Lance Olsen - Sewing Shut My Eyes

13. SHE LEARNS HOW TO LOSE GRACEFULLY

She’s already tired. Her legs feel like hardening cement. Her body feels old at nineteen. She stands in the back bedroom on the first floor of Uncle Buddy’s Hunting Cabin and stares forlornly at herself in the mirror. Tom isn’t the gentleman she had imagined. Or maybe Tim is the gentleman she had imagined. It’s hard to tell. She unzips her jeans, skins them off, shrugs her Sick Poppies t-shirt over her head. She runs warm water in the shower. Her breasts beneath her lace bra. Reaches for the Ivory soap on the sink ledge. Her name is Melinda. Or maybe it’s Glenda. Or Brenda. Ker either wasn’t paying attention when it was mentioned or it wasn’t mentioned in the first place. When Melinda or Glenda or Brenda looks in the steamy mirror again another head floats behind hers.

Zodiac Killer, homicidal maniac. Bright brown eyes. Flawless teeth in the mouth hole of his ski-mask.

He raises two fingers to his forehead in a flip salute to posterity.

The first teenager, wearing lace panties and bra, ducks and covers.

An ice pick glints in the shadows above her fourteen gallons of bleached-blond hair.

She opens her mouth to scream.

The ice pick descends.

The first teenager senses mortality.

201. THE DISCOVERY: CHANNEL

“Uh, hey… ” Ker says, beer can pausing maybe two centimeters from his lips.

He leans forward.

Wasn’t that… yeah… hey… wasn’t that Syndi’s face in the audience-reaction shot back there?

Okay, so maybe it took a couple of minutes to register, but fer shure it was, has to be… just after that what’s-her-name, fat lady with the whipped-cream hair, admitted she whacked her own fraternal twin in flagrante utero.

Steady, boyo. Steady.

He leans back.

Lessee.

Okay, Take Two: there was this anorexic mom-type with green turtle-shell glasses next to a black rodential woman with simpatico tears in her eyes… a-and right behind them, bobbing just out of focus, was… Syndi… yeah, Syndi… Ker’d of course recognize her anywhere… long honey hair in a ponytail… wire-rimmed glasses… slightly puzzled brown eyes… almost like Ker wasn’t the only one wondering why she was there…

Only… why was she there?

She’s supposed to be at work today, right? Plus she’s never mentioned the Psychic Healer Network. Plus that show was shot… where? New York, probably, or Chicago.

Cr eeeeee py.

Ker shudders.

Weh-hell… these things were always prerecorded, weren’t they, bordering as they always did on a species of well-disguised infomercials, and, uh, Ker guesses it was just possible this was taped like four years and one day ago, twenty-four hours before he stepped into The Vinyl Fetish, or maybe seventy-two, or maybe three months, which isn’t the point, is it, but nonetheless… maybe it represents just one of those little secrets lovers keep from one another, or… not so much secrets (Ker simply couldn’t contemplate such a thing hanging between Syndi and him like one of his body organs on the drying hooks down at work)… as just, um, what… just unexplored psychological territory that would under the right circumstances become totally mapped.

Unless, it goes without saying… unless it wasn’t Syndi, but one of those look-alikes you see all the time on the streets around town who you could swear was like Ellen DeGeneres or that woman from “Friends” or something, except wasn’t.

Right?

With one hand Ker tips back the Bud for a long mind-clearing swig and with the other flips channels in reverse, descending the decision tree, trying to relocate that show… only the thing is… the thing is… he can’t.

Okey-dokey. Not to worry, he thinks, starting, needless to say, to worry. Not to panic. He’s been hopping around a lot, and hasn’t a clue where exactly he’s been.

It’s all right.

No sweat.

A-and he hasn’t been looking at the time… so for all he knows the show is already off the air, replaced by an infomercial about how to hit it rich by buying all these houses in Arizona or investing in Rogaine or something, o-or maybe another guest and host are on in the second segment (if indeed the fat woman and healer comprised the first), o-or maybe there’s a commercial cycling and so he’s in fact looking at the right channel but it feels like he’s looking at the wrong one.

“Shit,” Ker announces, clicking.

This horrendous green snot bubble balloons out some pig-snouted female kid’s left nostril and the well-dressed woman across from her at the nice LA restaurant begins spontaneously kecking.

Click.

A woman with stelliform shoe-polish black hair’s head derricks up and down in a man’s naked lap.

Click.

Prosthetic surgery is painful, but it can powerfully renew our sense of involvement in the world. It’s all a question of where you locate the information interface: how much you can stand to lop off, or just how far back you’re willing to go …

Click.

A reddish-brown male Cimex lectularius (bedbug to you and me) in ghastly close-up stabs its beak into a female’s abdomen, preparing to release its sperm into her wound and hence bloodstream.

Click.

Tribal drums and primitive wails blossom. Colors whirl. Black men in grass skirts and jangling brass earrings, bracelets, and necklaces dance wildly around a bonfire, shaking spears, lifting knees, hooting and jabbering at the nightspirits. Their earlobes hang to their jawbones. Scars funnel their cheeks. Only the whites of their eyes show. Ker believes they’re real, but feels there’s an equal chance he’s just watching a rerun of “Gilligan’s Island.” They leap and caper around a naked pale body tied to the ground, ready for sacrifice. Arms stretched out to the sides. Legs wide apart. The face alert, familiar… very familiar…

Click.

A-and it’s… it’s… OUTTA HERE!!!

111. AS SEEN ON TV

44. DUCK & COVER

“What you gonna do about it?” the barrel-chested man in the black cowboy hat asks.

Ker feels in familiar territory and settles back in his bean-bag chair.

“This!” the barrel-chested man in the white cowboy hat shouts, flipping an oily blue revolver into view.

“Good lord God, no! ” the mother in the white cowboy hat cries, trying to stand, crinkled and old.

The barrel-chested man in the black cowboy hat tries to duck and cover. But it’s too late. The barrel-chested man in the white cowboy hat fires. China crashes. Crystal splinters. A chair cracks against the floor.

“ Uggggh! ” the mother in the white cowboy hat cries, fatally wounded.

111. AS SEEN ON TV

“Say what?” Ker says.

249. AS A SOAP OPERA

It is also worth mentioning that although egg consumption in the United States is one-half of what it was in 1945, there has not been a comparable decline in heart disease. Moreover, although the American Heart Association deems eggs hazardous, a diet without them can be equally hazardous. Not only do eggs have the most perfect protein components of any food, but they al

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68. DUCK & COVER

A glistening black Porsche sizzes through what looks like downtown Dallas or downtown Miami late at night, screeching around corners, turboing through intersections. A Corvette jets down avenue after avenue, low slung, white, locked in overdrive. Scattered gunfire. Because of the rapid jump-cuts, it’s unclear exactly who’s chasing who. Closeup of Rex Rory behind the wheel of one of the cars (though which is unclear), perspiration sparkling on his face, fury in his eyes, hatred at mouth corners… most likely, given the context, not playing the flamboyant resident (though this obviously is open to debate and readjustment through viewing time)… followed by the closeup of that barrel-chested man in the black cowboy hat, sweat sparkling on his face, eyes wide with fear, nose now broken and swelling, who isn’t, in fact, Ker is almost sure, the guy from the other show, though it’s possible he is, in which case next week’s episode is playing simultaneously with this week’s, only on a different channel, or maybe the syndicated version of the show (whose name is on the tip of Ker’s tongue) from let’s say two years ago is cycling simultaneously with the so-far-non-syndicated version, only on a different channel. Ker in any case has the sense that he’s missed too many pieces of the plot to understand very much. An excess of lines has been spoken without him there to hear. He might as well give up. Plus he has the feeling he’s seen this one before… until, that is, the wedge-shaped spaceship appears, a glowing green delta over the city, and simply tremendous, as in the size of a hovering battleship, and it’s busy shooting some sort of photon-torpedo-looking jobs at both cars, only the aliens inside are really bad aims and keep nuking wads of unsuspecting tourists who have no right to be standing on street corners at this time of night in this kind of iffy neighborhood anyway. Until, that is, the camera zips inside said ship, and Ker sees the two standard-issue cute human kids at the control panels, maybe twelve or thirteen years old, all agitated, trying to fly this thing and clearly pushing the wrong buttons by accident, and it dawns on Ker this whole business is really a comedy, the kids having crept aboard said craft probably built by dad in Utah or something and bumped the throttle without knowing it and now are on some kind of cartoonish joyride, ha ha… unless, uh-oh, Ker thinks, they aren’t kids at all, but scary kids-appearing aliens, maybe pod-kids, and this ducks-in-a-barrel thing is their idea of a good time, and maybe they aren’t on earth at all, but on their home planet, a-and this is simply their playground out back or in their cellar, a-and the guys in the cars and all the bystanders have been unknowingly kidnapped and transported here while they slept, a-and still believe they’re in Dallas or Miami, which from their perspective is being invaded, which is a possibility definitely worth considering, in which case it’s really a horror film that’s super-intelligently conceived, though Ker kind of doubts it, but decides to go along with the flow anyway, since it’ll make his viewing more palatable. Until one of the kids or pod-kids or whatever lifts a can of something apparently called a Zerp soft-drink and takes a chug followed by a wide satisfied smile, and the announcer, this French guy who sounds like he’s on barbiturates, says something Ker can’t understand, though he once backpacked through France for two weeks, and in college took two years of the stuff, and Ker realizes he’s been inhabiting a commercial masquerading as a horror film masquerading as a comedy masquerading as an action adventure masquerading as a soap opera.