The Message                  

3,016 wds                                                                                                             

Call me old-fashioned but i still have a land line to my phone and an old voice mail system. I only keep the tape-voice mail because it hasn’t broken yet. I own a phone machine called a Phone Mate, which i plug into my telephone outlet when i leave the house. The machine answers the phone with a recording of my voice; “Sorry i can’t speak with you now but if you leave your name, number and a short message, i’ll get back with you soon,” sound of a buzz-tone and a response is recorded. Most messages are recorded in the first half of the tape, listened to a day or so after, the tape is rewound and the first voices recorded covered by new voices. Sometimes a message left on the last half of the tape is listened to but not recorded over. This afternoon i listened to the last half of the tape.

There was a message from James that hit me hard because i thought her had called today or yesterday. He said, “Hey big guy George, hot party Saturday night, call me pronto. This is James.” The message was ten months old but i didn’t think it was that old as i listened to it. 

I had to sit down. James is dead, has been dead for many months! For half a minute everything that had happened in the seven months since he was killed rushed into my brain. Had it really happened? Was James in fact still walking around breathing, opening a door, looking at a clock? If so, all of it was fantasy; what ii had done to James paintings, the incident in the bathtub, my love for Ann. It was all a dream.

James was murdered. It was all in the papers and the other news. He was described as a promising artist. The police never caught the murderer and eventually the neighborhood, the city, the universe, returned to life as usual. 

For some of us everything was changed. No one we knew had ever been murdered and at first the police suspected all of us, his close friends, until we produced alibis and they dropped us off one by one for lack of evidence. Whoever killed James loved to kill. They broke into his house, actually they probably just walked in the front door since James never locked his door. He was working in his small studio at home and went downstairs thinking ah ha, someone has come to visit and they pumped six bullets into his braid and three in his chest. This had a unique effect on his fellow artists like me.

In many other ways James and i were alike. We were the same weight and height, had the same aspirations for immortality through5 art, not great art, which we believed doesn’t exist, just good art, the kind we live with. We were craftsmen. We were more than once mistaken for brothers. We went to school together, enjoyed getting drunk and high, listened to the same music and played softball. 

I remember one night staying up drunk enough to talk with great clarity and confidence about Plato and Epicurus. Typical guys. 

Our crowd got together two months after James was killed and we had a strange party. It seemed that until then no one wanted to walk out on the streets. I would go to the supermarket and find myself thinking, what am i doing here and split for the nearest bar where thing made sense. At the party no one felt normal. We bought a keg of beer and stood around draining it but not talking very much until early in the morning. We endured periods of deep silence, still, no one wanted to leave. I think we were trapped by an unconscious, unspoken desire to arrive at a conclusion. We arrived at no conclusion. 

A few nights before i had reached a conclusion i have never told anyone about except Ann.

The thought that no one gave a damn about James or me drove me insane. James and i shared a studio and a dozen of his paintings, all his work, his life’s work, were stacked along one wall. I sat in my chair looking at them and no longer believing that if i died receiving six bullets in my brain a part of me would still be out walking around showing a face to the world. James’s paintings sat there day after day unmoved and without anyone coming to look at them for five minutes or one minute. So i set them along the wall, took one last look and methodically went crazy. I was berserk, high, i was an atom bomb. It is an old African custom which i invented on the spot to bring about a metamorphosis and transfer of spirit from one astral plane to another; to bring utter destruction and cause to go out of being one material form and thereafter to find the essential essence of a material object regenerated. That was my delusion. I was full of shit.

I trashed James’s paintings. I cut them to pieces, broke up the stretchers and threw it all out in the dumpsters in the alley. Then i sat down to paint and nothing happened. The spirits of the destroyed paintings that were supposed to flow through me onto my canvases left the building or were never there. I tried; i slopped a lot of paint on my canvasses and tried to shape images that are more than images but i had no model, no form. James did not step into the room to help me. I had done a truly stupid thing.

The next morning i wanted to jump under a bus. I kept seeing James’s mother in the faces on the street. She had never before asked but now she would ask to see his art. And all around i felt his eyes floating by me. 

I would go like James, forgotten, partly due to my own actions. It happens no matter what you do. People will always be walking the streets from on e store to the next. If i died it would be zero to them. Popular movie stars, public figures of all sorts, great scientists, artists, writers, athletes die and the world goes on the same. It’s an acknowledged fact. I just never thought it was so true until James was murdered.

In the days after he was shot six times in the head with a .22 pistol (the police think it was a pistol because even in our neighborhood carrying a rifle would looks weird) i had dreams of killing.  There is a feeling when the bullet enters the body; first shock, then there it is. I have hunted and have had to shoot animals where they lay wounded, their eyes looking at me. When a bullet enters the body the skin is dented, blood wells up, you feel the bones split apart. I imagine that’s what James felt and that was it for him, he was gone, unconscious. But the shooters were nervous and wanted out, but they also wanted to be sure, to see what it looked like to shoot him more in the head where they chipped aways the tan forehead, seeing his blood and brains ooze out of the small holes and feel the crunch as each bullet went in. Then they shot him in the chest, the lead cutting through muscle and puncturing organs. I imagined his lungs released a sputtering of air, the blood bubbling out and spreading into his shirt. Think of it, looking into that last face, the last face. Who was it?

In my drug induced delirium it stuck it me; this wasn’t James who died it was me. It wasn’t his death that was so insignificant, it was my life. 

All my dreams of fame through high art vanished, stomped into and swallowed in grass over my friend’s grave. 

I became extremely depressed. I started drinking early and didn’t stop until i passed out. I took a lof of dope, speed to keep me up, coke for strength, pot for dreaming or whatever i could find where i could find it. It became routine, a crutch, anything to restore my illusion of importance. 

I had been stoned when we had that strange party. Nothing happened at the party, just standing around a keg trying to think of something to say. I managed to stay that way for many months. My job slipped away and then it was winter when work was scarce anyway and i knew i would soon run out of money but didn’t care. One morning i woke up thinking ah crap, another day. I filled the bathtub and had a hot soak. My mind was tangled up. it was a cold winter day and the snow was piled up outside my windows. The apartment was a gloomy place because my roommate and i didn’t get along so no one swept the floor or washed the dishes. You were advised not to inhale or stick your tongue out as you walked through or you would taste the odor.

I slipped into the water rand thought it would be nice to go like this, floating, sleeping. I smoked half a joint someone left in an ashtray by the sink. I became drowsy and was nodding off when a sound in the apartment beyond the door woke me.  I had left music playing out there but this was noise cutting across the regulated path of the music. It sounded like someone sneaking around trying to make their footsteps light.

I sat up in the tub slowly, listening, yes, someone moved quietly thought the rooms out there. 

My clothes were in my bedroom and there were no towels in the bathroom. I usually used my bed sheets to dry off. Besides, i didn’t want to move. I was comfortable. 

But soon they would find the locked door and know someone was behind it. Would they remain quiet and sneak back out having taken from the apartment all that was valuable which was nothing at all, or would they kick down the bathroom door, breaking the tiny hook in its eye bolt?

What did he look like, that last face? 

And then i thought that it was my roommate and laughed at myself. But i had another idea, what if it wasn’t my roommate and me here like a fat-ass turkey simmering in a roasting pan? Thinking it’s my roommate i am about to call out to the same people who murdered James. Why not? A more bizarre coincidence has happened before. Men in wartime have been trapped in cellars and lived for years on rat meat and wine. Parachutists, their chutes unopened, have landed in trees and snow banks, unhurt. It was also possible one of our own friends, one of the guys at the beer keg with a split personality and planned to rub each of us out methodically, as methodically and completely as i had destroyed James’s paintings, his life’s work. 

I killed my friend, that’s what it boils down to. Now some friend was coming after me. It’s a crazy world.

So i didn’t move or shout. For a long time i stared at the door knob and about that little hook in its eye bolt, vaguely expecting to see it fly apart before the bullet in the head, torn to splinters as the door comes flying open and i see the face. In a way i was curious to see the face.

What if it isn’t a man? I slipped into a dream of a police woman i had seen sometimes on campus. She has a nice figure, generous top and bottom and slim between. Clearly she controls her appetite (for food at least) and works out. But her face is squeezed in; thin nose, strict lips.  She look s mean, efficient, a practiced killer who can also be loving though as a child she enjoyed twisting the heads off small birds. Stray cats no long come to the small saucer of milk she leaves by her back door below the heavy metal basket ready to fall around them. Long ago she craved positive, steady companionship so she got a dog from the SPCA and in a way fell in love with the pup until . . . one day the pup misbehaved on the living room rug. “You did a bad thing and must be punished.” They went for a drive in the country. A wild impulse took hold of her and she broke free of regulations. Stopping the car in a deserted area she led the frisky pooch (she needed no leash, a tossed stick kept the best friend near) into a thicket. Removing a small pistol she reassured herself no one would here the shot. And yet a moment before releasing the safety and cocking the weapon, she thought of turning it on herself and paused, looked into the barrel wondering, dreaming, then returned to the task a6t hand, the task of the enforcer. After all, she was not guilty, not the one to be punished and what kind of society do we have when the enforcers commit the crimes?

     It could be her outside my door, why not? She is so disciplined, exact. I would admire the cool, precise hands (half an hour before her quick hands rubbed lotion into one another) as they cock the gun and braced the wrist, the polished mechanism part of the hand the smooth brass cartridge nosed snuggly into the chamber. Ah, her lips as she steadies the weapon so straight colorless, firm! Her grip without a tremble as i feel the muzzles of her pistol edge aside the hair at the back of my head and the cold metal against skin, the skin pinched up between muzzle and skull, the copper jacketed lump of lead waiting to flame forth, spinning, twisting to bury itself in the ridged yellow pulp of my brain, my fondest memories. 

The idea pulled me back. Why not her? The world is insane, reasonless, chaotic. Why not her? None of us expected what happened to James and none of us expected him to be forgotten, of that block of experience to go without reason completely out of existence. Was i not sweetly dreaming of my sweet executioner?

But even this thought began to fade and melt away into the sleep of oblivion had not the intruder tipped a glass off the kitchen table. The crash of splintering glass dug into my ears. The muffled word shit and the idea of being shot became too real. Fantasies about death, i was like a child playing with charged electric wires. This notion (for a man in a bathtub, water to his neck) struck me with such force i was completely turned around. The glass broke; i was going to run.                         

        Rising slowly, so slowly the water only rippled about my hips, i moved in silence. I brought a leg over the edge of the tub.

It kept revolving in my brain that this was happening to me, not James and i didn’t want to disappear, to die like James.

I also kept returning to the idea that whatever i thought would happen had no possibility of happening. I was constantly revising my thoughts. The moment i thought it’s my roommate, ha ha, i also thought no its; a crazed police woman or one of the guys who filled my cup and lit my cigarette or anyone with a .22 pistol.  My whole body and mind moved toward the door, then i changed my mind and rushed to the window. My dad used to say it doesn’t matter what calibre is used if it kills you you’re just as dead. 

It surprised me how quickly i moved to the window and opened it, the blast of cold air hitting me but not slowing me.

I breathed deep of the cold air coming off the snowy sill. Someone knocked on the door. Whoever it was turned and jerked the knob. I got one foot out ready to leap up with the other and slide out.

A voice sounded, “You in there, George?”

My roommate!

“Yes, yes i’m here,” i shouted as i pulled myself back in. My hand slipped off the edge of the tub as i tumbled back, bashing my head against the sink. I laughed. I stood up. The sandstone sill of the window had scratched up my legs but i was too dazed to care. 

As i slipped back into the water of the tub i called to my roommate that i loved him. 

He said, “Do you love me enough to let me in to use the shitter?”

All this; the party, trashing James’s paintings and the stoned almost jumping naked into the snow came back to me as James again spoke out of my phone machine. “Hey big guy George, hot party Saturday night. This is James.” And i felt heavy and lost. I had almost forgotten that vo9ice from the grave, my lost brother. The meaning was clear; how many just like James lost like me, are washed away and forgotten.

I was sinking again but not half a minute had passed when another, living voice called and pulled me out of the chair. I rushed to the window.

Later she told me, “You came to the window with a very peculiar look on your face,” and i guess i was glad to see her. Ann was standing in the noise down on the sidewalk in the bright sun, her smile flashing like white stones  in the swift water of a creek bed. She held up in the pocket of her curved, tan hand an old softball, its dirty white leather glowing in the sun.  Poor James. I ran down to her and outside. 

End of “The Message”