Fun Fiction Fourth: A Hungry Creation
Send to KindleWell, Gentlemen, I can’t remember where I was when the Glink
first contacted me. I think it may have been in the hot corridor
outside of the office. The hot, eel corridor, like an eel. You
know the one? Of course not. But, then, the Glink never
contacted you, so how could you?
I was, I believe, discussing Mozart with Sarah when I first
knew its baleful eyes, the all-knowing eyes of the mouse as it
peers at the owl that sets upon it. Funny how a word means
exactly what it means, isn’t it? “Baleful.” Baleful is the look
on the subdued face of an ocelot, and so the creature knew what
it saw. Sarah, her back against the ribs of the eel, her
slightly tilted beret insinuating, along with her presence in the
heat, a desire to lead a tropical revolution that would never
come to fruition, because Sarah is not that type of girl. Sarah,
her back against the ribs of the eel, mite sized beads of sweat
imperceptibly making their way to the top of her top lip, her
hair twisted into a pair of braids that sauntered out from her
beret only to be crushed to death between her back and the wall.
Sarah, her back against the ribs of the eel, her skirt a red
velvet blanket of new snow covering the ground between her knees
and her waist. Sarah, her back against the ribs of the eel, a
back issue of a nature magazine of a girl, across from me in the
hot corridor, laughing. She laughed, and every time she would
laugh, the Glink would sigh.
At first, I welcomed the Glink and his balefulness. Or, I
suppose, I could say her balefulness. The Glink is above such
matters. Sarah was taken slightly aback, of course, when I
explained to her the next day that our discussion of Mozart had
awakened a sighing, sad-eyed Glink that had chosen me for some
tour or another, but she knew me for my eccentricities, I
suppose, and giggled and thought the idea of the Glink was cute.
You see, gentlemen, Sarah and I had a game when she was over at
my place, drinking vodka or gin and tonic. I lived in an
apartment located near a train track at the time. The office
beyond the hot corridor didn’t allow us to have both a good flat
and a good bottle of vodka, and it was in our nature to choose
the vodka. Any bed is good enough to pass out into, we used to
say, but you can’t pass out without a good incentive.
Wait, now, because I know you’re all thinking that my
visitations from the Glink were brought on by too much alcohol.
This is simply not the case. Sarah drank more than me, if not
the same amount, and she didn’t see the Glink. We would never do
anything so mad as to finish an entire bottle in one sitting, for
example, unless we had friends around to split it with us. As
neither of us had any friends or lovers, we usually drank about
half of a bottle between us, after which we would pass out onto
my bed.
Also, it will destroy the flow of this narrative if you go
assuming that this is some kind of twisted tale of unrequited
love, or love at all. We had no such relationship. What Sarah
and I had was a profound friendship, the kind rarely found among
even the oldsters who have been joined in matrimony long enough
to buy each other additional golden rings. This level of
friendship, of course, allowed for expression in ways that many
ill-conceived observers mislabeled ‘romantic.’ I tried to
explain to them, repeatedly, that I am the kind of person who
enjoys doing wonderful things for my wonderful friends. Ask the
Glink, for example, who stopped sighing when it noticed how
pleased Sarah was when I left her a dozen galaxy-shaped yellow
roses one morning. Or ask the Glink, who grew slightly less
melancholy when it saw how pleased Sarah was when I unveiled the
portrait that I painted of her in pinks, blues, and yellows. I
painted it from memory, of course. Or, if you will, ask the
Glink, who grew slightly less bashful when it found out that I
cancelled an interview for a position at the University to stay
home with Sarah, who had come down with a stomach ache. The
Glink will tell you. I did these things out of friendship, and
the Glink will tell you not to assume that I did them because
Sarah was in love with me. Sarah was not in love with me.
No, Sarah was not in love with me, but we were happy,
because we had our friendship, and our jobs behind the door in
the hot eel corridor, and our vodka, and my apartment near the
train tracks, and my bed to fall into when we were ready to pass
out and play our game. To explain the game, I must tell you a
little about my apartment. The place was not large, but it was
big, and it was basically nothing more than a large room with
four doors, one to the kitchen, one to the bathroom, one to the
bedroom, and, of course, one to the outside world. In the
central living area I had my art studio, where I painted with
oils on canvas, as well as a collection of items that appealed to
my aesthetic sense. I am, I admit, something of a squirrel,
burying things in my house until I need them for some artistic
winter. I had small, broken statues lining a bookcase, various
decorative poles stacked against the wall closest to the kitchen
like a jungle of New Guinean spears, paintings from my portfolio
on empty wall space, bits of string suspended from closed books,
umbrella skeletons folded into corners. I am a clutterer, but
everything was clean and in its place. It was all what I
considered neat stuff, and Sarah would often bring me things to
add to the collection. My favorite was a set of multihued
croquet hammers that she and I had suspended from the ceiling
with bell-filled metal cylinders attached to them. We called
them “Thor’s Chimes,” because when you walked under them and
touched one with your hand, it would collide with the others,
making what can only be described as thundering dings.
As I mentioned, the building was near a train track, or a
set of them, but not so close to annoy and clatter us awake. The
tracks were just far enough that the house would quiver ever so
slightly, almost erotically, if you can imagine a building being
touched in just the right spot and shivering in pleasure. Except
for the bedroom. Which is where the game comes in. Understand,
Sirs, that the bedroom was the only room in the place that didn’t
shake because it was the only room constructed of concrete. It
seems that the apartment used to be a garage, which explains the
motor oil phantom that frightens the mice away, and it is
perfectly normal for a garage, according to the landlord, to have
had a kitchen and a bathroom. However, as nobody sleeps in a
garage, he had to add a bedroom. But why, you ask, did he add a
bedroom of concrete? Because he had a surplus of concrete bricks
in the garage. I don’t really understand, either.
So the bedroom didn’t shake when a train would pass, but
everything else did: the statues, the poles, the hammers, the
paintings, all would rattle, a rattlesnake symphony of bells and
boards, whenever a train would pass. Then, the second night of
my residence in this particular apartment, I noticed a peculiar
occurrence that had coupled itself with the rattling of my
collection. After the first train went by and set everything
shaking, I grinned, of course, at the novel pride that comes with
renting a place with an ill-defined “character.” I then closed
my eyes and began to drift backwards into sleep. Suddenly I
heard a noise from the living room. I bolted up, an alert
response that dated back to the days of my childhood in the
woods, where I was deathly afraid that an ape-man would break in
through my window and smother me. I knew that I had no mice, no
rats. This isn’t the area for them, as you know. I stood,
cautiously, feeding on adrenaline, and switched on my light. I
am getting to the game!
Exercising great care, I inched into the living room and
checked the windows, all of which were closed and locked. Of
course, as I am a kind of believer in the supernatural, this only
partially served to reassure me that I was fine. My back to a
wall, I decided to keep watch in the lap of a dust-sheet covered
recliner given me by my grandfather. When I finally realized
what the noise had been, I returned instantly to my bed, as
relieved as a boy whose targeted crush has agreed to meet him for
a movie. The noise, it seems, was caused by a number of factors.
When a train would pass, the wooden frame of the house would
shake. This, in turn, would cause everything in the house to
shake, including all of my items, which would stop shaking, but
would not settle instantly. As they settled ever so slowly back
to their original positions, they would make strange and
unnatural noises. These noises would enter the concrete bedroom
and would actually be modified by the walls. This is what I
heard, and this is where Sarah and I got the idea for our game.
Before I met the Glink, of course.
The game went as follows. Sarah and I would finish early at
work, which was always just a few moments late. Each day the
minutes on our release time grew into a persimmon tree, taller
because the days were getting shorter and colder and taller
because she and I worked in different departments, and I felt as
if I had to climb a tree to see her at the end of the day. You
know? Ours was a very special friendship. So she and I would
finish at work, sometimes early, and meet for dinner at the
Chinese restaurant up the block from the office. After one of
those inner city meals that consists of a few slices of thin meat
in a bowl of noodles and weak broth, through which we invariably
laughed at the fat Buddha on the wall who held a sign advertising
instructions for the Heimlich maneuver, we would spend the rest
of our money on a bottle of good vodka and return to my apartment
by the railroad tracks.
It is important, when selecting a bottle of vodka, to keep a
number of factors in mind. The primary characteristic of good
vodka is its odorlessness; vodka assumes the nature of whatever
it is mixed with, which explains its popularity. We would often
spend a half hour in the government store smelling the vodka
samples and determining which smelled the most like water. One
must always remember that, as far as drinking vodka is concerned,
the amount one spends on the bottle is inversely proportional to
the strength of the hangover the next day. Sarah and I
determined that, on average, spending twenty dollars on a fifth
of vodka was a good way to bribe the stuff out of giving you a
hangover.
After selecting our drink, we would amble, hand in hand,
down to my place, her arm sometimes in mine, her head sometimes
on my shoulder, mostly our laughing faces gliding through our
city’s famous fog, two enormous, grinning eyes of some loose
giant cat. It was a grand aspect of our friendship that we
always agreed to wait until we got to my place before we started
drinking, which we started almost as soon as we were in the door.
Sarah had her own drawer in my closet; she stayed at my
place more often than not, though I am a gentleman and never
touched her in any questionable way. Since she was not in love
with me, I didn’t dare lose her friendship, for fear of losing
her along with it. She would cast her beret and scarf into her
drawer, remove her boots, and I would make myself comfortable as
well, and we would talk. The content of our talk at this point
is insignificant. Suffice to say that each word that passed
through the room during those conversations was a word that you,
also, have spoken or heard during a late night conversation in
bed with someone you have agreed not to touch for fear of losing
her. I know you all know what I mean.
But enough. I digress. The game! The game was this: as I
mentioned, for as much as a half hour after a train passed, my
items would make interesting noises that became modified by the
construction of my bedroom. Sarah and I developed an insane plan
one night, based on the intoxicated line of reasoning we used to
construct Thor’s Chimes. We decided that we would attempt to
create an audio sculpture out of the items in my collection. It
was her idea, really. She was always thinking that way, the way
that the nautilus decides to construct the next chamber of glass
instead of shell, and so, just before we decided to turn in for
the night, we would configure the items in such a way that the
train would produce different noises each time. We would, for
example, move the metal statues ever so slightly together and
balance a book on them, and we would open the umbrella skeletons
and perch them on the top of the bookcase, and we would try to
literally use the collection as an enormous symphony of possible
settling sounds, so that after the train passed, the objects
would be played by the vibration.
This was the theory, anyway, that led to the game. It
didn’t quite pan out that way. Oh, the symphony worked, all
right! After we set up what we thought would be the junk art
version of Beethoven’s Ninth, we dressed for bed, into which we
leapt with anticipation once we felt the twelve ten rock by. As
our eyes gradually adjusted to the darkness, we lay still,
listening for our creation, a smirking inch between us, newborn’s
smiles on our faces, and we heard the noises begin.
The settling produced vast notes of pitch, yowlings and
thumpings and squeakings, and the other noise was Sarah beginning
to chuckle. Is it funny? I asked, pleased that she was happy.
It’s not that, she replied, so much as what it sounds like.
Which is? I asked. Well, she snickered, casually curling up
against me, as she did sometimes, well, it almost sounds as if
you have a cat playing in the other room. A cat! I replied,
grasping her hand, which she allowed me to do when she was curled
against me, a cat! We set out to create an invisible symphony
and we create an invisible cat! How like us! I said. We work
so well together, she replied, running her hands through my hair.
You aren’t, she then said, you aren’t falling in love with me,
are you? I admit I turned away, but I was listening to the cat,
and I said No, as I’ve said before when we brought this up.
Good, she said, uncurling, because I wouldn’t want to hurt you.
I love you too much for that, and now we have an invisible cat
that needs our care. Don’t you think it helps that you don’t
have any mice here?
And so that was our game. We adopted, or created, an
invisible cat out of the noises made by statues and books and
umbrellas and croquet mallets and string. Every night, before
the twelve ten, we would reconfigure the collection to create new
activities for our cat, which we didn’t name, and the game was to
decide just what the cat was doing in the living room as each
noise was made. This is what we had, and this is why the day
after our Mozart discussion, when I told her about the Glink, she
thought it normal, although she couldn’t hear the Glink sigh, she
couldn’t feel the Glink’s melancholy, mouse-like eyes weeping
into her shoulder, and she wouldn’t, either.
I hope that this game gives you some insight into my
situation, gentlemen. Now you all know about Sarah, and how
important she was to me, and how we were so much alike, then.
Now I hope you see how me telling you about the game helps me
explain just what happened. A week after our discussion, I
realized that Sarah would never experience the Glink, because a
week after our discussion I found out that she had been feeding
the invisible cat.
It was her turn to set up the objects, because we had
modified the game, and we would take turns arranging the objects
so that whoever didn’t do the set up had to guess what the cat
was doing, and so she had me remain in the bedroom. When she
came in and crawled into bed beside me, I noticed a hesitation on
her part, as if she had left her watch at home one morning, and
couldn’t decide whether or not to go back and get it.
Did you forget something? I asked. No, she said. Did I
tell you that Sarah’s face is the face of the nameless girl who
danced with you one night and then was lost at sea? I think I
noticed the change in her that night for the first time (that is,
the change that comes from feeding an invisible cat) and she
said Why? Is your Glink or whatever telling you I forgot
something? Isn’t that what you call it? It is, I replied, and
no, the Glink isn’t here right now. The Glink doesn’t come into
the bedroom for some reason. Oh, she said, but nothing is wrong
with me. Then she turned onto her side with her back facing me,
which is, to me, the equivalent of building the Berlin Wall
between me and Sarah, and I grew angry. Finally.
I couldn’t believe it! It was simply a mysterious
transition, but that night, for some reason, became Waterloo,
became Leningrad, became the essential unexpected defeat. Her
back was solid rock, the backside of Mt. Rushmore, tragedy out of
comedy, and her reaction to my simple question had a mewling
crawling out of the living room that was enough to cause her wall
to become soft, a plush wall, and I had no idea what had
transformed her into a golem in the first place. I tend to walk
away from statues, especially when they are so dear to me, and so
I decided to do something that I’d never done before, and as the
twelve ten retreated into the whistling background, I retreated
from Sarah and threw back my covers.
As I got out of bed, the Berlin Wall came down, and she
looked at me, and I smiled a little half smile, the kind you give
to the mother of the child who has just spilled his milk on your
silk tie. Where are you going? she asked. Don’t you hear the
train? I do, I answered. But it’s not loud enough. I need more
vodka. But . . . but you can’t get more vodka, she said. You
never get more vodka! Without looking behind me, perhaps fearing
that I would lose my upper hand like Orpheus lost Euridice, I
exited the bedroom, and Sarah’s cries of protest mingled with the
whistle of the train.
When I crossed into the living room, I felt the Glink again,
mouse-like and speckled, and it was sitting in an old chair that
had been my grandfather’s, and I looked over at it just in time
to see the Nile carved into its face by a single tear, and just
in time to hear it whisper a sob. As the Glink whispered, my
bare foot fell into a bowl of cream, white flashed between my
toes, and I jumped back into Sarah, who had come behind me.
You’ve stepped in the cream, she said, feebly. What is this
cream here for? I asked. For the cat, she whispered. The
invisible cat? Yes. The invisible cat? Yes. The invisible
cat. YES.
How can you feed an imaginary cat? I bent down to pick up
the bowl and steamed, stamping my foot on the carpet to dry off
some of the sticky cream. Sarah leaned against the wall, film
noir wise, and reached up to stroke a hanging croquet mallet as
if it were some dark flower. I see, she said. Just because I’ve
taken to feeding the cat, you have the right to mistreat me.
You, you and your Glink. Leave the Glink out of this, I said.
What? Leave the Glink out of this? Leave the Glink out of
this? How the hell am I supposed to do that when you won’t do it
yourself?! Now calm down, I said. You’re overreacting. Sarah,
we created that cat. You know that. The cat is nothing more
than a few strange noises. Some strange noises made by some
strange objects. A train, a few books, some plaster statues,
some hammers hanging from the ceiling, these are your cat. My
cat? she said. Just some hammers and plaster? Here are your
hammers! She snatched the hammer like a choke-chain, pulling it
down with a muffled, metal thud, and then the next like a grape
vine, hammer after hammer until Thor’s Chimes were just some
croquet equipment again.
I was speechless. And, as you all know, the Glink was
getting agitated and sadder, crying now, a lost bear cub of
sorts. Fine, I finally responded. Fine. The chimes were
getting old, anyhow! Old? she said. Old? You know what’s
getting old? You know what’s really getting old? I’ll tell you
what’s getting old! Old is us! Old is what’s going on here!
Old is the fact that you are not normal, because you have some
imaginary being watching you, and you hang hammers from the
ceiling, and you paint me and stay with me when I’m sick and cook
me meals, and you are so weird and funny, and you are so, so, so
in love with me, even though you know I am not in love with you,
and I can see right past you, don’t you understand? You cannot
be in love with me, because you are my friend. My friend! Don’t
you understand? You’re too nice for me to love you, too good.
Don’t you know how things work? But never mind. Never mind
that. That’s not the worst part. The worst part is that you are
so in love with me that you won’t even admit it to me, because
you don’t want to face the fact that everything that you love
about me is what you’ll lose if I love you back. And, the other
worst part is that I let this go on, because I cannot be in love
with you, because I am not good enough for your love. That is
what your “Glink” is, you bastard. I can see right through it
without even having to see it! So take down these paintings of
me, and let the cat starve. I don’t care.
Can you believe that? She honestly told me that I am in
love with her.
I know this sounds strange, but there was no uncomfortable
silence after that little confrontation. Instead, she went and
got dressed, called a cab. I picked up the bowl of cream and put
it in the kitchen, threw it out the window, actually. Another
interesting thing happened then that I really should mention. As
you can imagine, after this exchange, the Glink paced back and
forth in the living room, peering at me through onion eyes and
mooning and sighing. As the last drop of my third shot of vodka
crawled down my throat, I caught a small whistle from the living
room. It was the Glink, and its whistle was the sound of an
empty chariot, the sound of a barren womb, the sound of a missing
pet, the sound of a sad dog or a giant sloth. The sound was
shaped like a slug, and as it tapered down into the canyons of
sadness from which it had been borne, Sarah’s outline appeared in
the doorframe, an aura surrounding her that was some kind of
perfect cookie cutter. Did you hear that? she said. That must
have been the twelve ten. It’s twelve twenty three, I said.
I don’t know when her cab arrived. I went back to bed, and
that was the last time that Sarah spent the night at my house,
the last night she and I played the game. But there’s more,
Sirs.
I had a dream the night before last, that my father and I
traversed a shore lined with rotting manuscripts and old, rusting
seashells. He was in his grey pea coat, and he had a grin on
under his mustache, and it was telling me that I shouldn’t move
to the city, that I should stay in the old town. After a moment
of discussion, during which I explained to him with a waist-
level salute that I intended to leave despite his protests, a
white statue appeared before us, a sculpture of lace and snowy
velvet (if there is such a thing), and it had Sarah’s face. She
handed me a white rose with three petals, and she touched my face
with fingers that melted against my skin, and she turned and
sobbed. “What was that all about?” I asked my father. “You
fool!” he replied, “can’t you see she’s in love with you?”
This does have something to do with why I’m here today,
gentlemen. You have consistently been impatient with me. I will
get to the point, but I must Get to the point. You see?
So, I had this dream, and, as you all know, though none of have ever enjoyed the Glink’s presence, those of us who sing
in the company of the soft and heavyhearted Glink often see
dreams as direct and justifiable Morse code. This dream, to me,
was a sending. And so I plan to tell her what I found that
night, which is why I have come to you. But surely you must know
what that was, gentlemen, for why would I be here unless what had
happened had happened? I awoke from this dream, this intrusive
juxtaposition of symbols and words, and I had the realization, I
heard the twelve ten blow by like a foghorn carried by a giant, I
felt the house shake, and I heard the cat, I heard the cat
prancing about in the living room, a dancing marionette of
disattached ghost limbs of sound, but there was no cat, there was
no cat that I had set up, because the game had ended, and the
Glink sobbed, and the cat shrieked, and the sad-eyed Glink
screamed in terror, and that’s why there were no mice, because
she was right, she was right, she’s always right.
And I sat up at the silence.
And I got out of bed.
And I walked in to the living room.
And the Glink was dead, its baleful eyes empty, its mouse-
like body torn from its head by invisible claws, by a hungry
creation.
So you see? I do. That’s why I’m here. The Glink is dead,
gentlemen, and I need your help, your help, please.
My Glink has been killed by a cat.
May I have it back?
