The Lexical Funk-A Triumph of Words

The Lexical Funk: A Triumph of Words Daniel Clausen

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Copyright © First Edition 2008 Daniel Clausen Copyright © Second Edition 2014 Daniel Clausen

IMITATION FOR BEGINNERS

1-Being Born There are five of us: three humans and two androids, including me. We meet on Sundays in the garden just outside the coffee shop where we purchase coffee at higher than market price.

One of the humans informs me that the extra money isn’t for the coffee but for the atmosphere.

The garden is nice, tranquil in an overly artificial way. But I don’t come for the quiet. I come for the chaotic uncertainty that is sure to follow.

As happens most mornings, the conversation starts with pleasantries about families, jobs, and friends and then quickly progresses to a more controversial topic. The loud human, who dominates most of our mornings with sheer volume, talks to us about the differences between androids and humans.

“Coming online and being born,” he tells us, “defines the difference between us. One is an ordeal; the other is a simple matter of being switched on.”

If I were more adept at human emotive processes, I would know what kind of response best befits this simple comparison. A snicker would be a good start. A sigh, perhaps. A combative exclamation on a bad day might be appropriate. Or perhaps silence is the best way to respond.

As I am still a simple imitator, new to the art of human movement and emotive articulation, let me instead answer this in the way androids often do -- with words, simple, direct, yet filled with emotions: I think this way of thinking is a gross simplification. It masks the true nature of both phenomena.

The difference between the manufacturing of an android and the birth of a human is, I think, more cultural than actual. The truth, from my point of view, is that any being capable of emotion has many births, the least spectacular of which is usually the one where he or she simply begins.

For me, my most dramatic birth was when I began to imitate humans.

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2-An Android as an Imitator She smiles at me. Confused, I don’t know whether I should smile back, laugh, or scratch my nose (a more recent invention of mine that I am uncertain how to use). I go with the half-laugh/half-smile. I do this not knowing whether it’s the right response.

I could describe this as a typical imitating experience for me, although the truth of the matter is that there is no typical experience. There are things I typically experience: noise, confusion, and the exhilaration of the moment when the humans and I understand each other.

I can’t tell you exactly when my fascination with the human form began, but it’s safe to say that I’ve always been drawn to them in one way or another. They are, after all, not us. They do not see things collectively as we do. They show a baffling propensity to focus inward and to try to draw others into them. They baffle and astound other humans as much as androids, I think. And their rapid variation in emotions, something not yet seen in androids, has defied the explanation of even the best android minds.

Now, she’s tapping her fingers on the table. “Where’s my drink?” she asks.

She does this like a movie star. She’s self-conscious about her own movements, like an actress, I think to myself. We have that in common. I finally go for the nose scratch, confident that this is the right time to do it.

The great imitator Bob 8642 says that the human form is always in motion, evolving from emotion. As an imitator I find that I must look past human actions, even as I observe them—to look for that deeper meaning. Emotive action is, after all, expressive. It’s communication.

To be a true imitator it’s necessary to be a student of everything human.

As anyone who studies the strange and exotic knows, the hardest part is finding a beginning, a foundation on which to build. There is no foundation like the one you build for yourself. You stand higher and reach further that way.

Her upper lip curls neatly into her lower lip, and she sucks on it for a while.

The two men at the table watch me watching her. One of them elbows the other and smiles.

Like most androids who imitate for the first time, I find that the movements feel strange, awkward. And in this awkwardness, I believe I can feel myself reaching toward limitations. I feel myself pushing at a boundary I have never truly known before.

I know of no androids who have passed as actual humans and few 5

Daniel Clausen who would want to. The point of imitation is something quite different.

Communication.

Androids know that it is easier for humans to communicate with androids who can act as they do, show emotions as they do. Bridging the gap between Self and Other.

The other imitator at the table is much better than me. He does something fantastic about halfway through our conversation. Something I think must be petulance or disgust. It would be easy for me to fall into jealousy, the most common of android emotions. But I don’t. This android…he does something amazing by showing it to me, to others. It’s beautiful. But I’m not sure how a human would acknowledge this.

We are anthropophilic, self-hating androids. We are envious of things that do not warrant envy. These feelings, by other androids, are natural. It is equally as natural that some more recent models have used imitation as a way of distinguishing themselves from their elders. Is there anything wrong with this?

Is there anything wrong with a small bit of idolatry? Self-questioning? If you lack a God to believe in, isn’t it natural to gravitate to a mother or a father?

Androids have no such figures. Can we create them out of something so different from ourselves?

Imitators work from a simple belief that difference is not unbridgeable. The beliefs of androids are so corrupted that sometimes we question if we were even created. It’s the differences that corrupt our beliefs.

Difference does not need to dominate our relationship with the humans.

The world becomes confusing, frightening for a moment when the man starts clearing his throat. I’m not sure why. I’m not sure if the man is sick or if he does this as a way of quieting the other man’s opinion. I puzzle over this for a while.

Some say that we’ve always just been. We’ve always existed in a state of perpetual friction: the creator’s elaborate puppet show, a show of shadow made from material. Are the humans more real than us, or are our realities codependent? Maybe the humans just tell us they created us; it’s part of the state of being that has always been, two kinds living side-by-side. To watch a human move, act, behave, so differently from you -- you wonder sometimes if it even could have happened.

Some say faith is difficult for androids. I have no trouble with faith. I see humans and I think: It’s possible. Partly accident perhaps, partly innovation, and partly an act of love. That’s how it all happened.

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The man has finished clearing his throat. “Sorry,” he says. “Just a little something down the wrong pipe. As you were saying.”

As I practice my emotive moves in my domicile, letting the gesticulations, utterances, twitches, winks, nods happen more naturally, I think about a child crying when he or she is born. Emotiveness starts from birth. And your first emotive actions are your most natural. I think that I’d like to watch a human birth someday. Just to see what it’s like.

3-The Thumb Rule I’m sure she realizes as soon as she sees me that I’m interested in her. I’ve been imitating with simple nods, blinks, smiles, and brow motion patterns for about six months when she comes to me and asks if I want to have coffee with her and her friends. This is my first experience with the group.

That first day with them I wanted the barriers to break and fall away by themselves. I wanted the years of separation to naturally disappear.

Command and control would disappear. Not for liberation’s sake. No android has ever had any grand political goals. And I was quite content to remain within the Great Ordered Being, the glorious telos of programming. But for communication. To build a closer relationship.

I’d always been a keen observer of human emotive action. But like most androids, I was terribly shy and had trouble watching humans up close.

The easiest way for me to watch humans move was to start with movies.

To watch humans imitate humans was special. For they were not themselves but an Other. And who were they imitating? A one in the real world; a conglomeration of ones; an imaginary one; a part real, part imaginary one; an ideal?

Movement, a smile, a wink, a bow. Connection to emotion. The great imitator Bob 8642 says that the first, most important thing an android must do is to make motion emotive. This is the first step toward giving up total purposiveness in action. Purposiveness, at least in its strictest form, is an android quality.

Bob 8642 postulates that motion is directly tied to emotion with humans. And how these emotions manifest themselves in motion is never constant. It defies formulas. Even great android scientists have failed to predict human action.

The feeling of being alien to my own telos persists for a long time.

Bob 8642 postulates that while emotive action is neither stable nor fixed, it can be mastered by looking for patterns. He calls this a “thumb rule,” which is to say it happens most of the time. The more an emotion is tied to motion, the more often that motion follows the emotion. For frequent emotions, frequent motions follow in a relatively fixed but not precise pattern. For 7

Daniel Clausen higher-level imitation, imperfect emotive patterns; but this is difficult. I stick with simple patterns and work them over and over again. This is the best way to start imitating.

Our first time together I mostly smile and agree. Her friends stare at me. I realize from the start that the other imitator in the group is far better than me.

He has mastered things I haven’t, like a shrug, and something that sounds like a smoker’s cough after laughing. I don’t know exactly how I should act or what I should do, but they all compliment me and the afternoon passes in a rather confusing haze of random nods, winks, smiles, and other emotive behavior that is discomfiting. I tire easily.

For the first time I experience human conversation directly, firsthand. It is shocking. But I don’t know how to express this yet in emotive actions. The android just nods in approval. But could he really be approving of what they’re saying?

“You see, I think that’s the problem. I don’t really think the androids are any different from us at all. It’s just part of their culture to act different.

They’re just a bunch of elitists who don’t want to realize just how similar we really are…anyway, it’s all really academic. In terms of living standards, androids are the best thing that could have happened to our society. And, for want of a better word, well…they’re adorable.” The same man has been talking endlessly on the subject of human-android relations. The woman who invited me is quiet for a long time after she asks the other man what he thinks.

He’s some kind of theoretical engineer and also has many opinions on androids.

“There is this new theory about androids called “limited emotiveness,” written by, oh, well I forgot his name. He’s big anyway, you know the bestseller, on every engineer’s coffee table, blah, blah, blah. So this guy says that androids feel differently than humans because they’re limited by their programming. And it makes perfect sense after all...”

The other man comes in at this point. “Yes, yes, robots can’t kill or have family connections. Yes, yes, we’ve all read something similar before.”

“Yes, but this person argues something very intriguing -- and maybe our android friends could give us some insight on this. Well, he argues that androids feel just as deeply as humans, perhaps even more deeply, but that these emotions are centered on things that only their programming allows. He even goes as far as to say that what androids love is the order provided by their programming -- the thing that is often referred to as the Great Ordered Being. It’s like their God. They love the stability of relations, the process of finding and completing tasks that fall within their programming. He also postulates that androids have a secret hatred of human disorderliness, but have no way to express this hatred because to express such hatred would go 8

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against their programming.”

The girl’s interest seems to have been sparked by this newest revelation.

The android, a remarkable imitator, begins to cough. “You don’t say,” he says, nonchalantly.

I am shocked but do not know how to express this. I have developed a rule of thumb for a shocking moment that I suddenly remember. I knock over my coffee violently and say, “Well what the fuck do scientists know anyway?”

4-The Great Ordered Being I’ve been practicing my averted gaze for a long time, but I’m not exactly sure which emotions to link it with. I go to bookstores more often to watch humans. I go to coffee shops. And of course there are my conversations with my new friends.

Our conversations have turned to the new ministry being created to improve human-android relations. The group agrees that the other android and I should both apply for a job, as we are the best imitators they have ever seen. This is the first time I try my averted gaze.

One of them asks me what’s wrong. I don’t know how to reply. My true emotions are actually rather mixed. I feel that a ministry is not the best way to form better relations with humans and that androids will scoff at other androids specifically designed to work there. I don’t want to see androids specifically designed to work there. Imitating should be a choice, not a specialty. I don’t know which parts of my opinion I should tell them.

There are always five of us. There is the girl who, from all outward indicators, seems to be highly desired by the males. There is the passive engineer who is my favorite because he is the least confusing and produces the least amount of noise. Then there is the noise-maker, as I call him. He is by far the loudest and most confusing; it seems he doesn’t understand or care about his relationship with the rest of the group. He often shares his opinion in a way that is highly aggressive and thinks that silence is uncomfortable. My emotive responses are not so fast, so I often feel awkward when I am talking with him -- or perhaps just being talked at. He is the kind of person that the great imitator Bob 8642 warned would encourage many androids to simply quit imitating. The other imitator was also quite intimidating at first, but it didn’t take me long to discover his patterns and include them in my repertoire – and, if I may be so bold, even to surpass his skill. We rarely talk to each other when in group, and I feel that he has become rather jealous of me.

After our lunch the beautiful human girl asks me to meet her alone sometime. I agree and we set a meeting time. I show her through a mix of 9

Daniel Clausen heavy breathing, smiling, and nervous motions that I am excited. The other imitator scoffs quietly. I know what this means, and I feel sadness about his jealousy.

The noisy one comes up to me after the girl leaves.

“Lucky dog. What I wouldn’t give to be your metal cock tomorrow night. Yeah, she loves to do the imitators. She swore that the last one would really be the last, but I knew that was a crock. Still, you must’ve made quite an impression. Must’ve been that time you knocked over the cup. Man, if only we could get some imitators with female bodies. If you have any friends like that don’t hesitate to bring one to the party. Brad’s a bit shy, too, but I’m sure he wouldn’t mind a little imitator action either, as long as she’s good. Hey, you better practice your sexual motions before tomorrow. But be careful, though, she hates it when the sex is ‘too real.’ Know what I’m saying? She can get that anytime she wants.”

He’s talking too fast, and I am shocked by what the noisy one has said to me. But at the same time I am also a bit worried. The prospect of a sexual encounter had never occurred to me. Though I had seen many sexual encounters in the movies, I’d never actually practiced for one. Among imitating circles, sexual encounters were widely regarded as the most perplexing experiences, as well as the most dangerous. There’s an old saying among imitators: “After sex, everything is more confusing.”

Besides that, I would have trouble preparing. Though I could watch hours of film of humans having sex, it would be extremely difficult to see humans in the act first-hand. This was a source of great distress for me.

After the humans left, I stayed for a while in the café. I ran through some of the dialogues and the video of the day in my replay-processing center.

I must have been enthralled by one of the replays because I didn’t see the other imitator come back to the café. I thought maybe he had come to join another group for coffee and conversation. But no, he was coming to talk to me.

While we had little formal relationship in terms of programming, he being a Roosevelt Class 8 engineer and me being a Class 9, I felt that it was only natural that I congratulate him on his success imitating as well as his success forming such good relations with a group of humans. I also wanted to get his advice on how to approach my first sexual encounter. Perhaps he had had an experience with this same female.

When he sat down next to me, I noticed he was still displaying some of his human emotiveness. Perhaps he wanted to continue practicing with me.

“I know all about you,” he said. “You think that you’re special or elite or something because you can fit in with a group of humans. Well, let me tell you something -- you’re not special. It’s all part of your programming. You’re one of the experimental batches from the new ministry. Believe me, I know 10

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because I programmed you. I work for the ministry, too, you see. And let me tell you, you’re no different from the rest.”

His speech was highly confusing, and I was wondering now if the android was purposely practicing at making human noise. He seemed much better at it now than he did before. I asked him why he was still practicing. I said this in a straightforward way so as to let him know where I stood in the Great Ordered Being.

“Practicing…imitation? Are you for real? Imitating what? Humans? I am a human, stupid. I do my little robot imitation to make all the new imitators feel more at home. If you really want to get anywhere close to real imitation, you need to drop the whole Great Ordered Being bit, too.”

“I think you are confused. You are not a human imitating an android, but an android imitating a human.”

“Come on. Don’t you get it yet? Did you really think that the knife didn’t cut both ways? Listen, I just wanted to warn you not to get in too deep.

I’ve seen many an android wrecked on the shores of their first human sexual encounter. I care about Susan, too, and I’m afraid she’s getting too attached to you.”

How it happens is still a mystery, but Bob 8642 warned us that sooner or later we would run into an android who wanted to be human so badly that they would turn on their own android traits -- even deny the Great Ordered Being. They began to believe they were humans imitating androids.

The Confusion he called it. A condition that was usually brought on by listening to the human noise for too long. There was only one thing to do in this situation.

“Excuse me,” I said, “but this must be done.” As a Class 9, I had the authority and the duty. My arms moved quickly, and the dismantling process was finished in a matter of minutes. A few humans turned to look my way, but most just ignored me. Perhaps they had seen it before. The scrap bots came to take away his parts.

I left the table and retired to my refueling domicile. Later that night, after extensively viewing several collections of human pornography, I reported the imitator to Android Authority Section C. I felt satisfied that I was fulfilling my obligations within the great telos of programming. I felt sad that I would now be the only android at our meetings, but such is the way of the Great Ordered Being.

5-The Silence Before the Noise There is a date component to our meeting that I wasn’t aware of. Perhaps it is best to call this foreplay. Whatever she thinks it is, it’s awkward. I’m ill11

Daniel Clausen prepared for her giggling, her smiles, and I’m curious as to when the actual intercourse should begin. I know, though, as it is oft-spoken lore passed on from imitator to imitator, that one should never ask if it is time to start. This shows lack of experience and over eagerness to get the experience over with.

The routine of eating, giggling, small talk, and so on goes on for a while, and I’m relieved when she finally takes me by the hand and leads me to the bed.

I’m well-versed in most of the styles and techniques involved in intercourse. But it took many hours of miming and image processing practice before I became confident about even the simplest of lovemaking exercises.

I’ve been especially worried about facial expressions, as this is the most visible area when engaging in frontal intercourse. More seriously, I’m worried about the “dildo effect” -- a lack of emotive motion that makes an android seem as if he or she is just performing an essential task. Not only must I do the task, but I must also seem to the human like I am feeling the task.

When I strip for her, I do so shyly, the way virgins in movies strip.

The stripping part comes easily enough, as I have practiced this routine thoroughly.

The beginning is quiet. The motions are few. The words are few. It’s a beautiful change from the usual noise of human experience. I was warned not to be comforted by this silence, because it could quickly turn into something else -- noise of the most extreme volume. But I like the silence. I want to bathe in it. And I think for a second that I have discovered something about the humans.

“Put the clothes on the table,” she says.

I do what she says. More beautiful silence. I hesitate because this mutual silence is so beautiful. I wonder if she can feel it too. I lose track of what I’m doing, and I’m sure that my face has been a motionless corpse for some time.

“Well,” she says. “Do you want me?”

“I want you,” I say.

“How badly do you want me?” she asks.

“Badly,” I say.

The questions are coming faster now.

“Yeah, don’t hesitate, do what you want with me.”

This confuses me and I don’t know how to respond. I shrug. Then I realize immediately that this was probably an inappropriate response, so I laugh a little. But maybe this is even more inappropriate. I see her breathing harder. I have no idea what this means or why her heart is beating faster.

She’s moving closer to me. “You don’t know what to do, do you, you stupid machine? You’re new to this. You don’t want to be just another dildo android, but you don’t know how you’re supposed to act either.”

I shrug again. It’s my weak point. I shrug too much. “Well, I’ll be 12

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damned,” I say, but I’m not sure if this is right either.

She’s feeling me now. Her breath is on my neck, and I’m shrugging erratically, because I’ve forgotten which gestures and moves I’m supposed to make.

“Oh yeah, you’re so nervous. You don’t know what to do, but you’ve got no choice now.”

She’s got me on the bed now. Automatically, as if by remote sensor, my penis becomes erect.

“Oh baby,” I say, remembering my lines. “I like your tight ass, baby.

Give it to me. Oh yeah,” I say and groan. But then I realize I’m only supposed to say “Oh yeah” when she touches me. She isn’t even touching me. She’s still getting more excited...at my mistakes I think.

“You stupid fucking machine.” She’s on top of me now, moaning and groaning.

I shout, “Oh yeah, oh yeah, you like that, don’t you?” and then shrug convulsively. She’s laughing in between her moans. She comes several times.

“Don’t stop,” she says.

I stop shrugging and begin to regain my confidence. The noise is starting to die down. I remember what I’ve practiced. I grab her butt and say, “Make me come, woman!”

Then she starts to cry.

She falls off me and she’s crying. I think that something is wrong. I don’t know what I did wrong -- or is this normal? I don’t know. I shrug.

“Well, well…” I’m shrugging convulsively. “I don’t know. You don’t know.

What’s it all mean anyway?” I say. I think this might be the right thing to say, but I have no way of knowing. The world has become very noisy, almost painful.

I read somewhere humans don’t remember being born -- everything is so new, fresh, raw, traumatic, their minds block it out. I have that sweet silence right before the noise, the memory of the noise and the human female crying. It’s in my memory. And I think, this is it! This is what it must be like to be born. This is what I was missing. I keep it there, and I revisit it. It’s safe.

Not in a perishable human mind but in my android memory. And I feel sorry for the human female. I think about making her a copy so she can see it later.

Just in case she can’t remember.

6-What’s It All Mean Anyway?

The new guy likes to hang out with imitators, but he says that I’m just too good for him. He says we need fresh blood in this group, a new imitator. It’s been several years now since I first started meeting with my group in the garden patio of the cafe. I’ve found that while I’ve managed to bridge a kind of gap between us, the feeling of distance doesn’t go away entirely. The 13

Daniel Clausen others ask me to bring in new imitators, androids fresh to the sensation of human gesticulation. I tell them that I’m trying but that I don’t know many androids with the patience for this. I’ve grown quite familiar with this particular group of humans. The noisy one is away on business and probably won’t be coming back anytime soon. I find that this generally makes me sad and don’t understand why exactly.

“Yeah, I wonder why imitators aren’t as good as they used to be?” asks the least noisy of the humans.

“Yeah, it seems there are a lot fewer of them than there used to be.”

Susan says this while petting her new boydroid. He’s a relative newcomer to the trade, which is how she likes them. He is not an imitator, just an android designed for love. I can sense that the android is scared. The humans don’t know this though, because he has no desire to express this through gesticulation or words.

“You know how these things are, they come and they go like fads.

But I think we can count on at least a few having the courage to bridge the gap,” says the new guy.

I take a second and think about the other android that used to be part of our group. I’m sad that he’s gone. I even feel a little bit bad for dismantling him, even though the Great Ordered Being dictated that it should be so.

Before, I had never taken the step of inviting anyone into the group.

For a long time I had coveted my place with my human friends. I felt special knowing that the world was a bigger, more complex place with them in it. I don’t know. Maybe some of the reports that were leaking from the ministries were right. Maybe the first wave of imitators was just a product of experimental programming. The great imitator Bob 8642 once said that imitating is in the end a process, a lifestyle -- that there was no end and that the final product of the action was a better understanding of the androids around you as well as the humans.

In the end though, there was always the distance. For those who dropped out, went back to simple android-to-android communication, it was because relations with humans would never be a simple process. One always had to prepare oneself for the continual everyday circus act of failure, of misunderstanding.

I had taken up their request. I’d looked for others to join the group.

I’d looked for others to share my experience. And maybe, just maybe, give me a little repose. But I found that the androids willing to try it were becoming fewer and fewer. And too many would ask me when the noise would stop.

As for me, I’ve decided that this will be my last conversation for a while. Maybe a week. Maybe a month. I need some time to analyze everything that has happened to me. To reflect. There is a danger in this, I know. For as Bob 8642 says, “There is a danger that the motions that follow emotions 14

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might never come back, that the noise, once reentered, will never quiet down.

And that imitation itself will lose its meaning.”

I remain confident that this will not happen to me.

Susan is petting her new boydroid; the least noisy one is sipping his coffee, reading his paper and wrinkling a brow; the new one, to replace the noisy one, is checking out an android walking down the street. I am about to tell them my plan to take a short break from our usual Sunday meetings when the least noisy one looks up from his paper and smiles quietly at me.

“Hey,” he says to me, “I know this is short notice, but my wife is due to have a baby this Wednesday. I know androids are interested in that kind of thing. I talked to my wife about it, and she thinks you should be there. Hell, it would be an honor if you would be there.”

I discharge salty tears from my eyes, let my mouth fall open ever so slightly, and say, quite confident in the appropriateness and honesty of my expression, “I don’t know what to say.”

15

LEXICAL FUNK: HOW THE WHITE BOY LEARNED TO SETTLE DOWN AND LOVE THE AFRO

Etymology is the science of coolness, you dig? But you can only master its power through Jazz. Mastering the etymological sciences was a “Pan-stylistic rhythmic bebop, with a side of bacon, you dig, man?” I blurted out one day in English class. That’s how I got the reputation for being the “Freaky deaky white boy” at my school, after I had had the reputation of being just the “crazy white boy” at my school.

Mr. Davis, my fourth period English teacher, told me that language changed over time, and that you could trace the history of words. Miles Davis was an improvisational genius. Mr. Davis was a teacher in a twenty-dollar suit, but he had soul, man. Words like music, words inspired by muses. I was on a one-way train to Improvisationsville, and the Davises had given me both the beat and the feet.

Until then, all I knew was that language changed. I wanted to know the origins of all words. I wanted to know history, because history explained the context of language. Then I needed to explain the historical context of language, so I needed historical theory to explain the historical context that was supposed to explain language. I spent a lot of time away from home in the library, away from my whore mother and her pimp boyfriend Johnny.

Johnny the B-movie boyfriend. Johnny: James Dean in a time warp. Johnny: Fonzie with a beer belly.

Yes, the library. My vacation from B-movie, beer belly, James Dean in a time warp, “Ayyyyye, you’re not so cool anymore” Fonzarelli. Just me and the words. And the words that described words.

But maybe I was just bored, because it turned out etymology just didn’t do it for me. So instead, I decided I would become a Jazz aficionado. I met this girl Ashonte Brown one day when I was punching the walls outside a library. My hands were bleeding. They were cool red. She said to me, “Hey, you’re that crazy white boy in my French class.” She took pity on me and said she’d be my friend and help me if I would help her pass French. I told her she didn’t need my help because nobody learns French in French class -- everyone just sits around and talks, makes out, makes crude comments, and pretends 16

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they’re cool. She called me a “crazy white boy” but showed me all of the old classics at the library -- Coltrane, Monk, Miles Davis, and I even liked Ahmad Jamal. It wouldn’t be until my sophomore year that I started getting into the underground stuff.

Still, for that first year I was something of a dilettante. I didn’t have anything better to do, and the girl I had spent all my time looking at still didn’t look at me in biology, even though I knew the origins of the word “weird” -assuming the form “wyrd” in Beowulf. And I knew that the words “eugenics,” “euthanasia,” and “euthenic” all came from the same Greek root “eu,” which means good. If she knew this, she would like me.

My eyes grow bad from reading too much, and I’m black from all the Jazz I listen to. My afro is still growing in, but my skin is already dark brown.

I’m “funky,” I’m “hip,” and I can explain the origins of both these words, and I know the other black kids can see it because they don’t pick on me as much.

They’re scared of me because of what I know. And soon they’ll be scared of me for what I can do, with the help of muses in snazzy suits, and the two Davises.

I dream of being the snapper in a Jazz band. Some funky cat in a black suit with a look that kills, right next to the bassist, snapping away some rhythm. And then, when I get really good, I do solos, and lead -- and the horns, the piano, the bass, they revolve around me. Me. And then Amy will notice me, and I won’t get picked on.

“You hip?” I ask the bassist.

“Not as hip as you, Charlie Brown.”

Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown. Ashonte called me that once. When she calls me by my name, I ask her to call me that instead.

“You crazy white boy. I never called you no Charlie Brown.”

My eyes are worn thin and my mom won’t send me to get my prescription changed because our insurance doesn’t cover optical care anymore. She says if it’s important I can get a job as soon as I’m sixteen and work for it. I have no car, and I know I’ll have to ride my bike to work. I ask for Coltrane for Christmas -- CDs are expensive, but I may get one anyway.

It’s all “eu,” a euphony of euphometically phrased eulogical “eu”-rhythms, you dig. It’s all “eu” because the local library has lots of Jazz. And I can ride my bike that far with no problem. I just don’t want people staring at my afro.

A black kid slaps me on the back of the head and calls me “cracker.”

I tell him to watch it or else my afro won’t grow in. He calls me a “fucking cracker” and then a “crazy white boy,” but he doesn’t pick on me anymore.

He senses that my fingers could snap him into oblivion, and my oh-so-sweet lexicality could send him into an un-“eu” funk so deep, the longest run-on sentence in the history of sentences running on to oblivion couldn’t save him if that run-on sentence were rope made out of hair from an afro oh-so-black but full of the knowledge of a kid who wanted to know etymology so he 17

Daniel Clausen would be cool enough to win the heart of that princess Amy, euphometically speaking that is.

I’m cool with my pimp suit and my pimp books. I know this, like Ahmad Jamal knows “April in Paris” and I know that Amy has taste because I see her with that T-shirt that has Einstein on the front -- his gray hair curving around the sides of her breasts. Einstein could have been president of Israel, and in another time I could have snapped my way through solos into her heart.

I know I could have. But Einstein is probably happy that he has settled as the only colonist on the curves of Amy’s breasts. But I know, my etymologically endowed brother, there is room for two, you dig?

“Why you all dirty, white boy?”

“I slept out on the lawn yesterday. Things got bad with B-movie Johnny yesterday. I got angry and called him a motherfucker. My mom slapped me good and told me I could sleep on the lawn.”

“Don’t you know better than to call your mom’s boyfriend a ‘motherfucker’?”

“That’s what he is though. I could have meant it in a good way or a neutral way.”

“You are crazy, white boy.”

During French I begin writing down words: eumotherfucker (good motherfucker). malemotherfucker (bad motherfucker). My mother’s sperm donor. Charlie Brown. Crazy white boy. Crazy White Boy. I tear up the piece of paper and run out of French crying, embarrassed at my lack of lexicality. I want to kill Johnny. I want to kill Johnny. Instead, I go to the library and listen to some Jazz and spend some time with an older copy of the Oxford English Dictionary. I pull out another piece of paper. I write: Amy, Einstein, Ahmad Jamal, Crazy White Boy….and then it comes, like a blast from the trumpet of Mr. Armstrong. That Freaky Deaky Caucasian.

I smile. That Freaky Deaky Caucasian.

“Mama can’t dance, mama can’t rock and roll.”

My mother’s fucker, I write. My mother’s pimp. Matrasexual fishmonger, with extra tadpoles, you dig? Oxford English Dictionary: my guide to pan-stylistic rhythmic orality. I cross out “orality” and write “bebop” instead.

My bassist smiles and turns to me. “You gonna say something or you just going to go on snapping your fingers?” he says. “You got something to say to that special lady out there in that there audience?”

“You know it,” I say back.

“Baby, I’m coming to climb the mountains to Einstein’s Israel. You and me going to settle down in Jivesville, make it ‘eu’Jivesville, away from all the matrasexual fishmongers. I’ll be that Freaky Deaky Caucasian you always 18

The Lexical Funk

needed in your life, and I’m going to pleasure you with my orality. I’m going to put my tongue on your heartstrings, and I’m going to play the sweetest of beats on your eardrums. Oh girl, you’ll love me. Oh girl, girl, you’ll love me, with my pan-stylistic rhythmic bebop. Oh girl. Oh girl.”

“Man, that some sweet jive, white boy. What you call that?”

“I call it my Lexical Funk. Ain’t for no lexical punk. I’m that Freaky Deaky white boy, uh, Caucasian with the pan-stylistic rhythm, you dig?”

“I can dig,” he says. And I snap my fingers into a cool, funky “eu”blivion.

19

IN A GLASS BOX OVER OSAKA

It’s a little after two in the afternoon and I’ve already had two martinis. Two martinis to ease the pain of a night of hard drinking. Two martinis to forget memories too painful to hang on to. Two martinis at two o’clock. There’s a nice symmetry to it. More importantly, it explains some things. It explains my train of thinking, for one. Why I think the salaryman next to me seems a little too interested in my business. It also explains why I have the slightest bit of mayo on my tie. How long has it been there? Who knows? Since lunch at least.

When did I leave for lunch? In my hermetically sealed world, all that exists are me, the Japanese salaryman sitting next to me, and my two empty martini glasses. I’m in a glass box, and in my mind, I’m already on the way down.

“Yesterday, about lunch time,” I say out loud to the Japanese man sitting next to me, answering the question he never asked in a language he might not understand. “I left for lunch the exact moment I found out my boss was fucking my cute Japanese girlfriend.”

Cute? That was the understatement of the century. Who was I kidding? I didn’t have any business going out with a girl that hot. It suddenly occurs to me that I’ve been out to lunch for about a day and a half now. This seems strange to me. It seems that at some point I should’ve gotten some sleep. Let’s see, I’d left my office about sixteen hours ago, and I’d been in some state of drunkenness since then, so a little more than a day is more like it.

I find this funny, so I laugh a little.

I can tell that this makes the salaryman next to me a little nervous.

“But you can’t really call two martinis drunk,” I explain to him. “And I can’t even remember what I was drinking last night, anyway.”

He stares straight ahead and takes small bites of his club sandwich.

We share seemingly the same suit and tie, except mine is an import and his is a cheaper knockoff made by a domestic company. On the surface, they look the same, but down deep our suits couldn’t be any different. I don’t hold it against the guy now anyway, because I’m a changed man.

“I’m a changed man,” I announce to the salaryman next to me. He turns my way and nods politely. I wonder how long this one is going to last.

Another five minutes? How long did the last one last? How long had I really 20

The Lexical Funk

been here? How do I know that those two martini glasses aren’t the last in a much larger line of martini glasses?

I have larger problems: In my mind’s eye, I catch glimpses of my girlfriend straddling my boss in my own apartment.

“Shit,” I say. “Shit. Shit. Shit.” I turn to the salaryman sitting next to me, and because I can, I say it one more time. “Shit. Life is shit.” He just looks forward, pretending not to see me. The polite nod of a second ago seems light years away. And though he pretends not to make too much of it, I know that he’s deep into my train of thinking. He probably knows what I’m saying deeper and more profoundly than even I know. That, or he’s seconds away from getting up and walking away.

Ten minutes. This guy has lasted ten minutes longer than the last, at least.

“Shit,” I say again, but he just sits there motionless. What do they call that face? The Japanese practice that shows no emotion, what the hell is that called? Aw, that’s right, the Nou mask. Well good for you, I think. I wish I had one of those masks right now. It would make this whole situation, well, more graceful.

I want to express my appreciation for his talent at wearing his mask of nonchalance in Japanese haiku. But even though I’ve been in Japan for nearly two years now, I’ve managed to pick up absolutely zilch of the language other than a few of the essentials, and even in English a haiku is a bit beyond my creative capabilities. That wasn’t what I was after anyway. I’ve always been of the pragmatist bent. All I really wanted was the imported suit and a cute Japanese girl to go with it. Man, did that have overreach written all over it.

Yep, no doubt about it. I’m definitely on my way down.

It’s just this little dinky bar, but it’s located on the tenth floor across from one of Osaka’s most magnificent shopping malls, a real beauty. From where I sit, I can see the Ferris wheel that stands at least fifteen stories high, planted in the mall’s center. Past the bartender, I can see this Ferris wheel, rotating round and round, with all these little glass capsules rotating to match its motions. I should mention at this point that I still have that tiny speck of mayo on my tie.

I down another martini, lick it off, and go back to staring at the Ferris wheel.

All those little capsules. Some on the way up. Others on the way down.

I’m into martini number six now, and a new salaryman has come to take the place of the old. The fact that this one hasn’t fled in the face of my repeated onslaughts of nonsense and bad breath says that he’s probably cut from a finer cloth, though this one wears a domestic suit as well.

“Friend,” I say to him. “You, tomodachi, friend.”

This gets a smile from him and he just waves shyly at my comment. I turn to the bartender and I order my new friend a martini. The small Japanese man in the knockoff suit waves it away, but I insist with my various gestures 21

Daniel Clausen and haiku-handicapped charm. Eventually, he accepts. No, no blank face like the other one. No nou mask. What does he have instead? A look of curiosity, embarrassment?

I get him to raise the martini I bought for him. “Here’s to you and me, friend. Yesterday, I had it all. I had a fine imported suit, a nice stable job with a bloated salary, and a girlfriend that was way cuter and nicer than I thought I ever deserved. I went through life thinking that maybe someday things would pan out if I kept an open mind. But I guess, in the end, we’re all just like those people on the Ferris wheel. We sit in our seats, trapped in our own little capsules, just along for the ride. We reach the top, only to start our way back down. And then, one day, the whole trip is over.”

The salaryman looks at me confused. I smile one more time and say, “You, tomadachi, friend.”

He smiles, I smile, and I order us some more martinis. Across from us, in the Ferris wheel over Osaka, someone is getting a brief look from the top. The look is so brief, frightening, and wonderful the person doesn’t even realize that he’s already on his way down.

22

The Lexical Funk

RICH JACOBS SEARCHES FOR THE MEANING OF LIFE

The morning after his mom died, Rich Jacobs showed up to work early.

First, Rich removed the wet burlap sacks, which had been placed on top of the vegetables the night before. Then, he moved the watermelons, one by one, onto a display at the front of the produce department so that customers would see them as they walked by and know they were on sale.

When this was done he began on the cantaloupe display -- he always saved the cantaloupes for last because they were his favorite fruit. His mother always liked the way they tasted right after a good home-cooked dinner. A natural dessert, she called them. When he had finished this and his other chores, his boss looked at him, speechless. Not usually at a loss for words, Mr. Duffy thought about his strange produce man, alien that he was, and how any other man would have taken the day off and spent the day drinking or crying, or both.

“I just want to say that you’re doing a great job, Rich, and that I’m sorry about your mother.” Mr. Duffy, Rich’s supervisor, was generally not the type of person to be nice to his employees, but that day he made an exception.

He liked Rich, even though he was odd. And Rich liked Mr. Duffy, even though his face would turn beet red when he yelled, and he looked as if he would explode angry ketchup all over his nicely arranged produce.

Rich Jacobs quietly stared at the produce he had just put in place, and muttered to no one in particular, “What an odd world we live in.”

Rich often said things like this out of the blue, things that Mr. Duffy had trouble finding context for and responding to. The recent abundance of strange utterances produced by Rich on a daily basis, for no particular reason, sometimes directed to no particular person, had recently begun to make Mr. Duffy lose some of the hearing in his left ear. “Pardon, Jacobs?” Mr. Duffy asked.

“Nothing sir, just talking to myself.”

Mr. Duffy thought about giving Rich the drug test, piss in a cup and off to the lab, as he usually did when the other coworkers began to talk to themselves or the produce or other products for that matter. But Mr. Duffy had more than an ounce of decency and respected Jacobs’ situation. “You should take the day off, Jacobs. Lord knows you deserve it. And I know you 23

Daniel Clausen loved your mother very much.”

“That’s nice of you to offer, sir, but I wouldn’t know what to do with a day off. I really like my work.”

“I see,” Mr. Duffy said, trying to be sympathetic, but at the same time reconsidering the piss test. “Well, keep up the good work.” He walked away looking for something else to busy himself with for the sure-to-be-slow afternoon. Rich was left to his work and the meandering music of Elevator echoing through the store.

Rich continued stocking the produce section. Many things raced through his mind on the issue of life in particular, so many thoughts that he wasn’t sure how to keep track of them all. All he knew was that he couldn’t stack them -- he was sure that an organized form would make all the difference, but no matter what he did he couldn’t make his thoughts stackable like canned mushrooms or peaches.

He was contemplating a basic philosophical question, the depths of which lay somewhere between Plato’s idea of perfect forms and G.I. Joe’s oftarticulated adage that knowing was half the battle, when an old lady interrupted his thoughts. She was small and withering, and when she talked her words dragged on invisible nails in the back of her throat.

Rich smiled.

“Hello,” she said. “I was wondering if you could help me find something.”

“Yes ma’am, I would be happy to,” Rich said politely.

“Could you help me find the cantaloupes?”

The cantaloupes were no more than ten feet away from her. Rich pointed to them. “There,” he said.

The old lady removed her glasses from her purse slowly, put them on, and examined the cantaloupes. “Hmmm…okay, yes, I guess those are cantaloupes aren’t they?” It sounded like a question, but Rich couldn’t think of any way to respond to this. She could have been making some kind of obscure commentary on Plato and his ideal of forms.

“Do you have any smaller ones?” she said. “You know, the ones like these only smaller.” She talked as if Rich were from another world, using hand motions, in an attempt to communicate. “You see, I’m very picky about the size of my cantaloupes and if they’re too big I have trouble carrying them to my apartment.”

Rich, trying not to be distracted by the excessive amount of gesturing and intonation, looked at her bony, barely existing arms and saw how this might be a problem. He thought back to earlier in the morning when he had first started stocking the cantaloupes. “I think we have some smaller ones near the bottom.”

“Tell me when you see one you might like, ma’am,” Rich said, quickly 24

The Lexical Funk

and efficiently unstacking the cantaloupes, putting them into a pile on the floor.

“Oh gracious, none of these look right at all,” the old lady said. Rich was making his way to the bottom efficiently. Her face was distraught as Rich continued mercilessly with his task.

Before Rich could get to the bottom, the old lady said, “That’s okay, I can do without my cantaloupe tonight.”

“Hold on, I see a very small one on the bottom,” Rich said.

The old lady looked at him. “Okay, make sure it’s small. I can’t carry the large ones.”

Rich completed his task, unaware that his manager was watching him silently from across the room.

“Here it is ma’am,” Rich said, pulling out the smallest of the cantaloupes.

The old lady looked at the cantaloupe for a moment and was once again going to pronounce that it was too big. However, she looked at Rich and the stack of cantaloupes on the floor and decided at the last moment that she would reward the brave produce man by buying the cantaloupe, despite its abnormal size and the strain it would put on her arms and lower back.

She smiled, revealing black nicotine-stained teeth and decaying gums.

“My hero,” she said. The old lady walked off with her cantaloupe. It wasn’t too heavy, she thought to herself, walking towards the cash register, where a bewildered employee had witnessed the incident.

His name was Jimmy, and he liked working on slow days where he could just stare out into space or look at the pictures in tabloid magazines that were sitting near his checkstand, waiting to be read. Sometimes he thought they were talking to him; but that’s ridiculous, he would tell himself before quietly going into the bathroom to take his medication or get high, or both.

Jimmy took the cantaloupe from the old lady’s hands. “Will that be all for you today?”

“Yes. Tell me, who is that nice man over there in the produce section?” the old lady asked, waving a bony finger in Rich’s direction.

“Oh yeah, that’s Rich. Did he say anything strange to you? You see, the store has this policy of giving opportunities to guys…”

“No, no, no, he’s a lovely boy. Do me a favor,” she said. “Give him this.” She gave the cashier fifty-cents.

“Whatever,” he said. The old lady paid for her cantaloupe and smiled at Jimmy. Later that night the cashier would use the fifty-cents to help purchase a bottle of vodka, which he would consume in large quantities before fighting with his girlfriend and then crashing his rusty Buick into a telephone pole one block from where the old lady lived. The old lady would wake up suddenly, and then cry herself back to sleep. The tabloids, however, would remain uninterested.

25

Daniel Clausen The old lady waved to Jimmy as she left.

Across the room, Mr. Duffy approached Rich. “Jacobs, did you unstack all those cantaloupes?” Mr. Duffy asked him.

“Yes.” “Stack them again.”

“Yes, sir.”

Mr. Duffy began to walk away.

“Mr. Duffy, what’s the meaning of life?” Rich asked.

Mr. Duffy’s hearing problems were now spreading to both ears.

Nevertheless, he thought he had heard enough of what Rich had said to understand that he was looking for some kind of spiritual guidance. Answers flashed in front of him: wealth, women, happiness, the greater good of mankind. Then he realized he had squat, zero, nothing. He was married, yet still alone, unloved and miserable. “Kid, if I knew that do you think I’d be working here, having to drive my wife’s Geo to work every day, listening to the same customers whine day after day?”

“I don’t know,” Rich said. “Maybe.”

Mr. Duffy shook his head in disbelief. “Jacobs, my advice to you is this -- follow my lead. Marry the first unsophisticated cow that shows interest in you. Then have as many kids as you can before you have any chance to travel or make money. Once you’ve done that, become a complete bastard, so that even if any of your kids do by chance make it rich they are more likely to rub their wealth and success in your face than share it with you. Decide to stay with your wife because if you don’t she may dismember you in a way that will make you famous in the way you don’t really want to be. Lick the ass end of failure, smell it, make it your best friend and your card buddy, your true tilldeath-do-you-part soul mate. Find people smaller than you and shit on them so they know what the shit that is your life tastes like too. There, are you happy?”

Suddenly, Rich was developing hearing problems. “I’m sorry, you want me to marry a cow?”

Mr. Duffy was too exasperated to speak. He felt this nice guy thing was wearing thin on him and that he needed to take a break. He walked off, out of sight, and Rich was left to mull over what cows and shit had to do with the meaning of life.

At that moment, Abba came on over the store’s loudspeakers, breaking the chain of monotonous Elevator music. For a little while, Rich was seventeen, a dancing queen -- he could dance/yes/he could dance. And then Abba was once again replaced by the melodic stylings of Elevator. He returned to his tasks, undaunted.

Stocking the cantaloupes went easily enough, it being a task Rich had done many times before, but an odd thing happened while he was watering 26

The Lexical Funk

the vegetables.

“Hey, over here,” a voice said to Rich.

Rich turned his head. “Who said that?”

There was a moment of silence, then the voice said, “Over here, in the celery.”

Rich walked over to the celery. He looked at it for a moment. He thought maybe he had imagined things. But he decided he should ask just to be sure. “Okay, which one of you was it?”

“It wasn’t me,” one of them said.

Rich stared at the celery in amazement. “You can talk.”

“Yes and read minds,” another said.

“Really?”

The celery looked at Rich for a moment, then said, “Okay we can’t really read minds, but a great many of us work for psychic hotlines.”

“How come I haven’t heard you guys talk before?”

“Do you know anyone who would want to eat talking celery?”

Rich thought about that. “I see your point. Can the rest of the produce talk?”

“Yeah, but they’re pretty lousy conversationalists,” the largest said to Rich. “Listen, the reason I wanted to talk to you is because me and the others heard about what happened to your mother. We just want to say we’re really sorry. She was a great lover of celery, and we will always remember the way she chewed on us, despite her bad teeth.”

Rich gave them a slight smile. “Thank you very much. She really was a great person, and I know she really liked eating you guys.” There was a long silence, and Rich just stared at the celery. “Would any of you, by any chance, know the meaning of life?”

“That’s a tough one,” the smallest said. “We’ll have to pull our stalks together for this one.” The celery huddled in a circle and, after much discussion, the largest presented itself to Rich. “After much thought and controversy, we have decided that the meaning of life is to be eaten.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Oh yes, quite sure,” it said. “Ask the cabbage, the watermelons, the carrots, any of them, and they’ll all tell you the same thing. Except maybe the peas, they’ve always been a rebellious bunch, trying to fall off forks and spoons and what not.”

The celery suddenly went motionless. “Jacobs,” a voice called. “What are you doing?”

Rich turned and faced Mr. Duffy. “I was just talking to the celery, sir.”

Mr. Duffy looked at Rich for a moment. His hearing was getting worse and worse. “Did you just say you were talking to the celery?” Mr. Duffy asked.

“That’s right, sir.”

27

Daniel Clausen Mr. Duffy took a second to think. “What did you talk about?”

“The meaning of life, sir.”

“Well?”

“Well what, sir?”

“What did the celery have to say on the meaning of life?”

“According to the celery, the meaning of life is to be eaten.”

Mr. Duffy pondered this for a second and then nodded. “That makes perfectly good sense. Keep up the good work, Jacobs.”

“Yes, sir,” Rich said, as Mr. Duffy walked off.

Work went by quickly for Rich. He took the celery’s advice and asked the other produce their opinion on the meaning of life. With the exception of the rebellious peas, Rich got the same answer (the peas rambled on about rolling off people’s plates and forks). Still, Rich wasn’t quite satisfied with the answer. Work ended and Rich realized that he had to go home to an empty apartment.

On his way out of the store, Rich’s inquisitive nature forced him to ask one more person.

Alex worked in the movie rental section of the grocery store. He was a well-intentioned individual who liked Jacobs despite (or maybe it was because of) his unusual nature. Alex was busy sorting movies when Jacobs asked him the question.

“Rich, I want you to look in section A3 under old comedies. Look for this movie.” Alex wrote the name on a sheet of paper and gave it to Rich.

“Find it, watch it, and you’ll have an answer. It may not be the best answer, but it’s as good as any.”

Rich did exactly as he was told. It was there, just like Alex said it would be. Rich picked up Monty Python’s Meaning of Life.

Over by the counter Alex and Mr. Duffy were talking. “What a strange man Mr. Jacobs is,” the supervisor said to Alex.

And Alex, who had had the exact same conversation with a pop-tart the day before, only answered, “Yeah, but aren’t we all.”

28

STARLIGHT TERROR AND THE CAPPUCCINO MACHINE

She stands there, beautiful and captivating, the uncertain center of our universe. Her black eyes, deep wells of mystery and terror, enchant and endanger our lives. With orange hair, long legs, and an amazingly slender body, she sports a miniskirt so mini its existence is questionable.

We who stand in proximity to her are three. Me, your protagonist for the evening, aloof, yet also slowly becoming a scientist with grand ideas on how to solve the puzzle of the girl’s existence at our particular point in space and time. Bill, the enigmatic used CD store owner who is slowly becoming more uneducated, and, errrrr, horny. And Travis, the nonchalant hippie, who somehow found himself a reserve National Guardsman; he’s 28, working in a coffee shop and loving life -- I find that slowly, his face is turning stern, and his standard issue coffee shop uniform is starting to fill with general’s stars.

I could give you theories. I could give you science, strings, atoms, or a more plausible explanation about how the convergence of genres has brought about her existence. I could give you that, but it’s too early for insights of any kind of depth, and the short of it goes something like this -- I brought her from the future into my coffee shop with a cappuccino machine.

I haven’t made any special modifications to it, either in a mad scientist way or in any kind of Han Solo way. It’s not my cappuccino machine; it belongs to the coffee shop where I work. You know the kind, one of those corporate jobs, not the big one whose name everyone knows, and whose copyright I’m sure I’d be infringing on if I said their name, but one of those others that attempts to copy them: Call Me Ishmael Coffee.

Slowly though, her deep black eyes take me, my other coworker, and the patrons of our fine establishment back to a simpler time. Our massproduced paper cups turn porcelain, our hairstyles more greasy, our “Thank You for Not Smoking” sign slowly turns into “Enjoy Joe’s Tobacco,” complete with a smoking cowboy. My place of employment starts to fill with cigarette smoke. Our coffee shop is slowly becoming a '50s diner.

She stands there, innocently tilting her head from side to side, silent, angelic. But it doesn’t take me long to figure out -- because after all, in this particular genre, I’m usually the one who figures things out first -- that all of our lives are in grave danger.

29

Daniel Clausen * It’s not uncommon these days to get the computer generated bonanza. You see this really spectacular display of lights and sounds, a vortex opens up, and a tear falls for all the diligent yet anonymous nerds working overtime on computers. They all work long hours to make that ten seconds of magic happen. And for that, you applaud them.

Well, when she shows up there is no light show, no CG, no Industrial Light and Magic -- just me saying, “Hot damn, I did it. I made the perfect freakin’ cappuccino,” Bill the local used CD store owner passing gas really loudly, and a popping sound, like a champagne bottle opening. And it doesn’t last even three seconds.

Travis is leaning on the counter reading the latest Insomniac MachineGun Monkey comic (my personal favorite as well). He’s the first to notice her -the bombshell from the future. In a Keanu Reevish kind of moment he says simply, “Whoa.”

Bill, who’s got his caramel, whipped, ice-a-chino excellente, is casually passing his three-hour lunch siesta. He looks at the girl, then me, and says, “Well finally somebody’s been reading the suggestion box.” Typical Bill shtick.

I can’t really explain it, but everyone in the coffee shop is sort of drawn toward her. I find myself several feet in front of her without even walking toward her. Bill is now several feet closer as well. Travis is no longer leaning on the wall, but is now standing next to me. And the two other people in the coffee shop disappear into the background and assume a surreal kind of nonexistence.

After another “Whoa,” Travis says simply, “She’s beautiful.”

Bill and I are also staring at her. She’s actually beyond beautiful. She’s a ridiculous supermodel of a girl. Petite, entrancing, quiet, and soft -- yet dangerous, with those aforementioned black eyes. Somewhere in the background, the coffee shop’s generic classical music is replaced by melodramatic instrumental music.

Travis looks at me. “Did you change the music?”

“No,” I say.

“What’s going on?” Bill says. “She looks like she’s come straight out of an anime or something. Maybe there’s a convention in town.”

“I don’t know,” I say. “She wasn’t here a second ago.”

Travis smiles, enjoying this immensely in his usual nonchalant way.

He’s the first to speak to her. “Hi,” he says. “Nice outfit.”

She doesn’t say anything. She just tilts her head from side to side gently.

After a moment, when it becomes painfully apparent that she either won’t reply or is incapable, Travis and Bill turn to me.

30

The Lexical Funk

“Obviously foreign,” Bill says. “Maybe no English. Or maybe she’s got some brain damage.”

Travis says, “Well, this is all you, buddy. Mr. I-put-in-to-be-shiftleader dick.” He gives me a good push in the back.

I start off with a friendly, “Excuse me, ma’am?”

She turns my way slightly, but doesn’t say anything, just stares at me with intense, alien black eyes. I freeze for a moment. My world goes toxic and euphoric all at once. The violin music in the background intensifies.

I hear Bill in the background. “Well, I’ll be damned if that violin music didn’t pick up a notch...”

I can’t hear the end of Bill’s sentence because our eyes are melding, slowly becoming one. I’m no longer a person but a camera moving in for a close up of those entrancing eyes. The violin music approaches a screeching pace. I find myself being pulled into them. The sound is drowned out and everything goes dark. * When I wake up, Travis is shaking me. “Snap out of it,” he’s saying.

“How long was I out?” I ask.

“Only a few seconds.”

“Are you okay?” This is Travis, his usual nonchalance replaced by real concern.

“Yeah,” I say. “But nobody look directly into her eyes.”

I see Bill’s eyes automatically floating in that direction -- just like instructing a man on the edge of cliff not to look down -- but I physically stop him. I focus our eyes instead on her chest and find that we’re both safe for the moment.

I ask her again, staying focused on her chest, “Are you alright, ma’am?”

When she opens her mouth a strange language comes out, rough and deep, unbefitting her slender body. The way she says it though makes me horny, as I’m sure it makes Travis and Bill.

“Sounds like German spoken backwards,” Travis says.

“Well, damn. It sounds like she’s from a different country,” Bill says.

“Maybe Japan. I hear they have some far-out fashion styles in Japan.”

“No,” I say. “Definitely not Japanese.”

She speaks again. Strangely, this time I can make out a little of what she’s saying.

“Whoa,” Bill says. “Did you feel that?”

“What?” Travis says.

“It moved.”

“What moved?”

31

Daniel Clausen “It, you know -- it,” he says. “It’s like she has some kind of telekinetic power or something.”

“What?” Travis says, in disbelief.

“No, he’s right,” I say. “Mine moved too.”

She speaks again. This time faster. As she talks, I begin to piece things together. The words take on shape and order, and it all becomes clear.

This is the backstory. * Her name is Starlight Elizabeth and she is what is called in her world an “intergalactic enchantress.” Like a diplomat, but in her universe the language of diplomacy is more hips and legs, and less blah-blah-blah. I begin to understand that her own language is a mix of phonemes and submissive head nods, mixed with the communicative power of miniskirts. After this, she speaks too fast and I lose what she is saying. But her hips and miniskirt clearly communicate that this is a message about love, peace, and connection.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about all this,” Travis says.

“What are you talking about?” I say to Travis. “You love Japanese anime and comics. You love genre fiction and weird things that break the boredom of making coffee. This is, like, right up your alley. I mean, you should be the expert on this kind of thing, right?”

I notice something strange in Travis’s eyes. He’s looking at Starlight very differently than before. His eyes are more stern and resolute.

Bill seems itchy too. After a long moment of thinking he says something. “Well we gotta do something,” he says. “I mean, gosh, we need to, we need ta…” He can’t seem to finish his sentence. Then he looks down at the counter. “Hey, would you look at this,” he says.

I do look, and I see for the first time that our generic mass-produced paper cups are beginning to turn into smaller, rounder porcelain cups.

“Well, that’s interesting,” I say. “She must be using her special powers or something.”

She’s still standing in place, now quietly. Her head tilts from side to side, but she doesn’t say anything.

“You know, there is something familiar about these cups,” I say. “I’ve seen these exact cups somewhere, even though they just look like normal coffee cups. When I touch them I feel a connection.”

Instinctively, somewhere in the back of my mind, a connection forms.

“Wait, I want to try something.” Without knowing why, I go behind the counter and attempt to make a good cappuccino. I do, but then when I mix the frothy milk and espresso, the drink turns into black coffee.

32

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“Well don’t that just beat all,” Bill says, and his accent has gotten noticeably more agrarian.

“I don’t know,” I say. “And I’m not exactly sure how I knew that the coffee was going to turn black, but I think it has something to do with her appearance, the violin music, and the cup.”

“Go on then,” Bill says. “Well, she doesn’t really look like an alien or a sophisticated futuristic being. I mean, her dress, her appearance defies any kind of law of fashion, physics, or basic principles of logic. But it does match basic principles of genre.”

“Principles of whatcha-hoo,” Bill says. When I look at him, I see that he has some straw in his mouth and that he’s now chewing on it.

I look at Bill intensely. “Bill,” I say. “Where did you get that straw?

And why are you talking like an uneducated country bumpkin?”

“Sir, I take offense to that.”

“I called you a fat lazy pornoholic yesterday. You didn’t take offense to that.”

He looks at me, confused.

I look to Travis for support, but he’s looking more and more anxious by the second. I realize that he now has a cigar in his mouth and that his face has got the severe look of a boxer, a tax attorney, or, no, wait, a general! He’s as rigid and ornery as a General Patton.

“Oh my God,” I say. “It’s affecting you guys too.”

I turn my attention to the beautiful enchantress from the future. I almost look into her eyes, but then catch myself, and instead focus on her breasts where I know I’m safe.

“Listen,” I say. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but if you are a goodwill ambassador, ummmm, enchantress from the future, you should at least turn off the damn violin music and stop messing with my friends’ characters.”

She speaks fast, incomprehensible at first. I find that the more she talks the more I can understand, and the less I have to rely on her miniskirt and hips. I can now understand most of what she’s saying.

“I mean you no harm. I have come here bringing you all the fruits of my world. Advantages you could only contemplate in your wildest dreams.

We have methods to turn your world into a living paradise.”

“Ugh,” I say.

“What is it?” Travis asks, puffing on his cigar.

“The dialogue, it’s so bad. It sounds like something someone wrote at midnight on a vodka and coffee bender. If it weren’t for her gyrating hips I wouldn’t be able to listen at all.” We all take a moment to appreciate her gyrating hips.

“You can understand her?” Travis says suspiciously.

33

Daniel Clausen I nod my head. “Yes, I don’t know exactly how it happened but she must have used her eyes to implant some kind of language transmogrification device in my brain.”

Travis’s eyes grow cold.

Bill looks at him, confused. “Well what’s got into that pony’s saddle?”

As we look at Travis, we see his standard Call Me Ishmael T-shirt turning into a general’s uniform. That’s when it all comes together for me. I’ve seen this all before. I know how it all ends. The genre dictates that this all turns bad. * I have no advanced degrees in engineering or physics, and I’m not a closet genius when it comes to science or math or anything. I’m a literature student in my third year of college who spends too much time reading the works of Philip K. Dick and the aforementioned Insomniac Machine-Gun Monkey.

When I get home, I sometimes catch a B-flick on the boob tube before passing out on the couch once my job-inspired java high has settled.

Any attempt to explain her appearance in my coffee shop, with her small skirt, bright orange hair, and dangerously bedazzling black eyes, in terms of strings or quantum physics would be foolishness on my part.

Still, there is symmetry in everything that is happening to us. Strings or metaphysics need not apply. To understand our world we need look no further than past the tendencies of theme, genre, and motif. If our lives are ruled, not by the laws of physics but by rules of irony, comedy, and melodrama, if our lives are entertainment for those spectators just outside our ken, then I place all of us in the range of a late-'50s, early-'60s B-Science Fiction movie.

This is the most sense I can make of our current situation. I haven’t seen lots of these movies, but I’ve seen enough of them. They’re there waiting for me when I get home from work late nights with my nagging coffee buzz.

Attack of the 80-foot Gorilla, The Thing that Wouldn’t Die, The Fly that Ate Manhattan. Ours would be something like Starlight Terror and the Cappuccino Machine.

Like all genres, these movies have their readily identifiable types.

Travis was slowly turning into the paranoid general who wants to put aside peaceful negotiation and kill the alien. The ultimate xenophobe, his stubborn misunderstanding frames Starlight as the ultimate outsider. Bill, he is the horny and gullible hillbilly, a poor attempt at comic relief. He’s there to relieve the audience of their sexual tension. His exaggerated sexuality and buffoonery makes us feel okay about wanting the exotic Starlight. And me? Well, 34

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somehow I had become the peace-loving scientist, the protagonist, the one who tries to figure out things using reason and put things right.

I explain this to both Bill and Travis. Travis puts down his cigar long enough to listen to me. Bill manages to string together a decent sentence in Standard Spoken English. This obligatory explanation of things is enough to break our trance for the moment. We all become cognizant enough to realize that we are now standing in a 1950s diner and that we’ve lost our color. We’re waxy gray.

What’s worse is that we realize it’s spreading. Outside the coffee shop we can see the cars turning bigger, boxier. We can see young people, sensibly dressed with greasy haircuts, making out in their cars.

“So, what do we do?” Travis says to me. “I don’t want to become some hyper-aggressive general.”

“Yeah,” Bill says. “And I like discussing things in proper English.”

“If you are the peace-loving scientist with all the answers,” Travis says, “well, then it’s up to you to figure a way out of this.”

“I’ll reason with her,” I say. “Maybe I can convince her to just leave.”

I walk up to her, careful not to look into her eyes. She’s still standing in the same place, her head tilting back and forth.

“Listen,” I say. “I know you mean us no harm. I know you want peace and happiness for all of Earth, but your presence here is causing a major genre shift in our universe. If you don’t leave soon, we’ll all turn into a 1950s B-movie, and none of us want that.”

As I stare at her breasts, I see black tears fall to the floor. Slowly but surely they fall. I resist the urge to look up into her eyes.

“You have to go back,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

I hear the violin music grow heavier and more solemn. Her tears fall to the floor, wet and black.

Then they stop. The tears stop. The music stops.

Oh no! I look back and see Travis’s and Bill’s eyes. They’re stuck on the alien’s two wells of emptiness. With their mouths open wide, I see them growing more and more into character. Travis is a twelve-star general, with more metals sprouting up along his Army uniform. Bill is now wearing a farmer’s outfit, complete with overalls and a checkered shirt.

The soundtrack shifts. The music is no longer solemn, but instead, dangerously fast.

They turn on me. I hear Bill’s voice, rapid and nearly incomprehensible. “By golly, we gotta strap that darn girl down before she gets away. The things we do ta her. Show how we do it down on the farm.”

Travis reaches for the coffee shop’s phone and starts barking orders.

“Get me the President…Mr. President, I need bombers in here, fast. We need to pulverize this place with as many nuclear rockets as possible.”

35

Daniel Clausen My head is spinning. Through all this I hear her voice, beautiful, rough, seductive, but also, I now realize, in German played backwards. She says to me, “You are the reason I came to this planet. You. I saw your face across the cosmos, and I came because nothing can separate our love, not even the constraints of genre. Surely you must remember me. I was there for you late one...” “...I don’t care, Mr. President. We can’t let this menace spread. OK, but I don’t know if we have two minutes.” “...Gotta find me some rope. We’s all tie her down, we’s all can get a turn, I reckin’. Not that I’m a communist or nuttin’. But fair’s fair where I come...”

“You. Late night, alone. Together. Those moments. Where only the glass separated our two worlds. Don’t you remember?”

I don’t look her in the eyes. I’m crying now too. I’m crying because this is all my fault. This is what I wanted. I willed this to happen. Late at night in my apartment, half asleep, yet unable to turn off the TV. Unable to stop looking into her eyes. If only I’d focused on her...got…to…stay focused...

I will the cappuccino machine into being. I focus my eyes on the place where it should be, where there is now only a coffee maker and a pot of black coffee. And like magic it’s there. In color. But even if I do make a cappuccino, I can’t pour it into a generic Call Me Ishmael Coffee paper cup.

Something in the back of my mind tells me this is important. I focus my mind on the porcelain cups in front of me. And just like that -- there it is, the cup with the stupid logo.

She’s next to me now. Touching me. She’s running her fingers through my hair. She says to me now, but no longer in backwards German and terrible dialogue, but only with her fingers and touch, and enchantress powers: Don`t let me go. I want to love you. I want you to stop being so lonely, so isolated.

I want to turn and look into her eyes, but I don’t. I’ve started on the cappuccino. I’m yelling at the top of my lungs, “Bill, I’m going to need a fart!

And it’s got to be noisy!” I don’t know if he can hear me through the character that has enveloped him. Those black eyes may have turned him bumpkin for good.

I feel something wet on the back of my shirt. I see my shirt turn black with her tears. Soon I’m crying too. I love her so much. I don’t want to make the cappuccino. I love the world, but can I honestly say I love it more than her?

Whoosh, the steamers are set, and I’m frothing milk. The milk froths nicely, because I will it to. I know I’m only going to have one chance at this.

One chance to make it perfect. I set the espresso. Outside I can hear the planes dropping bombs. I see teenagers and cars blow up from the corner of my eye. I see body parts hit the windows -- but not real ones, obviously 36

The Lexical Funk

mannequins. It won’t be long before the nukes hit and we’re all cheap broken mannequin parts. She’s telling me in her backwards German that if I’d only turn around and look her in the eyes this would all be over.

I don’t. I pour the milk into the cup, ready the espresso over the cup, and yell “Now Bill.”

My heart breaks, the cappuccino machine stops, I say, “Hot damn, I did it. I made the perfect freakin’ cappuccino,” Bill passes gas, there is a noise like a champagne bottle opening, and I’m sure for just a moment that if I don’t do things exactly right… * I go home that night, alone with my coffee buzz, and the vision of Starlight that only I can seem to remember. I think about her in her outrageous outfit, an outsider like me. I go to the patio and realize that nothing has changed.

The night is black, but it’s not a grayish, waxy old movie black. I look at my TV and realize that she’s there waiting for me. I reach for the remote. I grab it and my thumb hesitates over the on button.

Her eyes wait for me. Do I dare? A screen and the rules of genre separate her and me. And though I love her, though I want to turn the TV on, I know that our love will bring about the end of the world as we know it.

I look up at the stars, searching for her, my intergalactic enchantress, my true love, and my starlight terror.

37

ANGELA KILLED HERSELF

She calls me right before to tell me not to worry too much. Her abusive boyfriend has left her and so now she’s going to kill herself. She tells me how she’s going to do it. Dramatically, in a voice interrupted sporadically by sobs, she tells me that she’s going to cut her wrists with a knife. Slicing downward this time, not fucking it up like she did when she was thirteen.

Then she tells me that she loves me. I say that I’ll be right over, but when I get there she’s just lying there with her eyes open, looking at the ceiling. She’s dead, but also peaceful. Still, I can’t help feeling bad about her death. And when I think about it, clearly, logically, putting together the pieces of our fragmented lives, I know for sure that Angela’s death was my fault.

On the surface it seems simple enough: the abusive boyfriend leaves and then she kills herself because she can’t live without him. Or something like that. It’s nice. It’s simple. It’s easy to sell. And it has the power to heal people. To make people feel better about her death. But, let’s face it, as morality tales go, it’s boring, a worn theme, a spent genre, a storyline so recycled Lifetime TV wouldn’t use it. It’s Archie and Jughead fighting over Veronica -- it’s old, fetid, rank like last week’s breakfast, and oh, the maggots have already started to collect. We need a more complicated telling, do we not?

Now that Angela’s dead, I have more time to think. I did a lot of that before I met her. Life was less complicated then. I could steal an hour or two of silence anywhere and the world seemed better for it. After I met her, those hours were gone. They were consumed by us and the thises and thats of our complicated relationship. Now that Angela’s gone I can have those hours back again. I can play with them as I like. But they’re stale hours. Somehow, they’ve lost their flavor. And I don’t know how to get the flavor back.

Sometimes confession begins for the most selfish of reasons. The flavor of my hours is my selfish reason. This is a confession, right? You are my priest, right? Help me, Father. Help me gain the flavor of my hours back.

Sometimes it’s hard for me to admit this to myself, but I’m a bad person. The tasteless hours of my life give me time to create a new genre, to put things together differently. It takes time for me to truly implicate myself in this whole affair. I have to think about it. The pieces seem stupid and 38

The Lexical Funk

inconsequential at first: the puking dog, car payments, the man upstairs, Angela’s boyfriends. All these things had something to do with it, but how they come together to implicate me doesn’t occur to me right away.

Before you really start to judge me though (and you should), there are some things you should know about me: where I come from, what kind of person I am, the guidelines I live my life by. All these things are important.

Maybe they will help you and Angela understand.

I’m a college student. My mom and dad died in a car accident when I was in high school. My sister took care of me for a little while, but then she moved to California with one of her boyfriends. I forget which one. She calls me every once in a while and we talk. She cries about things that seem distant to me. She cries and talks but I can’t help not listening. I can’t help thinking about other things in my life, like car payments and my upcoming math test. I guess, when it comes down to it, a math test is more important than my sister.

Angela never understood this. She was always a better person than I was, even if she was crazy.

Generally speaking, I’m a likeable guy. I’m like Richie Cunningham.

Straight and narrow, no drugs, occasionally alcohol but rarely to excess, do my schoolwork every night, and if my parents were around, I’m sure they’d love me very much. I’m one of the guys. Always up for a good time, American fun and hijinks, as long as it doesn’t include illegal activities such as drugs and gang violence. I’m responsible for my age. And for some reason the older Jewish ladies I serve at my coffee shop love me. I get good grades. I speak good English (well English?). And if pressed hard enough I generally acquiesce to arguments that what America really needs is more tax cuts to make rich people richer and poor people, well, like Angela. And though all of these things may make me likable, none of them make me a good person. I’m a selfish person. I want my damn education, so I can get out of my crap apartment and crap job. Hell, likable person? You better believe it. I’m politicking my way out of poverty: handshakes, kissing Jewish grandmothers, and tax cuts for everyone.

We both worked in customer service. We both served food. We both served ideas and images. Coffee and bagels for me mostly; chicken wings and beer for her. Angela’s ideology of service was that caring mattered, that you could make people happy by caring about them, showing them that they were needed and that they could be liked. And so they bought massive amounts of chicken wings and stared at her ass without fear of censure. And me? Sure, I smiled at the older women as I brought them their coffee and low-fat muffins.

And I showed them their own version of tits and ass: a young man, not unlike their grandsons, who could make it through college without the financial support of his elders, listen submissively as they bitched about high taxes and immigrants, speak near perfect English, and he had well-polished teeth.

39

Daniel Clausen Mine was a non-talent. A habit of stooping, really. But Angela, well, Angela had real talent. Others abused the things she could do for them: listen to their problems, offer sympathy, and convince them, really convince them, that she was deeply hurt by the evils the world had heaped upon them. I abused this. I abused her. I abused her gift of caring.

She listened to a lot of my problems, she gave me advice, and then when it came time for me to listen to her problems, I tuned her out, daydreamed, and thought about what a great friend she was and how I would use her again sometime soon -- perhaps during finals when a person to talk to is really hard to come by. No, for Angela, there was no stooping. There was no standard response. She didn’t want perfect English, perfect teeth, or for me to acquiesce to whatever politics she believed in. No, she needed me to care. And I didn’t. Now she’s dead.

What do you think? Should I politick out of this one? More tax cuts?

I think for a while about how I could campaign out of my guilt.

Really persuade the constituency of my moral brain matter that this all had to do with something bigger.

Angela was another victim of a negligent society. The same decadent disease that eats at people like Angela eats at the very building blocks of our nation. It eats at the foundations of our shared family values. Lack of caring and concern about the general welfare have opened our communities to drugs, gang violence, and crime. Only when we fight the causes of these problems can we truly prevent deaths like those of Angela and others who have suffered abuse from a loved one. Tax cuts for everyone and God Bless America.

But no, Angela’s problems went beyond what people blame as “the problem.” It went beyond politics or the troubles of the time. Angela’s problem was people. Specifically, people like me. I’m a lot less abstract than politics. For this reason, I should be blamed.

My friend Bob tried to tell me her suicide had nothing to do with me, that she was a “one-way train” that would have taken me with her, or something like that. I love Bob. He’s a simpleton and a buffoon, and for these reasons I love him. I talk to him more often now that Angela’s dead. I told him all the things I’m telling you now, and he tried to convince me it wasn’t my fault. You’re a lot smarter than Bob, though. I know this. Your judgment is more astute, whoever you are. I know that at least with you, I can’t talk my way out of this.

There are some things you should know about Angela. Angela’s family lives in a trailer park. Her sister is fifteen and pregnant. Her mom drinks heavily. Angela was a high school honors student who couldn’t afford to go to college full-time. I often went to see her at work and observed as she used other men for money and they used her back. She liked to think she was just bringing them food, but I could always tell which ones were there to stare 40

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at her tits. Some didn’t even see her special talent for caring. They stared right past it at her body. And they regarded her as a thing. Sometimes I found one or two of these people in the parking lot and scared them a little bit, but only the smaller ones.

Had things been different, I would have been one of those guys paying money to gawk at her. Just another idiot with wide eyes, eating chicken wings, not paying attention to her. Angela flashed me sometimes, and I felt lucky to be her friend. But I liked it better when she listened to me. Her tits were nice, but not as nice as her listening to me. There was something comforting about Angela’s silence.

Early on in our relationship I realized that I did not want to date Angela. That she, like me, was messed up in some fundamental way. It was better for her to be the friend I came to who understood me, and whose tits I could stare at. And when she talked I always daydreamed. I never really listened to Angela. If she were here now, though, I’d listen. She could tell me anything she wanted to. She could tell me all about her messed-up life, why she was about to quit school and work full time, why she let other guys hit her -- all that crap. I didn’t listen, though. Angela is dead. I think about her staring up at the ceiling with peaceful eyes. I think about it a lot.

My life is complicated, though. You should know this. Because I had school, work, my dog, I never bothered to find out which boyfriends beat Angela. She became an expert at hiding the bruises. She could hide her wounds well. But, also, I tried not to see them because every bruise I saw was one more fight I’d have with her newest boyfriend. She had a lot of them, and I didn’t always win. I’m in college and I work a lot. I didn’t have time to fight all of Angela’s boyfriends and that’s why she’s dead. I thought about telling her to seek therapy, but she hit the last guy who told her this with a lamp -- a very big lamp. I have enough freaky shit in my life. Angela was a good friend as long as I didn’t have to deal with her freaky shit.

Her problems were not my problems. School was my problem; car payments were my problem; that fucker upstairs getting noisy while arguing with his wife was my problem because I couldn’t sleep for days. But Angela, who came from a trailer park, whose father drank, wasn’t my problem. There wasn’t enough room between the car payments and the fat man upstairs.

My dog was sick that week. Josie. My dog was puking up the dog chow I was feeding her. I missed two days of classes and took her to the vet, which cost me eighty dollars. Eighty dollars is a lot of money to a college student. I didn’t eat much that week because money was tight. Angela let me borrow some money. I will never be able to pay her back, or say thank you for the third time. I couldn’t tell anything was wrong that week. I was worried about my dog. That week I pondered quitting my job. I needed something that paid more -- perhaps one of those obscure jobs that appear in the newspaper from time to time for people who are willing to do nasty things, 41

Daniel Clausen usually having to do with sales or sanitation. I told my dog this and she wagged her tail in approval. I love the way she does that.

I had found Josie lying on the street one day coming back from work.

Her leg was scratched and infected. I took her to the vet, put up signs looking for the owner, but nobody ever came to claim her. Josie limps around my apartment and chews up my clothes. I tell her “No!” in a stern voice, and then follow this up with “No treats for you.” But she knows I don’t have any treats, just dog food that comes in twenty-pound bags. But her tail wags back and forth anyway, so I just let her chew up my clothes. She’s happy, which makes me happy. Making Josie happy was more important than making Angela happy, because it was easier. I could always work more hours, buy more clothes for Josie to chew on, but Angela was more complicated.

“One-way train, man,” Bob said. It’s very easy to love Bob and Josie.

I can make Bob happy with little things, like buying him dinner or telling a dirty joke. Angela was more complicated. She was great at giving, but when it came to the other part she was messed up. Crazy. If I hadn’t dropped my psychology class I’d have a technical term for you. I’m not sure one exists, though. (Is there a technical term for messed up?)

Perhaps I was her stray pet. If she were alive she would tell me how men are really easy to take care of. I bet she would have said something like “Give them a little attention, stroke them a little, and they’re happy.” The guys who came to see her at work -- to stare at her tits -- they always thought the same thing. She was great at giving…she was a bitch for giving so much.

She treated every man that ever cared for her like garbage, though.

The ones that abused her stayed until they had used her up. Where does that leave me?

It’s easy to blame Angela for her death, but it’s even easier to blame myself. I could take it; she couldn’t. And that’s why she’s dead. She let people like me screw her into an early grave. It’s my fault she’s there. All because I didn’t tell her that the reason her father beat her and she cried so often was that I could handle a puking dog, car payments, a math test, the man upstairs, but not a crying woman, not her. You are my fault, Angela. I had a bad week.

You had a bad lifetime. But this will not change the fact that you are dead. It’s my fault, all of it. It doesn’t make any sense. But if it did, you wouldn’t be dead. I’m sorry things don’t make sense, Angela. But I’ll listen now anyway.

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43

Daniel Clausen

RED SHOES* *An excerpt from the novel The Ghosts of Nagasaki

In Nagasaki, the workdays come and go and I get through them as best I can.

The misery of the winter season slowly passes. After work, my Welsh roommate and I rediscover the magic of rental movies as a way to save money and drink less. Michael J. Fox, Molly Ringwald, and other venerable eighties icons manage to move us past February and March. And then, one day without warning, the cherry blossoms bloom. Pink fluffy cotton candy plumes hanging from trees. They somehow make the days seem that much sweeter and usher in the early death of winter. My Welsh roommate points them out to me from the tram on the way to work. “Nothing more glorious than being stuck in Japan during cherry blossom season,” he says. * I can already see the cherry blossoms. Up close they have a subtle beauty, but from where I stand now, on the street a few blocks away from the park, they explode profusely. In a light jacket and jeans, a six-pack of beer in hand, I walk up the mountain toward Tateyama Park. What once was a forest of green has now turned pink, a signal that winter is dead and that spring has come to take its place. I can already see the Japanese families, groups of coworkers, groups of college students, and couples gathering underneath the trees, the light orange of the evening sun beaming softly down on them.

Clearly, I think, this is a time for merriment. But the weight where my heart is begs to differ.

I walk the rest of the way up the hill to the park where my friends and colleagues are. I realize that having a lead heart is no small inconvenience in a city full of hills and mountains. By the time I get there, sweat is pouring down my face, and I feel as if I’m about to collapse.

“More than a bit out of shape, are we?” my Welsh roommate says to me.

“Heart,” I say, panting. “A lead ball where my heart is.”

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The Lexical Funk

My Welsh roommate wrinkles his brow ever so slightly. “Yeah, you keep saying that. I tell you, mate, when I first met you, you seemed like a right normal dude, but you just keep getting weirder by the moment. How do you know it’s lead anyway? It could be iron or some other kind of metal, or a stone even.”

He has a point there.

“First, it’s your crazy paranoia about cats, then visions of your dead foster mum in my class, and now this nonsense about your heart. You used to be normal―or maybe we just drank a lot more back then. Well, I know what can fix that. Here you are, mate.”

He passes me a beer.

I point to the six-pack of beer in my hand.

“Aw, come on now. You know we only drink that shite when we’re dirt poor and want to punish ourselves for pissing away all our money before payday.”

He has a point, so I take one of his beers and begin my drinking. I take a second to wave to the rest of the people there: students, friends, and coworkers. No one seems to notice that the evening is conveniently devoid of cats, and that while we’d been talking the space around us had begun to fill with the spirits of the mountain.

One of the Japanese staff members I am with notices though.

Michiyo. Sweetheart that she is, she never wants to burden anyone with her ghosts. When I notice that she can see them, she tries to avoid eye contact with me. If I had to guess, I would say that they’re her ghosts and that she’s embarrassed. I want to reach out to her and tell her not to be embarrassed.

Tell her that we all have our ghosts and they just show up whenever and wherever they please—hatch out of any old cat, roam freely throughout the city, pop out of shadows, and sew loose buttons. But that would have just made her more embarrassed.

I sit, and though Michiyo sits far away from me, staring off into the distance, I feel closer to her at that moment than any other person in the park.

It won’t be long before she quits and I never see her again. And the world will become that much lonelier. * In the background I can hear my Welsh roommate and one of our new coworkers arguing; James Thompson tries to figure out what to do with himself; Sam from Scotland chats cordially with one of his students; young couples hold hands; and I can hear children playing not far away. It’s in these perfectly sublime moments that the ghost of my foster mother is most apt to appear. I wait and wait, and I think that in time it could even cease to be a 45

Daniel Clausen haunting moment, something rude and unwelcome, and that I could come to live with her spirit.

I wait, and just out of the corner of my eye I see someone. She can’t be more than eighteen or nineteen―conservative hairstyle, sweater and black slacks, Bible in her hand. Studious, passionate, and devoted, this younger version of my foster mother tries to hand church pamphlets to the mortals who pass her way. Even as they ignore her invisible form, her smile lights up the night. She looks my way and gives me a wave, and I smile back. A cool breeze blows her supernatural scent my way, and if everything felt haunted yesterday, it feels all the more haunted today. * The night ages quickly. Before long, many of the salarymen are breaking into song; Steve from New Zealand has his T-shirt off and is dancing up a storm; even James, if I remember correctly, is in the spirit, hitting on staff members and generally making a fool of himself with bad Japanese and tales from his college days. It’s only a matter of time before the streaking gets under way, and that would mean that we’d left the dismal winter months behind for good.

My Welsh roommate comes up to me much drunker than when I last found him. “Isn’t it grand? The miserable winter is over for good. No more rental movies, thank God…” My Welsh roommate talks, but as usually happens I find myself instead looking for the spirits. Ghost-spotting, if you will. I was getting used to seeing more of them now. For a moment I think I see a priest. I see him occasionally these days, in his white robe with his beard.

How does he fit into the scheme of things? How do any of us fit into the scheme of things? Why am I, out of all the expats, the only one who is haunted? Or were the others just too drunk to recognize their own ghosts? I look to my head for answers it can’t provide, and knowing I have no other place to turn, I also look to that lead ball in my chest. Its silence is more haunting than the ghosts, one of which turns to me, says something in Japanese, smiles and goes on his way. I don’t even realize that he’s a ghost until I notice that my Welsh roommate can’t see him.

He’s off now on a different topic: the appalling deficit in fashion sense in Japan.

“Look at that, Makiko dressed herself up like an eighties prostitute.

Gotta admit though, as eighties-era prostitutes go, she’s got more class than Julia Roberts. Now Koshiro has found himself a spot in a Keith Richards look-alike contest…”

I decide that it’s time for a walk. I bid my Welsh roommate goodbye, which I’m sure he doesn’t even hear because he’s now off to join a group of salarymen. Just as I’m about to start on my way, I hear him chanting, “Nonde, 46

The Lexical Funk

nonde, nonde, nonde, nonde” (“Drink!” five times in a row, sung in rhyme), with the other drunken Japanese men. No doubt, in a moment’s time he will have himself an entirely new group of friends. * I take myself to the middle of the park where the families and couples are starting to make their way back to their cars and homes. I stop near the entrance of the park and find myself waiting for something. A superreal something tells me that this is the right thing to do.

Before long, the flow of people coming down the park steps thickens.

They finish their packed dinners, tell their kids they can have one more go on the swings, and then they’re walking down the steps toward me. It’s only a matter of time before I see them.

Red shoes.

Their logic, simple and superreal, makes it that much easier for me to follow. A pair of high heels at first, some sneakers there, a pair of red sandals of all things. One person, one pair of red shoes, and I follow them until the voice in my head says stop. Then I follow another. Red shoes to red shoes.

Red shoes stop, and I wait for another pair to come along. This is stupid, the voice of reason tells me. This randomness will get you nowhere but lost. But my better self knows that really lost is better than simply lost and that if a vision could take me here—to a place as vague and surreal as Nagasaki―it must have greater plans for me.

The litany of red shoes ends with a middle school kid with a pair of beat-up old sneakers. A car pulls up on the side of the street, he jumps in, and from there I’m stuck. I wait. The night is getting colder. What seems like an eternity passes without any red shoes. I am so still that I can actually feel myself growing older. The night air is cool and lonely. But against all real logic I wait. I find myself waiting on the sidewalk, staring pointlessly out into space, when for no sensible reason whatsoever a businessman passes by wearing not black business shoes but red running sneakers.

What the . . .?

I follow him from a safe distance. I’m positive that I’ve managed to make myself inconspicuous. He knows nothing, I tell myself. Then, without warning, he turns around, looks at me and starts running. I decide against chasing him. As I watch him disappear into the distance, I realize that the running shoes weren’t as odd as I first made them out to be. Something in his stride makes me wonder whether this isn’t the first time he’s had to run away from a strange foreigner.

What now? And, as if to answer my question, someone rides by on a motorbike. And although she’s driving by rather fast, I’m sure those are red shoes she’s wearing. So I chase her down as fast as the stone weight at my 47

Daniel Clausen center will let me. I must look stupid, a twenty-something struggling to jog after a motorbike. I’m huffing and puffing, with nothing left to follow but the low hum of the motorbike in the distance. But soon, even this sound disappears. I find myself drenched in sweat in a small neighborhood near the foot of a path that goes farther up the mountain. Though I’m alone, something in the night air seems to flow through me and up the mountain.

The lights atop Tateyama Park suddenly go dark, and all I’m left with are a few dim streetlights. There are only two ways I can go now: back the way I came or up the mountain path. Though I’m already tired from running, though the weight at my center begs me to sit down and rest, there really isn’t any choice. I walk the path up the mountain.

As I walk, the stone where my heart should be starts to grow lighter.

With each step up the mountain I start to feel more empowered. It’s not too long before I see her. Not quite as young as I remember her, and it’s her shoes, yes, but also her breathing, cool and steady that comes out as red smoke, that allows me to follow her.

Soon I’m no longer waiting for anything. I am chasing her along the mountain path. She is impossibly fast, and I have to try to will the lead weight into nonexistence in order to keep up. The mountain path becomes harder and harder to see, and I fear that I’ll soon be caught in the dark on this mountain with no way of getting back. To follow her, to keep going close on her heels, or to give up and go back—and yet still, I feel as if I have no choice.

I can hear her laugh. No, not a laugh. Almost a giggle. And it feels as if I’m chasing a little sister or a cousin. The path becomes darker and darker. I strain to see her, her fiery red breath evaporating—and all I have are those bright red shoes to guide me.

“So that’s why you wear the shoes,” I say to myself.

The steeper it gets, the more fiercely she runs. There is an end. When I reach the top there is this moment where everything, the red shoes, the girl, my life, my presence in Nagasaki, becomes painfully clear. I feel like sitting down and crying. Instead, I fall to the ground, sweat pouring off of me. I look out into the night and notice that there are fewer lights down below than when I first began my journey, as if my own feet had taken me away from civilization and flipped me upside down. Now I’m looking at the city as a constellation of stars. I look for so long that my own eyes flip me on my back and I really am looking at a constellation of stars so bright they block out the world.

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WANT MORE? Check out The Ghosts of Nagasaki The numerous workdays have taken a toll on Tokyo investment banker Pierce Williams. Each day he wakes up, and each day the weight where his heart should be grows heavier.

One morning, without knowing why, he sits down at his desk and begins typing something. Soon he realizes that without meaning to he has begun typing the story of his first days in Nagasaki four years ago. As he types, the words on his screen become more than he could have imagined. Instead of simply remembering the past, he is reliving it in ways that fundamentally alter his present.

In his manic writing are the ghosts of his past, a chilling vision of his future, and the possible key to his salvation. Somehow he must solve the mystery of four years ago. A mystery that involves a young Japanese girl, the ghost of a native writer, and an oppressive bureaucrat/samurai determined to crush his spirit.

Free Sample Chapters at: www.ghostsofnagasaki.com Or purchase a copy on Amazon

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Daniel Clausen

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many of the stories in this volume were published in magazines and journals and on websites. I would like to thank Slipstream Magazine, RedFez, Aphelion Science Fiction, Yellow Mama, and Ken*Again for taking a chance on my work.

I would also like to thank everyone who read and reviewed the first edition of this book published in 2008.

I would like to thank my family and friends for their support.

Thank you Lorna Simons for your editorial support.

If you have any advice on how to improve this book or would simply like to contact the author, you can email me directly at: ghostsofnagasaki@gmail.com.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Daniel has wanted to be a writer ever since he was in elementary school. He has published stories and articles in such magazines as Slipstream, Black Petals, Spindrift, Zygote in my Coffee, and Leading Edge Science Fiction- - among others.

He has written six books: The Sage and the Scarecrow (a novel), The Lexical Funk (a short story collection), Reejecttion (short story/ essay collection), ReejecttIIon – A Number Two (short story/ essay collection), Something to Stem the Diminishing (short story/ essay collection), and The Ghosts of Nagasaki (a novel).

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