By Darren Kaminsky
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Darren Kaminsky's novel, Sugar Spun Sisters, appears in serialized form every Monday right here on Me Three. The story follows the lives of five twenty-somethings living in Washington D.C. As far as the editors are currently aware, none of these characters work in politics.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
July 14
“Hurt me a little at a time.”
This house exists on a green island floating high above Washington D.C. The Washington monument points at it like a glowing white finger. To get here just head towards true North along the sidewalk in the sky until you get—Columbus-like—to some miniature of San Salvador; veer towards Sirius, the dog-star until you reach a row of houses entirely encased within a gigantic basket of tree roots. Our house is midway down the row, enshrouded in a carousel of sunlit leaves.
“Lose me a little at a time.”
Befuddled Nell fiddled with piles and piles of piles. She was taking them out, sitting in them, pushing at them like a bulldozer so that they’d conform to some pattern of organization that made sense nowhere but in her head.
Dani and I helpfully sat on her bed and supervised. All this was to go into two big green army surplus duffles. Her family are army green duffle sorts of people.
Their family tree is full of ornithologists who sang in barbershop quartets; paleontologists who ate frozen mammoth meat at The Explorer’s Club in 1910 and a few Suffragettes whose icy stares and frowned-upon-by-polite-society hats could be seen in the photos sitting on Nell’s desk.
“How’d that mammoth meat taste?” I asked her once after she’d once again told me the mammoth meat story.
“Pretty awful. Most of them couldn’t keep it down and several of the members wives qualified for membership just by trying.”
When we first moved in, Nell said she was going to write a household manifesto, that we were going to live like no other household had ever lived. It was nice promise and I was in the TV Dinner Room for the only Manifesto writing meeting. It was Nell and Kerran and they were so stoned that neither of them could talk. Kerran is not an ideal candidate for author of a manifesto and he spent most of the proceedings making Nell giggle. Kerran is a fucking giggler from way back and giggles all the time and sounds like Mugsly from the old Hanna Barbera cartoons.
On manifesto writing night something important was happening on the news and I had to tell them to stop their giggling so I could hear the TV and they wouldn’t so I turned the TV up almost as loud as it could go.
Consequently, that’s the only coherent part of the manifesto:
Section 2, paragraph 3: Members of the household will stop their fucking giggling in order to watch the TV.
There’s a big sepia-toned photo on her desk of her bearded grandfather and her turtlenecked grandmother standing in front of a large chitty-chitty bang-bang car outfitted with a tall mast and a huge sail.
Nell tells plenty of stories about her grandfather who was a paleo-archeo-anthro-ologist who spent a good deal of his time hunting for early man, especially in his earliest expeditions.
Early man was never found though her grandfather found the ancient pattern of a monkey in the desert made out of rocks and looked onto pyramids whose very existence was impossible and sucked in his breath to calculate how much dust and dirt would swirl over time to cover humankind’s most intricate cities, made of stones too big to carry and too big to cut.
Much of his work was on how the Mayan’s kept track of what was in their storehouses. “Like it or not,” he said, “warehousing is the key to advanced civilization. No food, no nothin’.”
Nell talks about him always in the present tense and she often starts her stories from the photos of him. “Oh...” she said, “...there? They had run out of gas in the Chilean desert and they built a mast and used sheets to make a sail and they threw out all that they had found so that the car would move quick enough to get them to water.
Nell’s grandfather, Bernie Cochrane, walks back into frame and wipes dust from his glasses and his lapels. He’s tall and skinny and pockmarked from the various exotic diseases he’s contracted. In front of an audience, he gives himself wholly over to the Midwestern folk popery of his persona and scratches the lancing tuber of his own quilled chin.
“They found these gray rocks,” Nell said, interrupting her own story... “And they had to throw most of them out...Months later, he’s sitting in his brown tweed suit at the Museum of Natural History and he describes these rocks and someone said, ‘Bernie, that was ambergris...’”
“What’s ambergris?” I asked.
“It’s something whales produce in their stomachs to coat foreign objects?”
“What sort of foreign objects?”
“Spearheads, beaks of giant squids, artificial limbs...Anyway, it’s worth a lot of money because it’s used in perfume so he threw out thousands of dollars worth of it.”
“But he got home.”
Back in the museum during a seminar, Bernie Cochrane called on a blond student, “Shouldn’t we be specific about these peoples?” his student asked him, wanting him to define the Mayans only in comparison to the Mayans, and Bernie answered, “Your question has an irritating sameness like ‘fast food” he said, but Nell knows that there was no ‘fast food’ then.
Could he have, standing in front of all those ancient artifacts and stone doughnut shaped calendars counting down until the end of time, invented the term? It made an odd sense, one of those things likely to be true because of its improbability.
“No one knows what their stories were,” Nell’s grandfather said, “how would we know? It was all, all of it burned by the Spanish. They could maybe have told us how they moved blocks of stone, where they came from and..” but Nell didn’t know the story from there and told us again about her grandparents flying across Atacama in a sail-car full of ambergris. In the sailcar, picking up speed and trailing dust, Nell’s grandparents felt so close to the ancient Inca and ancient Maya and whoever had come before than they did while standing in the ruined warehouses using their beaded strings to count off ancient non-existent parcels of grain.
In that car, Bernie Cochrane, had tried to guide them using an old astrolabe that he wore around his neck. “Toward Santiago,” he’d said to his wife reassuringly, and turned the wheel ever so slightly towards Vega as the celestial hemisphere blurred passed.
“Societies that can warehouse food can eventually develop Wal-mart, Bernie said via Nell.
“Don’t you mean Woolworth’s?Wasn’t it Woolworth’s back then?”
“Woolworth’s, Wal-mart, the Mayan storehouses: all of them so successful, all the same, what’s the difference? They’re all going to be gone. They’re going now. What we call them doesn’t matter. The role they play matters.”
If we warehouse, we survive.
At some point, Nell started ramming her stuff into the green duffles.
I walked over and picked up a pile and started to stuff it down the mouth of one of the green duffles and Nell pushed her glasses further up the bridge of her nose and said, “No, don’t put those in that one, put them in the other.”
“Does it matter?” I asked and she didn’t answer.
I walk over to another pile and start to pick it up and put it next to the duffle I’d just stuffed the other pile into.
“No, those don’t go in there,” she said. “Let me...” and she walked over and took the pile and stuffed it down the mouth of the duffle as if she was somehow doing something different than I would have done.
“You see? There...” she said.
“Yes, Of course,” I said and, of course, I had no idea.
Later, after the duffles were downstairs, Dani and I started sanding the floor in the upper kitchenette part of my room. I’d been using all the kitchen cabinets for clothing storage. I’d even turned off the refrigerator and had put a bag of charcoal into it so that I could use it for storage.
But, it still, no matter how often I’d cleaned it, smelled like rotting meat and I couldn’t use it for anything.
The flooring had been linoleum once but was now so decayed and so splintered that the plywood of the floor below was exposed. I ground the sandpaper in big sweeping circles and again and again with hoping to get as much off as possible. Finally, nearly at dawn, we had enough of it off to begin adding the deep blue outdoor paint and at around 10am, we began painting little yellow stars. Dani’s little stars were just blotches and I told her that I’d paint them myself.
Her face contorted in fury and she began to cry.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“You don’t trust me to do anything,” she said. “I’ve been up all night doing this and you won’t let me even make a star?”
“But, it’s not a star. You made a blotch.”
“The stars are blotchy. I made them and accounted for what they look like through the atmosphere,” she said.
After that we made all the stars blotchier.
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Darren Kaminsky is a writer living in Brooklyn. He can be contacted at sugarspun @ bigbagoftricks dot com.
© 2005 Me Three
