Out of This Stony Rubbish

The cave's vault acts as a natural amplifier. The speakers, dozens of them, tiny and rigged across the narrow shelves of stone, all of them feed into the player. It's thin, touch screen blurring in places, smearing electric color in the corners.

He likes to blast Tchaikovsky.

He hears it when he's over the hill, down where the road is breaking apart with each new spate of rain; he hears it when the wind is right and he's crouched down in the shell of the gas station, looking for the evidence of rats on the concrete floor.

"Hanta virus," he murmurs. "Only in the shit, though."

Once he tried to kill a cat. He had plans to eat it. This, back in the faded days, right after. The animal, rail-thin and cornered in the cave, crouched down. Its fear filled his nose with the sharp stink of piss. It looked at him, ears folded back, with eyes that made him think of the past, of Muffin Pumpkin Tigger, and he couldn't do it.

So instead he brings the rats up from their holes in the desert and lets them loose in the cave for the cats to find. There are two of them now, both yellow and ragged-looking. They're skittish. They hide inside the piles of gutted computers, peeking at him with coins for eyes.

Every day he blasts the 1812 Overture. Each day is like the last and so he doesn't know if he's dreaming, or if this is life, the awful repetition of life. In an earlier dream the chickens were hungry. In a dream inside that dream he picked prickly pears and fed them the seeds. He burned the tiny spines away with a palm-sized blowtorch. He hummed as he did it, conducting the orchestra with his tongue inside his closed mouth. He has a bunch of them back at home: chickens, prickly pears, blowtorches.

"Williams Sonoma." Sweat gleams at his hairline. "Crates full, liberated from a broken-down truck."

Liberated. A funny word. It was once an important word but now it's just another map of letters, another bit of language eroding back into its semiotic dust. He thinks that once upon a time, this word was a license to kill: to spill blood, to gut morals, to cut out ideals like tumors. He thinks a lot about words. He hums and arranges them into piles in his mind: once upon a time there was a boy. Once upon a time there was a war. The boy outlived the war. The boy turned into a man somewhere along the line. The man lives in a cave.

That's right; it's a man-cave. A laugh-track drifts to him down a long corridor of years.

There's a can of Coke. Bells ring throughout the swelling emphasis of the music, underlining the moment. He pries the can out of the loose rubble. He wipes the dust off the logo with his thumb.

Logo: from the Greek

lógos,

meaning

word.

It was a word once. It was a pictograph, a morpheme, a symbol that meant many things. To him, the logo now means

before

. Before it meant before

,

it meant

childhood

, it meant

summer

, it meant a sigh. It meant doing homework at the kitchen table, the neighbor's dog barking at the street, the TV on in the background.

The metal is hot. He pops the tab and levers it open with a click. The carbonation is gone. Inside, the cola has separated into water and a bottom layer of heavy sugars and dyes. He knows it won't taste like much of anything. He squats, the sun oppressive on his back, and holds the can to his nose. He takes a long breath. The first bloom of the can, a whiff of scent waiting to escape, is almost like the real thing. The Real Thing, Trademark. He sniffs it until his nose adjusts to the smell. He brings the can to his lips. He drinks.

It's like drinking soup. Hot, listless soup.

He looks out over the dry hills. The land is a million shades of delicate brown. The sky is washed-out, weak.

"But I don't have a bunch of chickens." He sips. "That was a dream within a dream within a dream ago, at least."

* * *

It's time for your bath

.

Once upon a time he spoke to her aloud. Once upon a time he did the voices. Over time his lack of talent eroded his desire. Over time he couldn't stand the sound of his own voice. Now his voice comes out once in awhile, sneaks out when he's not looking. It murmurs, crouching down below the level of his ears so it won't catch his attention.

He fills a basin with soapy water. He uses Ivory soap because he likes the memories caught inside the smell. By candlelight he takes her face apart, pulls the tongue loose, pops the eyes out of their sockets. He drops them into the water. He likes her eyes when they're clean, shiny, the stubborn film of dust polished away.

He takes off the black wig. He whistles as he works.

It's easier to pretend to be a girl. He longs for the harem fantasy but in ancient Egypt there were no men allowed in the harem, no men allowed to touch the queen.

I am a girl

. He takes her eyes out of the plastic basin, rubs them one at a time with a soft square of cloth.

I am a girl and it is my job to bathe the queen, to make her sweet-scented and beautiful for the pharaoh

. He washes the wig with rose-scented shampoo. The wig is made of real hair. In the old days, such a thing hid out on cancer wards, dreaming inside donation boxes. In the old days, such a thing was expensive. He rolls the wig into a towel, presses the cloth until it dampens. He waits until the hair is dry before be pins it to a Styrofoam head.

Do you want it to be braided?

No. Not tonight. I want to feel it on my skin tonight

.

He tries to imagine himself as a girl. He looks at his body when he passes reflective surfaces, glances at his face on the surfaces of water, but his recollection is shifty. He knows the color of his hair. He knows that it's curly; it's grown long, it bushes out around his head,

it's a Jew fro

. He pinches a curl and pulls it out straight. His eyes cross to look at it. Brown. Light brown with candlelight glints that suggest some blonding from the sun. He thinks of Sun-In, and for a vertiginous second it's the funniest thought he's ever had.

He sits back on his feet, laughs and laughs. His voice summons one of the cats out of hiding. It creeps forward, small and yellow with stripes and dirty white feet, looking up at him, such a coquette with tawny eyes dilated and the masked face tilted just so.

"Hey." His voice fills the cave. The space takes hold of it, strokes it into depth. "Kitty."

It hunkers down and watches him.

"Where's your friend?"

The candlelight flickers in its eyes, flashes metallic green.

"So we aren't talking now?" He pours water into the doll's mouth, swabs out the cavity with a rag folded over his fingers. "I see."

For now I am the girl. I am shy and quiet, humbled by such ethereal beauty. My lips tremble with the fear of speaking

.

The cat's tail swishes.

"Are you looking for water?"

It stretches out its front feet. He puts the rag aside and wipes his hands. He holds one out. The cat gets up, creeps forward, sniffs at his fingertips. Whiskers twitch. Its nose is cold and wet.

"You've never let me touch you before."

The cat's nose bumps against his hand. The whole of his face relaxes into a smile and it feels strange, foreign within his flesh. He reaches out to touch the fur between its ears and the cat flinches. It whirls around, runs a short distance away. "Come here, kitty."

It looks back at him, hopeful.

He sets the eyes aside. "You want to watch me? Okay. You sit over there." He washes the tongue and places it next to the eyes. "You stay over there, I'll stay over here. Fair?"

The cat hunkers, its tail coiling round its feet.

Out comes the vagina. He drops it into the soapy water. He props her knees up and against a pair of rocks. With patience he soaps up the loosened patch of pubic hair. The cat watches, seated in shadow, eyes flickering.

He tries to sink into the fantasy but the cat's eyes are on him, measuring his worth. Restlessness kindles in a space just above his right eye, the same old place, frustration blooming there and drifting down through him, drifting with the languor of ashes. He wants to get angry. He thinks of flinging water at the cat,

cats hate water, it would run away.

But beneath his restlessness is longing.

I'm a guy washing a doll

. Tears burn in his eyes.

That's all

.

* * *

What happened?

He doesn't know. He has only pieces of the world that was, fragments of memory.

He sits, knees drawn up, in the shade of a boulder with a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli. He's prized it open and eats the soft packets of pasta with a plastic fork. It tastes artificial, like some scientist in the Chef Boyardee laboratory sensory-mapped the flavor of ravioli, but he or she (or ze) didn't do a very good job because this was the only job he or she (or ze,

gotta pay

all due respect to the gender continuum, now

) could get. The pasta itself is like paste. He doesn't remember what tomatoes taste like, or beef.

The mind doesn't remember taste

. He squints.

It only remembers if something tasted good or not

.

He remembers the earliest news. Revolutions breaking out all over the world like some kind of disease. The internet, vectoring freedom far and wide.

And then...

He leans his head into the stone and closes his eyes. The silence of the desert, of big lonely places, holds him. Once upon a time, it soothed him.

Once upon a time there was a boy, though he was really a man who felt like a boy, this boy-man; he went to college even though the world was starting to soften, to pull apart and feel strange, like something left behind.

"Mom," he says.

How could you let me do it?

He turns his eyes skyward, knows that his parents must be dead, his little sister, his few friends from the old school days.

How could you let me go off, to the other side of the country, knowing the way things were?

The sky remains blue.

"There are only so many monuments to build."

He has them, outside his cave. Down the slope and around to the back, away from the plume of runoff generated by him when he cleaned out the chicken coop, a circle of stones. Half of them were already there. He spent the first winter out there, a rarity, snow falling down from a blinding white sky, sticking to his shoulders. Picking out the stones. The snow, musty inside the dust, a strange sharp cold flavor melting on his tongue. He pushed the stones into place.

The ring, just big enough for him to sit inside cross-legged, surrounded by names pecked into the stone: Melissa.

Melissa your sissa

, his mom used to say when he was small, her stone between one reading Father and one reading Mother.

He knows their names, but he doesn't want to see them in this place.

His

place.

Jodotha.

The dog

. Gaga and Sylvie.

The cats

, and both of them gray tiger-striped girls; he always loved the cats, loved their compact size and sweet voices more than Jodi, who was big and dumb and too excitable. Brian, Matt, Jason; boyhood friends, guys who forgot him long before he graduated high school but those old memories were tender, lost moments of carefree days, so he kept their names in his circle. As time passed, he scratched in more things:

if we don't do them no one will; the smell of green frogs at midnight, because downtown girls know what they're doing

, obscure one-liners out of his past, links with people and places and times that are all dead.

He takes another bite. Chews, even though the pasta is so soft that it doesn't need much chewing. He looks down. The sauce, so red and thick. Tasteless.

In college things turned rotten. The government remained closed-mouthed to the end. People got sick. It wasn't a plague, there was nothing biblical about it. There were riots.

He puts the can aside and fights the rising tears. A wave of nettles floods his face, hurts in his sinuses, stings beneath his eyelids. He holds himself still. His tears and his muscles struggle against one another. The world blurs.

Bones in the body?

"Two-hundred and six."

Muscles?

"Six hundred thirty-nine, approximately."

Teeth?

"Thirty-two if the wisdoms are intact." His knees pull up to his chest. He rests his cheek on them and starts to rock. "Thirty-two permanent teeth. Twenty deciduous." He swallows. "Baby teeth."

His chin quivers. He presses it down on his bony kneecaps.

Thunder mutters in the distance. He looks up. Dirty clouds move over the hills and drag a gray curtain of rain. The drops evaporate fifty feet above the ground.

The power went out. The dark came in sections, erasing blocks of the city.

A group of kids on his floor wanted to wait it out. By then half the campus was a ghost town, students with duffel bags disappearing, classes abandoned without explanation. In a way that was the scariest thing, how the rooms turned into tombs.

Every night they stood on the roof and watched the city burn out. As the last lights went under, they still told themselves that it would be okay, that the national guard would show up even though it was almost summer and the heat was brutal, and they slept in the tunnels during the day. The water mains shut off as people made cisterns out of bathtubs.

He presses his heels into his eyes.

Chromosomes in the human cell?

"Forty-six." He presses his quivering lips together. "Twenty-three pairs."

* * *

He gets up each day and stretches. He rules the desert. Each day he does this. Someone has to.

Here is my scepter.

He is alone and so he is king; lizards and snakes and chickens and scorpions are his subjects. He sits in the corner of the cave's mouth and eats eggs scrambled on a propane stove. He smells the scant layer of dew as it evaporates.

Here is my robe of state.

He stands at the cave's low entrance and watches the sun fade from the sky. It's hot. The heat shimmers up out of folds in the distant dusty ground and lies to his eyes.

"It says I am water," he murmurs. "It says come. Drink."

Once in a while, on the yellow line, he will find the remains of a campfire. Sometimes there are prickly pear rinds too, empty cans, the bones of hares. Once, at dusk, on his way back home, he stood at the top of a hill overlooking the road and watched the distant moving dots of bicycles meld into the shimmer. He shaded his eyes. The dry air is tricky. It shrinks the miles.

How close did they come?

He walks back inside. The wind follows him and blows dust onto the backs of his ankles. The stone walls are cool where the sun doesn't touch them.

He bypasses his makeshift kitchen, past the tangled piles of wire and gadgetry, pushes deeper into the dark. At first everything is green, shimmering as the sun leaks out of his eyes. He waits for the shape of his bed to creep out of the dark, first a corner and then the rumpled blanket, the slumped pillows. He crouches down, takes the mp3 player in his hands. He turns it on. His teeth sink into his bottom lip.

His finger traces the same circle over and over again. The clickclickclick of the touchwheel hums into the silence. Light frosts the planes of his face. He thinks the calendar inside must be off, that it must've lost time on its long journey from the past to the present, because

Three years isn't enough time. It can't be. I feel too old. I am too old

.

He puts the player down. He sits cross-legged below the ledge that is his threshold, perched on an old chair cushion, watching the sunset colors flare to life.

His thoughts wander back, circle around to the girl. She's in the back, in the darkest part of the upper cave. She has her own bed: a twin mattress covered in cartoon sheets, her head cradled in a red velvet sofa pillow. He found the pillow inside an overturned camper. She's turned on her side, knees bent. She wears a silky nightgown to bed. He keeps her covered with a fleece blanket. He tells himself that she is tired, she works nights after all.

"No."

He gazes at the sky, rapt.

I am the pharaoh

.

The sky cools to ash behind pink streaks. He turns on a song. He closes his eyes, cranks up the volume until his ears pulse.

She is the girl

.

* * *

In order to perform, he must imagine things the way she would imagine them:

Inside her own skin, she is cold. She's cold and he's there to warm her up, that's his job, to stoke up the fire and cover her with blankets until the shivering melts away.

She likes it when he gets under the covers with her. She wants him to hold her close, to curl himself around her. She says

hold me

. He does it until he starts to sweat.

She doesn't think of her breasts as perfect even though they are. To her, they are just breasts. To him, they are a promise of paradise, a dream within the mind of a comatose civilization. Her breasts are too big, too full, for his hands. Under the covers with her, smelling woodsmoke trapped in the fibers of the blanket, he holds them, long skinny hands gripping. Her nipples are getting hard, nuzzling his palms, even though they are always hard.

His eyes close. He concentrates on the feel of her flesh, the weight of it. Her skin gets warm. His breath quickens.

The apocalypse fantasy never gets old. Funny. It should, given the circumstances. He changes it up, though, turns apocalypse into snowpocalypse.

They are in a cabin, in the woods, surrounded by a falling curtain of snow. They're wrapped up together in the blanket against the chill.

She thinks about his tongue in her pussy. She likes that, his tongue. She'll get wet if he licks her. She'll get wet, her clit will swell. She'll squirm. They'll get hard together.

He ducks under the blankets, backs down the slope of her flat stomach. He leans his forehead on her mat of pubic hair. He kisses her vulva (

volvere,

he thinks,

"to roll"

) and holds her lips open. He pushes spit into her with his tongue and his breath puffs back into his face, smelling of deteriorated silicone. He licks, swirling through the moisture.

He imagines her moaning. She moans. Sometimes she is silent and he concentrates on the roughening sound of her breath, the rise and fall of her ribs. Today she is not quiet. No one does it like you, she pants. Put your tongue in me. Stick it in.

His cock throbs, trapped between his hipbone and the ground. He feels his pulse squirming around in there.

I'm gonna

he thinks. He scrambles over her, pushes her legs apart with his knees. Her hips are stubborn. He sits on his heels and pushes them with his hands, feels resistance in her old joints. He leans over her and aims the head of his cock at her split-slicked hole.

I'm gonna

. His eyes close. Her skin sticks to his belly. He breathes through his nose.

I'm gonna

.

She's dry. He spits into his hand, does it once twice three times, smears her cunt with it. He works up some slide. It's hard going. He wishes for some eggwhite but the eggs are too dear.

He's inside.

He doesn't think about her as he fucks her. That fantasy is gone. Each thrust puts him deeper onto a new place visualized as a sandy beach curving out of a river. It's piled with junk. His breath quickens at the sight, rasps in and out of his throat. He climbs up inside the dream, suspended in the net of his thought. Once upon a time everything was a connection:

she and I, we both grew up with Coca Cola Ford automobiles Disney Chicken McNuggets the taste the flavor the images they are the same, in her mind and in my mind

. He ascends the trash heap, dizzy with the fumes of pleasure. He finds rock like blackened melting snow, old soda cans, upholstery like dead skin, discarded laptops.