krizmuz-dot-cum all ye faithful

From: ecvv

"Grampa. Tell me about Krizmuz," Sam said.
     It was cold, Dixon’s feet were cold, and the air was thick today; the wind turbine on the roof of block 45-731—he could see it on the window screen—was sluggish, congested, as if the crude oil-coloured air were crude oil—more words from the distant past—like “Krizmuz”: "Crude oil" was something he'd heard about when he was a kid, a story about a king who turned everything he touched into slimy, black oil.
     "Krizmuz," he said shifting in his chair, his lips having trouble with it, like putting on an old pair of trousers. He gazed into the fire for a second. It was a coal fire—a real coal fire. Well, the coal wasn’t real, but the fire was.
     "Yeah. Krizmuz,” Sam said, getting up from playing with the cat and going over to the screen that was a window and a screen—the weather forecast changed colour—to red, with a streaming banner: 'SANDSTORM ALERT: 24/12/2324—gusts: 100-120 km per hour expected over next 24 hours.'
     “Mum says it had toys and things—Krizmuz. People gave out toys." The cat moved into Sam’s vacated chair and stretched. It made a sound like an overloaded motor and folded up into a ball the size of someone’s head. It was a genTech cat: a cross between a robot and a genetically-reconfigered rat. It looked like a cat, meowed like a cat, but it wasn’t really a cat, any more than the meat in the meatballs they’d had for dinner was real meat.
     “Well... Krizmuz was more than that,” Dixon said, at last. “There were Kriz-muz lights… and Kriz-muz movies.”
     “Kriz-muz—Krizmuz, Kriz-muz...” Sam said in sing-song voice moving closer to his grandfather. He was a wiry little lad—small for his age and he couldn’t stay still when he spoke, as if his whole body were conducting what was coming out of his mouth. He sat down on the floor beside his grandfather’s chair, his face, his big eyes, looking up—his implant flickering, a band of sub-dermal points of light dancing across his forehead.
     Like a Krizmus tree, Dixon thought. "Tree" was another word Dixon hadn't spoken, or even heard, for a long time. "There were—toys. That, I remember. I mean... I remember being told that. And singing, and food, lots of food."
     “What's it mean, "KRIZ-MUS?" Sam said.
     "I don’t know—money. Getting things. I forget—"
     "You mean you've forgoogled it. Mum says you’re, ‘Baron of Urls.’"
     “I'm not that old. Yet." He shook his head and closed his eyes and the ancient search engine he'd been implanted with (when he was a lad not much older than the boy at his feet) slowly kicked in. It made him draw in his breath and hold it for a second, till the dizziness faded—and there before his eyes were the words "Krizmuz,” and "Krizmuz Day,” and an old spelling of it, not with the K and two Zs, but: C-H-R-I-S-T-M-A-S.
     "So, what have you got?” Sam said, shifting round so his feet were closer to the fire. “Mine came up with nothing…” His hand absently brushed against a sudden sparkle of reds and greens above his left eye. The cat was with him now, stretched out, soaking up the infra-red from the fireplace.
     “Let's just see what Wiki says—” Dixon said, sitting up straight.
     “Wiki?”
     “Ancient philosopher—before your time…”
     “Read it to me.”
     “I will. Just hold on a second… Okay, here we go—here’s a bit by a guy named Assange the Fourth…no, the Fifth… Kriz-muz or Krizmus (with an 'S') started out as ‘Christ’s Mass’ which comes from the Middle English Christemasse and Old English ‘Cristes mæsse.’ ‘Cristes’ is from the Greek word ‘Christos’ and ‘mæsse’ is from Latin ‘missa’ (the holy mass). In Greek, the letter X (an aspirated velar stop /k!/) is the first letter of Christos, and it, or the similar Roman letter X, has been used as an abbreviation for ‘Christ’ since the mid-16th century. Hence, ‘Xmas’ is sometimes used as an abbreviation for ‘Christmas.’”*
     “Sam spoke up then: “I thought X-mess was something, dirty—naked women showing off there titties and stuff like that—”
     Dixon slowly shook his head. “Well, you’re wrong. You’re thinking X-rated, maybe — when they look through your clothes at airports and see things they shouldn’t—they used to x-rate you, too. For broken bones—” He suddenly grimaced and said, “Ahhhh. Scheise!” holding his head in both hands; his eyes were shut tight.
     “Signal’s gone,” he said, at last. He was breathing hard: “Friggin’ piece of crap,” he said, thumping the crown of his head. He snapped his fingers and gestured over to the kitchen; Sammy got to his feet and came back with a bottle: his grandpa’s medicine.
     Dixon took a long drink, leaned back, and closed his eyes. Sam could see them moving around behind his eyelids; they were like darting mice under a bed-sheet. After a few seconds Dixon started to speak again. “Here we go—another entry, Much later—more recent. About a hundred years ago, I guess… I’m not going to read this one, I’ll just play it for you. If I start to cough, slap my back, okay?”
     He seemed to fall into a trance; his chin fell onto his chest and a low, rasping hum emerged from his mouth. His lips hardly moved, as if the sound were coming from an old metal device deep in his throat.
     But Sam knew what was really happening—sort of—it was coming from Grampa’s own voice box (his mum had explained it to him once), all to do with a special way the circuits in the muscles of his throat changed so they could act like a machine… and say what the old search engine was playing across his grandpa’s eyelids:
     “It's the cusp of 2214, and it's time to take a nano sec or two to look back, cut through the spam and tweet ya’ to the true meaning of Krizmuz.
     “If we hack back to the beginning we see that it was the night before Krizmuz when it really took off: Winter Solstice—ground zero: where B.C. and A.D. came together, time-wise—a calendar clash of the Old and the New—a Testament to innovation, but that’s whole other story…
     “Needless to say, it was a night to remember—silent, calm, all is bright, deep and crisp and... even in the desert, it was cold. Brightly shone the moon that night, (Tho' the frost was cruel…) desktop wallpaper-picturesque, finely pixelated—the flares of Saddam's oil wells in the distance, beacons in the night.
     "We know now, of course, how it really started—the seed of it, so to speak. We must backtrack a bit, flashback to nine months earlier: Vernal Equinox, to be exact… it went like this:

'It’s the middle of the night, the UFO swoops down out of nowhere, hovers over the hut in a blinding glare of pulsating lights, the rushing wind driving the sand and camels into a frenzy. Gabriel beams down—or did he come down a chimney? He plays a tune on his trumpet and says, to the poor little woman huddled in the corner ( Or did Mary dream it all? We don’t know for sure): "The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also, that holy thing—which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God...'

     “'That holy thing!' What a name for a kid, fancy growing up stuck with a name like that! Later on they changed it to 'BabyJesus,' which sort of has a better ring to it. This close encounter has come to be known as 'The Annunciation,' which is where the word 'Nun' comes from—Mary being the mother of all Nuns. It should have been called the 'Cosmic Insemination,' or something like that: 'the Genetic Infusion Of The Otherworldly'—God’s gift to women.
     And here’s another account of it in a book called the Qur’an—from Sura 3, Verses 45-51...

'Behold! the angel said: "O Mary! Allah giveth thee glad tidings of a Word from him: his name will be Christ Jesus, the son of Mary, held in honour in this world and the Hereafter and in the company of those nearest to Allah: He shall speak to the people in childhood and in maturity. And he shall be in the company of the righteous. She said: "O my Lord! How shall I have a son when no man hath touched me?" "Even so,” the angel said, “Allah createth what he willeth: When he hath decreed a plan, he but saith to it, 'Be,' and it is! And Allah will teach Jesus the Book; and the Wisdom, the Law and the Gospel, And appoint him a messenger to the Children of Israel, with this message: "'I have come to you, with a Sign from your Lord, in that I make for you out of clay, as it were, the figure of a bird, and breathe into it, and it becomes a bird by Allah's leave: And I heal those born blind, and the lepers, and I quicken the dead […].'"

     (A crackle and a buzz came out of Dixon’s throat then, and his head jerked back, as if he’d been electrocuted; the cat scurried into the corner.)
     Dixon mumbled for a bit then started speaking again: “So, you can imagine, whatever way you look it, when he finds out about this, Joseph is really pissed—Mary up the stump, and all—on account of being cuckolded by God—Allah, or Klaatu. or ET, Morkenmindy, the favorite Martian—whatever… then one night, there’s poor old Joseph, lying there in bed, in a cold sweat, as this ghost of Krizmuz Yet to Come tells him: 'Get on your bike, mate... come on, pull up your socks! Be a mensch!' So he does the right thing and marries the poor girl. And to make a long story short: they get a donkey and end up in a barn just outside Mecca.”
     Dixon’s voice changed into a dialect that puzzled Sam; he did a quick search and discovered that it was an "Oxbridge Accent”—whatever that was.

"And we saw in the form of an ineffable pillar of light descending, and it came to rest above the water. And we were afraid and shook when we saw it. And we cannot speak about the brilliance of the star of light, since its radiance was many times greater than the sun, and the sun could not stand out before the light of its rays. And just like the moon looks in the daytime in the days of Nisan, when the sun rises and it is absorbed in its light, so also did the sun seem to us when the star rose over us. And we got ready with our whole encampment, and with our provisions, and with the pure and holy gifts, those that we brought out of the Cave of Treasures of Hidden Mysteries, in which they were deposited previously by our fathers, and we went forth in great joy, our hearts exulting to come to the place that was commanded to us, to worship the vision of the star of infinite light. And the star, our guide, our good messenger, our perfect light, our glorious leader, again appeared for us. And we had no need of the light of the sun or of the moon, because their light became diminished in its sight, and by night and by day we walked in its light, exulting and rejoicing without distress or weariness."**

(...buzzzzz—crackle—hissssssssss…):

     “Dateline, A.D. zero: The Cattle Shed. All is calm, all is bright. It’s a silent night—except for the lowing cows, and the shepherds, the faint slap of high fives all round, Joseph flitting about, boiling water et-cetera, et-cetera.
     “And Mary finally gives birth—(buzzz…..hiiiisssss…)—in the straw and the muck from the animals. And just at the right moment the UFO swoops in again, sits right there over the stable, hums a bit, shoots out this gigawatt beam of cosmic light… Next to the manger, there’s a couple of generals, and captains—salvation army blokes with kettles on chains, playing tambourines. Mary Krizmuz and Joey Krizmuz are basking in the glow of the pulsating spaceship—visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads… and Babyjesus, smiling, and quietly burbling; mewling and puking, no doubt—but we won’t get into that. He was a good lad by all accounts.
     “It turns into quite a circus, eventually—with Santa Claus coming down the chimney; Harry Poppins going up. The three wiseguys, Bathysphere, Milkier... and, Friendliest of them all, Casper—show up with their camels. Bringing gifts of course: Gold, Franks‘n Beans, Zoozoo's petals… along with an iPod, a bottle of perfume from Macey’s (or was it Gimbels?), a rattle shaped like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle...
     “Kris Kindle of the Amazon drops in, the Grinch, Amahl and the Nightcrawler, Walt Disneyland. Gabriel starts jamming with the Little Drummer Boy—Elvis drops in with his posse... and then the party really heats up: Frosty the Snowman starts dancing with Round John Virgin; Tiny Tim throws away his crutches and there he is, with a great big smile on his face tiptoeing through the poo bits…
     “Shepherds are rustling up a mess of lamb-kebobs; washing socks and Krizmuz stockings... then in comes Rudolph the Red-Nosed Rainman, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid... eleven pipers piping, ten lords a leaping. Felice Navidad and her special friend, Tannenbaum of Giliad… it’s all there, if you want to check the facts—digitized, analog punch-carded, youtubed…. controversial sure, the political implications of it all, but documented, nevertheless.
     “The Krizmuz lexicon is an inextricable part of our culture. The story lives on to this day in such expressions as: ‘Is that a Yule log in your pocket? What, the one that’s big as me?’ and ‘Thank you. Thank you very much.’ ;’We like Sheep’ and from ‘Krizzy Carol Gets Scrooged’: ‘Well, cut me throat and rip me liver if I tell a lie…’”
     “But one thing we know for sure, it's a wonderful life, and Jesus loves me, this I know… and '...every time a bell rings an angel get's its wings' 
      (click—sssssssss...buzzz—hissssssssss…):
      "Frohliche Weihnachten, Joyeur Noel… Buon Natale. And, as Lenny McCardy once said, ‘All you need is Love dadadadada…’
     There was a screech of white noise, erupting from Dixon’s mouth; a crackle, a splutter...
     It all suddenly stopped; Grampa Dixon’s eyes opened and he sat upright in his chair (Sam had never seen him look so imposing, so, alert). He blinked for a second, and stretched, as if he’d been asleep, or in a coma.
     Dixon scanned the room with it’s glowing fire, the huge window screen that looked out on a sorry excuse for a view and the cat that really wasn’t a cat...
     and his beloved grandson, Sam, whose mother was really just another illusion: a genTek mock-up of a mother—but he hadn’t told Sam that yet, and he probably never would.
     His eyes came to rest on his bottle of Scotch and when he found it, he gave it his full attention.
     The cat was back, rubbing against his leg, now, meowing in a perfect, replica voice of a meowing cat.
     “Grampa!" Sam said. "Are you alright?”
     “Yeah, I’m fine” (he took a deep breath)… I guess.” After a long drink of whiskey he said, “What did I say—at the end?’
     “It got all, kinda’ confusing—”
     “Yeah, well. I’m not surprised. It’s been—distorted over the years: the message. You know—signal to noise ratios and all that... They teach you that in school? Shannon's Formula?"
     Sam shook his head; he was stroking the cat now, scratching its belly. He looked a bit disappointed.
     “I suppose after, what? Two-and-a-half thousand years? It’s like those steps in old Walmarts—worn away where it really counts. You google this guy’s name 'Jesus Christ' you get what? A billion; 10 billion; a trillion hits? A trillion to the power of a trillion?” He took a deep breath. “I tried it once and my head locked up.”
     Sam frowned: “Grampa! They’ve fixed it since you were a kid. I mean, if I do that…” He paused for second as he used his own search engine (his whole forehead came to life in a pulsing splash of colour and the cat bolted for the nearest dark corner), it just says ‘infinity.’ What’s that mean: ‘infinity’?”
     Dixon looked up at the ceiling. “Forever and ever, I guess. And everywhere. As the lawyers used to say: ‘In perpetuity throughout the universe.’”
     “The name of a—little baby?”
     “Yeah. Well, not just any baby. You got to remember; something—magical happened, way back then… just a baby, sure, but, it was bigger than that. He was a special baby. A baby that grew up to be a very special man -- and he’s been… in the news, I guess, ever since.”
     “Bigger than the Beatles?” Dixon nodded.
     “Bigger than Elvis?”
     “Way bigger than Elvis.” He closed his eyes and took another long drink, and this time ended up draining the bottle.
     The huge window screen flickered and the streaming text changed colour, back to white (the sandstorm alert was over) and the time/datline changed too: to 12:00 A.M. - 25 slash 12 slash 2324.
     “Good Lord, I remember that—the date!” Dixon shifted in his chair. That’s, Krizmuz Day! the date: 25 -12… it’s Krizmuz day! (buzzz…..hiiiisssss…) Hallelujah!
     “What was that?”
     “I don’t know—it just, came out of nowhere…”
     “Grampa. Are you sure you’re alright?”
     “Yeah I’m fine—just... the cupboard over there. Get me that other bottle of my, uh, medicine. And you get yourself one of those special, vintage bottles of Coca-cola! It’s Krizmuz, for crizzake—”
     “Wow,! Cool! It’s Kriz-muz! Alright!!”
     That was Sam’s first Krizmuz, but not his last. It was, however, the last one for Grandpa Dixon.
     But Sam never forgot that night for as long as he lived: all the noise that came out his grandpa’s mouth, all the crazy joy along with the gibberish—and as time went by, and the gauze of his life filtered out that noise—the slag, if you will, he came know the truth of it all…

"[...] and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of all of us!"**

     And so, as Little Sam observed (24/12/2324) let us all rejoice and shout out: “Wow! Cool! It’s Krizmuz! Alright!”
   
Hallelujah!!
Hallelujah!!
Hallelujah—Hallelujah—Hal-le-lu-jah!!

— Michael Hale
Copyright © 2010
_________________________________________________
* from: Wikipedia
**Quote from: Revelation of the Magi: The Lost Tale of the Wise Men’s Journey to Bethlehem by Brent Landau (HarperOne, 2010)
**Quote from: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

"[...] he can't live without the 'The White Album'"

“A good chef can make a memorable meal from the most modest of ingredients. A good writer can do something of the same sort. "A Fold in the Tent of the Sky" demonstrates Michael Hale is a good writer.
     The ingredients of the story seem improbable at best, and downright silly at worst. He starts with a batch of psychics. He adds a dash of intrigue and a generous portion of questionable motivations. He lets them simmer in an exotic setting. The result is a delectable book that is, for want of a better term, truly novel.
     Hearing a description of the plot for "A Fold in the Tent of the Sky" might be less satisfying than reading the recipe for an exquisite dessert. Suffice it to say that the psychics are hired to be a sort of remote control intelligence agency. During the course of their employment, it becomes apparent that they can observe events happening far away. In space and in time. One of them realizes that manipulation of time can be quite profitable, and goes to great lengths to prevent his colleagues from finding out.
     Hale suggests a way to commit the perfect crime: commit it in the past. If you prevent a rival from being born, you never have to worry about him (or her) causing you trouble later in life. Of course, tampering with the past can have unintended consequences in the present.
     The psychic named Simon doesn't mind that, at least not until one of the manipulations erases all traces of The Beatles. He can live with wiping out his colleagues. But he can't live without ‘The White Album.’”
— L. D. Meagher, CNN
Read more…

Paperback Edition: coming in January 2015
ISBN: 9780062385222; ISBN 10: 0062385224
On Sale: 01/20/2015
William Morrow - Harper Collins

rope trick

Photo montage: Michael Hale

Try to imagine a three foot-long piece of rope floating horizontally about seven feet above the ground—thick, hemp rope, the kind you see in ship yards lashed to bollards, or in Soho art galleries attached to bits of rusting, welded steel. (They are usually framed by track lighting and badly refinished hardwood flooring.) This one is nowhere near Soho, or a shipyard—it hangs suspended above the parking lot of a liquor store in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota.
     It's a hot, cloudless day at around two in the afternoon. A breeze has come up, but the hovering length of rope doesn't move.
     At this moment its shadow falls perpendicular to the lines of paint that mark the boundaries of parking spaces. The lot has recently been repaved and the white lines are crisp against the tuxedo black of the new asphalt. There are no cars in the parking lot at this time.
     A man who is wracked with indecision is thinking if I phone her right now I might catch her heading out the door for work. But he senses that this impulse is somewhat misguided, and he puts it down to the surge of caffeine from a recent cup of lukewarm coffee.
     Try to imagine the complex caffeine molecules locking like LEGO blocks into the slots of some esoteric matrix of the man's brain chemistry. (Let your mind float tangentially enough to see it as a multicolored, animated simulation; or an illustration with arrows, captions and cross-sections of brain cells—a page from a Scientific American article, perhaps.)
     It is foolish of the man to think that talking to her now will make any difference at all. She has told him outright that their relationship has no future. But it is not caffeine alone that changes his mind about making the call. He keeps falling into the memory of the shape of her nipple in his mouth, the damp coolness of it grazing his cheek...
     Turn your attention back to the rope: No one has noticed it yet. The parking lot is not often frequented; the liquor store is the only viable business left in the strip mall and it does most of its business between five and seven o'clock. The neon COORS sign is barely visible in the glare of the midday light.
     There is a beauty to this place that would have made the caffeine-addled man's forbears gasp: the fastidious uniformity of the lawns among the parking lots; the abundance of trees: mature oaks, maples, and butternuts lining the boulevards; the illusion that a solitary pedestrian is safe in his solitude, that the sun and odorless air are not lethal, but benign.
     For the duration of this hypothetical visit, the great great grandfather or great great uncle, say, would forget the dull ache of his obliterated teeth and more than likely sink to the knees of his matted woolen trousers and say a few words of thanks—to God, the God he assumes has brought him here. He would reach beyond the sumptuous curve of the concrete curb of the intersection, where it dips to accommodate wheelchairs and baby carriages, and with a tentative finger touch the warm, pewter blanket of recent blacktop. He would be persuaded, for an instant, that he is indoors. There is no soil here, no dirt. Only this odd, black, sun-baked floor with its ribbon of concrete (like perfect pie crust) butting the thick carpet of grass. There is no smell of dung, bad breath, or sweat-marinated linen in this place. No scent of lilac, or hawthorn. Not an insect or bird in sight.
     Back to the young man now, and his obsession with this particular woman. In the air, there is a ripple in the electromagnetic field fanning out across the square miles of the man's community. It has been triggered by his speed dialing of the woman's cellular phone number. (He is somewhat bereft; for he believes, in his solipsistically adolescent way, that his hesitation has sent her out the door and on her way to her job in the city—she has told him she works for a large brokerage firm in Minneapolis. The afternoon shift—which didn’t make sense at first, but he has come to accept it for what it is. The way he has come to terms with traffic congestion and his need for coffee.
     Like a pebble tossed into a lake his call is just one of many thousands of EMF pulses saturating the air of this Midwest community. Somehow, this solitary signal, like a sperm cell finding its way to the egg (You may be tempted to digress once more and conjure up an image from a "The Learning Channel" special about the miracle of birth.) has reached the phone in the woman's purse.
     The purse is on her dining room table. She is in the bathroom, and the chirp of the off-the-rack ringtone—and the screen that is glowing now, bathing her imitation tortoiseshell compact in a pulsing, mythic, neon—is lost in the flush of the toilet and the rush of water blasting from the vanity faucet.
     She actually works at the liquor store, the store in suburban St. Paul strip mall where the three foot-long piece of rope hangs suspended in bright sunlight. She tells herself that her part time job is only a temporary position; she is planning to go back to school in the fall. She is hoping to be accepted into a Masters of Business Administration program at a college in Illinois. The expensive phone was a present to herself; she believes in the rituals of creative visualization. Mastering the multi-functionality of the fancy cutting-edge phone is a prefigurement of her future success in the business world. The shoes she wears, even to her job at the liquor store (the men she goes out with) all are calculated to redirect the flow of her life, move it in a positive direction; she sees these fine adjustments to her daily comings and goings as a form of nomadic feng shui.
     She is thinking about the man who is calling her on the phone (and how relieved she is that she dumped him when she did) just as the water level raising the ball cock in the tank shuts off the valve. This verbal connection is lost on her: the risqué allusion that it conjures up—it would be more surprising if it wasn't beyond her ken; Alicia knows nothing about the workings of a toilet.
     She remembers the feel of his tongue circling her nipple, and that he works for a prominent accounting firm out in St. Louis Park; a fact which, more so than the memory of his tongue, places a counterweight of regret on the scale pan of her decision.
     The ends of the section of rope floating seven feet above the suburban liquor store parking lot are cut cleanly, as if by a precise and exceedingly sharp razor blade. The length of the rope at thirty degrees Celsius is exactly one meter. The temperature of the air around the floating rope has risen point seven degrees Celsius since the man dialed the woman's cellular phone number. This change in ambient temperature has made no appreciable difference to the length of the rope.
     She hears the phone, at last, and answers it.
     "Hello?"
     "Hi. It's me, Jack (not his real name)—"
     "I was just thinking about you—"
     "Thinking about me? Isn't that weird? So was I. Thinking about you, I mean. So. Something on your mind? Something you wanted to say?”
     This puzzles her—the circular nature of his approach to the conversation. "You called me," she says, after a moment.
     "Yeah. I was going to call you and, well—I did. So. How are you?"
     "Fine, I guess.”
     There is a crackle on the line for an instant—an attenuated, digital stutter. Cell phone interference. This is a throwback to the noisy, scratchy, phone conversations her great grandmother used to have back in the nineteen-twenties, the nineteen-fifties. "I was just leaving—"
     He hears what sounds like a modified, exasperated sigh—at least that's how he perceives it. Again, it could have been static.
     "I'll call you later, okay? From work—" she says then.
     “No. Don’t call me from work.”
     “Why not?”
     “I’ll be busy.”
     “So, if I call you from somewhere else, you won’t be busy?” She is remembering why she stopped seeing him, now. His voice has triggered a memory of dread; an unspecific dread. The way he would exhaust her, even when he was giving her pleasure.
     “Just call me from somewhere else, okay?”
     “I’ve gotta’ go. I’m late.”
     “lf you call me from work, I probably won’t pick up.”
     “Fine.”
     “Text me.”
     “What?”
     “Text me.”
     “Text you?”
     “Yeah. Text me and tell me you tried to call.”
     She tries to put body language into what's going out through the mouthpiece. She sighs again, deeply—she hopes it’s getting through to him this time: her eagerness to be somewhere else. An analogue representation of a sigh, a cartoon sigh (although she doesn’t think about it in these terms; she would never use the word “analogue”—even in the context of her own stream of consciousness.) “Let’s just forget about the whole thing, okay? To be honest, I’ve got nothing to talk to you about.”
     At the moment she sighs an uprising of thermal turbulence causes the rope suspended above the parking lot outside the liquor store to move. Not as you would suspect, up and down, or side to side; but within itself, so that the length of it changes. It compresses then expands no more than a millimeter. No one notices. No one has driven by in more than two hours; no one has come close enough to the parking lot to notice.
     The period of flexing is twenty-one seconds. Its shadow has moved since the man dialed the woman’s phone number; it is now 8° off perpendicular to the parking demarcation lines.
     The woman hangs up on him and turns off her phone. She puts the phone back into her purse and leaves the apartment.
     By the time the woman arrives at the liquor store parking lot the rope is gone.
Copyright © 1995, 2011 by Michael Hale

in camera

When Janice went back to the house — finally, after her lawyer had told her to — she wished she had brought a camera, or her mother to witness all this. There was a new wall running the length of the hallway, bisecting the foyer and ending at the staircase. Unpainted wallboard, the seams and screw holes bandaged, gagged with patches of plaster. Where the partition had been dragged into place, the hardwood floor was scratched with parallel grooves — like claw marks.
   "Which half do you want?" Frank said when he finally looked up at her. She had never seen his hair so thick, not since they'd first met. She decided it was the plaster dust giving it body, adding to the gray. "The side with the sun room, or the kitchen?" He finished a stroke across a seam with a flourish and the sound of the blade against dry wallboard made her think of the way he skied — his turns: tight, bum-wagging arcs, the edges of his skis digging till they found ice.
   "Jesus, Frank, you're crazy. You know that?" There was a burning, adrenalin flush running through her — she could feel the air going in and out of her lungs. She wanted him crazy, she realized then. Part of her wanted him doing things like this so their friends would have stories to tell each other about why she had left him.
   The night before, on the phone, she'd told him she wanted her half of the house and she regretted that now. She remembered fairy tales where three granted wishes ended in heartbreak — a slip of the tongue, words spoken in haste. Retribution.
  "What in God's name are you doing, Frank?"
  "Giving you what you wanted. Your wish is my command."
   For an instant she thought he had been reading her mind. Her words had set things in motion, pushed him over the edge. Her departure had unleashed some creature inside him that could do things like that — read minds, bend spoons. Take her words and fashion them into events.
  Frank put down the tub of drywall compound and wiped his hands on his jeans. He flicked a crust of it off the end of his thumb in her direction saying, "Do you want some coffee or are you here for the show?"
  There was plaster dust on everything; he hadn't bothered to cover any of the furniture — the aquarium water looked murky, the fish sluggish — but it made the room brighter somehow, like a hotel room at a seaside resort.
  He leaned against the door jamb and folded his arms; the hairs on them were flecked with white pollen sacks of plaster dust. Janice watched his eyes trace the length of the new wall. He was better looking now than when they were first married. In their wedding pictures he reminded her of one of the Bee Gees. Her friends, all of them, every one of them back then, looked like overripe fruit. Flower Power gone to seed: ruffled shirts and wide collars; cartoon ties; frothy sideburns obscenely pubic in the camera's flash. Her wedding dress had been a mid-thigh mini, and they had danced their first dance to some sappy song by the Carpenters. Something about angels; but she couldn't for the life of her remember how it went.
  In the pictures Frank's face, with it's hollow cheeks (made all the more so by long sideburns) seemed unexpressed, bud-like. An unfurled flag. She remembered it as handsome: trendily gaunt and angular, perfectly suited to the helmet of his thick black hair. And his body (skeletal, hairless, white as raw chicken skin) as the ideal rack to hold up the accouterments of fashion.
   She recalled that it had been raining when they drove away from the reception in their new going-away clothes, the shaving cream on the car windows spelling things they couldn't read. Frank had stopped in the parking lot of a Mac's Milk and used the soggy Kleenex flowers from the antenna to wipe it all off.


Three days later when she came back to the house with a camera she found that he'd changed the locks; so she went round to the back door and broke the glass with her elbow stuck inside her purse — just like she'd seen in a movie. The glass was harder to break than she had expected — tougher, more forgiving. Not at all like in the movies: glass made of sugar, friendly glass that didn't cut; chairs that crumbled like bread sticks over people's heads. The world of gingerbread houses, Hansel and Gretel.
   That night she lay awake in her mother's spare bedroom thinking about the new wall running down the middle of the hallway. She had taken the roll of film to one of those one-hour photo places. None of the pictures had turned out the way she wanted them to. The wall looked as if it had always been there, as if it belonged there.
  She got out of bed, padded out to the kitchen wall phone and called him. It rang five times but she didn't hang up. She left a message on his answering machine: "I'm putting the house up for sale. My lawyer says if you won't sign the listing he can get a court order." She could see him awake now, in their bed, slowing scratching at his chest, listening to her voice echoing down the new hallway.
  They were "joint tenants," the lawyer had said. Or "tenants-in-common" — something like that. Since the house was in both their names, she would need his signature on the listing.
  "Joint tenants." More fairy tale, lawyer talk. I put a spell on you. Power words. "Tenant-in-common."  Maybe she should leave him another message. She wondered what the recording tape did to her words — whether they got stale like bread or turned into something more potent like old orange juice. The clock on her mother's ancient avocado stove flipped over one of its little black pages and it made her jump. It was 2:36. Janice opened the fridge and looked in, not knowing why. For the light, she thought. The comfort of the light, the sight of her mother's food — there was no other fridge like it. If she'd been blindfolded and brought here she would have known it was her Mom's — everyone's fridge like a fingerprint.


  She was in her own kitchen — her and Frank's kitchen — leaning against the counter near the sink thinking her new blue suit jacket would end up with a line of plaster dust across the back of it. Frank was sitting at the kitchen table. "What do you want. I’m on my lunch break," he said, peeling an orange. When he shifted, the hammer in his tool belt rattled like something officious.
  After a time he said, "I got a call from your sister the other day — have I told you that already?" Janice shook her head. Frank had an obsessive fear of repeating himself. His father had died of Alzheimer's.
  He warmed his hands on a cup of coffee. "She's coming into town to see us. She thinks we're being — 'ridiculous' about all this," he said, raising himself up in his seat the way he did when he wanted to make a point about something. He was smiling at her but his eyes were watery, as if his smile were pushing out tears.
  She looked over to where he had taped a piece of cardboard over the broken pane of glass she'd broken to get in the house and wondered whether that had something to do with it — what he was trying to tell her with his strange smile.
  This was two days after she'd taken the pictures. He had called her eventually, curious to know whether it was she who had broken the glass in the door. They didn't need a court order, he said. He would sign the listing willingly. When he was through with the house, no one would want to buy it anyway.
  There was another wall now — an extension of the other one, really — where the door under the staircase used to lead from the sunroom side of the hallway to the kitchen.
  When he left her alone to go back to whatever he was doing she opened it and found wallboard again: new two-by-four studs and wallboard — the back of it this time. Dove-gray with the manufacturer's name stenciled on it.
  It touched a memory Janice couldn't quite place (the sight of seams showing where plaster has oozed through and hardened). She must have come upon it in the corner of another house somewhere — in the back of a closet or in an attic — seeing it in the light of day again: the other side of the skin. Ageless.
   Janice was drinking a cup of his coffee — her coffee, out of her coffee maker — and he was telling her, now, about tensile strength, compression, things like that. Frank was a structural engineer.
  "The only flexibility is in the paper," he was saying. "You cut the paper, it falls apart." Frank took a razor knife out of his tool belt, picked up a piece of scrap wallboard and scored it — lightly, gently, with the finesse of someone skinning a rabbit — then broke it in two with the fingers of one hand.
  The coffee was doing nothing for the dryness in her throat. She could see drizzle through the kitchen window beading up on the hood of her car and it seemed odd that so much moisture was only a pane of glass away. She refilled her cup and used the powdered coffee creamer; she wondered if it was made from the same stuff that had settled on all her dishes.
  The next day she came back with the real estate agent and watched as Frank obligingly signed the listing agreement. "I'm going to buy you out, Frank," she said even before he had a chance to look up from the paper. He just smiled at her and picked up the tool belt. He went through the dining room into the foyer and climbed the stairs.
  "Between you and me I think you better get this place looked at before you go doing anything rash," the agent said, looking up at the ceiling, following her husband's footsteps, listening to the chime of planks, the rumble on the hardwood floor above. Coming in the front door they'd had to step over a fresh pile of lumber out in the hallway. There was a line of holes spaced about two feet apart she hadn't noticed before running the length of the kitchen ceiling and out into the dining room.
  The agent was the husband of a friend of hers at work and he was going to give her a deal on the commission, given the nature of the situation — her wanting to buy the place from herself. He tested the kitchen floor, bouncing a few times with the tip of his tongue showing, and his shiny metal pen jiggling in his shirt pocket.


The day they put the "FOR SALE" sign up on the front lawn she presented Frank with an offer on the house. It was less than he had agreed to sell it for, but she figured she would give herself room to maneuver. He took the agent's nice pen, crossed out her figures and signed it back to her at the full price. "I'm not going to settle for anything less and neither should you," he said smiling past the agent.
   The agent just frowned, not getting his little joke at all and slid the paper towards her through the plaster dust and orange peel, right away saying "You have to sign it back too, remember, you both being the vendors. Up there where he changed it back to the asking price."
  Janice picked up the pen and put her quick scrawl right up near Frank's over the new numbers he'd written in, thinking it all through like a puzzle: me and Frank holding out for more. Then, in her mind putting the other hat on, the buyer's hat. Deciding what to do next.
  After a moment she said, "I can sign it back now, right? If I want to? As the purchaser?"
  "I haven't ever done it this way before," the agent said. "You want to think about it first? Look upstairs, maybe?"
  "Just tell me what I have to do."
  "What's your new offer? You going to meet him halfway or what?"
  "I just sign it again, right?"
  "Yeah, twice. No. Maybe it's three times, I don't know. Let me have a look at that." The agent sniffed then slid forward in his chair, straightening up and blinking at the paper on the table. Frank was leaning back, busy scratching at the underside of his forearm, at a white scab of drywall compound, his eyes fixed on the ceiling.
   Janice looked outside at the sun beating down on her patchy lawn and then at Frank, his thick hair — then quickly back to the window, at the glass clouded with plaster dust. "Once we settle on a price, I don't want you changing anything back, okay? Leave everything the way it is right now, okay? Frank?"
Copyright © 1995, 2007 by Michael Hale