Chapter 2 - Gravity

 

Chapter 2

Gravity

"Fuckit.  Gimmie the cinamin roll with the cinamin cream cheese frosting and some black coffee, hot as you can get it."

Just a nod from her.  I shuffle and bump and distance-jockey the four feet to where payment will occur but contains three people and still too much time to be worth the effort.  It's not excruciating, it's not even awkward.  Its flipping through channels while someone is talking to you, it's on and off a bus with tourists for only a stop as you hustle between comfort and home while they see every moment too brightly, to adoringly to ever enter it, and so wander in dolor, snowblind but herded, and never able to really get off the bus, not really.  God save the Archetypes.  

I get my coffee and dip back to my table.  I come here for many reasons, one of which is that they still pour the drip themselves.  Out front Cole stands on the book and papers i have marked my table with.  He is just 3 inches tall, chasing away tired passers by and once, a lady's dog.  I brush him off.  I sit.  I breathe out. I breath in.  I breathe in.  breath IN.  BREATHE IN.   

Here comes the cinamin roll, no, no that's not mine.  I am out of the sync now, can't even guess when my food is coming.  I couldn't see a UFO now until decades after my abduction.  I might even accidentally walk into traffic, or drop my phone, or god spare me, I might back up into someone who I will think treacherously snuck up behind me like a ninja.  But I will just be old, or feeling old, or swollen from bread, achy, or just tired from all the coffee I have been drinking.

There is no one attractive here and the paper I paid for sits mostly in an astral location that might as well be someone else's post office box, so I fold it, and get up to leave and then sit again because I realize I still haven't gotten my cinamin roll, and that is when I feel it.  A tractor beam upon that limbic tumor, falling up into a black sun, held here to the upside down earth, by only the weakest gravity, a balloon's gravity, stillness being the only tether that can secure me against falling up, that and a table that, if the owner's really thought about it, would be replaced.  If they could really stand here and be present while looking at that table, they would get rid of it and replace it with even an empty fucking bucket turned upside down, or some cinderblock and a suitcase.  But I don't fall up.  this flimsy finity fucks up again and misses another chance at finishing this book.  

Feeding the Archetype is easy.  The Archetype is hungry.  the Archetype is always hungry.  The cinamin roll comes on a plate in the arms of a young girl, a "barrista", and I stand up and kick a chair out off the sidewalk and into the street and shout "Great, Finally Fuck!" and walk back to my van, a man wronged by actions unalterable for the better part of 20 years, and stress fracturing from dipping in and out of reality, in a cradle of belief.  I leap out like a baby, but not into the waiting stone arms of Cole's altar fire, but the soft carpet of a living room I traded his life for, where a baby's head won't break.  I complain like a prince.  There will be blood.  I think there is screaming or shouting, but it is not mine so I walk on, to my Van, then turn back and grab my shit, my rag, my book, my phylactry.  I need to walk more.

At The Review, lowercase kate tries to take my coat, then spends a few moments wiping cinamon roll icing off my back.  No cum jokes.  I psst her away and she wrinkles at me undefensively and goes back behind the counter at reception,  sitting with way too much sex, and points at me and I make a retard face back at her, and go to my desk and sit, and can someone on this planet make me a fucking chair please?  

Sticky notes from lower case kate, one says "coffee?" with a question mark on it, a package in brown paper with twine string, the August edition of Locus, the Billings Gazette, the Standard and the Daily all wet, 6 letters, a bobble head of someone supposed to look like me found presumably in a trash can not located in this building, a ream of paper from the mailroom, a shoe, Is that my shoe?  I check my feet.  A one dollar bill with a fist flipping me off in sharpie written over crazy George's face.

The package probable has a head in it, even though its small.  It's probably a shrunken head.  It's definitely a head, who puts this kind of time into a package.  Holy shit, this is what is meant by Bespoke!  

"Billy wants the mail room to open that" comes Cathy's voice.

"Billy fucks his dog." I reply.  I can see her shift peripherally, but I don't care and didn't want to see it.  Cathy is Billy's EcSec and sits against one of his glass walls on a couple different levels.  Billy's blinds are always opening and closing for dramatic effect.  I shake the box to see if it makes head flopping around noises, but its definitely a book.   

I turn and look into Cathy's face until she physically becomes a hiccup and looks away.

"You don't care?" I prompt her, but she head wobbles, asks what, says she cares, asks, "care about what?" and then says shell call the mail room to come up, and dials Ruth's old line, Jimmy picks up with his outdoor voice, and I can hear him downstairs and on the receiver at the same time., and Billy starts fucking with his blinds, and I drop all the letters into my trash can from which I am sure at least two of those letters were pulled from and put back onto my desk, and take my scissors up and all without breaking eye contact with Cathy, "that he fucks his own dog Cathy, I've seen it." and I start counting coup on the package, which she is physically reacting to.  Billy raps on the glass of his office wall from within his office with a knuckle, a real 'Hey You', and a good knock, then again, for my attention which he cannot purchase with a knuckle no matter how well he raps, then Jimmy from the stairwell is up here popping gum, and that's it, I flip the scissors around in my hand and the mood goes from testing to suicide by cop and Cathy is talking over the crescendo in my head and Billys door has opened and "Let Jimmy take that" and "Ricin" and "Put the Scissors Down" are like song titles in a greatest hits commercial, and knowing it's a book that is in the box having jostled it enough, I drive the scissors into it three times really hard and shout "Ohh, OOHHH!"  and Cathy might have shit, and she skirt-walk-runs from behind her desk past Billy and into his office, and a "what the fuck is a matter with you" shoots out of Billy's head,  and in Jimmy's loudspeaker voice a "whoa, is it dead yet" and lowercase kate is chewing her lower lip looking at me while she leans back, legs crossed, bested somehow, pissed about something simple and yet unimaginably complex, and a "hey, get the fuck in my office now" and then he follows it with a "Cathy, get out of my office" and here she comes again, same skirt-walk but more of a jog and less of a run, and I turn and look at jimmy and say "Ill see that package burned alive in this office before I ever give it to you Jimmy", and then a "Now I said" from Billy, and a "Fine" from me, and I put the box on my desk with the scissors sticking out of the top while looking at Jimmy and I shake my head 'no' to him and back away, then turn into Billys office and shut the door behind me and sit in the only good chair at this fucking paper.

"what's that old lawyers name" but Billy just sits down and genuinely looks at me.  "the one that did that great plein air, it was down in that lady's coffee shop in Kalispell."  and he looks.  Billy has always been in control of his voice.  I used to call it being stupid.  "Verne, or some old guy name like that, he was 60 like 20 years ago.  the old lawyer guy", but, Billy frowns indicating he does not know.  "Val, Alvine, fuck, I am gonna be stuck here, not Lou, not ROY!  Fucking ROY!"  Billy nods, "Roy.  I really think if Cathy retained Roy, they could get me on assault for what just happened out there." and Billy smiles about as wide as he can and then starts wheezing.  "I swear to god, I thought she was gonna cum or just seize up right there," and Billy through the wheezes "You gotta fucking, you can't" and then more wheezing, and I say "Fucking Roy." lean back and smile.

"You know, you gotta quit farting in here, your gonna make a terrible impression on Cathy" I tell him, "We can all hear it" but he is still wheezing, "Youve really put her through a lot", but now I am laughing, and though Billy will be dead soon enough, the pain is worth the laugh at least as far as I am concerned, and then we are spent and might as well have been fucking for the release of a good laugh like that offers a soul.  It may have even pushed the cancer back, but his treatment is just sweeping water. 

"They found another one." he says to me, once the room had stilled and our fates had each rodeo wrapped our attention on distances and destinies manifest here only in the subconscious with color and urge, and his words put us back in our shoes.  He was a paper man, a good man turned leader, and I was an asshole, not even a gumshoe and no reporter.  I was and am a bad man, cleaned up and pointed at, at something.. 

"A guy or a girl"

"A girl"

"A Woman or a girl?  a Kid?"

"A woman", he nodded with a silent calm down.

"How bad"

He shrugged.  "She's at Logan"

"ICU?"

"No, she's post op, fuckin all cut to hell.  Post Op Med-surge 402"

"Jesus man, Amy works Med Surge"

"then take your dick with you" he says sitting up and closing his jacket.

I lean back and think about carrying this chair out of the office with me, and look up at the ceiling.  "Your friend from back in the day, at Malmstrom, he ever get back to you?" 

"He's AWOL.  AFSF was here this morning.  Traced my call back." and he tosses me a card.  Lt. Billings.  I sit up, stand, walk out of his office and go straight to my desk, pick up my phone and dial Billings.  

"Jesus.  head on?" he calls after me. "get him, get the phone"

I have a hand on my arm, and Cathy is trying to hang up my phone but I pick up the phone and hold it away from her, politely navigating Airforce Staff until I hear "Billings" on the other end.  Its a dance of minutes for everyone else.  

"What did you do?" me shouting, scream spitting, almost eating the phone.

"Excuse me?  Who is this?" from Billings, and lots of jostling on my end, how many people are pushing me around in here, and did he just break glass or was that on my end too?

"What the fuck did you do over there?" from me, and Ii am on one leg now, imbalanced but part of a living pile of people at loggerheads but standing, is that what we are doing, is this a scrum?

"You need to be real careful now and.." from Billings and the phone chord is being yanked so hard it has turned into steel cable.  more shouting, almost can't hear. 

"Motherfucker, you think (wrestling) you can come into my house, (for just a moment I cannot see at all) fuck with my people?  I am (receiver still in hand but away from face now) cover you in your (Jimmy arms, I am in a headlock.  they should call it a throat lock, or a throat something, blacking out) mess.. public.. Fucking New York Times (Someone fell over a desk, did I fall) kill yourself!" (hands all over me, desk above, book in my back, presence of mind to be concerned about the scissors, clothing in my face, clothing in my mouth, rug burn, hot ear, one word shouts, lots of em, commands, darker, darker, and then I am just swimming in the black)...