Julia Brennan
Slab of Earth
He had dirt and squalid words, which were capable of conveying very little, and he took to putting his pen to paper. And everything he wrote was squat and uninspired, like a row of tulip bulbs stuck in soil and never sprouted. He lived in a spare room with few furnishings and his view was of the vacant parking lot across the street. He watched cars slide into empty spaces and fill them.
He had never even been to a party. He sat up straight and ate fast food and imagined “sheer ceremonial lavishness,” all words he had looked up and combined using his pocket Oxford Dictionary.
When he looked very closely at anything, he saw nothing. When he looked at a gun he could not see the bullet. He could not hear the impending shot. He was not good at dissecting passages in books, and he was even worse at dissecting other people’s feelings.
Once a woman had tried to kiss him and he bit her, drawing blood up from her lip.
He constructed a maze for a mouse that lived in his bedroom and watched the mouse knock into walls made of paper. He looked at his pen and he wrote one word and that word was “heart.”
“Bite” was a word used to describe the perfect or imperfect qualities of mammalian teeth.
“Heart” was stuck in the body like bulbs were stuck in dirt. He had dirt in his head beside the names of authorities who had taken things from him: an apartment (landlord), a job (boss), a lover (bastard Jack), a brother (prison). “Officer” took his brother away.
“That whale has a gross overbite,” a scientist said in a magazine interview, of a whale who had washed up on shore, stomach crowded with tin cans and plastic wrap.
He looked outside at gray skies, said “sublime” aloud. He watched a dog piss on the street below him and deployed his loud shouting voice to tell the dog to put his tail between his hind legs and piss neater next time.
“Please” was the polite way to ask for something.
“Appease” was often condescending.
Time could be anything: “wasted,” “money,” or “of the essence.” Time could be anything except for nothing because one was always stuck in time. “Stuck in the past,” he whispered and posed like Lance Armstrong hunched over a bike in the Wax Museum on Lark Street. Lance was once famous, a “role model” even, but time “would not be kind to him” because he was also a liar.
He ate diseased red meat from the supermarket and prayed for E. coli because he liked the sound of it. E. coli was as hushed and precious a combination of syllables as “birdsong” or “light beam.”
The day before he’d met a man at the grocery store. The man was purchasing a bundle of lettuce. The lettuce was dirty at the roots. When he picked up the bundle of lettuce, the man explained how to brush the dirt out of the roots.
“If you have a plastic comb, like a lice-comb, that will do the trick. You just tug through the white vines with the spikes.”
He wanted to accumulate knowledge like that. Useful knowledge, unlike “sheer ceremonial lavishness.” He spoke to the cashier, who stared back, glazed over, as though she were a bust in a museum and not a person.
He began to speak to the cash register instead of the cashier. “This is your nine dollars and five cents. Take it.”
“You’re talking to an inanimate object, you know,” the man had said.
That man knew it all.
At night, on his mattress, he circled words he didn’t understand in the newspaper. The newspaper was crammed with minor tragedies. All of his tragedies were minor, according to his brother, but nevertheless left him with a heart that burned.
A girl walked by. She yanked her dog’s leash. He yelled down at the girl and told her she was ugly because he had no other words for the look on her face.
“You probably piss like your dog,” he shouted.
He could not dissect emotions though he dissected himself daily. He clipped his nails, pulled his eyelids back and made faces at girls who flipped him off and instructed their dogs to piss on his stoop.
“Dirty” was a word he knew and as the dog peed again, he knew that the dog had achieved it. That dog was a dirty dog. He pulled on his blue slippers, went outside, stole the dog from the girl and beat it in the neighbor’s yard. “Beat” was something you did to a rug when it was dirty.
The future was not a thing he could picture. It was always moving forward or back.
“You killed my dog,” the girl banged on the door. He stood on the fire escape and looked down at her. She looked like someone else’s perversion. Her wide hips almost plastic. She was on her knees. “You killed my dog.” No one stopped to help her.
He walked to the edge of the fire escape and threw a heavy can of paint onto the sidewalk. He felt something close to remorse when the can knocked the girl’s head, forcing her back onto the concrete. Then he looked up her skirt from on high and watched a dirty limousine slide into one of the empty spots.
The man who stepped out of the limousine was clearly her father. The father took one look at the girl and the dog and began screaming.
He knew the man and the girl didn’t live in his neighborhood. The limousine was more expensive than a house on the block. Houses here looked like broken teeth in a mouth full of cavities. The man looked like a gold-capped molar: rich.
“Wash your sick car,” he yelled down to the father. “It deserves it.”
Unlike his daughter, the father was handsome. Her mother must have carried the ugly gene. He imagined the dirty womb of the girl’s pregnant mother, sitting in the front seat of the dirty limousine on the way to a hospital. Twenty years ago, if he had to venture a guess. He wondered if her water had broken inside of the car, covering the seats in a fuming heap of liquid. Was the interior as dirty as the exterior? The man must have driven into a muddy farm field to let cows shit all over the hood.
The man’s car was dirty but his suit was pressed. He wore a white suit and it looked perfect against the background of his dirty luxury car. He thought the man looked “angelic,” in a real spiritual sense.
He looked up the word “angelic” in his dictionary, then reached for the pocket thesaurus he kept in his other jacket flap. He wrote “heavenly” on a piece of pa- per. He wrote “light” beside heavenly. He wrote “pink, devout, divine.” He wrote “gates of heaven populated by angels.” This was very bad news for him.
“Would you like to come up for a drink?” he said, in an attempt to “appease” the father.
He looked at the man, studied him cry and tried to cry with him. The man hovered over his daughter. He was emitting a beaming, darkening light.
“You killed my daughter.”
She had blood around her head. A halo of red.
“Shame” was also a word he knew. Many a teacher had said “shame on you,” while wagging a finger in front of his eyes. His mother, before she died, when she found him digging around her purse for cigarettes, had done the same.
The woman who came by with the clipboard told him that he seemed incapable of feeling it. He didn’t know if that was “true” or “false.”
This was the same woman who’d told him her job was to “protect vulnerable populations.”
“I’m here to protect you,” she’d said.
“Better to protect animals on the brink of extinction,” he replied. “Already so many are gone: quagga, great auks, Steller’s sea cow. Dodos, passenger pigeons. Soon yellow-eyed tree frogs, ploughshare tortoises, Yunnan snub-nosed monkeys.”
“Yes. But today my job is you.”
The father did not respond to the drink inquiry. He flung his daughter over his shoulder, a dead animal, and wept. Carted her off like a plow cart’s wheat and dirt.
He retreated to the back of the apartment where he pulled out a brand new Scientific Encyclopedia. On page thirty-two there was an image of earth.
He put pen to paper and wrote:
“I have been on earth for such a long time, but I never really knew if it was flat or round. I know it is round, but it feels flat to me, so maybe it’s flat as well? Here. This vertical pole pierces through the center of earth like the dagger my brother threw at me all of those years ago, which pierced through my earlobe. The dagger that landed me bleeding on the floor to be found by our poor mother, who then fainted on the spot and repeatedly shuddered.
‘Heart Attack’ is two words, which, when combined in sequence, marks a great and quiet absence.
“This vertical pole elongates this piece of paper when I focus on the black and white lines. No longer can I reconcile earth with the image of this long black line, which some hand sketched, so thin and slender, and this circle drawn around it, like the red ball I would throw to the dog if he were still alive and not dead outside of my window.
“I assume the pole that separates one half of the earth from the other half drives down the middle of Ohio, where I am right now, ‘in time.’ Maybe my house is on top of this line, this pole, and this pole moves next down to Argentina and gets eaten by stray dogs who are almost too alive for their own good.
“I don’t know much about South America or the harsh bitter cold of Antarctica, but now I see there is this dotted line speared through all of us and people don’t respect this common pole at all—this is the thing that makes us all turn imperceptibly while we sleep. Wow.”
In bed he looked into the damp light of his room and saw a vertical stripe of light hanging out on his wall. He convinced himself it was one of the poles of the earth and traced it with his ring finger. Then he tried to slide down it like a kid down a plastic yellow tube in a park, but he could not slide down it, and so he really was just rubbing his ass against the wall, trying desperately to get to the center of everything.
It was ninety degrees inside. He stared at the thermometer on the wall. The stinking carcass of the dead dog on the street was rising to invade the damp darkness of his bedroom, but at least it was not the human carcass of the dead girl with her skirt lifted up. If it was the dead girl he might have brought her inside, having some respect for human life.
“Women” could be “wrong” or “misleading” or “manipulative” though it was now thought best to believe them.
“At face value” meant “question no further.”
He then opened the Oxford Dictionary and placed it next to the Scientific Encyclopedia on the floor. He began again to read diagrams whose meanings he could only “take a stab at.”
“Stab,” he said aloud, “Like a pole piercing through earth.”
“Stab,” he said aloud, pulling on his glasses, assuming the role of stuffy academic. Looking like the men who walked past his apartment in the morning while he sat on the fire escape chewing tobacco and spitting on them.
Stab was a word that sounded like “slab”: slab of the earth, stabbed poles through slabbed earth.
He went to the kitchen and fried a steak. He ate the bloody steak and began thinking of the angel man father in his pressed white suit.
There was no one to love in the world. He was eating an animal.
“Stab,” he said, and looked up “stab” in a YouTube search bar. A performance artist filled the screen and smiled a haggard smile. She was beautiful in an utterly terrifying way. “Utter” like “cow udder” or “utter” like “wow” or like “to speak a deeply felt sentiment.”
The performance artist began to stab the little knife into the spaces between her spread fingers. The little knife on a table, aligned with the pole of the earth, aligned with the stem of a tulip, aligned with the streetlamp outside, aligned with his own leg now pounding the ground to get the neighbor downstairs to shut up.
“Axis” was a word that sounded like “access.” Access. “Access” was a word he heard often when he inquired about his brother’s life in prison. “He now has access to the telephone,” a woman might say. “Good behavior has granted your brother access to our library.” “But my brother can’t read.” “Access to a reading instructor has been provided.” “Yesterday your brother learned the word fragment from a friend. To show his mastery of the word he pointed at his friend Cato and said, ‘My boy Cato has a fragment of a bullet in his ankle.’” Access to a reading instructor has been provided. He thought of shiny gold stars in a desk drawer at the local library. And of the woman who doled them out, applauding all the other children.