The Atomic Man Pt. 3: The First Egg

A familiar rotten taste in his throat and an uncomfortable humidity in his crotch tells Charlie immediately upon waking that he has slept in his clothes. The fierce midday sun glowers at him through his living room window where he is sprawled on the couch. Rising, he attends to his first drugs of the day. A tall glass of water, cigarettes, coffee's on the brew. Stronger coffee than the last time because each time he makes it these days he decides to put more grounds in, thinking, "Christ, do I need it."

The first egg feels soft and malleable, like muddy water in his palm. The tips of his fingers caress its shell as he moves it between his thumb and index finger, and cracks it against the lip of the skillet.

The neon lights revealing chipping plaster on the walls of a motel that charges by the hour, a consignment for hormonal burdens. Passions in faded rouge and teal walk drunkenly down a dingy hallway. The lights in their room are off and they stay that way as the door shuts.

The Atomic Man Pt. 2: Charlie In Love

Charlie remembers how the wan fluorescent lights in his kitchen struck her face and revealed acne scars like moon-craters. He'd never been so turned on by someone's forehead. It was explosive.

The powdered ecstasy prickled the back of Charlie's nostrils and he felt his toes lift off the ground. He wanted to grab her just then, dig his fingertips into the small of her back, and draw their bodies together tightly, like blood between glass slides. He'd observe her closely and magnify everything.

Without touching her, he felt their erogenous zones light up like Operation. Her breast in the hollow of his chest, his thigh against her crotch. His lips scraping the thin tendons in her neck.

He remembers as he sits, naked, on the end of his lonely mattress that night. His lust for the alabaster-skinned girl whose name he has already forgotten is grown cold and stale as the pepperoni pizza, three days old, which he prepares to eat. The bone-dry cheese peels from the crust like burnt skin and he looks out his window at a quietly smug moon.

"Sooner or later," he thinks, "I'll lose my mind."

Bones of Macchu Picchu Pt. 1

Jorge de Castenada chewed a hanging bit of flesh on his chapped lower lip idly. Having ridden since the now-setting sun was only a promising glow on the horizon, Senor de Castenada had succumbed to shallow contemplation. He was unconcerned with the unsure mountain path ahead. His thoughts lingered, like the hanging strips of dead skin on his lips, on the cacophonous trampling below him; the sauntering listlessness shared with his fellow riders like a jug of intoxicating wine passed wordlessly.

****

Manuel's shin bulged obscenely near his ankle, the shattered bone which he had tried to straighten with vines lashed around a tree branch flexed outward with every torturous step he took. He gasped in agony, and fought the urge to lie on his stomach and crawl the rest of the way up the rough shale. The open sores which wrapped around his bare torso like a torn shawl were a constant encouragement to stay on his feet. As he labored, he grabbed at exposed roots and resilient shrubs, drew comfort from them, feeding his own stoicism with theirs. The air was thick with tropical humidity and he sucked it into his lungs with difficulty; breathing warm syrup. The limestone dust hanging around him seemed to collect in his wounds and weigh him down.

In the suffocating tranquility a Rudyard Kipling fable intruded upon Manuel's thoughts. It involved a rhinoceros, a fearsome armored beast he had never seen. The rhinoceros, an arrogant and vain beast, removed his skin once to take a swim. A man put cake crumbs inside the rhino's hide so that when he re-donned it, the itching was maddening. In his efforts to scratch at them, he rubbed off the buttons which would have allowed him to remove his hide. So the beast was doomed to a life of wrinkles and irritation, which is why, Kipling wrote, rhinoceroses are such violent and cruel creatures.

The thought of a world where such fantasies took place uplifted Manuel. A blithe, saccharine land where pains such as his would only irritate and no one, animal nor human, knew to fear death. As a heron flew overhead Manuel amused himself by calling out to it:

"Hola! Fellow creature of the mountain, might you be so kind as to lighten my load a bit? My pack is heavy with firewood, and I would abandon it were it not for my fear of the coming night which even now creeps up behind the sun with murderous intent. Surely, if any of your relatives are nearby, you could carry a log between the two of you? I will meet you at the top, where we can share the succulent berries which I have gone to such pains to gather, and tell legends around the fire!"

The Atomic Man Pt. 1

(The other day sitting in class I thought I overheard someone say "atomic nights." This is the beginning of a story built from that phrase.)

Charlie couldn't get his bowl lit. He sat on the bare mattress in his bedroom, holding a purple lighter nearly out of fluid, trying to smoke the little bit of dope he picked up from his cousin last weekend. It would have been hard enough with the piece of shit lighter, but the ceiling fan was on, dousing every feeble flame he managed to coax from the sputtering lighter.

Charlie was getting angrier. Like idling at a green light. Nettles and stinging sweat.

He was tired of fugue days and atomic nights, blazed into fecklessness, nuked to sleep only to rise and face another inscrutable morning.

"Ahh, fuck!" said Charlie the Atomic Man, the housing contractor aging at quantum speed, 28 going on 40. He flung the lighter across the room.

An Abridged List

Must remember to stretch when I wake up.

Must remember to say "Bless You" when strangers sneeze.

Must remember to keep practicing my whistle.

Must remember to shave that weird hair on my nipple.

Must remember that it's all so funny.

Must remember to be grateful for misery.

Must remember the way the stars looked when I was drunk, like falling tears.

Must remember how happy that woman was when she found five dollars on the street.

Must remember: Mountains.

On a neighbor's front porch during a thunderstorm

"I know this black guy." Jason stood as he began to relate his story, eager for my undivided attention.

"He's a gangbanger, he used to hang a blue rag out of his left pocket, because he's a Crip. He could walk around all day and nobody would want to look him in the eyes." The tale picked up pace.

"I have this other friend, big fucking swastika right here." Jason slapped the spot on his bare chest, three times.

"We went to the beach in LA. He had his shirt off, he's a big guy." He knotted his shoulders to emphasize, looking like someone pushing a wheelbarrow.

"People would come up to him, ask him about it, make conversation. He talked to them, he's actually a nice guy. But it goes to show you, in this country, people are more afraid of a black gangbanger than a white guy with a fucking swastika tattooed on his chest."

A combination of driving through New Jersey, half-remembered dreams and frantic words scrawled in a notebook at 4 a.m. (Part One)

I awoke this morning stuck between sky and earth. As I began to squirm free, I realized I must have rolled over in my sleep and wedged myself into the horizon. For a moment, I stopped struggling and as I considered whether to go back to sleep I took a moment to appreciate the intimacy of the situation. My bed had been empty for some months, and the closeness of the eternal, inscrutable blue above me was comforting, though my back itched from the dirt. Half-imagined fantasies, like time-lapse videos of flowers, blossomed and withered in my sleep-drugged consciousness.

Several hours later I woke again. I was still ensconced, but the cool serenity of summer's dawn had given way to imperious noon: a bone-bleaching Sun had ascended to its throne and forbade a return to sleep. Licking parched lips, I propped myself onto my elbows and started to shimmy free. Scraping my knee against a sharp rock on the ground, I managed to escape, and set off in search of a cup of water.

Descending into a bowl-shaped valley, I saw a sprawling industrial town. Heralds of acrid smoke, burning plastic, rushed up the hillside to greet me. Great steam towers like ram's horns boring vertically into the earth emitted a drone which reverberated mightily throughout the town. Cathedral steeples in the distance roiled in the heat of the factories, like a reflection in dirty water. The whole scene was like an overexposed photograph, I could feel the dirt under my fingernails as I held it in my hands.