Michael Martone - Four for a Quarter - Fictions

PALETTE

At night after closing, the crazed blacktop of the parking lot is sealed, the thick tar swept along the split seams, slapped about cursively with sopping mops that splatter and spray antimatter milky ways, black stars on black backdrops, the constellations unreadable in this light, a kind of Palmer primer of crippled capitals, detached legs and leaking ovoid gestures gone awry, creases on a palm incised, scored, toothy selvage. Over all these alphabets and glyphs, a slurry film is broadcast by machine, all pneumatic nozzled steamed sheeting, plowing back and forth, lapping the air-brushed edge over the edge, masking (a mat of matte black hermetic iced devil's food cake, empty black void, a desert dessert) the edge edged with another edge. And after that, while this new nothing dries, the night crew tees up some comped cones à la mode taken from the soda jerk on overtime at the take-out window. These little lamps of lactose lit-up, winnowed with each flickering lick. They're a kind of optical illusion, floating on the air, that their operators (doused in shadow camo leotards of silky asphalt splashes) make disappear.

In the dark, they watch the painter in spotless overalls overhaul the scaffolded sign out front of the Shoppe. It's an artist's palette with eight moons of vibrant neon colors jewelling its rim and a rendering of three sable hair brushes thrust through the illusion of the thumbhole. The script A of the store name drips toward the hummock of the ending z 's ascender, loop-less, the italic flourish of its blobby tail, the abdomen of some oversized insect, the splat of the apostrophe, all mimicking the French curve of the big ol' kidney shaped sign, all hip that then goes all square, intersected by the rectangular sign within the sign, all business and no art, the special message board of misplaced applications — M B3EF NO ODLES, TH TUR KEY, F BBQRIBS.

They watch (as the earth's crust cools, sculpting their triple dips of neon-colored ice cream into a concrete demonstration of Zeno's paradox of time and space) the painter paint the pictures of paint, mixing paint on his own homemade palette (a slab of scrap wood) dabbing red paint on the red “paint“ of the red paint of the sign-sized palette.

The painter arcs his way through the whole rainbow of color, each one a substitution for flavor, a gigantic graphic synesthesia, of ice creams already melting into metaphors, comparisons, these synaptic associations made in the palette-shaped brain, wedged into our cone-shaped skulls. This is like this and this is like this and this is like this. It is harder now to tell the painter from the paint. More licking. More liking. More this-ing. The stars overhead look like stars in the sky. The blacktop looks like blacktop. The ice cream tastes like ice cream. The sign looks like Sign. The artist painting the sign, who looks like an artist painting a sign, signs the sign with something that looks like, when you look at it closely, even in this unfathomable and defining blackness (a color that is both all the colors and none of them), another sign.

POSTCARD CAPTIONS

1.

On a long reach, the leading airships in the breakaway pod jockey for position as they drift into the third turn near South Bend during the 17 thrunning of the Tour d'Indiana. Dirigibles, blimps, balloons — all manner of lighter-than-air craft — vie for the coveted Otis R. Bowen Cup in a thrilling race, often taking months to complete, covering the four corners of the state.

2.

In the distinctive barn-red livery of International Harvester, a tractor blimp plows the anvil top of a fertile cumulonimbus, kicking up a trail of cirrus clouds in its wake above the parched summer fields near Monon, Indiana. Following close behind, a John Deere zeppelin prepares to sow the newly turned furrows with seeds of silver iodide in the hope of sparking needed precipitation, a practice invented by noted atmospheric scientist Bernard Vonnegut, brother of Hoosier novelist Kurt.

3.

A rapt crowd of Hoosiers observes as the Oolitic Fire Department douses the smoldering wreckage of the Derek Jeter balloon on Christmas Eve 2002 after it slipped its tethers during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City. The three-story balloon, depicting the Yankee slugger sliding headfirst into second, eluded detection during its month-long free flight over the heartland until its fiery reentry in the limestone country of south central Indiana.

4.

Casper Kastellnick, of nearby Port Royal, Kentucky, expertly rides the buoyant atmosphere produced by the world-famous helium springs outside Vevay, Indiana. The lighter-than-air air geysers erupt inertly on a predictable schedule and are of such duration and magnitude as to allow local aficionados time to master their spectacular levitational displays.

A ROOM

First, there's the sun (which is eclipsed by the moon {the moon itself obscured by wisps of clouds} haloed by the luminous corona) which is a ball of gas (which is a state of matter characterized by the lowest density and viscosity). All this, in the corner of the stamp (the whorls of raised ink {exactly like the oily residue of thumbprints left by your correspondent} of printing, expanding like a gas {expanding until evenly distributed within its container} to its edge) near the selvage. Now (wait {a second}) where am I?

A TOWN

Pictured: the recently discovered and described “predicate.“ Here, the verb of being has just come into being. An “am“ can't even simply sit since “sit“ hasn't been invented yet. The local population is, however, intrigued. They've begun to “be.“ They have been naming things for decades, are on the verge of naming, “have been naming,“ a verb. Some “nouns,“ like “name,“ are not just nouns but verbs also. Shown in the inset: Things they have “named.“ The “adz.“ The “hibachi.“ The “bustle.“ The “gyroscope.“ The “puck.“ The “quotation mark.“

A VILLAGE

“Who dreamed us here?“ the inhabitants of this village ask in their dreams. They try, upon waking, to renegotiate the covenants inherited from their ancestors — the dazzling hue of their houses, the shifting distribution of their neighborhoods. Their undreamed dreams accumulate, cloud the black, black night with sparks of color. They forget to ask. They ask. They forget they've asked. They ask. Who smudged out the road that was never there? Who erased the sense of a sense of direction? They dream: “Who dreamed us here?“ “Did you?“ they ask. “Did you?“

A RESORT

Spring finds hundreds gathered here to stand for something else. The participants remember to observe, and the observers remember to participate! Everyone remembers to remember! A lock of hair becomes a copse of trees; a fingernail turns into a placid lake. At the cocktail parties, you are encouraged to sample canapés of your own fingers but forget, until you remember, you have no way of picking up your own finger! And later, they unfold the map! Its scale is 1:1! It corresponds exactly and fits like skin! It is your skin!

“Calling birds“ refers to colly, or collie, birds. “Colly“ or “collie“ means “black.“ It comes from an older English word for coal. “Colly bird“ is the European blackbird. Common in parks and cities in Europe, it looks like a dusky version of its cousin, the American robin. Both belong to the thrush family.

VEERY

The next time they talked on the phone, she told him she had just started to come when she heard her daughter return home downstairs and call out to her. Falling from the bed, she ran across the room to close the door. As she ran, the orgasm caught up with her, the blood rushing from her head, her legs turning spongy, compressing beneath her. When she came, he knew, she often expelled a multi-syllabic, “Fuck,“ and he could hear, though it was distant and hollow with echo (in her haste she hadn't had time to disconnect), the first fricative transmute to a plosive burst of greeting, a schwa-y “Whah,“ closer to the first notes of her daughter's name. The next time they talked, she would tell him how intense it was to be moving through the spasm, all inertia, entropic, irresistible, spilling as she spilled toward the door, her momentum carrying herself and the door forward to a slamming slam he could hear clearly. She said it was like a cartoon, the motion so suddenly staunched, her writhing, her worming. Her back turned to the door, she slid slowly to the floor with the squeak of naked skin on enamel paint, one hand fumbling behind her head for the lock's knob while the other, between her melting legs, tugged at herself, plucked out the minor key tufts of sensation as she settled bare-assed, panting. In fact, the next time they were on the phone, the retelling of this last time was enough to take her over the edge again, the conjuring up of the sprint across the room, the throbbing pulses racing through her racing legs, turning the ground beneath her viscous. “Fuck,“ she said distinctly in his ear. What he did not tell her about that previous time (the time she left the phone connected on the bed to rush to the door, coming while she ran) was that he continued to listen over the distance, hearing the padding feet and the grunting climax and the call and the slamming door and the puckered squeak of her skin on the door. She had been using a vibrator, one that plugged in, and it continued to hum, the sound dampened by the bedclothes. It nested near the phone, creating a humid occluded silence, overdubbing the static hiss sparking off the wire. He too had been about to come when he heard her hear her daughter's voice and start her stumble for the door. Had he come, he wouldn't have uttered a sound, intent, instead, on listening to hear the “Fuck“ slip out of her and positioning his release beneath hers, emitting a kind of melted sigh for her hard consonance to ride on. Now that she was gone, he slowed his stroking and continued to listen closely. There was a window open. It was late spring there, and he swore he could hear the percolating silence of the warming air as it infiltrated the mesh of wire screen near her bed. He lived miles to the south where the spring had long ago turned torrid, his room closed up and dark. He rolled onto his side, insulating his ear away from his other ear, encasing it with the pillow that filtered the bass line purr of the whole-house AC cycling outside. He heard her then miles away talking with her daughter through the door, the door acting as a kind of resonator, transmitting the mundane news that she'd been napping, asking for a moment to get dressed. The vibrator went dead. She unplugged it and pulled it to her, a clatter hitting the floor, the scrape of it as she coiled the cord, the vibrator's hard plastic case stuttering across the sisal rug. He heard drawers of various timbres slide in and out, the little rattle of the swivel pulls against the plates. The jittery knickknacks disturbed in the haste. He heard her, he swears, dressing, her jeans on first, standing, the flat stomps as she skipped twice to balance, the stereo tramp of both feet finding the floor as she pulled up the pants. He listened for the zipper and heard it. Then the soft whisper as she rolled a T-shirt onto her arms followed by that stopped — up submerged sound as her hair, silk, slid through the abraded collar. She walked flat-footed to the door, brushing out her hair as she shuffled, the pitch changing as she stopped, then the sweep of all that hair over the top to brush from behind and below, currying the muffled mass of it back up over her bent bobbing head. And then he heard her leave: the volume of her diminished in his ear, the distant depleted report of her, calling her daughter's name, descending as she descended the stairs. The silence settled out heavier than air. He pressed the phone closer to his ear as if to inject his own hushed self into the recently disturbed acoustic there, to detect any sonic smidgeon left in the mix. Her swallowing. A footfall. Those eyes blinking. He boosted the gain of his signal, attempting to catch her shallow breath breathing. Instead, all he heard in the stillness, spilling in from the open window, was a birdsong, a slurred series of downward inflected quarter notes. Each note tripped progressively lower in pitch, spiraled, cascading down a scale. It began again with a simple, non-inflected cheep, ended with a rolling trill. It was one of the thrushes. The hermit or the robin. He had told her at the beginning of the call that all the flocking robins in his neck of the woods had disappeared a few days before. I am sending them your way, he had told her as they began. A kind of foreplay, he had thought, releasing songbirds north to her along with the heat, the seasons turning, his own sprightly combination of suggestion. There it was again, a long lowering run, arranging itself into a fragment, a phrase, an adjectival clause that modifies a person, place, or thing, an intensifier that amplifies. Very. That sounds like very. Very . Very like very .