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The Towering Gas Baron
I have a second bedroom in my apartment, Davenport's room. The room is a thermal stigmata so I had sealed up the door in October when the gas baron, his towering figure clutching wads of money and laughing in mad glee, had promised to kill all the elderly in the land with his immense prices. I closed the door on Davenport and I hadn't seen him in four months. My entertainment center was not keeping up with the current trend of the living room. It was forced out of the neighborhood by a huge globe and a second typewriter. I broke through the plastic seal in spring and moved the displaced furniture into Davenport's room. He didn't say anything as his den was transformed from a dumping ground for all my disused possessions into a holding camp for the television. Perhaps he was still groggy from the hibernation.
I had been tired all week, and the overzealous workout didn't help. I thought eating two burgers might counter the fatigue. Now, after five minutes with the tiny electric grill, I need somewhere to eat this fabulous feast of ground buffalo and sugar-free sugar wafers. Maybe I'll watch some tv while I eat, get in some good old fashioned American meditation. I look in on the scrubby room. The bare fluorescent spiral in in the ceiling casts a sickly blue glow that makes it look dirty sterile, like a motel bathroom. There's Davenport, monopolizing the floor.
“Why not sit down, eh?” He speaks in a wet Slavic accent, like my own ancestors from unknown dirt farms in Eastern Europe. Once I swore I'd cut him in half with a chainsaw. Such was my hatred of his flatulent bulk. I'd hack and pry him into tiny pieces and leave him in a dumpster, but you can't destroy a thing with such character. You can't destroy a thing that speaks to you in your great-grandfather's voice. The voice of that gambler of family land, that bootlegging garage arsonist.
“What, you doubt old Davenport?”
I see flecks of spittle flying from his thick imagined tongue. Imaginary tongue perhaps, but a real smile a sly vampire smile.
“Come, sit down on old Davenport my friend. Rest your tired bones.”
“You can't trust davenport”, I tell myself “He'll burn down the garage for the insurance money and lose it all at the card table. But, where else can you sit? It's just for a little while.”
Davenport creaks and pops the familiar spring as I bring my full weight to bear upon his worn and tattered folds. I try not to think of the colony of lice that must surely inhabit the ancient foam arms.
“There you see? Is good.”
I refrain from comment. Stay on guard.
The familiar pop-eyed characters parade themselves through a hyper-techno future. Robots wage mock battle, cyclopean Jello-molds enslave Jamaicans. I lay back into the foam and stretch my legs across the expansive floral pattern.
“This show, is strange thing. I don't understand.” Davenport contends.
“Of course you don't understand, you've been in this room for ten years.”
“I should get out more, perhaps. Once, I belong to old man across the hall. Always with the soap operas and the bible meetings.”
I rub my eyes. They see the orange-red glow of compression, and they taste the paprika from the burgers. I should have washed my hands. I set the plate down on the floor and set my untouched can of pop on top of the plate.
I've created a perilous machine. The purpose is not yet clear, but it is clad in many canvas fin-like sails too numerous to count. It is a great mass composed of a wooden chassis and gears, so many gears. I keep it in my shadowy garage with the greasy old tools. In its beginnings the machine was a noble thing, but I made a terrible mistake. I used too many gears. I put too much trust in their elegant form that I forgot their many grinding teeth. So many gears, so many sharp teeth corrupted the heart of the machine. Its purpose was turned to malice.
I tried to fix my creation. My son and I worked long into the night removing gears, realigning shafts in hopes of somehow turning its evil heart. But the machine would not be swayed. It snatched up my son in its jaws and pulled him into its thousands of sharp grinding teeth. I tried desperately to free free him. Even after the machine had swallowed half his body and the floor and walls ran black with his blood, I pulled upon his legs to free him from the monster. It took the whole of my son's body, and with one of its sharp fin sails it reached around as I wailed and pierced my temple on the left side with such force as to break the bone and pop the eye from its socket. It swallowed my eye in its many jaws and backed away into the shadows of the garage.
Lying one the bloody concrete floor, I saw that the machine was the embodiment of all that is most abhorrent and cold and devious in the world. Mutilated and anguished, my heart was turned to obsidian fury and I swore the most depraved violent death to the machine. I would rip out its iron bowels with my own hands and jaws. Just like crazy Ahab. I'm reading Moby Dick right now that's why this is all so familiar. My wisdom teeth hurt. I'm grinding my teeth. I always grind my teeth like this when I sleep without the mouth guard.
I open my eyes, or maybe I don't open them but I imagine that I do. I can't move. It's the sleep paralysis. That Davenport is an asexual succubus. He's trapped me down and is feeding on my ridiculous dreams and molar filings. Got to move. Got to open my eyes.
I'm stabbing the machine with a twelve foot ivory harpoon. It smokes and lashes with its great fin sails. My wife is screaming at me not to go back to the garage. Don't hunt the machine. It's too powerful, let it go before it consumes my soul as well as my eye and my son.
I can't do more than flutter my eyes. It's the angle of my head. It's constricted the blood and confused the nerve or something. I concentrate all my effort on moving my arms reaching for something to pull myself to a sitting position. But the arms are like beached jellyfish. It's dark outside, I think I saw that much. My god, it must be ten o'clock by now. I'll never get any writing done tonight if I don't get up, and I haven't done any writing since the coffee shop on Saturday.
I feel myself losing the battle and I consider just giving in and seeing where Ahab takes me, but I feel saliva pooling under my tongue and running down into my throat. My irrational fears of drowning in my own spit have spurred my resolve. I order my leg to move. I grasp my pants with my weak hands and tediously pull the limb onto the floor. Then I pull on the second leg and it responds of its own accord and throws itself past the other leg. The inertia pulls me into a roll and I fall onto the floor. I knock over the aluminum can and yellow liquid glugs out onto the grey-blue carpet
“My friend, what has happened to you? Is your show over?”
“You know.” It's all I can manage at this point, and it sounds slow and numb.
“Know what my friend? I have just been sitting here watching the television. I don't understand the programs as good as you. I don't know when one ends and another begins, you know?”
I pull myself upright. I weave around a bit as I grab the tiny travel alarm clock on the television. Nine forty-eight.
“God damn you Davenport.” I wobble out of the room for some black tea. I'll come back for the harpoon later.
“Come back soon my friend. We will do crosswords, or maybe you can look on the computer again for a woman willing to date you, eh?
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The Bee's Knees
Last edited by underwood : 07-02-2006 at 02:14 AM.
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