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Late-Night Caller
LAST NIGHT, EXACTLY WHEN nothing was happening, I got a call from someone who couldn’t speak. He mumbled into the phone. His mumbling was fast, superabundant, and I think at one point he tried to tell me that he ‘never sleeps a wink.’ I said ‘Yes’ as many times as I could. And then there was a shift in his tone, a shift toward anger, toward annoyance, toward outrage, and it was all directed toward me. I told him to stay calm, to stay where he was, and that I would meet him in the next few minutes. I told him he was in distress. He ‘unhummed’ confirmation. When we hung up, I was relieved and grateful that in his distress he didn’t try to mutter an address to me. He was certainly a man without a tongue.
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Val
In high school, I had a friend named Val and I believe she intentionally exposed her crotch to me one afternoon by propping her legs up and holding them just so her soccer shorts billowed, allowing sunlight to penetrate the fabric. She flashed a shaded panty-less groin in my direction while twitching her legs back and forth. Leaning back to take in the sun while our friends sat nearby unobservantly, she gave no knowing smile or wink. Cunning or clueless? How could I not look? This is what I remember of Val from high school: nonconformity concerned her the utmost. She read how-to books on the subject, she chose her boyfriends by their eccentricities, her face was trussed up with piercing and chains. But her crotch was normal, as perfect as anyone could find. She had great teeth, too.
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Generosity
Pauline from next door said, ‘I’ll tell you the truth.’ I said, ‘Please don’t. Please don’t.’ We turned to face the T.V. to see a pugnacious cartoon selling soap hoot a good-humored halleluiah at the shine his soap wrought. We were watching a doc about priapism. Her choice. I’d wanted to watch something on nest building. I thought fondly about a tiny down of hair that ran from the top of Pauline’s cheek to the curve of her jaw. Pauline said it was all mental. ‘What is?’ ‘The truth, silly.’ ‘I said enough.’ Pauline arched an eyebrow in a disagreeable way and didn’t say another word until the end of the show, and then I said goodbye. And she hiccoughed a nearly honest goodbye, too. Her personal perfume stayed behind until morning, smelling it vigorously before starting my day.
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Take Cover
For years I’d lived where lights polluted the sky, occluding the stars from view. As far as I was concerned stars could have blinked out existence, and I would have been one of the last to know. Then one summer I went to Canada to stay for a week, for rest, for recovery, fortification. I met a woman there who was from Boston, and like people who live in cities we stayed outdoors more than normal, and we walked faster than other people on the streets. She had dazzling shanks. One night near the end of my stay, a night I thought I might try to kiss her, we found ourselves at a public picnic table, where we slowed, and got all reflective and confessional. We shared a bottle of rum, our fingers touched—a crisp-lit moon (an authority on romance, if coldly) hung before our eyes and felt just for us. We were feeling young, selfish; we were feeling that nothing in our lives had been our fault. We felt a prefiguring. Who looked up first, I don’t remember, but we thought we saw a shooting star. It crept across the sky, and we said we’d never seen something so amazing as a falling star in ‘slo-mo,’ as if it knew we both wanted this night to last as long as it could. A homeless woman walked by and looked up and said, ‘Fucking satellite. Spying. Reading our brain waves. Stealing our thoughts! You kids better take cover.’
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Mother’s Cats
My mother asks things like: ‘What are you going to do with your time?’ And I say something like: ‘Live?’ She corrects me: ‘Work.’ When I go to her house, I wake up puffy around the eyes, nearly blind, and tongue-tied. I think it’s her cats. She has four. She says: ‘You overact.’ Of course, I have no retort. Nothing much happens at her house except the occasional cat fights. She likes to brag about how well-balanced her life is now that she has just her cats and no husband (my father).
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Speechless
This time I was trying to be serious when the man with no tongue called back. I told him not to ring me again. He grumbled. I asked him what made him think he had the right number. He hummed and grunted. I couldn’t agree or disagree with him, and felt nothing short of stupidity.
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Tough, Tragic
I saw Val some time ago with her daughter—a skillful and cold child, who furrowed her brow like an adult when I asked her name. Val appeared tough, tragic, and terrifically dressed in slacks and a low-cut shirt—no longer so concerned with nonconformity. As she dithered to keep her other guests busy, I tried to make polite conversation, but I got lost frequently in words as I wondered if Val’s vagina had changed after childbirth. Would I even recognize the once-prime image from my adolescence? I took a beer she offered me and nearly asked, ‘Can I see inside your pants? Again?’ I’d plan also to say, ‘I imagine its image is vastly more important to me than it is to you.’ Which could be possible, I thought, knowing how seldom I looked at my own crotch. But I held my tongue, as it were. Everyone else at the party was being polite. And so what if Val’s genitals were changed? So what? I saw it. Glimpse it. I’m sure I understood its power even then.
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Au Pied De Cochon
I took my Canadian love interest to a fancy restaurant, where we saw three men each wearing the same label on their shirts—a lightening bolt with a name written across it. They sat hunched, haunches to haunch. They were so close their smell had to be one. They scarf up meats, exotic meats. They ate tail, head, foot, tongue, eyeball. These men were hungry and their server was proud to bring them more. ‘I just love your enthusiasm,’ their server said, grinning at the slobbering bunch. They looked up, grunted, and put their faces down once again. ‘What on earth?’ my Canadian-love-via-Boston-brown-eyed darling said, eating a slice of pie with stonecutter patience. This spoiled our evening, somewhat. I told her my plans for law school. But nothing could take her attention from those men. So, I didn’t go to law school.
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Fingers Around My Neck
‘The meanest dogs live in the smallest cages,’ Pauline said. ‘Still it felt like fingers around my neck,’ I reminded. The tongue-less man had shown up at my front door, frothing mad and ferociously mute. How had he come, car or carriage? He wielded a worn farm-knife, the kind you might clean a chicken with and then dice potatoes. To Pauline I said: ‘And then I held out my arms and said Welcome home. And then he throttled me, tossing the blade aside. He throttled me.’ ‘Obviously a man of action,’ Pauline said, admiringly, and then asked: ‘What then?’ I said: ‘I threw him off. He hit his head. I grabbed the knife and held it to his throat. He looked like some homegrown hillbilly hayseed, like he was from some small town.’ And then that was when Pauline said, wisely: ‘The meanest dogs live in the smallest cages.’ ‘Where is he now?’ she asked. ‘God knows.’ ‘Truth?’ ‘Not right now, Pauline. Not right now.’ I don’t think she felt insulted. She profited a can of cheese whiz toward my mouth, which I took smilingly. I think Pauline’s great. She stays so up-to-the-minute with our friendship.
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Jamestown
Recently I spent a weekend with my mother touring historical sites. We strolled down one of the streets of God’s original world and came to a shop where they sold old-fashioned puppets. ‘You need to find yourself a girlfriend, Jake. You need someone.’ Grim was my mood over this. We each held up a puppet to our face, their little wooden limbs clacking together. ‘I’m not a virgin, mom. There was Mavis and Molly and Maggie and Magda,’ I said to my puppet. ‘Of course you’re not. Of course you’re not,’ she said to hers, ‘besides, son, one of these days you’ll be married and you’ll be so bored by sex your eyes will fall out.’ ‘Did my father’s eyes fall out?’ ‘Yes, yes they did. When he died he was as blind as a mole.’ We left that shop, walked down the cobblestone path, dodging the great piles of horseshit. Perhaps I do overreact every time I get around my mother? Perhaps I project my overreactions onto her? Perhaps she just acts the way she thinks I want her to act? She tugged on my arm and pointed to a very large man in a mechanized wheelchair. ‘Don’t ever get fat,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t kill yourself, son.’ I don’t know if she meant those two things went together. A child in my mother’s presence still, I thought kindly about being on my best behavior, which must be both insufferable and pride-inducing for her. Not that I haven’t said unkind or unclean things to her. But I wonder if all this dancing around the subject wasn’t hurting me somehow. Mother and I always want to be our best for the other, which brings out, you know, irony.
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Our Last Night
‘It’s not going to happen, is it?’ the woman from Boston said to me on our last night. ‘Why would you want it to happen?’ I asked, knowing that I had nothing to offer her except a small adventure. ‘Why wouldn’t you want it to happen?’ she retorted; she was desperate for something to happen. ‘What made you think we could make it happen?’ I said; I felt hopeless and depressed, the way I get when anything important could possibly occur. ‘Why not make it happen? It is our last night,’ her final words on the subject—the opening, the invitation, the entry. In the end, nothing happened. Something happening had become too heavy. When we parted at the hotel it felt like something important was missing. Pecks were exchanged. I’ve not spoken to her for years; I have to wonder if she seethes with as much disappointment as I do.
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Questionnaire
1. Do you feel your life is without purpose?
2. If so, explain fully. Use complete sentences.
3. Would you prefer your spouse or love ones to die before or after you?
4. Have you ever been willfully blind? Explain.
5. What is your most personal demon? Give it a name.
6. What makes you think you’ve answered the proceeding questions correctly?
7. Mind your thoughts, in geological time?
8. Which memory means the most to you?
9. Name the bones you’ve broken.
10. Now the organs.
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Showdown
The man without a tongue came to my door again, while I was filling out a questionnaire. For personal reasons, that is. This time he carried a broom and as soon as I opened the door he jabbed the broom’s bristles in my face. It felt like a thousand dull needles. He hummed and grunted the most terrible things to me. At one point I thought he called me a ‘whiskery pervert,’ but I couldn’t be sure. Nevertheless, I was soon on the floor, my face submerged in broom bristles. The tongue-less man, standing over me, howled. Why had I become the center of this man’s attention? I wished Pauline had been there to see this lunatic, perhaps she could have observed him and come up with a reason since the tongue-less man couldn’t explain for himself. He grunted and cried and garble-cursed and moaned and blubbered while jamming the broom into my face. I knew for certain that if I didn’t move quickly I would eventually loose an eye or both. I scrambled to my feet and rushed to other side of my den where I had a paint-by-number canvas on a homemade easel. I used the canvas as a shield. What was there to talk about? taking charge of my situation. Who needed a questionnaire? It was action and impediments to our will that makes us come alive (Pauline might have said this in her better moods; she was the smartest person I knew). I swung my paint-by-number canvas at the tongue-less man and he swatted at it with his broom. Things and thoughts were happening, quickly. And it is while we are fighting that I recognize that I’ve been assembling my whole life, mending back together something. My mother ever-so-often tells me how after she had me she was never ‘right again.’ Imagine the wrong. The tongue-less man clobbered me. I let him. I threw my paint-by-number canvas aside. As I allowed him to scar my face with the broom, I saw through his intermittent brush strokes the faint outline of an unfinished satellite, as if its image was flickering.
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Tap
Veiled hunger, awkward leer, constant insipid smile: this is how I see myself as a young man, around the same time I saw Val’s cunt. (I cannot decide if I like that word or not, but what else to call it? The situation deserves a better word than its bloodless clinical substitute.) The man without a tongue rests on my couch. I suppose he’s homeless. He makes a tapping noise when he wants my attention. Sometimes, I swear, I think he’s asking me to go to church. My face wasn’t cut by the broom; slightly abraded, yes. My mother called asking how things were going. I lied and said nothing was happening, that I was painting and that I had plans to go out the following evening with a new friend. ‘Jake, whose there with you?’ ‘No one.’ I tell her I’m planning to make a phone call, though. ‘To whom?’ ‘To a woman in Boston.’ ‘Don’t be off-color, Jake.’
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Ba-ba-ba-bam-boo
I called the young woman whom I had a near-fling with in Canada. I heard her child in the background, cooing and saying ba-ba-ba-bam-boo. As we talked, I cleaned out my medicine cabinet. I took out pills I’d not taken in years, swallowed them. I bandaged myself where I had no cut or abrasions: preparing myself, I guess, for whatever pain I might feel after the conversation. ‘You ever fill out questionnaires?’ I asked her. She said she did before she had her daughter, but not now. ‘Why? Is it because you think you’ve got it all figured out? Your child gives you some insight?’ ‘Maybe. Or… I guess I just don’t feel the need to question myself. I don’t want to disturb my thinking, perhaps. Children need consistency. I can’t crack open my skull and start searching for new answers this late in the game. I’ve got to go with what I know.’ ‘Do you wished something had happened?’ ‘God, Jake, don’t start it.’ Silence. ‘After childbirth was your vagina scarred or deformed?’ Silence. ‘Is that any of your business? Is that why you called?’ ‘No. I’m just curious.’ ‘Well, it’s fine. It’s fine.’ She sounded distant and hurt. We talked some more. She told me about her husband. I told her about the tongue-less man who lives in my apartment. She told me that it sounds weird. I told her his speech is weird. ‘I’m going to send you a painting I’m working on, of a satellite.’ ‘Oh, that would be nice,’ she said; she said it like I just told her I want to read her a poem. ‘Do you remember the satellite in Canada?’ She said she does, and then we dropped the subject and talked some more. She said vague and unimportant things, and I did similarly. We were both feeling out the conversation, searching for a stopping point. And then she said, ‘Ta.’ I went back to my painting. Now, I don’t think I’ll send it to her after all. Like Val’s vagina, the painting means more to me than it does to her, symbolically, of course. I take out some tapes and I pop one in the stereo. I hear the tongue-less man down the hall humming and growling to the lyrics. I had no idea he was a music lover. ‘Ta,’ she had said. And I think, ‘Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta.’
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Theatre
This morning I woke up thinking about the future. Ol’ Tongueless was scrambling eggs. He had written me a note: ‘Not killing you. Leaving today. Please don’t be afraid to speak to me. Invited Pauline over for breakfast.’ He had beautiful, jaunty handwriting. Why he had he waited until now to pass me a note? Maybe I’d ask Tongueless to stay. We three sit, eating omelets, talking about my conversation with the woman from Boston. I was still bandaged from head to toe and had awful hangover from the all the pills I’d taken. ‘What to do you think?’ I asked Pauline. ‘Do you think I would have been better off not calling at all?’ ‘Honestly?’ I sigh, ‘Yes.’ ‘You done good, Jake. You done good.’ Tongueless yarbbled and waggled his jaw in agreement. Bodily, we laughed, the picture of happiness. Pauline patted my leg under the table, and left her hand there. She was my best friend, the smartest person I knew. Idly I wondered what she looked like naked. Why not, she already knew me through and through; and she’d become fast friends with my one-time potential murderer. Looking at Pauline across the table, she smiled, an open smile, not knowing what I was thinking. Things could really start happening now.
—Jason DeYoung
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Jason DeYoung lives in Atlanta, Georgia. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including Booth, REAL: Regarding Arts & Letters, Corium, The Austin Review (web), The Los Angeles Review, New Orleans Review, Monkeybicycle, Music & Literature (web), and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Best American Mystery Stories 2012. He is a Senior Editor at Numéro Cinq Magazine.
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