Michael Martone - Four for a Quarter - Fictions

3“But you've got to understand me. You see, with me—“ Murphy paused, as though deciding whether to go ahead with his thought “—with me, it's been a fight for a long, long time to keep from being bored to death. That's what two years of combat did to me!“

A CLERK WORKING FOR THE ARCHITECT OF THE CAPITOL FLIES THE FLAGS THAT HAVE BEEN FLOWN OVER THE CAPITOL OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

It luffs, sags, as I haul it in, fold, send to a middle school in the middle of nowhere. There, the invisible's visible, I guess.

THE ATTACHÉ EXPLAINS TO HIS FIANCÉE THE BOLT OF GINGHAM CLOTH IN THE CORNER

Oh, that. The Salamanca Senecas' yearly treaty obligation. I keep track of all those promises promised — wampum, trinkets — the symbolic stuff. Mine to remember, remember?

THE SPECIAL AGENT WAITS ON THE PLATFORM OF THE METRO FOR THE NEXT TRAIN TO ROCKVILLE

Last on the tour. I demonstrate. The Thompson. Full auto. Spent shells. Fly. Kids fight over brass casings. It's a crime. A waste. My life.

TUESDAY:

BOSTON LIGHT:

BREWSTER ISLAND: 42° 19′ 40.85″N, 70° 53′ 4.26″ W

THE LAST MANNED LIGHTHOUSE IN THE UNITED STATES

The keeper writes when the light, flashing white every ten seconds, shines. 0123hrs. Seas: calm. Pressure: Falling. Skies: Severely. Clear. Stars: Disappearing. 1 X 1

ACHILLES SPEAKS OF HIS DECEPTION IN THE COURT OF LYKOMEDES

I couldn't stand the blood. The forty daughters of the king had lived so long together that the visitation of their monthly bleeding had synchronized before I got to Skyros. Preparing to hide me there, my mother, as she shaved my body, had rushed to tell me everything. How the brooches worked and how to comb and pin my hair, the way to look at a man and how to squat and pee. She had wheedled from Hephaestus, as she would later for my armor here, prosthetic hips and breasts made of gold and ivory, fragrant balsam and elastic willow, the minted nickel nipples. Whispering all the while, she wove the dyed fur of the codpiece into the scruff above my cock. The steps for the dances, the register of the dirge, goddesses I'd never heard of, all the ointments and unguents and where they go, the way I should let a man's hand slide over my rump. But she neglected to tell me how each month, beginning in ones or twos, then in greater numbers, the girls would leave their father's court and secret themselves outside the walls of the acropolis in the tents pitched on unpure ground to bleed. I taught myself to wait and follow the last clutch of girls from the palace. I imitated them as they gathered up their kits. We took dried figs and raisins, olive oil for the lamps, wool to spin, a flute or lyre, and the wad of cotton rags.

Blood, I've seen. I learned the stitch that knit up your wounds, Danaans, from those girls in exile. The needle, lathered in blood from my sewing, draws its own blood with its work, red pips on the stems of black thread. My spear too does its mending, pulls ropes of gore through my enemies. But men, you don't know what it is like to bleed the way the women do. To sit and seep like that. I watched them, a spot or two always in the folds of each crotch. The stains would slowly spread and soak through until one of the women would stand and unwrap the girdle sopping now on the inside. She'd toss it on the pile to be burned, and her sisters would wash her wound and sponge her dry and hitch a new sheet around her waist and legs. The smell was something. It exhaled each time the dressings were changed. Then the sisters would turn to help another. It didn't seem to stop. And the girls went on about their business, talking mostly like we are doing now.

I have never seen my own blood. Even as my mother's razor scraped the hair from my body, the blade whetted on my hide. Honed, the edge still dully slid over my thick skin, not a nick. I faked my fake menses, smearing jam on the cloth when no one was looking. At night in that stinking tent, I'd dream. Wrapped in sleep, I could not remember who I was. Reaching for myself, my hand burrowing in the rags between my legs, I'd feel the sticky puddle of what I took to be my bleeding. How could I be bleeding? In my mind, the jam had turned into the body's own syrup. I felt the stump of my cock nested in the fur sheath, everything smeared with blood. And I could also feel a cock, not mine, cut off stuffed up inside me. I told you I was dreaming. I forgot what I'd become. I kept bleeding.

Men, we rape. That is what we do. Who hasn't drawn his cock bloody as a sword from some girl no older than the daughters of King Lykomedes? You strip the frothy coating off yourself and then pin her down to let your buddy have his turn. But for a moment, before you wring it clean, you hold it in your hand, this core of blood. It makes you think.

And there was the moon that night. Of course, there was the moon. I watched it slip out of the sea, red and full, into the black sky saturated with the smoke of smoldering rags. The moon tinged the water with its own diluted hemorrhage. My mother is a Nereid. I've seen her melt into a puddle. She dressed me up as a girl and never wanted me to suffer. I knew I was fooling no one. Though for a while, I wanted to be fooled. Now I know. Men, I am a man, like you.

DRINKING BYRON

“I was never bled in my life — but by leeches…. Perhaps the tape and lancet may be better.“

— Lord Byron, in a letter to Hobhouse, 20 April 1824

St. Valentine's Day, 1824. Messolonghi. I fell seriously ill with some manner of convulsive disease. Had it lasted a moment longer it must have extinguished my mortality — if I can judge by sensations. I was speechless with the features much distorted — but not foaming at the mouth — they say — and my struggles so violent that several persons could not hold me — it lasted about ten minutes and came on immediately after drinking a tumbler of cider mixed with cold water in Colonel Stanhope's apartments. Leeches applied to my temples — the aim to break the high fever. Once removed — I bled — profusely, continuously. Doctor Bruno in terror called for Doctor Milligen when he could not staunch the blood.

A week later I was much relieved. Prescribed resinated wine, flavored by the sap leeching from the barrel staves of unseasoned pine, I drank to my health. We all did. Epilepsy — perhaps — we thought then. We sat and waited — for the Turks — whose sappers mined day and night, around this forgotten city, the Evzones retreating before their siege works. It rained and rained. Stanhope and Gamba complained. I no longer write poems. So I wrote, drunk on blood red wine, a Patras claret, this—

Seek out — less often sought than found

A Soldier's Grave — for thee the best

Then look around and choose thy ground

And take thy Rest

April. The spring come. I have seen a swallow today — and it was time — for we have had but a wet winter hitherto — even in Greece. I rode in the rain with Gamba to the olivewoods. Returned sopping, chilled. The doctors say I labor under a rheumatic fever. They want to bleed me again. I resist at first. The servants already wading in the flooded streets look for leeches. No, not leeches. The tape and the lancet this time.

The blood was wine red. They took twenty ounces. The bowls emptied in the garden, stain the thyme, the sage. Another bloodletting. A third. Later still the leeches once more — to the temples, behind the ears, along the course of the jugular, a kind of jewelry.