Jack O'Connell - Box Nine

Ike tries to pay more attention, but he feels he must be more drunk than he realizes. The dialogue starts to lose its logic, speed up a little, get louder. More than once, the actors stop in midsentence and stare at one another. Ike glances over to see Bella up out of her rocker and leaning on the bar, eyes squinted, giving full attention to the action. Ariel, the spirit, played fully naked by a well-developed adolescent girl, can be seen whispering something into Prospero’s ear.

The actor playing Caliban is a real muscleboy, probably about six four with a chest span twice the size of Ike’s. He’s dressed in a tattered loincloth and he’s got a blond head of long Sampson-curls that put Miranda’s locks to shame. His body is covered with white powder and he moves in a strange skittish but agile manner, sort of leaping about the stage with the hyper-surety of a chimpanzee and the risky grace of a veteran dancer. Ike can see his Adam’s apple doing a weird, overly rapid throb in the center of his neck. He’s playing off Prospero, and to Ike, the older actor seems clearly uncomfortable.

CALIBAN: You unrighteous fuck, I hope you get windburn like no amount of cocoa butter will help.

PROSPERO: You’re like the most strung-out meat I’ve ever tuned, dude. You should watch the tongue. I know some cheap change’d give you crabs that never leave.

CALIBAN: This was my beach, man. You cruise, hang a bad left on the pipe one Saturday and bang, you cruise in on my grains with the bimbette. I’m Mr. Right for the first go-around, def, “Hey, Callie, join the clambake, babe, hey, Callie, you’re the main guy.” But it’s all lie-city, man. I’m no Mr. Bonus, nooo , sir. You were a righteous fuck to Callie, teach me how to roll with the big curls, the right wax to lay on my board, okay? But now it’s just Calliethe-lifeguard, eyes on the water, don’t move your ass, and holler when the high tide breaks. I wish you’d drown in the barrel next time out, you shit!

PROSPERO: [ angry, but fearful ]: You dog! You mother! Me, who taught you the Prospero-roll, who taught you one-foot balance, who taught you surfer tongue—

CALIBAN: [ outraged, screams ]: You taught me the language, and the big score is that I know how to curse! The red plague eat your heart for teaching me the language!

Prospero’s mouth drops open to speak, but Caliban suddenly takes a swing and lands a full fist to his gut. Ike can see the big actor lose his wind and sink to his knees. There’s a shocked look on his face. Ariel lets out a yell. Miranda appears on the scene, looks down on Daddy, and grabs hold of Caliban’s steroid-expanded arm. He flails her away, letting out a bizarre barking noise, then grabs her around the throat and heaves her down on the floor next to Prospero.

“Jesus Christ,” Bella says, “this ain’t in the script.”

Surfers start to flood the stage area. Caliban starts into a yelling, spastic unrecognizable speech, while throwing fellow actors into walls and smashing random props and then regular bar chairs and tables. Ike sits frozen for a second. He hears Caliban yell words that sound familiar but have no meaning to him. Then the words end completely and there’s just an awful, high-pitched buzzing sound, as if a hive of crazed wasps were living in his mouth and throat.

Then the blood starts to flow. Caliban is taking full power swings at everyone, catching jaws and noses, cracking bone and tearing open flesh. He grabs Ariel and lifts her bodily into the air over his head, then pitches her against a wall. The sound of her impact stops everything, but for just a half a second, and then Caliban is on top of Prospero, pounding on his head, stomping on his kidneys.

“Do something,” Bella’s screaming, and it takes Ike a moment to know she means him. She wants him to act. To help. To subdue this insane son of a bitch in a loincloth.

Ike slides off the stool and watches as Caliban does a replay of the Ariel-heave with Prospero’s limp body. Then he notices Ike in the distance and his head begins to jerk and make horrible violent twitching motions. His eyes go into spasms of blinking and bulging and the whole time his mouth is moving too fast to really see, lips opening and closing in an awful, stomach-turning blur.

He starts to walk toward Ike in a jumpy stutter step. Ike begins to tremble, grabs the seat of his barstool, and pulls it up in front of him like some ill-prepared circus act. He thrusts out into the air several times and Caliban makes swatting motions with his hands, still too far away to grab a leg.

Ike tries to hold the stool steady. He yells, “I’ll smash it over your fucking head, asshole. Don’t do it.”

Caliban takes one more hopscotch step forward. Ike wheels, smashes the stool through the glass of the locked front door, and throws himself outside, tearing open his cheek and hand on shards that remained lodged in the frame. He falls onto the sidewalk and rolls, gets to his knees, then feet, and without looking starts a wild, panicked, screaming run away from Bella C’s.

After several blocks, he looks back over his shoulder, but there’s no sign of Caliban. He turns down an alleyway, jogs to the far side of a trash dumpster, falls to the ground, hidden from view of the street. He starts to suck on his bleeding hand, gags, falls sideways, and vomits. He begins to have spasms, his stomach emptying over and over until all that’s left to throw is acidic bile that burns all the way up to his mouth.

When the dry heaves finally begin to fade, he leans his back against the brick wall behind him and tries to reduce all his thoughts to a simple, logical plan of action, of movement. He needs to get home. He needs to get to Lenore. He needs to tell Lenore everything that’s happened. The box of mutilated fish. The Bach Room. The box of severed fingers. Caliban’s fit. Lenore will know what it all means. And what to do.

He reaches into his pockets but they’re empty. All of his money is on the bartop at Bella’s. He doesn’t even have a dime for a phone. So he’ll have to walk back out of the Canal Zone. He doesn’t want to move. He’d rather stay right here in the alley, like some kid who’s wandered off in a shopping mall, like some camper who went too far into the woods. Stay in one place and let the rescuers come to you, isn’t that the rule of thumb, the key to safety?

But, technically, he’s not lost. He knows his way back home. He’s an adult who’s lived in this city all his life. If he can just get started, he’ll be home in an hour. If he can just make the first move, pull himself up off the ground and walk out to the main street.

He stays seated. He begins to have muscle spasms in his arms and legs, annoying cramps of tightened muscle that start off as a ticklish throb, but once he’s conscious of them, increase to an awful, painful knot. He tries to massage the backs of his calves, tries to make his body calm down and let the muscles unclench. He runs his hands up his opposite arms from elbow to shoulder. The knots reduce back to the quivering, ticklish mode, but then lock there.

So he gets up and tries to walk the feeling off. He moves slowly to the end of the alley, pokes his head out, and looks from side to side, then steps onto the sidewalk and turns left toward the west side. He starts walking near the edge of the sidewalk, using the wall of parked cars, half of them burned-out hulks, as a shield. Each time a car comes down the street, he fixes his eyes on the pavement and quickens his step.

There’s an amalgam of dissonant background noise that perpetually changes. Mainly, it’s made up of music from the dozens of hole-in-the-wall clubs in the Zone. Weepy, overamplified guitar fades to neo-bebop alto sax, which is overtaken by slightly out-of-tune chamber music which mutates into a postmodern, electronic orchestra of unnatural, machinish sounds. It’s never clear exactly where any of the sounds are coming from. It always seems like it’s just one more block ahead, but by the time Ike reaches this position, the next noise has taken over and beckons from farther up the street.