The Ambulances

The dream picked up somewhere in the middle, and Justin Williams was unconsciously fooling himself into believing that he had just been in a car accident. It was what’s known as a “fender bender,” really. The constituents were out of their cars, situated in front of the scene, and both were surveying: Justin’s car appeared to have attempted a dive under the other car’s front bumper, and both were leaking.

Then a conversation began, and, while they talked, Justin looked back and forth, from the wreck to the other man, who, dreamlike, moistly and luminously shifted from personality to personality: first a wife, then an old teacher, sort of; and then a boss, and then a wife again. Every shift was maintained on a common scale: a small-framed, unassuming, almost vagrant, minuscule being. The conversation went like this,

“Why did you—?” Justin sputtered with his hands on his head while looking over the recently conjoined cars.

“Why did I what?” the other man inquired impassively through the shimmering guise of the checkout girl at the drugstore.

“You went straight. What the—why?” Justin looked at the other man and dropped his hands, exasperated.

“Yes. I went straight. And you turned into me,” the man stated blandly with the head of Neil Armstrong and the body and garments of Mahatma Gandhi.

“But you had your blinker on.”

“I know.”

This made Justin pause and think, what the fuck?

“You had your left blinker light on—which means, ‘Hey Everybody, I’m Turnin’ Left!’” Justin shrieked this at a very attractive lady he had exchanged glances with in the grocery store two weeks before.

“I know what a blinker light is for,” the other man said, trying to raise his voice.

“Ok. Then why the fuck did you go straight?” Justin had a knot in his throat and started spitting when he spoke.

“Don’t curse at me,” the other man raised an arm and finger in protest.

“Hey I’m sorry, but, I still can’t beli—or understand, why you would have your left blinker light on when you intended to go straight.”

“You had your left blinker on,” the other man pointed out and dropped his arm.

“What? Of course I did, that’s because I was turning, asshole,” this was delivered with venom to the smallest version of Muhammad Ali Justin could imagine.

“Alright. If you’re gonna talk like tha—,” the other man stopped and breathed rhythmically to the faintly converging, distant sound of approaching sirens, “—oh good, here they come. I’ll just sit over here,” and he walked and melted and dissolved away.

“Wait, who called the cops?” Justin said this with difficulty, like his head was being submerged in petroleum jelly; the long howl of the sirens grew shorter and shorter, compressing the air with ever tightening, imperial, overlapping vibrations. The sounds /k/, /ŏ/, /p/, and /s/ thickened and solidified in the air, banged and bounced into each other, and rebounded toward Justin’s mouth.

He surfaced with his eyes closed, slowly coming into the bedroom he left eight and a half hours earlier. A siren passed outside his window, down the road beyond the hedges at the back of his modest backyard. First, believing the siren had been the alarm clock, he thought, she better not have set the alarm, but it occurred to him that the sound may be the boy, in his crib. As his eyelids gently parted, he recalled the argument from last night, over junior going to daycare today, and, while visually perusing the crap piled on the bedside table, he remembered that he had won, and he thought, he better not be in there. Another siren, coming down the same road and from the other direction, mournfully dopplered past and through the vulnerable parts of the hedges, sending ripples over his neighbors’ backyards and a gently rolling wake over his bed.

He rolled over, peeling off the covers, and lay on his back. He stared at the bleary ceiling and waited for junior’s hail.

He surfaced again after a brief interval consisting of his head being forcefully plunged into a bucket of greasy metal gears, and, inside his head right between his ears, the overwhelming whine of enormous overloaded electric motors. While waiting for junior’s call, he had rolled over the other way, so, now when he opened his eyes, he was staring straight into the electric sizzling red evil grin of, 9:08. Bastards, he said, hitting his wife’s pillow and sitting up. Must be one hell of a fire, he added and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He stood up slowly, creaking; he hustled his balls through his boxer shorts and cautiously made his way to the bathroom.

He stood in front of the toilet and, urinating, he stretched his stiff shoulders and sore arms. His legs bothered him more, and he tried to stretch them as well, but stopped when he realized the action introduced too many new variables in his already precarious aim. He shook himself off and attempted a couple of deep knee bends; on the way up from the second one he had to quickly grab the bathtub edge to keep from going face-first into the rim of the toilet. He gingerly stood, chuckling to himself and, walking out of the bathroom, he mumbled, Yeah, I know what she’d say, All that sittin’ ‘round on the couch is wearin’ you out.

He rubbed his eyes as he walked past his son’s door, and thought, I ain’t even gonna look. He waddled down the hall with his fingers working every orifice in his head, he walked through the living room, sidestepping several toys and a tricycle, through the dining room and around a tower of blocks that lay crumbled on its side. Then he slid into the kitchen and right up to the counter where the coffee machine kept its noble vigil. He prepared his coffee and listened to the air coming through the kitchen window. The coffee machine gurgled to life, so he stepped over to the window, raised it a little more, and put his face to the screen. That’s weird, he said, and thought, usually there’s cars up and down that road this time of day. Meanwhile, from the other side of his house and several blocks away, a siren was faintly spilling over the roof of his house, bouncing off his hedges, and trying to make its way through the trees surrounding the road.

He stood upright, stretched again, and spied a package of muffins next to the stove. He stepped over thinking, chocolate chip, chocolate chip, and, picking up the package, he said, Shit, and thought, blueberry, oh well. He ate the muffin in three bites and wandered to the kitchen table where the day’s newspaper rested, classified section up. He stood chewing over the paper and thought, I got all day. I’ll save that for later. From two blocks over, a siren swung softly through his kitchen and then quickly withdrew.

The coffee machine gurgled and sputtered the last of his cup and exhaled a steamy sigh of relief. He grabbed his cup and began dumping sugar and cream into it, stirring, and then stopping when he heard a siren he knew was coming down his road. Its whine gradually bloomed to a growl as it approached. He threw his spoon at the sink, in his rush to the front window, and it rang on the counter edge, spun brilliantly in the air, and bounced to a stop on the floor. Sipping his coffee, he rushed through the dining room, stepped over the collapsed tower, breezed into the living room, circumvented the tricycle, and threw open the curtains in time to see two ambulances, from opposite directions, cross in front of his house. He thought, holy shit, what is this? Whose house are they going to? One ambulance continued further down his road, and the other stopped in front of his neighbor’s house, two doors down and across the street. Sipping his coffee, enchanted, he watched the spectacle. The siren stopped. The driver got out and marched up the front walk while two other paramedics clamored out of the ambulance. They opened the back doors and retrieved a gurney with collapsible legs and two large, black equipment bags. The driver hammered on the front door with his fist until the neighbor opened it. The neighbor said, I didn’t call for you guys, it may be Miss Mary a couple of houses dow—the driver grabbed him as the other paramedics rushed up the steps to assist. The driver said to the man, “Come on now, that’s good, yer alright, ok now,” as the three paramedics hoisted him up and carried him struggling down the steps. The neighbor shrieked, But there’s nothing wrong with me—and they slammed his back hard on the gurney, knocking out his breath. They wheeled the gurney down the walk and the driver held down the man’s neck and shoulders with his forearm while the other two strapped him on. The two paramedics loaded the gasping neighbor and gurney into the ambulance. They climbed in after and shut the back doors. The driver climbed in. When the door was shut, the siren started. The ambulance jerked and sped howling away.

Now I wonder what the hell that’s about, he said, taking a few steps back from the window. He thought, better check the TV, and he hunted down the remote. He switched on the TV and thought, the cable’s probably out again. The television warmed up and presented the crispest, brightest nothing, and he sighed, Fuck. A siren chased another down the road behind his house, and he felt his bowels wrenching and his scrotum crawling in the preamble to nervousness and anxiety. He shuffled to the dining room and set his coffee cup on the table. He stood, leaning on the table, in a relative silence for a short moment, and he tried to grasp something so tightly—a siren turned and approached down his street. He turned and jogged to the living room. The ambulance passed his house and stopped in front of his next-door neighbor’s mailbox. It jerked twice then backed up rapidly and swung around into his neighbor’s driveway. The corner of his house blocked his view, so he ran into the den and pulled up the blinds. Two paramedics were unloading the equipment, and he could not see the front door. The paramedics with the gurney stopped at the bottom of the steps and waited, looking up at the house. Surely they wouldn’t treat Miss Williams that way, he thought. The paramedics started laughing and one pulled a control baton from one of the bags. The third paramedic stepped into view with his neighbor held high in a bear hug. Her face was bright red and she appeared to be screaming so hard, she made no sound. The paramedic walked the woman to the gurney and sat her on it. Her face relaxed, the color returned to normal, and she started to cry. When she refused to lie down, the paramedic bounced his baton off her forehead and she went down on her own. They strapped her on the gurney and threw it in the back of the ambulance. The paramedics climbed in and, when the siren started, the ambulance squealed out of the driveway. He started to shake a little; he wandered into the living room—when he stopped walking, he felt like he was going to topple over and expire. A siren on the back road accompanied another siren coming down his road. He looked out his front window and watched the shrieking ambulance pass and continue down the road. He stood dumbfounded and wavering in his living room. Several swirling sirens invaded from the kitchen window and another turned down his road. He said, It just, and thought, it just doesn’t make any sense. Why would—and his front door swung open and slammed against the inside wall. The first paramedic, Frank, charged in and grabbed him. Two other paramedics with a gurney followed; the orange lettering on their bright blue uniforms read, Jude and Ralph. Frank grabbed him around the throat and kicked him twice in the groin. He whimpered and dry heaved when they dropped him on the gurney. Wai—, he tried to speak and then vomited. Wait, he croaked again, spitting and trying to raise his head. One paramedic said something and the other two laughed. From his porch, due east and across the street, David Williams watched the paramedics load his neighbor into the ambulance. His neighbor tried frantically to wipe his face, but the paramedics slapped his hands away. The driver’s door slammed shut, and the siren started. The ambulance screamed away; he took the last drag from his cigarette and snubbed it out. He sipped his coffee and listened to the layering of sirens, near and far, all the way around his house. He turned his head when he heard a siren turn down his road. It came into view and stopped four houses down and across the street. The paramedics rushed out with their equipment and broke down his neighbor’s door. Shit, I woulda figered Ed a been the first one ta go, he said. They dragged the neighbor down his front steps. He was limp when they dropped him on the gurney. He watched them load the ambulance and he turned his head to follow it as it shrieked by his house. Its siren blended with another coming the other way. He turned his head and watched that ambulance pass. He reached into his pant’s pocket for his package of cigarettes. He patted one out and put it between his lips. He was fishing in his pocket for his lighter when a siren turned down his road. Listening calmly, he brought the lighter up to the cigarette and stopped. From piercing the air to plowing through it, the ambulance came over the hill barely under control. He started to turn toward his front door and stopped. The siren approached faster and he turned his shoulders; he watched the ambulance pass five neighbors’ houses and screech to a halt at his front walk. The doors opened and he froze. The driver ran up his front steps and tackled him against his front door. The impact turned his neck and elbow awkwardly and he howled like a dog freshly struck by a car. The paramedics carried him down the steps and threw him on the gurney. Oh dear, I wonder what’s happened to David, Nancy Williams muttered through the screen in her bathroom window. She listened to sirens and the paramedics mimicking her neighbor’s blather as they loaded him into the ambulance. She flinched at the sound of slamming ambulance doors. She turned and stepped cautiously out of the bathtub. She grabbed a towel and wrapped it around her aged, diminutive frame and mumbled, Well, I guess I oughta brush ma teeth.

The Painted Nut, part three

If ever there was a decision to be made, he would have made it years ago, but, in his present occupation, he chooses only colors—he mixes them directly on the shell of whatever nut he is painting and has never felt his subjects being generated by him or allotted to him. His tools are tiny paintbrushes equipped with stiff synthetic animal hairs, some with only two hairs and some with no more than five. The color choices he makes are completely arbitrary and depend on his intention and the surface of the shell: the initial premises of his work revolve around grand, implausible schemes of interpretation that endeavor to wring spirituality out of miniature, flaccid representations of nature in unreal colors and distorted compositions. The darker hues he gingerly dabs into the ruts and grooves of the surface then, switching brushes, he strokes the lighter shades on the raised ribs. On every nut he attempts to deflate the unique topography of the shell and disclose a church spire surrounded by cypress trees or a garden scene complete with shallow brook and a variety of flowers or the striking portrait of a heavy brick palazzo or the shady rendering of race horses or fantastic and grotesquely colored upended baskets of fruit in impossible arrangements with wine bottles, teapots, serving dishes and candlesticks, and each time he paints, he fails. The painted grooves and ribs form a rhythmic clutter and the garish colors enhance the off kilter melody with a dissonance that cannot be blamed solely on the rhythm. The spirituality he requests from his paint is only a shade in the back of his mind. Like the shadow his crouched form creates when he awakes, it is only a cast, an immaterial presence the existence of which depends entirely on one physical form blocking the flow of an insubstantial energy.

If another person was present as an observer and she had the presence of mind to inquire about his progress he might only raise his head slightly, mumble a little and wave his hand, but it will not occur to him that he is performing a task—let alone working on a particular project or even producing anything. His head then droops again and he reloads his brush. Visualizing a lonely and vacant country road lined with apple trees, he dribbles ochre streaks over a blue field and the minutia tightly draws him in, leaving him with no impression of his surroundings, his stool and table, or the light that shines daily, or the kind of nut he is painting, or even the unexplained appearance and departure of an observer.

The Painted Nut part two

The figure of a man hunched with his head bent down forming a decrepit and abating arch on a too-high stool over a too-short table leads us to our principle. This contour is draped with a shrunken tent canvas that has, over the years, attached itself to his back becoming a part of his skin while slowly stiffening on his underside. He retained his shape over time by only vaguely moving his hands, not moving his head, and drooping over the table while his covering carefully buttressed his weight as it coagulated with age and indolence. The small amount of hair remaining on his head, matted and smooth like dirty old linen, started floating down and finding its way to the tabletop one thread, one strand at a time. Recently, the slight repetitive motion of his hands has pushed and corralled these fallen wisps in long rolling drifts like layers of dust and lint that stretch softly across the table, and these went completely unnoticed. Under his dry, scaly brow his eyes are wedged in a perpetual squint—not for lack of light, a light appears over his head every day, but for deficient sight and disregarded shadows, the lack of peripheral input—that is continually focused on miniature areas in front of his face on the table. No office or authority has placed him here; there is no love or attraction that has spurned him—only an excessively merited patience and the indecision of an unworthy perspective destined to grunt quietly to himself and sweat under a weary, desolate life.

Early in his deployment, he would occasionally recall flashes and hints of what he assumed was an artificially implanted former existence: the smell of grass blown in an open window, the faraway sound of surf, the rubbing of a cat against his leg, heavy and irregular footsteps, the mumbling and whispers of concealed hosts, the endless opening and closing of doors. In his circumstances and course of waning thought, and after a long unrelenting dialogue with his self, these remembrances faded to mere impressions that have no more significance to our subject than the accepted existence of the light over his head and the stool on which he rests. He hasn’t lifted his head in decades; the last time was when he thought he heard a knock on a door, but he told himself it was nothing. Initially he would rest his chin on his chest when the light went out for the evening, but his chin remains perpetually in this position, so now he merely pries his eyes open when the light appears. This light spreads just enough warmth on his back to counteract the chill felt in the shadow of his underside, and in this comfortable balance he makes very small movements as he manipulates microscopic tools across dimensions in reductionist space—occasionally he reaches over to exchange one tool for another from a supply in a dirty tin can that shares the tabletop with an old lidless wood box, three small plastic containers of paint, and a cloth bag of assorted nuts.

The Painted Nut part one

In light of, or in regard to, or concerning the consternation involved in, or surrounding, the collection of a single species endlessly contained, or restricted in free motion indefinitely, the lack of differentiation between thought and opinion that eventually arises from the frustration that coincides with the cornering of individual perceptions with societal and environmental pressure must be contemplated. It is in this confinement where, and when, obsessive thought processes take on an apparent universality and the individual softly recounts the history of histories to himself with a complete reliance on fact and truth that can only be described as futile, delusional, and very supportive. Of course, once this circle of cerebral grace begins its own construction, the question of any outside influence, positive, obliging or otherwise, begins to slide toward the indiscernible and, without intervention, eventually becomes unseen and incomprehensible—a vacancy with an infinitesimal effect in vary degrees of applicable consequence.

This type of snare, of which there is an infinite amount, must be imagined as having no real physical structure. Nothing holds the individual to his cause—he is free to change his mind, switch trains of thought, or depart whenever it occurs to him; and this is the problem: the always nearly-possible occurrence. Nothing other than the regenerative thought-loop of idiosyncratic reality ever occurs to the man in the trap. The ensnared are only a glance away from liberation (though they may only turn their head and find themselves in another equally galling position, movement from one trap to another may facilitate a type of evolution toward an eventual release). It’s as if a reader needs only an instant to look up and be freed from an innocuous novel, a line of rubbishy poetry, or the browbeating of an outmoded and dangerous tract of dogma. But most will and do keep their heads bent and locked in a nodding toward to the day their necks relent and their brains forget to keep the pumps running, neglect to turn on the lights, and allow their braided lifelines to unravel, fray, and molder.