Grace Krilanovich - The Orange Eats Creeps

Passing by the Anarcho-squats between Salem and Eugene I couldn’t help but absorb the longing of all the people lodged in every conceivable corner, suctioned into seams in the rafters. Their overwhelming sense of self-satisfaction warming the whole cavernous space like a great growling pot-bellied stove. They read to each other by the light of a bare bulb burning on the side of an adjacent building. The room glowed brown with the dim orange light. Their bodies were wrapped and bound like cheeses and, as it happened, their skins looked and felt like a salt-basted exquisite cheese because they never left the brown light. They had money — why didn’t they use it?… Thoughts of escape were suspiciously absent. They enmeshed themselves snakelike with others in proximity and groped long and poignantly, their minds jogging through the detailed process of making bombs out of ordinary household materials. Longing to be true fugitives, for true disaster to strike; they wanted to scrape crumbs off the floors of cops and judges and county supervisors’ homes, to gurgle their tap water after the inhabitants have torn themselves strangled and conflicted from this world. With great effort they pre-wrote suicide notes for each of the prominent robots they had scheduled to die. Cops had no clue, no intelligence on them. This was strictly a subliminal war, fought behind the eyes drowning in blood, scoring flesh with acid, sputtering out of a bubbling vat of gruel on the stove. They shared one giant body. It was hungry all the time because it was just a baby.

In the diner a few of them sat there and distracted the server while others dove into the back and stuffed their pants with dinner bread. “You pieces of rat shit,” we said to them, “this isn’t Europe, you know!” Anarchists! Never a surprise there. “Look at them groping each other under the table. You’d think they were conducting a symphony down there — ”Josh stood and threw a cup of ice in their general direction, “Thatch my roof, asshole! Turn my bucolic windmill!” Now it was getting redundant, “Strangle me with your extra long eyelashes! With your high quality beer and cigarettes — !”

Rising before dawn we went out to some yard sales in town and the people looked at us like we were friggin nuts, but it was all the other people who were drunk and falling all over their stupid shit piled in their front yard. I’m like, dude, stop spilling your beer on me and get away from me with your shitty beach-ball… It’s a little like shopping on another planet. The scene is populated with a whole subterranean world of people, most disproportionately single middle-aged men with grizzled beards, Hawaiian shirts, and windowless vans, who make a meager living buying repossessed storage units at auctions, then selling the wares at swap meets. They live fast and loose, existing parenthetically to mass society, usually buried in much of the crap they are trying to sell but haven’t been able to. They’re a dying breed. Their lives are full of shit and mystery and intrigue, with few redeeming qualities, personality-wise. We discovered evidence of human activity from a long time ago at a limekiln in the woods that had been abandoned 175 years ago. We sensed that horrible tragedies were inflicted at this site. Maybe a killer hid out. Maybe a guy was chained to a bed in the 1910s. Maybe a family of desperate teens in the Depression starved to death in the creek. We followed the tiny fossilized footprints of history’s small adults — the marks of a past race of dapper children, animal children with no decipherable language. We found a shoe, a man’s fossilized cigarette butt, a cat skeleton. Excavating, digging around I began to find objects both strange and familiar, telepathically guided by horrific artifacts projecting a tone from feet below. And I can’t help but think of all the other stuff that’s lying in wait in storage units all over the country. Panting, sweat beading up on their Mylar shells, waiting for the door of their enclosure to open up and let that strange light in. All over the country storage containers sat full and silent on the ground. Alone in the dark; issuing forth negative energy, the kind only stored objects can bring out. Throbbing in the dark.

When we got to the check cashing place it was almost three a.m. and the place was empty. Then we noticed a pair of eyes peering over the counter. The guy who worked there, I guess, but it seemed strange, like he was doing something back there. We walked up and noticed that he was crouching but that he was only four feet tall anyway. He stared at us and made pained wincing noises, as if for him breathing was something both precious and jagged. He looked like Evangele, except his skin was grey with spots and his hair looked like it was on backward. When he started talking it was like someone had pressed his button. A voice came out of a crack in the check cashing counter. “The Aspirin Man: His Story,” he announced.

“What?” Josh said.

“I’ve been waiting, you know — ”

“Can I have cigarettes?”

“Come a little bit closer so you can hear better. Lend me your ears, children.”

“Somebody turn him off, seriously.”

“You kids on the run? I was too when I was your age.” We didn’t answer, and yet he continued, “It’s rough in the trenches. I won’t deny that, but it’s no bed of roses here either!… You boys have been wounded? That’s fine, but I’m absolutely destroyed. For two years I’ve been on night duty. Do you know what that means? Exhausted! Worn to a frazzle! Oh my God!” He spoke so loud, like he was shouting over a black river at us on the other side: “At night I nap lightly at the end of a drawbridge under a box of industrial-strength Anacin tablets. The situation behind supermarkets is desperate, with all sorts of desperate people, desperate animals, and desperate things sniffing around the other side of the drawbridge. The opening in the building is exactly the same size as the truck that comes to leave its food inside. It pulls up and all the goods can roll off into the giant storeroom. But before the truck can pull up there’s the drawbridge, and that’s where I come in. I’m the lever-puller, the switch-thrower.”

After a silence where he even closed his eyes, he continued, “Industrial strength Anacin keeps me going. I have no use for the food that comes off of these trucks. No need for anything else to animate me — just that sour white ore pulverizing my limbs… My stomach hardened into a big white rock a long time ago. My eyes are two ping-pong balls filled up with sand, tap water runs through my veins — but my hand is still wrapped around that switch, ready to pull. I am the chiseled switch-throwing Anacin Man; pass by me and reach the warehouse of your dreams! My bed is made up in the destroyed cab of a Mack truck — that deadly incubator of mustachioed evil. Upholstered in lizard skin, sugared water glass, an enlarged growth where the steering wheel had been… I puff myself up and settle into a palette of cotton swabs in the back and watch a little TV set I have in there, licking my paws and wetting my ears as I watch my little TV set and dream Anacin dreams of white deer circled by moons as big as the sky itself.”

Outside the convenience store, at a spot in the sky, blacker than a storm winding its way through heaven, was a crack in the clouds. My eyes filterless, I watched the ribbon that wound and curled inertly in the twilight. Late at night I got lost inside… I remember sitting in the kitchen with Kim and she turned to me slowly and said cryptically, I can feel the wind that’s starting at the center of this house!… it’s turning and turning and turning, kicking up a wild frenzy. It’s turning and whipping around, turning me into something that I always wanted to be — my organs are crystallizing into gems . She sat straight up, staring at the wall behind me. I said Kim, Do you feel the ESP? Is it coming for you? She answered Yes, I feel it —