Christopher WunderLee - Moore's Mythopoeia

“It’s a phase, I’m the new girl, the one they’ve all just recently discovered. They won’t care about me in a few weeks.”

“No. You are assimilated, my dear. I can’t share you.”

They applause the rubicund jolly of the senior vice president’s antics in the front of the room. He has his hand over his mouth and his eyes are wet.

“We’ll talk about it some more, Joseph. I’ll come see you later this afternoon.”

“I don’t want you to come see me anymore. I won’t be just another person you visit, that wasn’t the point of any of it.”

“Oh, Joseph, come on.”

She will plead with him with her eyes. But he has already gone, moving swiftly through the crowd towards the door. To go after him would cause a scene. She turns just as Mike Mineliss wanders to her side. He will fill time, at least.

“…his vital signs are stable. He should come to at any moment, Mrs. Moore.”

Darkness. Only a faint flood of ghastly light, a shimmer of the sun; the sun that hung over the clouds as he ran towards the window. There are sheets over my body. There is a bed below me. There is a metal bar against my wrist. He opens his eyes to see his darling wife standing above him, speaking with a doctor.

“…the lacerations on his forearms, legs and chest should heal without scarring. He’ll be fine in a week,” the stranger said.

“Thank you doctor, thank you so much.”

There is a bouquet of flowers beside the window, in a vase, with a card. He has not read the card, he does not know the caring words it contains. There is a monitor he does not know the purpose of, with a red line racing across the screen.

“Joseph?” his wife pleads, in a desperate voice he’s heard before, in the night, when they have not had sex, when he has begged her and she has refused. Why would she prefer to fight? Why would she make so many excuses — I have to get up early with the kids, I didn’t sleep that well last night, I don’t feel well — and be so willing to stay awake to chastise him, to argue with him, to destroy him. You are the beast of my home. “Joseph, honey, my darling. It is so good to see you. Oh thank god… thank god this wasn’t our 15 minutes. Can you imagine? Our 15 minutes gone because you fell out of an office window and landed on scaffolding. It’s so good you’re okay… that we didn’t lose our 15 minutes to something like this… honey? Joseph?”

“Good morning.”

“It’s late, honey. It’s not morning anymore,” Mrs. Moore said, clutching his arm in a cliché of body language.

“Oh.”

“Do you feel okay, honey?”

“No…”

“Look, the office sent flowers,” she stared down at it, re-reading it. “They apologize for the senior who wasn’t there for your meeting. It seems that you weren’t on his schedule, some mistake by a secretary. Also, the janitor’s union has sent chocolates and an apology for the loose piece of carpet that you tripped on. They’re all so glad you’re okay. We’re so fortunate that there was that scaffolding there. Did you know that honey?”

“No…”

“No what? What honey?”

“It wasn’t scaffolding.”

“It was honey.”

“No. It was her,” he replied Berkeleyly.

“There was a window-washer’s scaffolding two floors below, you landed on it, after you tripped and fell through the window. They say it was a one in a million chance for you to fall through, but flukes happen. I’m just so glad you’re all right.”

“What day is it?”

“July 25 th, it’s a Tuesday.”

* * *

The unfortunate subject, hidden icon of a voyeur bureaucracy, crushes the alarm clock that shrieks in icy resistance, awakened from a thick slumber of phantasm snapshots that predict the pedigree of her nemesis, even envision his post of sixteen screens, like a mythical hydra, while mixing in the musty breath of the wolf, who she has recently had a visit from in the neuron flints of her subconscious, if such clairvoyant abilities are to be believed, not from want of material, or wishing to debate the love-lust yearnings of the Brönte sisters. She is not alone in the house, the spectator of big bang debris shares this hobby with a local, who arrives in the rooster’s waddle light of day, knowing her mistress shall be unconscious, and strums the feminine phallic at the foot of the bed while dreaming of mediaeval mechanisms surrounding the object of her affliction. This morning, a lengthy licorice whip fashioned by braiding strands of the sticky candy, pulverizes the fleshy ovals of her hind, after tying her tightly to her bedpost quickly transitions into a circumstantial rape that unfolds rather mildly into a voluntary duo suck-fest that almost wakes up the sleeping beauty who’s unknowingly fisted her accomplice while chewing on her swollen left nipple, all while the camera goes in for a close up. The voyeur, witnessing in dry throat wonder, loses his perspective at this point, unable to shrug politely and continue based on the theatre, he invades the compound through the unguarded thicket of the garden walkway while the assistant quickly slips back down the stairs and the lady of the house finally rouses unknowing the spiral hairs littering her chest are not her own.

The camera lens of dispossession, having been left on automatic search, following her slight movements as she removes her flannel, Fall catalogue sheets from her body, chronicles a deleted third party in the room, as she, long legged, slouching, absent-mindedly, strolls bare-footed into the adjoining bathroom for a lengthy bath in hot, tumbling water. He, whose skin glistens like rocket fire from her proximity, a prey animal who’s scent fills the cocaine heat of his inner nostril, positions himself like a young Graham for the best damn show he’s ever apt to witness, as she, unknowingly moves just as he would wish, to later step in a creamy mush of anonymous origin on the linoleum floor.

She takes coffee from a carafe on a hotplate and adjourns to her studio to work on an autumn line for a small boutique. Elisa is not in charge of the entire collection, only the evening wear. As she begins to scribble over the template of the perfect woman, a figure that strangely reflects the artist who was clothing it, her guilty assistant enters with the announcement she has a visitor. Close behind Miss Hanley (Hanley Financial Services) is Graham, his coat over his arm and with a focused stare on his face.

“Good morning, Elisa,” he said as he entered, throwing his coat onto a nearby lounge chair and coming up to her drafting table.

“Well, Graham, what an unpleasant surprise. What brings you to the country?”

“I haven’t seen you lately, you haven’t been to mother’s for Sunday brunch for the last few weeks. I thought, as big brother, I’d come see if everything was all right.”

“Oh, come now. The only way you’ll ever warm up to me is if we’re cremated together.”

“Elisa, don’t talk like that. I care about you, you know that, that’s why I’m here.”

“I’d tell you I want to be alone, but you’re the kind of person whose presence doesn’t really affect that.”

“Is everything okay? You seem more boorish than normal,” Graham said.

“Graham, this conversation’s about as necessary as a fence around a cemetery. Why don’t you tell me what you want so that I can get back to my work?”

“I told you, I’m worried about you. I know we don’t talk all that much, but I want you to know that I’m here for you.”

“I don’t know what to say, that’s so sweet. I do have some things I need to talk about. You know, as a woman, I can’t take care of myself and I’m just so worried that I’ll never find anyone who will want me. I’m as lonesome as a bachelor’s toilet brush. I’m so unhappily unmarried, Graham. You know, I try, I do try. When I’m asked things that are out of the question, I always have the right answer. I know how to say ‘yes’ in six languages, just in case. When I meet a man and he asks me if I might be free a particular night, I always tell him ‘no, but I’m willing to negotiate’.”