went upstairs and used the upstairs phone to call you.

“Um.” I said.

“C’mere.” You said.

“Look, we knocked the phone up.” I said.

“My phones fine.” You said.

“Well, mine isn’t.” I said.

“What-Ev.” You said.

“Really.” I said.

“I think we should talk more.” You said.

“I’m not ready to be a father.” I said.

Downstairs, there was another small trill and then a series of beeps.

The connection crackled.

“Do you have another call?” You said.

“No, I have a newborn phone.” I said.

“I need you to be serious.” You said.

We had been having problems.

Your cats were allergic to my deodorant, and your cats were your life.

So far, we had been making it work by my being smelly.

I wasn’t allergic to your cats. But they hated my guts. The first time I had met them, one had gone into shock and we had ended up at the emergency veterinarian, the vet eying me and explaining how I had to be careful and should be more thoughtful and what kind of a man was I anyway to try and kill some cats for vanity’s sake.

“I am being serious.” I said.

The phone line clicked again.

“Is that another woman?” You said, “Some cat-less woman you can be all clean around?”

“Look, I thought maybe you were phone was pregnant too.” I said.

“Hello?” I said.

“You have a weird sense of humor.” You said.

In the background at your house, I could hear the cats. They were yelling at you. Explaining how I wasn’t right for you, how anyone who didn’t like cats was not right for you.

“I have to go.” You said.

“Sure, ” I said, “go take care of your cats. Don’t worry about our baby.”

“That’s sick,” you said, and hung-up on me.

I went to the tool bag, and picked out the wire cutters.

Downstairs, the phone had dragged itself from under the bed, trailing its baby, the umbilical wires taught and hair thin.

I knelt down. The screen of the baby had a different number: 0.

The mother phone’s screen spilled numbers and its keypad flitted with light.

I pulled the dust off of the baby, and then I closed the cutters across the wires, but I didn’t squeeze.

The wire glinted between the blades, and I looked from the baby, its 0, to the mother, its screen flowing with letters and numbers, displaying all of the times you had called, repeating your name, your digits.

I waited for some signal, because I wanted to do the right thing.

I had to do the right thing.

You walk into the gallery well it isn’t so much a gallery as a warehouse and you walk down and back past the sorts of machines that made huge things or little things by the thousands though now the machines hulk silent bulked at their joints with grease thickened into porridge and the ground traced by ants but we’re all game and have come to expect this sort of place from Aaron who doesn’t seem comfortable in the main space down-town and zoning laws and the health department always seem to get in his way but in the basement of the warehouse he had removed the bricks from a back wall of the deepest room and instead dammed the earth with glass and behind the glass he had his slice of person built from the medical school body dressed by this mortician he knows in a suit and coffin donated by the Crisper Casket Company and Aaron won’t tell us how he cut a slice out of the middle of the coffin from foot to head and it’s that slice pressed against the glass in the basement of the empty warehouse and as he says nature takes over during the month the show has been up and the ants and grubs and even the worms that Aaron wishes he could keep out being so cliché pick  and chew their way into the coffin and remove the slice of corpse one mouthful at a time while we press our ears to the glass hearing the shifting of the dirt and the tap tapping of ant claws.

The guy at the Harrison Cafe was nice enough to let me have their receipt slip. Their cash register was using a strip of paper rather than spooling out endless receipts that people throw away. Or something. Maybe the customers still get a receipt? All I know is that I saw the strip of paper and had to have it. So I asked the guy and after a bit of, “What, you some kind of weirdo?” talk, in which I convinced him that yes, I was some kind of weirdo and it would be best for all concerned if he handed over the receipt strip. He gave in. A short excerpt I’m posting below:

OK. That was fun. Now I have the latest version of WordPress and of a statistics plug-in called ‘fire-stats.’

I’d recommend both.

WordPress version 2.3.1.  and FireStats, well, I’m letting FireStats try out its auto update feature. We’ll see how that goes.

I know. This is not the look of the blog you have come to know and notice.

This is because I’m updating the WordPress software in the background, and last time I did that with my custom theme, there was much chaos of random CSS code flying everywhere.

This time, I’m trying the WordPress basic theme first, and then updating the underlying code. Wish me luck. If this all vanishes, well, it had a good run, right?

p.