David Wallace - Broom of the System

A soft easy chair, old, covered in thick brown pretend velvet, that could recline so far back one’s head almost touched the floor. A footstool with a woven straw top. A small black table that served poorly as a desk and was at the moment bare anyway. A black wooden chair that went with the table and was irritating because one of its legs was shorter than the others. An even more irritating, blindingly white-bright overhead light fixture. Two ceramic low-wattage soft-light lamps with painted nut-and-flower scenes on the bases, purchased as alternatives to the overhead light, lamps that threw huge praying-mantis-ish shadows of Lenore and Candy Mandible on the room’s cream walls after sunset.

Eleven boxes of books from college, most of them Stonecipheco boxes, with red-ink drawings of laughing babies on the cardboard sides. All the boxes unopened, the athletic tape wheedled from the college trainer on the pretext of a mysterious pre-graduation sore ankle not even cut off, yet, and turning yellow. The boxes piled on either side of the west windows and supporting a tape player and a case of tapes and a fuchsia depressed and budless from lack of water in the August heat. A popcorn popper that popped popcorn with hot air. A box of Kleenex. A pretend tortoise-shell hairbrush. An old walker in the east comer, with two aluminum parabolas joined by twin mahogany support bars with soft cloth handgrips and the name YINGST carved in the wood of a bar above a hanging Scotch-taped publicity photo of Gary, the especially smiley Lawrence Welk dancer. Half-access to a bathroom down the hall, meaning half-access to a sink, a commode, a medicine cabinet, a tub with a shower fixture, and a soap-crusted shower curtain covered. with profiles of yellow parrots.

A bird cage on an iron post in the northern comer of the room. A mat of spread newspapers, beaded with fallen seed, on the floor below it. A huge bag of birdseed to the right of the newspaper, leaning against the wall. A bird, in the cage, a cockatiel, the color of a pale fluorescent lemon, with a mohawk crown of spiked pink feathers of adjustable ‘height, two enormous hooked and scaly feet, and eyes so black they shone. A bird named Vlad the Impaler, who spent the bulk of his life hissing and looking at himself in a little mirror hanging by a string of Frequent and Vigorous paperclips in the iron cage, a mirror so dull and cloudy with Vlad the Impaler’s own bird-spit that Vlad the Impaler could not possibly have seen anything more than a vague yellowish blob behind a pane of mist. Nevertheless. A bird that very occasionally and for a disproportionate ration of seed could be induced to stop hissing and emit a weird, extraterrestrial “Pretty boy.” A bird that not infrequently literally bit the hand that fed it, before returning to dance in front of its own shapeless reflection, straining and contorting always for a better view of, itself. Lenore refused to clean the mirror anymore, because as soon as she did so it was, in about half an hour, covered with dried spit again. A Black and Decker hand vacuum to vacuum seeds and the odd fallen feather or guano bit lay on the floor to the right of the bag of seed, having fallen out of its wall mount a few nights before.

Some personal items in the bathroom. A closet full of white dresses. A shoe stand bulging like a raspberry with black canvas. A bookshelf over the desk table half full of books in Spanish. Also on the shelf an annoying clock that clicked and buzzed every minute on the minute, and a little clay Spanish horse with a removable head in which was Lenore’s spare key. Above the west windows, broken venetian blinds that fell on the head of whoever tried to let them down. A tiny frosting of cracks in the glass of the tops of the windows, from airplane noise.

A manual called Care for Your Exotic Bird. A patch of chewed wall behind Vlad the Impaler’s cage from where Vlad the Impaler had gnawed on the wall in the dark when the mirror-show had closed, a patch from which plaster protruded, and about which Mrs. Tissaw was not pleased, and in regard to which a bill was promised.

Rick dropped Lenore off and she ran upstairs and came into her room and took off her dress. There was music and clove smell from under Candy’s door. Lenore’s room was filled with sad hot orange sunset. Vlad the Impaler had his feet hooked into the bars at the top of his cage and was hanging upside down, trying to find some reflective purchase at the very bottom of his smeared mirror.

“Hi, Vlad the Impaler,” said Lenore in her bra and panties and shoes.

“Hello,” said Vlad the Impaler.

Lenore looked at the bird. “Pardon me?”

“I have to do what’s right for me as a person,” Vlad the Impaler said, righting himself and looking at Lenore.

“Holy cow.”

“Women need space, too.”

“Candy!” Lenore went and opened Candy Mandible’s door. Candy was stretching, on the floor, doing near-splits, in a silver leotard, with a clove cigarette in her mouth.

“Christ, sweetie, I’ve been waiting, how are you?” Candy got up and moved to turn off her stereo.

“Come here quick, listen to Vlad the Impaler,” Lenore said, pulling Candy by the hand.

“Nice outfit,” said Candy. “What about the unclear emergency? How’s Lenore and Concamadine?”

“You’re sweet, but that kind of talk can lead exactly nowhere,” said Vlad the Impaler, staring dumbly at himself in his cloudy mirror. “My feelings for you are deep. I’ve never claimed they’re not.”

“What the hell is going on with him?” Lenore asked Candy.

“Hey, that’s what I was just saying,” Candy said, looking at Vlad the Impaler.

“Pardon me?” said Vlad the Impaler.

“I was rehearsing what to say to Clint tonight, tonight I’m going to break up with him, I decided. I was in here practicing while I waited for you.”

“Hi, Vlad the Impaler,” said Vlad the Impaler. “Here’s some extra special-wecial food.”

“How can he talk like that all of a sudden?” asked Lenore. “He only used to say ‘Pretty boy,’ and I had to like pour tons of seed down him every time, to get him to.”

“There are lots of pretty girls in the world, Clinty, you’re just so incredibly serious, ” Vlad the Impaler said.

“Clinty?” said Lenore.

“Clint Roxbee-Cox, the V.P. at Allied who drives the Mercedes? With the glasses and the sort of English accent?”

“Clint, Clint, Clint,” twittered Vlad the Impaler.

“Shut up,” said Candy Mandible.

“Anger is natural,” said Vlad the Impaler. “Anger is a natural release, let it out.”

“He could never talk like this before,” Lenore said.

The orange light on the shiny wood floor began to have slender black columns in it as the sun started to dip behind downtown Cleveland.

“Weird as hell. I was in here at like six-thirty, and he just hissed and writhed. And I went for a run, and I came back, and I rehearsed what to say to Clint, and then I went to stretch out, and then you came,” Candy said, tapping her cigarette ashes into Vlad the Impaler’s cage.

“Of course you satisfy me, Clinty. Don’t think you don‘t,” said Vlad the Impaler.

“Did you feed him?” Lenore asked Candy.

“No way. I’ve still got that scar on my thumb,” Candy said. “You said you’d do it all the time.”

“Then how come his dish is full, here?”

“Women need space, too.”

“He must not have eaten from it this morning,” said Candy. “Is that a new bra?”

Vlad the Impaler began to peck at his seed; his pink mohawk rose spikily and fell.

“This is just like the bizarrest day of all time,” Lenore said, untying her shoes. “Rick and I had dinner with Mr. Bombardini? Of Bombardini Company and skeleton eye-socket fame?”