>From the archives of the Hallmark Greeting Card Company, finally released under the Freedom Of Information Act: here is a rejected internal from Hallmark’s short-lived and controversial Ultra-Specifics Card Range:
21st BIRTHDAY CARD FOR A WOMAN WITH EXCESS FACIAL SKIN
Dearest Pugface, grown-up now
But it seems only weeks
Though time is a burden
Like your neck and your cheeks
>And so when the clock came she wasn’t ready and all she heard was voices from the front porch hidden from her by a thick glass door so what they said sounded like megaphone instructions from a sports day across the river where the water carried tone perfectly but not details of what the sounds were and so even though she was expecting the clock she wasn’t quite sure it really was the clock and she had been attacked in her own home before nearly ten years before certainly but it was a fear that never really left her so it caused some deep-held confusion to bubble up or burst or do whatever it had to do to appear suddenly clearly in such a real way before her that the men may as well have been holding her down right then forcing a sock into her mouth and telling her to shut the fuck up shut the fuck up over and over even when she was quiet so quiet not even letting out the sob that hacked at her throat and that was the biggest injustice or true unfairness that they did not even have any goddamn rules any sense of fairness even though she did just as they asked and it is this fear that causes her body to freeze now even though the two men on her porch are just here to deliver a grandfather clock from an antiques shop she had bought two days before and they really were very nice men because she had spoken to them when she bought the clock and they offered to deliver it even thought they did not usually deliver and perhaps they did this because she did not have a car or maybe it was because she really loved the clock so much that she had to buy it even though she knew she had no way to get it to her house and that was real love or a real need or whatever you really want to call it because she was willing to own it even though she knew she would never see it again.
>1. The “Thak”
2. The Faux-Biface
3. The Nu-No Head
>1. The “Grug”
2. The No-Head
>Some time ago, although not so long ago that things looked very different to the way they are now, there lived a family and, in particular, a young boy in the family, whose name is not important to the story, but if you should want to give him a name, why not something memorable, like Agar or Gaboo. These were not the sort of names people really ever had, despite what you might think, but if it helps you to place some “perspective” on this story, then go right ahead and assume that the world in which the boy lived contained swords or stone wheels or spacecraft.
Nonetheless, Agar (which is what we shall call him as there have been no objections nor better suggestions thus far) was an inquisitive boy, and was forever seeking answers to questions that no one had ever really expected there to be answers for. This made him something of a distraction to others, as he was forever seeking counsel on such matters as the whereabouts of his knees when he stood up, or where bats went during the day or crows at night. Indeed, Agar was seen—in the eyes of many who encountered him—as something of a nuisance.
While some of his questions could be brushed off with vague pseudo-science or folksy homilies, one particular question of Agar’s vexed—above all others—all who were asked it. It concerned, quite simply, the act of life, something in which all the inhabitants of Agar’s town immersed themselves in quite without worrying about its component details. What is life? Agar would ask, his little face scrunched almost into a question mark (an aspect of Agar’s physiognomy that most people found particularly irksome: that someone could facially manifest punctuation was almost more offensive than the question itself).
What is life? The more people Agar asked, the more vague and diluted the answer got. When he had exhausted the intellectual capacity of his own (admittedly mentally exhausted) family, he moved on to neighbours, to elders, to prominent members of the community. None could provide an answer. When, after even the leader of the town—a charismatic woman had assumed responsibility for the day-to-day running of the borough on the back of a campaign that stressed her proven and hard-earned “innate genius”—failed to provide Agar with even a semblance of an answer (the best she could manage was a sort of glottal groan that those around could only approximate as the word “hair”, which they were sure wasn’t right), a fund was announced to enable Agar to travel to the far side of the country where there dwelt a wise old man, whose wisdom, while only anecdotal, was at least sufficiently geographically removed to enable the townsfolk a well-earned rest from Agar’s annoying, scrunched-up face and all his whiny questions.
Before the day was up, the funds were raised, and it was agreed that Agar should begin his journey without fail. He left with the good wishes of all those in the town, and reminded that if he wanted to stop anywhere along the way, well, why not? There was nothing like taking a few days (weeks, months) to idle along and enjoy the scenery. And so Agar left, with a bright flame of curiosity burning deep in his belly, determined to reach the wise man and solve the mystery that had driven him forward at the core of his life for so long. But what were these mysteries when the greatest question—life—remained unsolved? He strode off with a solid purpose and an enviable speed.
And what of Agar, and the wise man? Did they ever meet? Did they discover the meaning of life? Well, that–as they say—is the question.
Nearly three months passed, and no one in the village heard tell of any news from Agar or the wise old man. Life in the town had become quieter, certainly, since Agar’s departure, and people no longer stayed home in the afternoons for fear of running into him. Whole families strode out confidently in the late summer sun, letting their heads relax, with nothing but a warm breeze to fill them. The leader of the town took to jogging, waving at all the contented faces she passed and soon the main street was full of flowers, tended to by simple folk with simple dreams. Everyone smiled. After a year, Agar was almost forgotten. Only his family had the occasional moment where they would sense some small part of the world had shifted out of place. But they had, by this time, formed a dance troupe, so they were usually too busy to start thinking.
>He has no friends, really. Just people who keep him occupied. He describes himself as hedonistic, because it sounds clever, and it means he gets away with almost anything. He’s not strictly handsome, but striking: in the way a good haircut can frame an oddly-shaped face.
He’s stacked against a bar, an outside bar that clings to the edge of an inside wall. Those around him listen. Like he’s a cash machine, like they need their symptoms of withdrawal. Like they have the privilege of his presence. He’s drunk, shape-shifting drunk. Soft and friendly, warm blood. His opinions are salutations to better times, a glimpse into the life he says he’s had. The well-cut jacket, the black shirt.
You only have to own a few things, he says out loud, but they’d better look damn good. He’s got a theory, you see, that you only ever have to hint. Imagination does the rest. Other peoples’, and your own.
He’s got a thick ring on his little finger, and a story hanging off it in flypaper strips. It’s about a night in a foreign city: a throbbing marketplace, spices and smells, a pair of charcoal eyes. Heat like a king-hit, mosquito nets and midnight sweat. Dawn with coffee and a salt-boiled balcony. Then the wistful look drains from his face, like his memories have returned to a bottom drawer. But he’s drawn them in, and they’re hooked, and they buy him another drink.
Every sentence is a new beginning: a seam of words from a sewing machine mouth. He knows what sounds impressive. When he leans forward, he shows his scars. Mistimed shiny lines: skin worms in the dim light. There’s a patch of razor burn on his throat that could be a vampire bite. But he’s a man with canines. To rip apart the meat.
He sees the one he wants tonight. She’s alone. She’s cruelly beautiful. She’s the only one looking nowhere near him. Sitting by herself at the end of the bar, head turned aside. He wonders how her body folds up. He wonders where her creases are. He wonders how to break her stony skin. Because this is desire. Always wanting more. Not the light, but from where the light begins. Because he sees the chance for another conquest. He sees the chance to take another piece of the world.
And he moves his eyes like a soft sound. Like a wet tear, cutting through nothing. He moves his shark circles, his luscious ellipses. He moves them past her body. He drinks her in; he feasts her hinted shapes and shadows.
She sees him now, and she moves her feline eyes. To rip apart the meat. His urge grows with her gaze, and he feels the swelling of his blood. In his eyes, in his groin. Unusual, this lack of control. This desperation. This weak-willed beggar who’s breaking his ribs.
She turns away, and he begins to falter. He loses his focus: a speck of mascara on her cheekbone. He’s stumbling, as she moves the skin below her dress. As her inner layer shifts away. As she gets up from her seat. He can sense he’s missed his chance. It’s nothing, but it’s everything, like losing a memory. A moment of promise gone to waste. And no one will ever know, but her. She is his fault line of frailty.
So he turns back to the bar, back to the open slates of more receptive strangers. He leans in close to their open faces, and he starts to tell a story of decadence and scar tissue.
But he knows now. She knows now. That he lives, he breathes, he exists. Underneath all of this, he still shivers in the cold. In his head, like everyone else’s, is the distant rumble of death. A fear of the unseen. She knows he is ferociously fallible.
He stares at the light sheen of liquid coating the bar, at the wet patch of foam around his elbow. He tracks his head for far-flung memories. Exotic, syringe-sharp.
He should find her, somewhere out in the night. He should let her know he doesn’t care. But he doesn’t. He takes a drink from an anxious hand, and moves himself closer to the warm fire of false familiarity. He opens his mouth. They wait.
>With the narrow-in narrow-out of vision and splendid conversation, I keep myself regularly upright, much as a ship with swaying ballast combats the vagaries of the open ocean. Slow-dancing down a taxi-line, slow-grinding to the shoulders and hips of a dancing body-mass. Smiling out into the banished night. No stars above me. A list of my planets: Earth, Neon, Fluro, Halogen, Filament.
>The rivulets raced each other down the outside of the window. They went smoothly over their well-traced paths, gathering other drops on their descent: recruiting troops for gravity’s march. If it had been dusty, like it used to be, rain would be a welcome novelty. Like it used to be: dust caked like a skin, water tapping like a sculptor’s hammer. Dry earth stripped, old layers left surprised and raw.
But no more. This whole town was a living thing, too fluid for bones, too transient for identity. The rain came, and no revelations came with it, just the smooth flow of one thing to another. She let her focus relax, and she saw the rain on the glass, then her own face. It was something she knew too well. Features that slid into background noise. Her well of feelings.
A bowl of old soup lay untouched on her bedside cabinet. The unstable atmosphere had lent pockmarks to its surface, clotting it into something volcanic. She had meant to empty it, but it had remained, like an old and stubborn thought. Her legs felt chalky under her nightdress; when she moved them together they sniffed like corduroy. All around her, this desiccative cold.
She longed for the mosquito-heat of long ago, spiralling like smoke, reaching under clothes to tickle your skin and sweat. Heat that was bright and joyous, the celebration of an endless season.
She licked her lips, and pressed her forehead to the window. The glass gave in with a small bump. She closed her eyes, and the water on the shore came to her, the shore that washed beneath her window. Her thoughts were rippled tide foam. Something would change, she thought. Something must.
>Taisun Smith was reading a book, his head wedged up on a pillow, light swaying out from a long thin lamp above his bed. He blew a slow puff of air from his mouth, as he was wont to do in times of frustration. His eyes strained with the words; they seemed nothing more than a black-and-white steeplechase. He tried to make sense from the shapes—the sticks and bowls and dots thrown together—but he couldn’t. He let his gaze fall through the lines of print, sightline dropping like a pinball through the gaps, jostling and rolling until it clattered to a halt at the foot of the page, resting on the 2 printed in the bottom right hand corner. He stared at the fine weave of the paper, imagining the tiny patchwork of fibres that held it together. He looked over at his wall clock. Three minutes thirty—this was how long the book had retained his interest. A new record. He closed the book with a familiar snap, a noise that echoed like a laser off his bare white walls.
Taisun Smith lived in an accommodation complex known to the outside world as Ivory Towers Apartments. When the outside world first hears the name, it immediately conjures up visions of sleek, modern studios, filled to the polished rafters with genuine intelligentsia, imagines deep discussions on rooftops with vodka martinis, polished glass surfaces and private gyms. When the outside world finally does lay eyes on Ivory Towers Apartments, however, its premonitions are brutally shattered. The premonitions are so brutally shattered, in fact, that they never really recover; they end up in a dusty bar somewhere shouting at their shoes, wondering where it all went wrong.
Ivory Towers Apartments failed to live up to its name in a myriad of ways. The colour of the building, far from being ivory, had taken up residence somewhere between misty grey and mouse vomit (the latter being a hue with which residents were inevitably acquainted). There were no Towers to speak of either, just a large, oblong brick building that seemed to have a very strained relationship with the terms gravity and mortar. Right at the zenith of this architectural anomaly, Taisun Smith had made his home. Apartment 103.
>
I left the cabin at sunrise on March 19, 1878, never to return (except half an hour later, after I discovered I had forgotten my hat). I walked some ten miles to the train station, whereupon I boarded a steam engine to New York. Of course, train travel in those days was not the luxury it is today. I shared a cabin with no less than 30 other men, and we were provided with only three chairs.
We all agreed to play a game of poker to settle the matter of who would get the seats. We used our neckties as gambling chips, a decision that roused consternation among some players (a tie-less neck, of course, was thought to represent skulduggery among the lower classes). Luckily, one thing the train service wasn’t short on was cards, and the 40 packs that were provided to each of us as we boarded serviced our needs more than adequately.
As we began to play, I realised that I had never played poker in my life. I began to struggle against the 30 others, who I was sure had all played the game before. Just as I was about to curse my isolated upbringing, a young brown-skinned man of about my age, sitting next to me, reached over and turned my cards up the right way.
“Thank you sir,” I told him. “How very kind of you to help a novice such as myself.”
“Not a problem,” said the man in a peculiar Irish-African accent of a sort I had not heard before. “Glad to help out a fellow who looks down on his luck.”
I must admit I may have looked a little more roguish than the other men in the cabin, owing to the fact that I was wearing my father’s best suit, which had accompanied my father through the bear attack that had so tragically taken his life.
The young man introduced himself to me, and I to him, then him to I and me to him. His name, as far as I could tell from him telling me, was Patrick Ollinger. Unfortunately for Patrick and I, the poker game was won by three finely dressed gentlemen of approximately the same age and fine-dressedness as Patrick and I weren’t.
We wandered the train for half an hour or so, looking for an empty carriage, eventually settling on the luggage compartment at the end of the train. I sat on a paisley carpetbag, while Patrick chose a large wooden trunk, covered with velvet.
“Patrick,” I asked him. “Why are you going to New York of all places?”
“I’m going to stay with my aunt,” he said. “My parents can’t afford to look after me, now that they’ve bought another house.”
“How many houses do they own?”
“Thirteen.”
“No wonder they can’t afford you.”
Patrick explained that he was travelling to New York to stay with his grandmother, who currently only had one house. I told him the story of my life so far, up until the point that I had told him about my life so far. Patrick kindly invited me to stay with him in New York, as accommodation was one eventuality I hadn’t prepared for.
The train arrived at Central Station by the next evening, during which time Patrick and I had become firm friends. We were standing some minutes on the platform before we realised we had in fact taken our temporary seating with us. Having no luggage of our own, we agreed to hold on to the carpetbag and the trunk until such time as the owners came to claim them and we couldn’t hide them quickly enough.
Neither of us had had anything to eat since leaving Vancouver, so we made our way to a cafeteria opposite and diagonally across and along a little bit then around the corner and up the road from the station. The menu contained many strange foods we had never heard of. Unperturbed, I ordered myself a serving of Slack Jacks and Patrick a Flappy Jim.
“Where does your Grandmother live?” I asked.
Patrick reached into his overcoat and pulled out a smaller overcoat. Inside was a slip of paper with the address on it.
“17th and 24th Street,” he said.
“I thought she only had one house,” I said. “Surely she can’t live on two streets?”
Before Patrick got a chance to answer, our food arrived.
