Cryptopolis and other st.., p.12
Cryptopolis and Other Stories, page 12
“Are you kiddin’?” I say. It is a cool looking couch: green and yellow with floral prints, like something right out of the 1970s. Pure kitsch. Here’s the problem: it’s brand new and sitting beside the back entrance to an apartment building. It’s clear to me that someone’s moving into the building and probably set the couch down for only a few minutes. It’s not someone’s leftover trash.
“We can’t steal someone else’s couch,” I say.
“It’s not stealing,” she says, “if someone left it here in the alley for anyone to take.”
“Whoever owns it is going to come back for it any second now.”
Laurie sighs, crosses her arms over her chest, and rolls her emerald eyes. “If that’s so, don’t you think they would’ve come back for it by now?”
“We’ve only been standing here for a few seconds.”
“I had my eye on it way back there,” she says, throwing her arm behind her like a child tossing a baseball for the first time. “I’ve been watching it this whole time. No one’s come out for it. It’s fair game. It’s perfect for your place! This could really pull the whole room together.”
“Laurie, I just want to go to sleep. This is ridiculous. You and I can’t carry that thing all the way across the street and up three flights of stairs.”
“I wouldn’t mind staying over at your place so much if this couch were there.”
“Wouldn’t mind…? You’re over there all the time anyway! If you don’t like my apartment so much, why don’t you stay at your own damn place?”
That familiar, wounded expression casts a shadow over her face. “Fine. Maybe I’ll do that right now.” Widdershins, she spins around and starts back toward her car, her heels clicking down the dark alley. We just spent an hour looking for the parking space; now she wants to abandon it.
I run after her, grab her arm, pull her back. She tears her arm out of my grasp.
“Stop it,” she says, “you’re hurting me again!”
She says this way too loud. I look up at the apartment windows and see lights clicking on. A dark face peers out at us. I’ve never hurt her once in my life. But the cops won’t believe that if someone calls them.
I raise my hands and say, “Okay, it’s cool, it’s cool. Let’s just grab the couch and go.”
“Not if you don’t want to.”
“I want to. I love the floral print. I loved the couch from the beginning. I just didn’t want to steal someone else’s furniture. But obviously, if it belonged to someone, they would’ve come out by now… right?”
Laurie nods. She tosses her purse onto one of the cushions and says, “I’ll take this side.” She kneels down, slips her hands beneath the couch, and remains there while waiting for me to take the other side. Her slim frame makes her seem deceptively fragile, but her job as a waitress keeps her pretty damn strong. So maybe she can handle the couch… but her high heels are hardly the best shoes to be wearing while carrying something this heavy across a street as busy as Alamitos.
“Okay, you ready?” I ask, glancing over my shoulder.
We’ll have to carry it all the way down the alley, dart across Alamitos before an Evergreen truck or a ubiquitous cop car runs us over, then drag it through the back gate of my building, and up three flights of stairs.
What the fuck are we doing?
I slip my hands under the couch, say, “Okay… on three. One, two… three.”
We both lift. The fucker is so heavy I almost feel my spine snap while a muscle in my groin shudders in pain.
“Holy shit,” I grunt, almost dropping the son of a bitch, “this isn’t gonna work.”
“Please start walking backwards,” she says. “Just for me, babe.”
I sigh and give in. Like usual.
When we reach the mouth of the alley, we sit the couch down on the ground to catch our breath. We collapse onto the couch right there in the middle of the sidewalk. Laurie rests her head on my shoulder.
“See?” she says. “It’s not that hard.”
“So, are you sure you need this thing?” I say between heavy breaths.
“Listen, if we’re going to be living together, I need the apartment to reflect my personality. This couch screams me. And it’ll go with the yellow paint.”
Yellow paint? What the hell is she talking about? I’m happy with the white walls that were there when I moved in. She keeps talking about her “moving in soon,” as if she isn’t already living with me twenty-four hours a day. She gives me a long kiss on the lips, then whispers, “Okay, babe, no rest for the weary.”
We take our positions on either side of the couch, wait for the cars to go by. The second there’s a break in traffic we start across. I have to scuttle backwards fast, like a crab, because Laurie’s walking so damn quick. I have this image of us dropping the couch in the middle of the street, a car approaching fast, the two of us running in panic, the car slamming into the brand-new couch, innocent kids dying, cuffs being locked around our wrists….
This dark fantasy passes the second we reach the other side of the street. We pause once more, take our seats in the couch. Laurie chooses that moment to cuddle up next to me and kiss me on the neck. She starts making out with me as if we’re in the privacy of my inadequate apartment with white walls.
She bites and sucks on my ear lobe, then whispers, “The second we get this couch into your apartment, I’m gonna fuck you on this thing so hard you’re gonna forget all about how exhausted you are.”
I stare into her pretty eyes for a few moments, pat her thigh, then say, “Okay. Well… let’s get going, then.”
We take our positions, me dragging the couch, Laurie pushing it. We carry it around the perimeter of the building, all the way to the back gate. We have to set it down again so I can prop open the gate with a discarded cardboard box that keeps crumpling under the weight of the heavy metal. I curse at the box, call it a faggot son of a bitch, then kick it into the gutter. A young couple strolls by holding hands, staring at the two of us strangely.
“So, are you done gay bashing the box?” Laurie says.
I manage to keep the gate open with my foot as I back the couch into the alley behind 44 Alamitos. Once we’re past the gate I feel a lot less self-conscious. All sorts of crazy people live in this dilapidated, eighty-year-old building. Two more won’t stand out.
I unlock the narrow door that leads into the first-floor hallway. We manage to tilt the couch in such a way that it just barely slips through the doorway. Then I have to drag the couch up the ugly green carpet, up the stairway, while Laurie pushes and shoves from the other side. The couch falls out of my hands at one point and almost takes Laurie down with it. I ask her if she’s had enough, but she says no. She’s no quitter, not when it comes to things she really cares about.
On the second floor we’re so tired we just allow it to fall onto the ground. It causes a loud, echoing crash that I think for sure will bring people running out into the hallway, but no one comes. I guess when you get used to ignoring gunshots on a weekly basis, a falling couch isn’t much of an attention-getter.
We rest on the couch one last time, Laurie trying to comfort me as I feel my tired and agonized psyche slipping off into the abyss one last time. Laurie and I have been through way too much drama in the past ten months. I wonder if we’ll ever get a break from the constant insanity and stress. And in that moment, I doubt it. After all, how can you get a break from something that’s coming from your girlfriend’s brain? From your own brain? By this point, it’s become difficult for me to distinguish between the two.
I can see my green painted door at the top of the third-floor landing. Just one more flight of stairs. Just one more, I keep telling myself as we drag and push and huff and curse and bitch and moan and at last deposit the hunk of Laurie-approved furniture right in front of my door. Apt. #312.
I stare at the door and realize it’s even narrower than the one down on the first floor. “Jesus Christ, Laurie,” I say, “look at that.” I prop myself up against #310 across the hall in an attempt to keep from fainting. “We’re never gonna be able to get that thing through there.”
“Yes, we will,” Laurie says. She says this with utter conviction. She tries it. Tries it for a long time. I even help despite the fact that I know the whole situation is hopeless.
After about twenty minutes, at some point just past two a.m., Laurie throws her arms in the air and says, “Well, I guess you were right.”
“I guess so,” I say. “So now what’re we gonna do? I can’t drag this thing all the way back down the stairs.”
Laurie glances around the quiet hallway, then says, “Well, why don’t we just push it up against the fire escape?”
“Oh, that’s a great idea, let’s prevent people from escaping during a fire.”
Laurie makes her trademarked “Tt!” sound, something she does when she’s annoyed. “Off to the side of the fire escape, dummy. There’s room.”
Well, there isn’t really, but we do it anyway because I’m too tired to think of anything else. We enter my apartment at last. I close and lock the door behind me. Laurie collapses onto my bed, fully clothed, and whispers, “Hey, babe, can you, uh… can you please get me something to drink?”
“What do you want?”
She covers her eyes with the back of her arm. “Some of that wine, I think. I’m going to drink the whole glass, then guess what, babe… we’re gonna fuck fuck fuck. Jesus, I need it now more than ever.”
I go into the kitchen without a word. When I come back with the glass Laurie’s fast asleep.
I set the glass on the floor, then crawl into the bed beside her. I don’t even get out of my clothes. Despite my erection, within seconds I’m unconscious too.
A day later Laurie leaves my apartment to go to her English class at the community college and never returns home.
She breaks up with me over the phone after three days of total silence. It’s an absolute shock to me. I had been planning on telling her I’d help her paint the walls yellow.
The couch remains out in the hallway for three weeks.
Then one day I come home, and it’s gone too.
Initiation
They pulled me out of the back of the car and dumped me on the wet concrete. It was raining that night. I could hear them talking to one another about how far down the alley they should take me. I could see nothing through the blindfold.
Two of them grabbed my bound legs. The third guy, the real big one I think, gripped my shoulders and lifted me into the air. As if I was a dead cow all trussed up and waiting to be skinned, they hauled my body about hundred feet away from the idling car, then dropped me onto the ground once more. This time I landed in soggy scraps of what felt like cardboard and old newspapers. Despite the rain, the scent of dead fish and urine and cheap liquor permeated the air. I could hear a horde of rats scampering away in fear.
My heart was beating at a rapid pace. Strangely, stupidly, my first thought was panicked concern for my rented tuxedo. Only then did I wonder, Is this it? Is this the end?
I heard the swift sssssssttt of a switchblade flipping open. One of them leaned over me. I could feel his shadow upon me.
I tensed, waiting for the killing blow.
I felt the man saw into the ropes binding my wrists. One of the other men was doing the same to the ropes that bound my ankles. Within seconds my arms and legs were free. The blindfold was torn off with a single, smooth motion. The men backed away from me slowly. I remained lying on the ground, blinking up at them in a daze. I made no attempt to move.
We had come to the blind end of an alley surrounded on either side by sloping walls of garbage. The big guy now stood behind the other two, staring down at me with his muscular arms crossed over his barrel-like chest. All their faces remained obscured. By masks. Ornate domino masks with swirling, arabesque patterns woven into them. Despite all my studying, I did not recognize those patterns. The men were still wearing their expensive tuxedoes, their hands protected by white gloves.
The big one said in a dull monotone, “Come back with the heart of fear” while tossing an empty leather sack onto my chest. Then all three walked away.
I watched them until they were lost in the heavy rain. I heard car doors slam. Heard the engine, still idling. But I didn’t hear them drive away. They were still there, waiting to see if I actually went through with it. I’d been trying for so long to lose the fear, and now they wanted me to find it again. What the fuck?
I glanced behind me, saw a pair of nondescript metal doors embedded in the red brick wall. I rose to my feet, trying to ignore the pain in my ribs, and tucked the sack into my belt. I approached the doors. I couldn’t find a knob, but there was a slight rectangular hole in the right-hand door roughly the width of four fingers. I slipped the tips of my fingers into the hole and pulled. The door wasn’t as heavy as it seemed. It opened easily.
Beyond the door stood a featureless gray corridor that extended into the building about a hundred feet or so before being lost in darkness. The ceiling of the corridor seemed lit by a very soft light. As soft as candlelight.
Behind me, the car engine was still idling.
I stepped into the corridor, followed it all the way to the end. At which point it diverged into two different directions, both of them heading off diagonally from the initial corridor.
I realized now what I was expected to do. I remembered this from my studies. I was entering a labyrinth, and this was the first branch. I was standing in the center point of “the Pythagorean Y”: a symbol of one’s path through life, a path in which one is confronted constantly by the dualities of human nature, the choices of good or evil, selfishness or selflessness, killing or healing.
Night or day. Black or white. Left or right. Yadda yadda yadda.
I knew from my studies that if you were to find yourself trapped inside a labyrinth such as this, the best method by which to find your way out again was to always move toward the left. No matter what, move in the same exact direction. Always left.
Unless, I thought, the point was not to be free of the labyrinth… unless you wished to remain inside.
I debated the point for a very long time, then at last followed my instincts. I moved right.
Before long, I came to another branch. And moved right again.
As I strolled through the corridors, the muted lights in the ceiling would flash on abruptly, then cut out again as I left that particular corridor behind. I assume motion detectors activated the lights only as long as they were needed. It was eerie to glance over my shoulder and see only endless darkness behind me, then look forward and see the same impenetrable blackness ahead of me.
Before long, I came to another branch. And moved right again.
And right again.
Right again.
Again.
To yet another Y-shaped path. On my left, the corridor continued apace. To the right stood a door. It was wide and rounded at the top, painted green and made of vertical wooden slats with splinters sticking out of it; it had a dirty brass handle, no knob.
A hollow agony brought on by pure fright clawed at the inside of my stomach. I wanted to run away, back into the alley. Take my chances and go.
But I remembered my studies: I stuck to the plan instead. I grabbed the handle and pulled. The door opened easily, as if the hinges were always kept well-oiled.
What struck me first was the total lack of rain. I recognized nothing about this world beyond the door.
I didn’t recognize the greenish-yellow mist that enmeshed the heavens, the mist that would part occasionally to reveal a gun-metal-gray sky resembling a circuit board inside a computer, the endless cracked desert landscape devoid of vegetation or animal life of any kind, the miles upon miles of skeletons that littered a tableau pocked with thousands of shallow pits (were they craters?), the strange black city in the distance.
The skeletons were immense, about 150 feet in length. They seemed more like winged reptiles. They had clearly been lying there for years. If there had been any sand to cover them, and any wind to blow it, their bones would have long since been hidden from view.
I didn’t know how many there were. Too many to count. They stretched off in all directions, dwindling in size to tiny white pebbles in the distance. A graveyard for dragons? I wondered if any spot existed in this desert not covered in death. This impression was strengthened by the mountain that loomed over the city, a mountain in the shape of what seemed to be a giant skull. If so, this skull was not human at all. It resembled what the skull of a jack-o’-lantern would look like, if jack-o’-lanterns were unfortunate enough to have skulls. A hint of the ape could be seen in its sloping forehead and prognathous jaw. I felt as if the skull had not been carved into the rock but had somehow grown that way…
The city in the distance was hard to see, not because there was anything obstructing my line of sight but because the structure was hard to comprehend. It looked both natural and artificial at the same time, as if an entire metropolis had risen slowly over centuries like a mountain range, a city grown out of the earth itself.
For the first time I glanced downwards and took notice of the ground upon which I was standing. At some point I had stepped all the way through the door without even realizing it. I turned and looked over my shoulder; there was nothing but desert behind me. And carved into the ground beneath my feet was a geometric pattern: a square within a circle circumscribed by a larger circle; this circle overlapped an even larger square, thus creating triangle-shaped tips at the four directions of the square. I was now standing in the exact center of the innermost square. No door in sight.
I couldn’t go back, even if I wanted to. First that idling engine prevented me from leaving, now this disappearing door. I knew at that moment I had made my decision long ago, perhaps way back when I was still inside my mother’s womb. I had to keep moving or lie down amidst the bones and die.
