BRIEF: I AM A STAFF WRITER FOR CADMIUM MAGAZINE, AN INDEPENDENT, ANTI-ESTABLISHMENT, CREATIVE PUBLICATION FOR OTHER CREATIVE PEOPLE. EACH ONE OF MY MONTHLY PIECES FOR CADMIUM IS INSPIRED BY A PAINTING, WOODCUT, DRAWING, OR OTHER WORK OF ART.
Man Taking Up Space
By Carson LaGreca
INSPIRED BY THE PORTRAIT BY MAGRITTE
Red neon buzzed in the distance. My head was just sawdust, thank-yous, and no-ma’ams. It could’ve been 3 in the morning. I’d been walking for a long time. I took a seat at the counter. The air around me was filled with that sound that is just two hundred different things all crying their own blues. The stool to my left was unoccupied, save for a week-old copy of The Junction, whose headline read:
DECENT LOCAL WOMAN LEADS TWO LIVES
I miss those days when news was news, I thought.
“Everybody has things they miss, jack,” said a voice.
I had been served without ordering. On the plain white plate before me lay a slice of ham, so thin you could see through it. In the center of this certain slice of ham was a human eyeball, one of that indeterminate blue-grey color that looks smooth, silky and depthless like whipping cream.
I rubbed my own. It could’ve been 3 in the morning. I pulled my kerchief from my pocket and my belongings flew to the floor, determinedly rolling away from me. I reached for my fountain pen. As soon as I wrapped my fingers around, it slipped away from me as if it has been coated in grease, propelling itself from my touch with the strength of something that’s fighting for its life. The linoleum was dirty, and I was tired but not gifted. I gave up, listening to at least two hundred mournful sighs from my seat at the counter.
“You don’t look hungry for food,” said a voice. “Self-pity’s no substitute, mind you.”
The eye blinked. The diner was empty. Only the fry cook with blue-grey skin stood staring at me through the little window, sucking in his cheeks. He thrust up his middle finger at me and I suddenly realized that the air around me was soundless. I couldn’t hear a thing, not even a single car motor making its way down Rosemont, not my own breathing.
“Are you listening?” asked a voice.
The room seemed smaller than it was when I entered.
“Pick up the fork and the knife,” said a voice.
The eye blinked. It never looked anywhere but directly at me. It could’ve been 3 in the morning. I was exhausted, I think.
The utensils had a nice weight in my hand. They were warm. There was an odd quality to them, like they had been filled with summertime air. I pinched the tines of the fork between my thumb and forefinger and they broke off, crumbled into a silvery pile next to the eye, which appeared now to be glaring at me.
What have I done wrong? I thought.
I looked up through the fry cook’s little window, the order slips waving back and forth on the line. A fat fly sucked at a spot of jam by my left hand.
I heard the door jingle and someone came and sat next to me. I looked at his shoes, his toes poking through the leather in places, the nails black with soot. I could see his shoulders, knobby and uneven in his too-large jacket. I could see he battled along all sorts of front lines. I could see he knew how to make love to a woman. Above all, I could see he was a wretched sort of man. The kind that does not apologize, does not realize that building and destroying is not always done with hands.
His body grew and grew as he sat next to me there in the diner. I could see his knee expanding, stretching and inching closer to mine.
“Say, you gonna eat that?” asked the man.
“I haven’t decided,” I said.
I looked at the man. He looked at me. He had no eye, just a sunken pale hole where the right one should be.
“What happened there?” I asked him, pointing to the hole.
“I lost a bet,” he said.
His elbow began to dig into my side.
“What sort of bet?” I asked.
“A bet with a woman,” he said.
“What sort of woman?” I asked.
“I think you could probably infer that,” he said, leaning back in his stool to rummage around for something in his pocket.
He was now probably 8 feet tall. His face loomed over me, huge and unemotional.
“Here,” he said, handing me a small photo of a family, paid for and taken at a portrait studio.
It was my family. In my place was the man, his hand on my son’s shoulder, his arm around my wife’s waist.
“I’m not hungry for food,” I said to him, pushing the plate towards him.
“Bless you,” the man said, “I haven’t eaten for 40 years.”
His head now touched the ceiling. It could’ve been 3 in the morning. The oxygen in the diner was disappearing quickly, and I would never be comfortable again.
The Great City and The Innocent Man
By Carson LaGreca
INSPIRED BY THE DEMONSTRATION BY FÉLIX VALLOTTON
I wasn’t hungry. I didn’t want to smoke. I pissed out the window when I wanted to piss. I let everything happen. I kept a fire on, I emptied the chest of drawers onto the ground and hid marbles and receipts in the floorboards. I laid down with my ear to the slats and listened to the pipes and the people below me arguing about the ripeness of a peach. I cut my hair. I scrubbed my fingernails. I ate cakes when I pleased. I was alone. When the landlady with the bent spine came to collect the rent, she told me I looked like a fiend. I told her she looked like everybody else.
Recently, my daughter became a lady of the cloth. She chose to commit herself to a life of bland foods, recitations, and the celebration of dying. It was well-suited. At age 12 she had already chosen her plot in the cemetery. She wanted to be buried next to her mother, she said. I told her I didn’t know where her mother was. She told me she didn’t care where I was buried, as long as it was nowhere scenic. Lovely personality.
Every day since my daughter left, a large crowd collected beneath my window in the square, making noise with their hands, their scarves tied around their mouths, growing and surging until they were beaten apart and back. They would come again the next day.
The facts began to become aware to me in a slow way, much like the way in which you discover that the love of your life is cheating on you with your brother—not by any obvious evidence, like finding his underwear balled up in your flat sheet, but by listening. I began to listen to the protests with the greatest intent, and having nothing much to occupy my time those days, I found myself sitting by the window for hours, hearing their chants and watching their fists.
One Tuesday, I was drinking my very last cup of coffee and eating a very hard biscuit when my days of observation finally coalesced. I had come to realize that I was the cause of the protests, that I had united the Great City in their collective hatred of me. All this time, they had been assuring me that I would pay for being such a useless father. I had to make amends.
Before the crowd began to assemble for the day’s protest, I snuck out the servant’s door of my building and walked briskly to the nearby churchyard. It was around one o’clock when I climbed the tallest tulip poplar in the convent’s green-trimmed garden. I loosened the laces of my shoes enough so that they were hanging from my toes but would not fall until I shook them off, and watched through the orange petals as the ladies with the covered heads and the starched capes filed into neat rows below me. One-by-one, like the mechanical dancers inside of children’s jewelry boxes, they stepped into the back door of the white building and disappeared.
I saw her, about 20 yards behind the rest, in her hands a blue glass bowl filled with chestnuts. She looked like an angel. As she passed beneath me, I rocked my feet back and forth until both shoes fell. One landed in the bowl, which flew from her hands and shattered on the stones. The other landed squarely on the crown of her head, and when she crumpled to the ground I could see blood trickling down her temple, pooling behind her white cap.
I slid down the tree and ran to her. Her eyes were closed. I pushed one open and her greyish iris stared right back at me. I took away my finger and the eye stayed open. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, I said to her, wringing my hands. She said nothing.
I carried her the four blocks through deserted streets, boarded shop windows, empty streetcorners, passenger-less railcars. Her limbs swung limply away from her body, hitting my thighs at an odd interval. In my apartment, I positioned her in a chair by the window. I cleaned her face with a sponge and laid a cigarette and some matches on the table beside her. She did not take them. She did nothing but stare somewhere over my left shoulder at a blank space on the wall, between the crucifix and my literature degree.
I was exhausted. I climbed into bed with dark red under my fingernails. I slept, dreaming about my daughter’s mother, but awoke because I could not remember her face. I checked my watch. It had only been three minutes.
OPEN THIS DOOR AT ONCE! yelled a voice that had the confidence particular to an inferior person who is given too much authority. YOU ARE WANTED FOR MURDER!
Then, a little softer, as if the walls weren’t already made of dust, Ready the battering ram.
I strode across the room and threw open the windows. The sounds of the crowd reached me then at a deafening roar, and their various accusations of unfairness, injustice, inequality, I realized, were not directed at me. I scanned the mass, the thickness of bodies, clammy with spit and anger, in search of the reason, the cause —why these people spent days on their feet with their jaws clenched and their stomachs growling. And down a block or two from me, next to the butcher’s shop, I saw a man, a man just like the one beyond my door, with viciousness in his heart and dark red under his fingernails, who had a snub nose revolver held to the head of another man, whom I recognized to be the owner the corner store from which I bought my cigarettes and shoe polish. An honest man. An innocent man. A man who adored cherry popsicles and always wore green socks. This was the center, this had always been the center.
All at once, everybody surged, going backwards and forwards and sideways, rushing in closer, hotter, thicker, towards the heart where it was just darkness, no gaps for light or air. And as the men outside my door flushed into the apartment and placed their hands around my throat, I rasped, before they could stop me, How could an innocent man unite the Great City without committing a crime first?
The Department of Eagles
BY CARSON LAGRECA
INSPIRED BY DÉPARTEMENT DES AIGLES BY MARCEL BROODTHAERS
“Here’s the thing,” he said. “I want to use you but I don’t want it to feel like I’m using you.”
“Go on,” I said.
“How much do you think this cigarette I’m smoking means to me?” he asked. “More than nothing, less than little. An approximation of what I felt when I very first saw you.”
“Very good,” I said, documenting his words with a golf pencil on a piece of butcher’s paper.
I was sweating. I felt like saying Finish her! Like someone watching a wrestling match.
“I don’t care about the way my hair looks in the morning, I just want you to touch me, and that is the truth,” he said.
We heard Darling coming down the path that led sharply downwards from the top of the cliff to the shore.
“There are 3,000 ways in which we come together and 3,000 ways in which we will separate. And in the end, it isn’t a choice. It’s gut. That thing you lack in the middle -- you will always be unsteady because of it. Even if everyone holds out their elbows as you pass by you will always be unsteady.”
His shoulder grew close to mine and I felt its heat.
“That should be italicized, there, the always,” he said, pointing to the correct one.
I licked my forefinger and smudged the always away, rewriting it.
“Thank you. Now, the grass is long and cool and you are the itch, and you are the quiet one. I hate you for the way you watch other people as if it amuses you,” he said.
“That’s lovely,” I said. “Spell something for me.”
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Spell ingrate,” I said.
“Oy! Bechdel!” Darling called from 30 feet above us. “What are you two doing?”
The seawater breathed on our faces. We looked at each other and rose from the pebbled beach. I folded the dampish letter into neat thirds and tucked it into the front pocket of my jacket. As we climbed the grassy slope, I patted it with my hand to make sure it hadn’t flown away or slipped from some unseen hole. I felt powerful, like I always do when somebody tells me their secrets.
Darling was in a rotten mood, his breathing back up the hill to the reddish-colored gîte sounded like a truck running out of gas. He hated having to move if he wasn’t planning on it. I imagine Darling’s morning routine spoke of a bowl cream of wheat with butter and salt, French choral radio, and a 3 minute, furious masturbation in front of his vanity. And all this while he shaved. Would explain the liquid bandages dotting his spurious little chin.
“I love you, Darling,” I said.
“Fuck right off,” he said. “What were you two doing down at the cove?”
“Something that hasn’t happened yet,” I said, ducking through the door.
Inside the barely-furnished cottage, reserved for us for two weeks and two days, I took a seat at the communal table we shared, our little weird workspaces makeshift but permanent. The thousand rings of coffee from Bechdel’s perpetually over-filled cups, scraps of cuticle and international tax documents littering the floor near Darling’s semi-patented reclining desk chair, my cigarette ashes rolling around everywhere in wispy logs if somebody exhaled or yelled or pounded their fists. Bechdel took off his red wool coat and hung it on an empty hook. His shoes squelched a little as he walked over to his Smith Corona.
“You see how she’s always speaking in code, like this? Never being straight with us, or up-front?”
“You’re not being very up-front either, Bech,” said Darling.
“Are we talking about me or her?”
“Neither of you,” said Darling. “We’re talking about what you were doing down at the cove.”
“Doesn’t doing implicate ownership, or the presence of physical bodies, or something?” asked Bechdel, re-inserting for the fourth time a sheet of light pink paper into the rollers.
“Bechdel’s trying to dispose of another starry-eyed female suitor he’s caught,” I said. “Do you remember Glenda? From that time in Crete?”
“Oh, shit!” said Darling, fidgeting with his crotch. He had something white and fatty between his canine and incisor. “Of course I remember her. Hair like a blackberry bramble. All those pimples between her eyebrows. Great rack. Thought she was a writer.”
Bechdel groaned.
“The writing,” he said. “She sends me a letter every single day. Sometimes twice a day. And it’s all utter fucking nonsense, half-Greek and half-brained. Last week she sent me an entire letter written on a piece of newsprint, all about, Christ, I can’t even remember…it was something like, how her cat has begun to hate her because it’s being possessed by the spirit of her mother.”
He lit his morning joint.
“She told me she would’ve rather fucked me but she settled for you,” Darling said.
“She told me she fell in love with you solely because you were an impressionable drunk,” I said.
“Hey, guys? Let’s just drop it. We have a lot to get through today.” said Bechdel, relighting the blackened stub end of the joint before passing it to my hovering pinched fingers.
Easing into my desk chair, I looked at the stacks of paper before me. By my left hand stood a vase of blood-red peonies I’d purchased that morning at the market in Le Conquet. Next to that lay a lazy pile of telegrams sent to our current location from men and women all across Normandy who needed their dirty work handled. Most were in Morse, or some other kind of easily decipherable code. Some clients really thought themselves clever, the James Bond type. Most were just disgruntled masochists with their hands perpetually gripping their wallets. Other clients were more interesting, more complex, and came with contemptible projects tacked with bigger rewards.
“Okay, okay, guys,” I said. “How about this one?”
I smoothed a rather crumpled telegram against the table’s edge and cleared my throat of sea salt and century-old dust.
“Attention: Department of Eagles STOP I have reason to believe my lover is going to kill my husband and make it look like he was poisoned by me STOP I have experience with dishonest lovers because most men are dishonest STOP I also have half a mind to let him go through with it because my husband is a dog STOP But that wouldn’t be prudent STOP Will you take care of him STOP Meet today at la tourelle on the western coast of Île-Molène at 13h00 STOP I will be wearing a blue dress FULL STOP.”
Bechdel rubbed his hands together and grinned like a starving cartoon fox watching dead rabbits roast golden over an open flame. Darling shrugged, as much of a resounding yes as he’s ever given.
“She sounds rich,” said Bechdel.
“She sounds hot,” said Darling.
“Jesus Christ, are you guys 12 years old? What time is it?” I asked.
“Fuck! It’s midday! It’ll take us at least 45 minutes to skipper to the west side of Molène,” said Bechdel, rising quickly and stuffing a waxed canvas sack with two handguns and ammunition, two knives (one machete, one Bowie), two bags of potato chips, two balaclavas, and a length of rope.
“Have fun, you two!” called Darling from his seat. He almost never came on excursions with us.
As the motor on our small skiff coughed to life, heading due northwest towards Molène, I proposed the following ending to Bechdel’s break-up letter to the insane Greek:
“For we are the Department of Eagles. Hire us to find out who your spouse is fucking. Hire us to blackmail your rapacious boss. Hire us to follow your conniving brother and take back the money he owes you. Hire us to break up with your concubines and cuckolds for you and deal with the aftermath. Hire us to vandalize, aggrandize, socialize. We speak your language. We accept pay by wire, and in the form of glorious shellfish dinners, if near the coast. We do not, however, fall in love.”
Les baigneurs
By Carson LaGreca
INSPIRED BY PORTRAIT OF STEPHY LANGUI by MAGRITTE
In the morning I find I am bleeding. I strip the bed down to its feathers and throw everything into the large basket by the door. It is sunny and my home is warm without trying and I am grateful to live by the seaside. On days when I bleed I feel less-than and also as round and floaty as a balloon. I love reading those old medical textbooks where men in white sharp coats write about humors and celestial pathways because I know I am a product of all of it, the largest-ever conglomerate of stars and cosmos, of dust and blood. In the book-case I have many volumes containing such horror stories, and I like to read them as I lunch or as I paint my long round nails. Like I said, the day is pleasant and I open the top sashes of every front-facing window at odd intervals, as though nobody will walk by and say, “My, she has such uneven front-facing window sashes.” I know they will not because I am invisible on days that I bleed.
I have quite a bit of trouble with all of my clothing being ill-fitting. Sometimes, when readying myself to head to the greengrocer or the beauty parlor or any other stressful appointment, I try on dress after dress only to discover that the whole of my closet has shrunken two sizes overnight and the only thing that will fit me is a thick wool sweater that itches unbearably and so I must cancel all my arrangements for that day and wait until either I or my clothing either shrink or grow until we are the same size again.
Like I said, on this day I feel equally infinitesimal and taking up too much space, like the insides of me are on the outside and rapidly expanding to fill any container which may contain me. And on days like this, I find it best to go to the sea. Before leaving the house I am sure to do my eyebrows and my lips so nobody might mistake me for a circus freak. And since it so happens that today, all of my clothing refuses to go past hips or shoulders or both, I decide to go to the beach in the nude. That is quite okay because, if you have got a quick memory, you will recall that it is my duty to become invisible on days that I bleed.
I must walk through my backyard to get to the street that will take me to the beach. My first step outside lands my largest perfectly-varnished toe on a scorching hot paver, and so I scurry back inside to find a proper pair of footwear. I settle on a pair of Mary Janes that are the color of a ripe peach and head out the door. My small horde of flowering trees smell so good that I want to chop them down because I do not feel as though I deserve such pleasure as I get from them. I can be a masochist on days that I bleed. The first thing I notice outside is that everyone seems to be busy, off doing something else in some other town. I don’t see a single soul as I make my way down Avenue A and turn right onto 71st street and I regret doing my eyebrows and lips and I want to be mistaken for a circus freak. The air is filled with the slippery sound of wind chimes as I climb the short staircase through the dunes. I lift my gaze and notice there is a miniature home seated squarely on the sand, nearing 25 yards from the water’s edge.
Every time I go to the seaside I am reminded of my husband who could not swim. I never persecuted him for it but on every vacation in which we went to a lake I would spend hours floating on my back, swimming so far away from him that his camera could not locate me and all of the similar colors I could see on the shoreline blended and swirled in my vision until it was no use seeing things anymore.
As I approached the tiny house I could hear two voices. One was heated, the other calm.
“And what do you think telling her that would have done, mon beau?”
“It would probably have enflamed her past the point of redemption, Charles.”
“And what good would that have done me?”
“Not much good at all, Charles.”
I could hear their voices plainly now. It was as if they were speaking directly into my ear. Thankful to the sun’s position, I sat cross-legged in the warm sand behind the tiny house and continued listening.
“How else was I supposed to go on? She had lost her own battle. She was miles away. I mean, when she spoke I felt nothing anymore— worse than nothing, I felt the absence of something.”
“What was the something?”
“Desire, love, devotion, you sadist.”
Both men chuckled, the calm-voiced one a bit more so.
“I love to hear of the demise, I won’t lie to you, Charles. It reminds me of that which is at your true center.”
“I’ll never admit anything, especially not to you.”
Another sonorous chuckle from both men, though the heated one’s soured quickly. They were sharing some odd sort of uneven joke that I could not figure out. I leaned in closer so it was as if the men were housed inside my very head, between my unfortunately civilized eyebrows.
“I did love her for a long while, though, and that I say at my benefit and your direct detriment, mon cher. I think I loved her more than I thought, and that is truly the worst regret to have in the world.”
“That is an unarguable fact, Charles. I won’t take that away from you as I did your life.”
There is a pause in their conversation and a gull floats down to pick at something sparkling and dead beside me.
“I don’t blame you for what happened.”
“I blame myself. Why did I think it was a good idea to try to teach you how to swim?”
I rise, and hinging at the hips I swing my face upside down towards where the front door of the house should be. I can see the men in full view. The house is hollow and the door is a rather sizable archway that takes up nearly the entire façade. The men embrace.
Don’t forget that when I bleed I am invisible. My late husband cannot see me. But I can see him, and I can see them, and I can see a large misshapen rock resting against the front wall that with a gentle sea breeze could tumble and crush them simply into stars and cosmos, dust and blood. I turn my neck at an odd angle that I’ll regret the next morning and I look at the sea, and it is calm. And I decide, wading unhurried towards the deep, that I will keep swimming forever, and I am glad to bleed and wear my Mary Janes and have a complex life and live by the seaside and I am glad to be untethered by man and physics and glad to have lived and felt love and I am glad, so very glad, to be the very strongest of swimmers.