Excerpt: The Purpose of the Kiss

Alright - Ted asked me for a longer excerpt. These are not not not in order - just bits I pulled from my larger document that I like better than some others. No revision or even fine-tuning whatsoever has or will take(n) place until December.

“Now watch this,” said Willy Lee, his crooked fingertips coming together as he leaned down toward the ground. “If you know what you’re doing, they’ll come right to you. Now, I learned this from an old Irish pro, used to live down by the old house in St. Louis. Watch this.”

Willy Lee placed his hands flat on the turned soil and began a soft and erratic tattoo there in the garden. Eyes closed, his drawn and cachectic features took on an air of concentration. His lips pursed and his adam’s apple bobbed as he produced a percussive chittering sound that weaved in and out of the pattern build by his fingers. Girl A watched, bemused.
A few feet from them lay an old length of pear wood used to distinguish what was garden from what was lawn. It had made little in the way of difference during the home’s long years of neglect, but had once served its purpose well. Willy Lee moved in slow hunched circles around the lawn, gravitating now and then back toward the pear wood. Tch-tch-tch-tch chk-chk-chk. His feet shuffled as his fingers danced as Girl A and The White Cat looked on. The White Cat began to follow Willy Lee, tail twitching. As willy neared the length of wood, there was a scuffling movement from underneath. A warty snout and bulging eyes appeared in the shadow, and a toad as big as Girl A’s hand came out into the sun.
“Calling toads,” said Willy Lee. “It’s a lost art.”
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-Oh shit. Oh fuck. Oh shit. Oh god. His breath came in great heaving sobs as he pulled himself up off the floor. With each desperate gasp for air, his stomach drew in closer and closer to his spine. He was a swimmer, pulled under by the waves and uncertain of which way was up. Boy A looked around the living room, at the broken remains of what had been his life, and tried to piece together what had been from what was left. His favorite chair, now in pieces, and scattered around the room. The end table, which he had always hated but which had been a gift from a treasured ex-girlfriend, had been over here by the kitchen and rested now partially through the easternmost window. He could, if he concentrated, run the whole damn thing in reverse. In his mind’s eye, he saw the end table work its way loose of the window, shards of glass shaking and bouncing their way back up off the floor, streaking their way through the air and meeting in a single perfect plane at the same instant the end table hurtled end over end across the room, coming to rest perfectly aligned with the edge of the sofa. The sofa itself did not move much, scraping backward across the room from the center over toward the far wall. The coat rack rose up, pole vault style, from where it lay in front of the door as the coats themselves gathered up from their places across the room and placed themselves neatly on their assigned hooks. All across the room, Boy A could see order forming from the chaos. Entropy reversed itself in his mind as he wished things back the way they had been.
One blink later, and it was all gone. Nothing was fixed. Everything was broken. Everything was shattered, and there was a scratching noise at the door. Boy A lurched to a standing position, himself working in a ghastly parody of the backward flow he had so recently imagined. Picking his way across the flotsam and jetsam that remained, he reached for the doorknob. The scratching noise persisted, accompanied now by a persistent mewling, as if his own misery had been given form.
As Boy A opened the door, The White Cat sauntered in. Stepping easily around the broken glass, ignoring completely the remains of the living room furniture, The White Cat looked Boy A in the bruised and bleeding eye and, with a repeated and insistent meow, demanded to be fed.
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There’s this thing. The Bad Spirit. It’s in all of us, and it is the worst we have to offer. The Bad Spirit is no more escapable than is The White Cat, which is our best. The Bad Spirit stalks us through the streets and the alleys and stays with us in the dark, whispering nothings and somethings deep into our inner ear, right past the eardrum and directly into the amygdyla, emotional memory core of of our mind and perhaps even our soul. The Bad Spirit nips at our heels and claws at our thighs, held deep in a penetrating embrace. The White Cat bids its time. Girl A’s Bad Spirit told her that she needs must kiss Boy A. Her Bad Spirit told her that this kiss should lead to other, bolder actions.
The White Cat was nowhere near Girl A at this party. The White Cat was busy elsewhere.
Girl A sat at the far side of the bar from the object of her attentions. Drink and heavy carbohydrates had weakened the barriers of her brain, the better to let in the Bad Spirit. Anthropologists have postulated for decades about the purpose of the kiss. Why, of all things, would two persons decide it was a good time to press their lips together and make a slow sequence of soft sucking sounds? What does this accomplish? The Bad Spirit knew.
Lists and bullet points cast aside, rational thought exterminated, Girl A got up off her stool and took a step.
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Tom (Boy A) watched in disbelief as this girl – this ravishing, drunken, and sloppy girl – stood up, clearly depending on the bar itself for support. The bar that had assisted her in the not inconsequential act of resisting gravity for the past three hours had provided her with enough time to consumer more than her carbon footprint’s worth of clear liquors and thus was about to fail her in her moment of greatest need. Her feet danced to the left – right foot doing a jig and the left foot doing a tango. Her head and her trunk did a jazzy little number off to the right, and down she went, teeth first.
Who was this woman, and did she really have that much blood?
A lesser man would have rushed to help, dreams of Prince Charming dancing in his head. A lesser man would have helped her up, poured another drink down her gullet, and hoped for the best. Tom, though, could just sit and stare obtusely as Girl A put one elbow and then another under her and hauled herself to her feet. Now just a yard or two from Tom’s feet, she tilted back to the right and then to the left and made as if to fall again. Walking, it can be said, is nothing more than controlled falling, and never had this been more evident than in the cringe-inducing trajectory evidenced by Girl A at this very moment. Before Tom new it, she was in his arms. He was uncertain as to whether he had caught her of if he had instead found himself on the unfortunate end of some exotic variation of the half nelson, found only in long-forgotten and certainly heretical translations of the Kama Sutra and demonstrated now in the midst of The Bottleneck by this strange and bloodied woman, who was clearly channeling the spirits of her shamelessly lascivious ancestry as she grabbed both side of his head, pulled his mouth toward her own, and kissed him. The coppery taste of her blood filled his mouth as her torn lips pressed against his own. Their teeth clashed and he felt a chip of bone on his tongue. He was uncertain if it was a piece of him, or of her.
For a brief moment, it was she who held him up, suspended in mid-air by the barest of contact with her palms and her fingertips. The relationship between his lower extremities and his continued verticality was held by the most gossamer of threads.
And then she was gone, and he had no choice but to sit. It was that or fall.
She was gone, off into the darkness to meet The White Cat.
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It’s 1980. Boy B is five years old, growing up in the suburbs of Poughkeepsie, if such a thing can be said to exist. 1980. The energy crisis wasn’t over, and the bright shining glitz and glam, spit and polish papier mache of the Reagan Era had not yet begun. Boy A’s mother is standing at the mirror, applying a very light foundation and a very dark eye shadow. A bit of a pale yellow powder to her forehead and around her mouth, to give some sallowness.
Boy A and his mother have just joined a new church.
Here’s the skinny. When the casseroles run out, it is time to change faiths. Last month, the Boy’s family was Baptist. Before that, they were Presbyterian. This time around, they’re going for the mother lode. Two weeks ago, Boy A and his mother stood up tall and walked through the doors of University Lutheran Church.
Nobody does baked mac and cheese like the Lutherans.
It goes like this: find a new house of worship and bone up a bit on the relevant dogma and politics. Say your amens in the right place. Learn when and where to kneel. Genuflect, if necessary. Show up once or twice. You might think it would be helpful to come in around the big holidays, like Christmas or like Easter. That never works. You just end up lost in the crown. Come instead at a time when nothing new or nothing special is happening. Come instead during a dry spell. This wipes out the big ones – the aforementioned Christmas and Easter, Confirmation Weekend or First Communions, those days when the Boy Scouts come and speak. You would probably even do well to give more specialized services like Maundy Thursday or Epiphany a bit of a past. Look instead to the Fall. Churches in the Fall are looking at the spiritual equivalent of last call for alcohol, you don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here. They are looking around the room, every last one of the beautiful people gone. It is time now to settle. Perhaps that woman there in the corner, the one with the bloodshot eyes and the missing finger. Perhaps she would do. Perhaps she could provide some small bit of solace, some bit of warmth now that it is well into the wee small hours. Besides, nobody’s, like, watching who you go home with. Nobody’s really looking at who joins your church come the long, dark, beer-goggle of the soul.
So you need two thigns. You need a working understanding of the major spiritual holidays and when they fall, and you need a deep freeze with no fewer than 38 cubic feet of storage.
Find your Fall day and walk on in. Look interested. Watch the pastor (or priest, or reverend, or whatever) as he gives his sermon (or message, or homily, or whatever) and look him in the eye. Remember those books on how to win friends and irritate people? Remember how you’re supposed to mirrororrim the body language of others? If the speaker is leaning forward, you lean in. Just a bit. If the speaker tilts his head, you cock yours off to the side as well. Lead his attention. Let him know that you care. Let him know, also, that you are hungry. You are a spiritual void just waiting to be filled with his message. You don’t want to show too much enthusiasm, or you’ll come off as fake. Just let a bit of depth into that soulful gaze of yours. Show that you are hungry, figuratively, for a connection.
Maybe volunteer a bit.
Two weeks later is showtime. Two weeks later is when the imaginary shit hits the hypothetical fan, and you get sick. Very, very sick.
Hence the foundation. Hence the eye shadow. Hence the sallow complexion and the practiced, hacking cough (Boy A’s mother found that it helped to take a hefty dose of robitussin – the kind with an expectorant – about an hour before church for a couple of weeks in a row before really moving in to close the deal). Hence, the freezer.
Your mother, you’ll say in the church youth group, is ill. Don’t tell anyone, you’ll say. It is embarrassing. It is humiliating. Your mother would tan your hide were word to spread that you have told. Your mother has cancer. You mother has emphysema. Your mother has lupus. Cellulitis. Pertussis. Walking pneumonia. Regular pneumonia. A heart condition. A punctured lung. A bleeding ulcer. A prolapsed . . . something. You don’t completely understand. All you know is that she is no longer able to take care of you. All you know is that the meals are no longer hot, and it is just too much work for you mother, your poor and suffering mother, to make it up the stairs to partake in the most blessed of all childhood rituals, the (wait for it) goodnight kiss.
You’ll want to be certain you have plugged in the deep freeze before delivering that bit, as well-rehearsed and as effective as it is.
In Church, there is no such thing as a secret. Within moments of the final hymn, before even the adults have gathered in the multipurpose room (or the breezeway, or the community room, or the daycare, or whatever) for the coffee and the donuts, no fewer than one half of the congregants in attendance that day will know all about your mothers Dreadful Situation. Many of them will even have created their own facts to fit the gaps in their knowledge. If you are good at your job, you have left these gaps on purpose. The other kids from the youth group, they are looking at you askance. You are no longer The New Kid. You are instead The Kid With The Sick Mom. They are gossiping amongst themselves and their parents if they might catch something from you. They are keeping a distance from you of at least fifteen feet, so as to avoid contagion. They are composing, learning, and memorizing the jokes and nicknames and practiced looks of concern that will fill the rest of your time in their company.
While they are doing this, their parents are making casseroles. Chicken tettrazini. Macaroni and cheese. Lasagna. Easy lasagna. Veggie lasagna. Chicken and dumplings. Pizza in a bucket. Mexican style beefy enchilada bake. Tortilla pie. Kids Love It Casserole. Chili cheese bake. Onion casserole. Chicken and rice. Rice and sausage. Rice and chicken. Chicken and beef. Rice pilaf. Rice a roni (the San Francisco Treat ding-ding), Mexican rice skillet. Chicken Parmagiana (called just “Chick’n Parm). One hundred and thirty seven variations on Tuna Casserole. Old Dark, Nutty Noodle, and Nacho Cheese casseroles. Baked, chopped, broiled, fryed and grilled cheese and vegetables and meats and bits and pieces and leftovers jammed and jellied together into a single nine by thirteen dish at three hundred and seventy-five degrees for 20 minutes, half an hour, forty-five minutes or an hour, loaded into the car of the well meaning, the pious, and the nosey and dropped off to be deposited in you own brand new shiney-white deep freezer.
There, the accumulated casseroles and guilt of a mid-sized protestant congregation could feed your family, including your poor sick mother lighting up another cigarette as she rummaged through the freezer for whatever seemed just right on this particular day, for about three or four months. Five, if you scrimped.
By then, though, you will have moved on and found a whole new religion.
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Robert hated Thanksgiving. Weeks and weeks worth of build up and menu planning and coordinating of transportation and deciding who was going to sit where and when and what family would go to whose house and why and on which day, all for a meal that ultimately lasted about forty-five minutes and went nowhere. To Robert, it was a meal like any other, only more so. He always found himself at the center of the table, sandwiched between two relatives to whom he did not know how to speak (it didn’t matter which two, as Robert did not know how to speak to any of his relatives.) For the whole of the hors d’oeuvres and pre-grace cocktails and grace itself and on into the butter and crescent rolls, Robert sat on his hands and he rocked. Gently at first, just a barely noticeable tick-tocking forward and back as he watched the crowd his family and strove to learn his way through the ordeal. Forward and back, forward and back, and then his leg kicked in, tapping out triplets in time with his motions. Tick two three tock two three tick two three tock two three and on and on and his attention moved inward to his own body instead of to the language and motions of those around him. Body rocking in ones and twos and foot going in the three. Fingers drumming, counting complete cycles of the rocking and the tapping. One two three tock Two two three tock Three two three tock and Four two three tock One worked a few times in a row, and then hit a sour note as Robert realized that the ones and twos and threes were all prime, but the fours were not, being themselves divisible by two. A slight adjustment up or own to three or to five would do the trick. Five it was, then. One two three tock Two two three tock Three two three tock Four two three tock Five two three tock One and then a snap of his fingers up by the left ear to complete the cycle. Nice. Yes. That would do. This would get him through the dinner prep and hopefully through much of the game his stepfather and grandfather would doubtless insist on watching.
The counting process had settled down to a point where the movements themselves were no longer counted. Ticks and tocks, back and forth, triplets and snaps went forward on automatic and what was counted was the end point of each cycle. One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five . . . one . . . two . . . and then his mother came into the room. Bobby, she said, Bobby? I need you to out to the garage and fetch the turkey, Bobby. It’s out in the fridge between the green bean casserole and the macaroni lasagna firecracker bake.
Dammit. Just when things were going so well. I’ve got it, mom. No problem. Robert took five steps across the tiled floor of the kitchen, each step in line with the tiles in the two-forward-one-over pattern of a chess knight. As he walked, his mother’s cat wove back and forth between his feet in a pleasing counterpoint to his own forward motion. He briefly tracked the cat’s movement as a path similar to that generated by the Spirograph of his youth, and then returned to the task at hand. Feet lined up nicely with the door out to the garage, hand to the knob and turn and pull. One two steps down to the smooth concrete floor, the cats padding feet giving a nice triplet to complement his own one-two, and a quick three steps to the fridge. Hand to handle, ninety degree swing out – door and refrigerator nicely perpendicular. Thank god it was so quiet out here. The cool air of the garage made it so he could almost tolerate the idea of going back in to face the chaos of his family. Robert leaned forward and grasped the turkey, still in its plastic wrap and began to work it loose from between the solid wall of casseroles and similar dishes that had been moved over from the deep freeze earlier in the week.
It was then that he saw his watch. Twelve thirty-four. Holy shit! Twelve thirty-four and fifty-one seconds! Nicely done, Robert! He had a five second cushion still to catch the perfect one-two-three-four-five. He stopped what he was doing and fixed his gaze on his watch. Fifty-two . . . fifty-three . . . fifty-four . . . and the cat bumped him in the back of the knee. Startled, Robert jumped and bumped the top of his head against the ceiling of the fridge.
At this point, he lost his grip on the turkey.
Five minutes later, Robert was standing in the middle of his mother’s kitchen, looking at his shoes. His heels and his toes just exactly touched the edges of the tiles. Mom. Mom? Something might be wrong with the cat.
What? What do you mean?
I was getting the turkey like you asked and the cat bumped me and I dropped the turkey. The cat . . . I put the cat in the fridge. You can’t look at it mom, you mustn’t look at the cat.
Are you serious? Is this a joke? I can’t look at the cat? What the fuck am I supposed to do? Is it dead? Is it hurt? Bobby? What are you even talking about?
The answer to your question, mom, is that right now the cat is both dead and alive, hurt and unhurt. We can assume a certain amount of injury, but at this point it is both very serious and perfectly alright.
Robert’s step-father walked into the kitchen, television remote clutched in his left hand. He stepped over and upon every single line in the kitchen heedlessly and with no sense of order. What’s going on, he asked. Why is Bobby rocking like that?
Something about the cat. I think he killed the cat.
Mother! The turkey fell on it. I saved its life, maybe. The only chance of it being alright is for none of us to look at it, none of us to even perceive it in any way. So long as we leave it in the box, so long as we don’t go anywhere near it, reality will remain bifurcated in such a way that she can be both alive and dead, both injured and recovering. Don’t you get it? Robert’s breathing sped up. He could feel his pulse behind his eyes as he stated his case. Why didn’t they get it?
Oh, Jesus boy! Are you trying to tell me that the cat, right this very minute, the cat is in the refrigerator? That it’s out there even as we speak, leaving paw prints in the jell-o salad?
Maybe. That is both true and false until we observe and the divergent realities collapse. That’s the way it works, Stan.
Mother of god, boy. That cat was a gift from her mother. It’s in the garage fridge, you say? And he started to stride on a diagonal across the room and toward the door that led to the garage.
You can’t do that, Stan! You musn’t do that said Robert as he moved to intercept. No longer a knight in movement but now a queen, moving as far and as fast as he needed, so long as was in a straight line. He had started on a perfect diagonal to the garage door and he retreated, queen to queen’s one. Stan. Don’t look at the cat, Stan. The only chance it has for survival is if we do not observe.
Bobby. Bobby. Stan sighed. The cat. The cat is in the refrigerator, Bobby. Alive or dead – and here Robert nodded in assent, to indicate that yes, alive and dead were both the case – how long do you think it’s going to last out there? In the fridge? The cold fridge?
Robert’s breathing, in an inverse geometric relationship with his level of anxiety, caught in his throat and stayed there. He felt realities collapsing around him as the probability of the cat’s survival dwindled rapidly toward zero – beyond the concept of prime and composite. His knees buckled and down he went, back against the cupboard.
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What do you think about when you look at the stars? What do you think about when you think about how old that light is, how far it has travelled to get here?
I think about the speed of light. I think about what it would be like when things surpass that speed.
How do you mean?
Think about this. As objects approach the speed of light, time dilates in relation to said objects. At the moment that speed is passed, time for said object begins to flow in reverse. Now, this isn’t something we’ve ever been able to observe. Even in most science fiction, they have to create whole new kinds of space to explain how space travelers can get from place to place without dying of old age, right?
Right. Like hyperspace, or subspace . . . Star Wars and Trek, respectively.
Right. Now, though, say that chair over there – and here he indicated a battered old office chair she used mostly as a stepping stool to reach the light bulbs in her high ceilinged bedroom – were to suddenly start moving that way – he pointed North – at a velocity sufficiently beyond the speed of light to move backward in time by five minutes. Now, were it to just move really really fast, but not in excess of c (Einstein’s designation for the speed of light), there’s no question. We would see it take off and smash itself to bits against the wall. Remember, though, that time dilation and reversal is a factor here. To our perceptions, the chair exists as a concrete object, more or less fixed in space. If it travels in time, do we see a duplicated of the chair come travelling in from the South? Do pieces of chair manifest on your floor five minutes ago, and reconstitute themselves in slow motion? Does the chair become whole again and take five minutes to scoot slowly back across the floor to meet its immobile duplicate?
. . . maybe?
Right! We can’t know? And then? And then what happens when the two chairs (which are one) meet? Remember that this is the moment when the chair actually started to move.
She came in with And so one moment we one chair, and then we have two chairs for a while, and then we would have no chairs, because it was destroyed five minutes ago when it hit the wall.
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Boy A and WIlly Lee parked illegally up on the hill, in the part of the University campus dedicated to Social Work, Humanities, and the other namby-pamby arts. The small lot by Twente Hall always had a space or two in it, as the number of social work staff who had been around long enough to rank the good parking pass were few and far between. Fall had settled in nicely, and Willy had told Boy A there was something special up on Hill.
Trust me, he said.
Such talk always put The Fear in Boy A.
Boy A and Willy Lee crested the rise on the other side of the hall and made their way down the stairs on the other side. About two thirds of the way down, on the right hand side, a rough-barked tree twisted up toward the blue sky (the forecast has said partly cloudy. For once they had erred on the side of the unpleasant.) Very few leaves clung still to the branches, and globes about the size of a baby’s fist peppered the limbs. Boy A couldn’t see these very well, but they carried a distinctive orange cast.
That there is a persimmon tree, been growing on the hill since a bit before I shuffled off this mortal coil, said Willy Lee. He gave the tree a whack with his cane and a swollen fruit dropped from the upper reaches and into his outstretched hand.
Here. Eat this.
Boy A took the persimmon from Willy’s bony grasp. The fruit was full and firm, about the color of rust. The skin held a bit of a powdery hue that was not unattractive. Boy A brought the fruit to his mouth and took a bite.
Oh. My. God. It started well enough, with a bit of sweetness on the tip of his toungue. It tasted a bit like dates, with a touch of cinnamon. This pleasantness did not last long. Within seconds after taking a bite, Boy A’s mouth was blasted with a shot of astringent so powerful, it was as if he had taken a can full of Witch Hazel and shotgunned it straight back. Pieces of persimmon pulp clung to his tongue and to his gums and to the inside of his lips, coating his flesh like adhesive. He could no longer feel his palate.
Ha! You taste that? That is the taste of a ripe persimmon. Willy Lee cackled, clearly enjoying Boy A’s discomfort.
It’s terrible!
Damn straight it’s terrible. Any damn fool knows you can’t eat a persimmon while it’s ripe. Didn’t you ever watch Looney Toons, boy? Thanks for the sour persimmons, cousin. Ha!
What the fuck are you thinking, old man?
I was thinking that I want you to climb this tree.
Excuse me? Why would I want to do tha?
Just trust me.
Boy A grasped the trunk of the tree and hoisted himself up to the fork where one of the limbs jutted out to the South. From this precarious perch, he looked down and awaited instruction.
What are you waiting for, boy! Grab the trunk and give it a shake. A good one!
Is this a gay thing?
Fuck you and shake that thing.
Boy A obeyed. The trunk was not so sturdy that he couldn’t get a solid grasp on it. It didn’t feel as if he were moving it very much, but the more flimsy of the limbs and branches in the upper reaches of the tree rattled. Boy A looked up, and was rewarded by the sight of fifteen or twenty soft persimma cascading down, bouncing off the branches and heading toward the ground. One clipped him on the side of the head, leaving behind a streak of pulpy persimmon flesh. Reaching up to brush out this bit of unpleasantness, Boy A lost his balance. Arms pinwheeling, he fell straight back and landed at Willy Lee’s feet. Willy reached down and plucked a squashed and unpleasant looking fruit from the ground by Boy A’s head.
Here. Now eat this. Said Willy and pushed the sodden, russet fruit into Boy A’s mouth as he gasped for breath.
The persimmon burst on Boy A’s palate like a bomb made of dates and figs. The scent of cinnamon rose into Boy A’s nose from the back of his throat and his mouth filled with the texture of fresh custard. The soft, spoiled flesh of the fallen fruit slid smoothly down into his gullet. He looked up at Willy Lee from his place on the ground. Willy knelt above him and looked him in the eye.
That, said Willy, is a spoiled persimmon. Any damn fool who eats a ripe persimmon gets exactly what he deserves. Dare I eat a peach? Eat a peach, my ass! Fuck Eliot and his pseudo-romantic bullshit. Peaches are for mama’s boys and pantywaists. Take a real chance and sink your teeth into a genuine Lawrence-grown persimmon and that’s what’s going to get you feeling the blood in your veins. You can’t eat a ripe persimmon. It’s terrible. You’ve got to let ‘em go bad first. They’ve got to fall from the branches and maybe even spend some time sitting on the ground. Then you pick it up and pull the leaves from it, worry the seeds out from the flesh and put it right in your mouth and you don’t even have to bite own on it, boy. You’ve tasted my fruit now, you know what I’m talking about. Stop dicking around with that ripe fruit, and find something spoiled.
Boy A blinked and tilted his head back to let the rest of Willy Lee’s fruit slide down his throat as the man himself faded from sight.