As a Machine and Parts Read online

  As a Machine and Parts

  Caleb J. Ross

  Copyright © 2011 Caleb J. Ross

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the written permission of the author.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Originally published by Aqueous Books, 2011, 2nd edition, 2013

  Viscera Irrational

  Cover design and internal layout, Caleb J. Ross

  Cover image CSA Images

  Print ISBN: 978-0615824116

  Produced in the United States of America

  O, to be a machine

  O, to be wanted

  to be useful

  --Menomena, Evil Bee

  01000100 01101111 01101110 00100111

  01110100 00100000 01100101 01101110

  01110110 01111001 00100000 01101101

  01100101

  --Toshiba, Satellite 1805-S207

  As a Machine

  Eric tosses night-glow emergency phone number magnets at a 1970’s retro avocado-green refrigerator, hard enough to rattle the rebuilt compressor. “Rebuilt” used loosely; he brags weekly of having fixed the botched part, defending his neophyte mechanic’s talents by blaming subsequent failures on untouched pieces. Marsha has owned this fridge for years, since we first met. We’ve shared many reheated carryout steakhouse dinners, and for that to continue I pray Eric gets smart soon. The magnets, comped from his part time at KCPL Energy, he handles with dirty fingers and perpetually-grimed knuckles; this makeup seemingly imperative to his skill; he’s good. The magnets rarely reflect. A hit, and a loose coil somewhere vibrates applause.

  “Heard you and my mom this morning.” He breathes this revelation through the widened gaps of his clenched, yellowed teeth. He doesn’t smoke cigarettes. The hue has always baffled me.

  “Which part? The moans or the screams?”

  A magnet ricochets. A rare miss. Eric has a shaggy-haired, hunched-shouldered look somewhere between flea market redneck and barefooted hippy, with the mental disposition of both extremes to keep him at a constant verge of Red v. Blue political explosion. For as long as I’ve known him he’s sworn to one day “get back at this fucking world.” For what, he never addresses. Possibly for giving him the ever-scent of sun-baked urine and rubber. I keep Marsha’s windows open when he’s home.

  This morning’s post-coitus exchange warrants all the more mutual antipathy considering our close ages. Eric and I share nostalgic referents: G.I Joe cartoons and China-made cereal box toys. We even shared a classroom once in fourth grade, but only briefly, as Eric ultimately traded education for paint fumes and carburetors. His then neighbor, still his neighbor, now a friend, Ferret, embraced the role of teacher. By the end of what would be fourth grade, Eric knew how to lynch a smooth joint. I like him for this. So far, only this.

  I break his magnet’s fire line for a slice of cheese and some mayonnaise. The refrigerator door handle stinks of spilled milk, long forgotten, but fitting to the kitchen’s organically-upholstered décor. Things spill. Things stay. Bread crumbs decorate mildewed counter tile grout. Aerosol degreaser overspray lacquers the walls, the oven, and the dying plant leaves to a spotty, reflective patina. The daytime home remodeling TV shows that Eric calls “school” would name this style Vagabond Rustic. I let the door swing hard against its deteriorating gasket and make a show of wiping my greased hand on a nearby towel. “You should major in house cleaning. And fix this gasket.”

  “Do me a favor and hit her harder tonight. I like that.” He grins, gathering magnets from the door.

  “That’s your mother.” It’s the only threat I have. I’m not his father. I’m his peer. Marsha and I will never marry. She’s too old. I’m too smart. It’s a shame Eric and I can’t bond. Grade school clique residue keeps us forever apart: he, an angry deadhead: torn jeans and Metallica t-shirts his uniform; me, intelligence and a taste for sweeter sounds. Perhaps if something were to change we could all come together as a family. A hastily-soldered yet solid family.

  “If you listen hard enough, you’ll hear me moan back from my room,” Eric says. A magnet cuts the air.

  His mother’s sudden appearance curbs my rebuttal, breaching the kitchen in a shirt I left on her floor weeks ago. I think I originally took it from Eric’s closet in a hurry to escape Eric’s inconvenient return home. This was before his mother and I decided to out our relationship. We’ve since grown comfortable with him as we’ve grown comfortable with ourselves.

  “How’re my boys this morning?” Her skin smells of copper and her hair of headboard woodstain; we redecorated earlier this week.

  “It’s three thirty in the afternoon,” Eric says, but smiles like he’s delivering genuinely helpful information.

  “You know I’m great,” I say.

  “What’s for breakfast?” she asks, reaching for a mug from the delicate stack of clean-enough dishes filling the sink.

  “Sausage.” I smirk. An angry magnet shaves my earlobe, whapping to the fridge door. I’m impressed. The compressor reports with a tinny vibration.

  “I thought you fixed that, Eric.” She fills the cup with yesterday’s coffee and sets the microwave for a full minute.

  “Probably the cylinder block this time. I’ll get to it tomorrow.”

  “Have you checked the mechanic?” Another missile, this one hard into my back, then drops to the ground. “Watch it, son.”

  Another magnet, to my neck, then the ground. I kick the felled weapon under the refrigerator.

  “Can it, Eric. Mitchell’s back isn’t right. You know that.” She turns to the cabinet for bread. I leverage her turned interest to pantomime sex, hips and ass slaps. Eric takes the bait and throws an entire stack at my chest.

  “Fuck!” I yell, genuine pain.

  Three days ago Ferret asked Eric and I to help him sleeve a dead llama, with an understood-beer-and conversation payment. Ferret’s first words upon our arrival were an unprovoked insistence on the animal having been found dead; “I didn’t kill it.” Which means, in Ferret-speak, that he did kill it. Ferret would kill anything if it meant keeping the skin.

  I don’t know if sleeve is his word or legitimate taxidermy jargon; he says it with such nonchalance that I’d argue for the former. It means the opposite of skinning; replacing the treated hide over the stuffed mold, post-gutting. The term sleeving misleads a textile-savvy layman such as myself, implying a simple loose wrap with zero mess. But the fit is tight and produces plenty of mess. They should call it socking, “or Marsha stuffing” I said to Eric during our visit, choking back a laugh. I blame his subsequent animosity and hesitancy to help after my fall on this beautiful comment.

  Two things: 1) blood is slick, and 2) Ferret is not a professional. I took the low end when transporting the freshly “found” body to Ferret’s basement, and slipped, landing sandwiched between the greasy concrete and 300 lbs. of warm llama.

  The resulting pain wasn’t muscular entirely, nor a skeletal thing. Ferret said he had experience in blunt force trauma and elected to inspect the contact point with a stethoscope he kept to “ensure death, when it isn’t so obvious.” I hoped he meant the animals. After awkward minutes and additional strange jargon (these words I’m positive are his: congetudinal breakage, suede abrasion, 100 lb test line stitches), he gave me the okay and assured me that I was still good to sleeve. I worked well, too, impressing both him and myself. He called me a machine, and welcomed my help anytime. Eric and I, as best we’ve ever done bef
ore, bonded…over blood. I fear what that means.

  “They’re fucking magnets,” Eric says, prying more weapons from the fridge. “Don’t tell me they hurt your back.”

  “They hurt my back.”

  Marsha removes her coffee from the beeping microwave, intercepting another magnet. “Eric Charles,” she yells.

  That sweet mother’s tone. Using a middle name works for me in a dangerous way. “I’m sure he didn’t mean it.” I say, embracing the moment, nodding toward the bedroom. She grins. Eric fumes.

  I catch Eric digging under the fridge through filth for my kicked magnet. His audible disgust warns me of the impending projectile, but I have other things on my mind. Other positions and scents already clouding my brain.

  The magnet cuts the air. Contact with my neck. But this time the smack against the sticky linoleum doesn’t happen. I rip the projectile from my skin and rotate to return it, but the magnet won’t leave my hand.

  “I’ll keep it then,” I say, sex and sweat on the brain, and escort Marsha to the back room, her coffee left steaming on the kitchen counter.

  An ambulance ride later and I’m tracking strangers like barcodes. I’ve cataloged the entire waiting room in sortable, delimited rows and columns. Thirty-six percent blond or blond derivatives. Forty-two percent brunette or brunette derivatives. Ten percent too bleached white to know. Twelve percent other. I don’t normally think like this, in numbers and charts. But for the last week, equations have been my air.

  A mother across this fluorescent bio-dome warns her eight year-old boy in long-tail threats, slowly bottlenecking into terse commands. He’s using a red marker to color his left earlobe. From my position, his ear appears vibrant with blood. The child obeys once the haggard woman reaches single-syllable threats, but he pouts in defeat, refocusing his crimson dye to the webbing between his fingers. His sister, sick, a 101 degree temperature I can read for no apparent reason. The boy and I commiserate. I don’t want to be here either, friend. We end up here only when nothing else works. We’re broken machines.

  “That’s a fine mother/son relationship,” Eric says, noting the exchange. “Yelling and teaching. That’s the way it should be.”

  “Your mom is not my mom.”

  “Good thing. I’d hope you wouldn’t break your own mother’s leg.”

  Eric drove himself, opting out of the inevitable awkward conversation regarding his mother’s new injury. Something like this was bound to happen. Over the last week, I’ve gained one-hundred seventy pounds, most of it in broken spurts, though I’ve lost three inches from my waist. My shoes ceased to accommodate the shifting shape of my feet, so I wear boots made for thyroid freaks. I’ve already lost two toes. I fear metal detectors. A crushed femur during sex was bound to happen.

  It started last Tuesday. I awoke from unsettling dreams, as they say, to find my left elbow replaced by a rotational hinge joint. Unsettling may be grandiose, as I suffered no more than a repeating nocturnal saga involving numbers, vivid fractions to infinity that I hang on to like a fable. During sex, I dream numbers. The dream isn’t, as it once was, fear-inducing; I’ve crossed that divide between conscious visuals and unconscious imagery. As soon as a dream starts, I recognize the ruse and have learned to enjoy the ride. But when I awoke, and the articular surfaces of my humerus and ulna had shed skin to reveal metal, waking life too, had crossed that divide.

  My chair moans under my weight. I move the floor, taking a worry-abused copy of Good Housekeeping with me. I have trouble thumbing through the pages. “Who’s the one with questions of respect, here? You want me to hit her next time.”

  “I don’t really love my mom like that,” Eric says in an effort to retract his earlier oedipal comment from the kitchen (7,268 characters back). “The situation isn’t something I know how to fight against. Sorry.”

  He insists on calling his mother and me a “situation,” while offering no restraint of hostilities otherwise. As far as he’s concerned, we’re fucking daylight away from jaundiced infants. “But look at that kid, Eric. He’s never going to learn. He’s a lost cause, a witch’s asshole in a coalmine, and there’s nothing that can be done. With a sister like that, sick eight days a week, the world doesn’t have time for him. The only reason he came is that the babysitter’s busy getting arrested and let go, both by way of indecent exposure. That woman’s not raising him. She’s tolerating him.”

  “How do you know the girl is sick that much?” he asks.

  “People are products.”

  A family of brunette derivatives herds into the waiting room, shifting the air’s equation.

  “People are people. Nothing more.”

  “Then what am I, Eric? I’m massaging my arm like it still houses muscle, letting Good Housekeeping fall to the ground. I’m not sure yet, but I think my phalanges are socket cap bolts now. They swivel. And as I knead my unfamiliar arm, the bolts meld. Think now, of all the things that once gave your life its tale. Your history. The existence to your essence. So many of these things depend on your evolved human form. Grasping, articulating, organic movement bound only by the constraints of the brain’s will. Imagine now, a flipper. Imagine a claw, lacking the nervous function to maneuver a magazine page, let alone a pen. Unfamiliarity will always presume devolution. Am I worse without a pen?

  “You’re a mother fucker, Mitchell.”

  That’s fair.

  I can smell the hallway latex and colostomy plastic pumping through the hospital vents. Dr. Fielding would call my still-healthy olfactories a good thing. He’s a doctor, not a mechanic, so of course he’s interested in keeping me human.

  “So why do you say it?” I ask back to Eric. He sits behind me with a geriatric topics magazine, his heart beating faster than it should (98 bpm). “If you didn’t mean it?”

  “To gross you out. What you’re doing is sick.”

  “It’s not sick.”

  “Explain it to me, then.”

  “It’s love,” I begin, but catch myself. The word feels so foreign against my tongue, tangential at best. Marsha and I used to dance around the concept of love like verbalizing it didn’t matter. Dr. Fielding said the first to go would be my fingers, and that the brain would ultimately succumb, but that I should have some time before I fail. Just last week I gazed in awe at stars. Now I count them. “Love…” I start again, but a nurse interrupts.

  She tells us that Marsha’s casted, then asks our relation. I let Eric go without me, forgoing an explanation. I use my time alone to catalog the popcorn speckles in the ceiling paint by size.

  Dr. Fielding wanted to be a vet. Now he works to give animals a chance by taming humans through a loose prescription pad. Mad Lib a body part, mention pain, and the pills flow. All pets really want is a warm lap, and Fielding’s rationale is that enough sedation will turn any busy pet owner into an adequate bean bag chair.

  His receptionist’s name is Kitty. Hand to god.

  Hang in There cat posters, yes plural, paper his walls like he’s peddling last resort-medicine. Hang in There is a fitting mantra for a man whose practice thrives on addicts and terminal cases. Hang in there, and surely things will work out. That’ll be a thirty-dollar co-pay, see you next month. I’m neither addicted nor terminal. So how did I get here? Marsha.

  “I heard Marsha had a stay with us last night.” Fielding slips a plastic cover over a candy cooking thermometer. I broke his scale last week, so he dives right into the internal assessments now, sitting on the floor in front of me. Once someone attains four-hundred pounds, precise weight doesn’t matter much anymore.

  “She’s still here. Just upstairs. Broken leg.”

  He tells me to open. “How’d that happen?” A mouthful of thermometer gives me permission to mumble through the embarrassing tale. When he yanks the thermometer from my under my tongue, I spit metal filings to the ground. My tongue doesn’t bleed, but still I taste rust. He checks the reading. “Two-hundred thirteen. You’re running hot today.”

  Marsha made me s
tart seeing Dr. Fielding as soon as my first toe fell away. She sees auras, said mine wasn’t its usual vibrancy, gray when it used to be yellow. She had been visiting Fielding for years, and I blame him for the shit she sees. Some of his pills could make a corpse see colors. Marsha’s no match for those pills. She swears by the man, so as a testament to my faith in our relationship I owed her the visit. And I’ve taken to him. Any other doctor would try to cure me. I need treatment.

  “Anything new?” he asks, a tiny flashlight stressing my iris.

  “Claws.” I drum them against the linoleum floor. “And I’m down to one toe. My hair is falling out. I think I’m evolving. Nobody loses body parts and feels fine about it.” Did I ever feel bad about it?

  “Any fever? Has your back pain continued?”

  “So you’re dismissing evolution?”

  “I can’t write a prescription for evolution, Mitchell.”

  “Back pain is still there. Must be I still have a back. That’s good news.”

  “Be thankful you can still move. Some aren’t so lucky.”

  Fielding has a colleague out west who diagnoses from an office papered in parchment degrees. I’ve seen pictures, Fielding and the hotshot shaking hands in a 1970s sepia-paneled office, the framed certificates looming like specters. Fielding speaks fondly, but refers to the man only as a professional associate. Hang in there, Doc. You’ve got fine wallpaper.

  The hair-plugged aging prodigy, Dr. Something, tried to steal me away from Fielding during my initial diagnostic sessions. Desperate for answers, Fielding phoned Dr. Something with a list of symptoms in-hand. Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva, Dr. Something said. “He’s a Stone Man.” Turns out, the villain doc was doing a study on F.O.P., and felt tweaking a few symptoms for the benefit of a research grant and a new wrap-around deck for his kept mistress’s corner condo was worth skewing a patient. The Stone Man gene is responsible for a slow morphing of muscle tissue into bone tissue, until finally the lungs solidify and the patient suffocates from the inside. F.O.P doesn’t account for my missing toes, a shoulder that plateaus at the top like a table, the disappearing hair, my weight gain, the claws, or my vanishing skin. There are charities for F.O.P. Where are the Mitchell charities?