Quick Fix
I was thinking of ways to fix my situation and talking to a girl with a cat, sending her fragments of messages on my grandmothers iPad. She kept sending me pictures of the cat standing on different things in her apartment. On the stove, the T.V, above the fireplace.
Whaat a climber! I sent.
Her apartment was much nicer than mine. She had a kitchen that was a totally different room from the living room, and a sectional couch that still had all the sections. And her windows had greenery visible through them and what appeared to be direct sunlight. No wonder she was so healthy-looking. She was prancing around this apartment with her cat, taking in sunlight for free whenever she pleased.
She kept asking to call me, and I had to explain over and over again that I didn’t have a phone right now, that the iPad was barely working. Eventually, she wanted to know what had happened to my phone.
Run over by car, I sent,
and kept looking around my apartment for any money I had somehow forgotten. It was going to be impossible to do anything with this girl if I couldn’t find a twenty or even ten dollars. With ten dollars, I could nurse a beer and let her talk about her cat and ask her about the liberal arts college she went to, and then maybe just maybe we would have a chance of falling in love. She did seem lovely. Someone who loves a cat, a thing that has nothing but contempt for its owner, must be a good person.
The iPad was vibrating the whole coffee table with messages, but I already had the velcro for the biggest couch cushion halfway off, I ripped it and found nothing, a gum wrapper, and an old pretzel. When I looked, she’d sent me a picture of the cat in one of those backpacks that has a sort of space helmet orb, where you can carry the cat around with you and let it see the city.
What a great idea. I sent.
He’s like a little spaceman. I sent.
It’s a girl. She sent.
And yes, he loves it. She sent.
God, please let me find some money, I said, and then remembered that I’d once had a PayPal.
I tried password after password on the iPad.
Whatcolorwillwewearinheaven123
Allpacinoisfive6
Moneypasswordformymone7account
Bingo.
Forty-five American Dollars sent to me by a guy named Brad who had thrown up in my car sophomore year.
I ran for the iPad,
Drinks?
Coffee?
A Walk in the park? I sent.
Why don’t you come over and meet my cat? She sent.
David Hockney
To Swirl and To Whirl
A rocket spun through the air from a patch of banana trees a few hundred feet below. He saw a little man holding a black tube, a puff of smoke, and then the rocket circling through the air towards him.
It hit the tail of the helicopter, and then there wasn’t any tail anymore.
And he didn’t even try to fly because without the tail, you just can’t do anything.
You need a tail to steer and steerings what flyings all about.
And so he just sat there and spun. He felt his body reacting to that sensation, his brain convinced he had fallen out of a tree or off a cliff, and his stomach confused by the loss of the gravity that normally kept it calm and functional.
Then it was dark, and he was waking up, and pain was all up the lower half of him. So much pain that he couldn’t see. So much pain that he thought he might be on fire, but he smelt no smoke, tasted nothing poisonous and rancid on his tongue but the metallic tang of blood. And then dark again, and when his eyes reopened, he was tied to a banana tree, and some men with rifles and flip flops were surrounding him, pointing and arguing.
So he tried to speak. Tried to say, to tell them, I am not in any army, I am a commercial helicopter pilot. I was contracted by a university to fly a botanist into the forest. He was going to study orchids. But he didn’t have the words.
He met a doctor at a clinic. A concrete house with a few beds and one flickering lamp that seemed on the verge of going out forever. The doctor had attended medical school in Australia, and he conveyed the pilot’s identity to the militiamen, who didn’t seem to want to believe it.
The pilot could only follow the acronyms of the conversation, CIA, CIA, CIA, they kept saying.
And he thought of the Culinary Institute of America, and knew that that wasn’t what they meant.
Walking across fields and rivers, through villages and over hills, walking for days and nights and through rain and sun. The five o’clock shadow turned to beard, and the high and tight got long and loose.
On the TV, a big-bellied thing, he saw his own picture come and go, but he couldn’t read the newsmen’s captions, didn’t even know the alphabet.
He met a girl who spoke English, and she asked him if he’d ever met the Yankees. He nodded and said yes, and she gave him a cigarette.
No one asked him what it was like to fly, or what it was like to fall from the sky. It would’ve been like asking a bird.
And then a helicopter in the field, a quick transaction, and it was welcome back, Jack. He woke up in a hospital in Dallas, where little nuns walked the halls, and NASCAR played on the common room’s TV. One of the nuns pushed a cart between the beds with cigarettes, but he knew they wouldn’t taste the same.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Spinning & Spinning
Many men wearing green are crowded into a square metal room. They are eating steak and lobster off of trays. The steaks are grainy, and the lobsters are small. They are on a boat, but they cannot smell the sea. Above them, jet planes are skidding off of a floating tarmac and dropping bombettes and unguided missiles onto militant strongholds and socialized healthcare centers.
While the bombs drop, old men gather in Times Square to hold novelty signs which declare, “I am opposed to this, but I haven’t let it take away my sense of humor.” Some young people in the home country of the men in green feel a tumor growing in their stomachs. A nausea and a cold sweat overcome them and take away their appetite. In the smaller country—the bombed and foreign country—people with t-shirts wrapped around their heads throw metal chairs through the windows of bakeries and steal bread to bring back to the basement, where they will spend the night.
On a betting website, people from around the world place wagers on which hospital or school will be declared a barracks of the Republican Guard and melted into bric-a-brac. A public intellectual thinks of the need, the necessity, to pay for the condo in Boca Raton and the orthodontical procedures for his son, and leaves the essay he wrote to linger unsent on his computer. A young man makes a short video and posts it on the internet. He misunderstands the situation, but his heart is in the right place.
Captains of industry send young men in tight suits and black socks to the White House to try to explain to the president that they don’t actually make anything anymore, that the modern economy is more of an abstract thing. A forty-four-year-old militia woman lands a lucky shot with a Soviet surplus rocket-propelled grenade. It sends a Black Hawk helicopter spinning and spinning and spinning into a cluster of banana trees.
On a nuclear submarine, the captain masturbates to a photo of the men’s swim team on the twelfth page of his senior yearbook. He’s secretly promised his wife he won’t launch a missile, no matter what. The grand opening of a therapy center for the retired miniature horses of Hollywood is delayed due to an oil boycott by a conglomeration of petro-states, which shuts down the data center that automatically prints out business licenses for white people.
In a jail in New York, the foreign president is perp-walked through a parking garage in a Nike Tech, throwing up a peace sign as he’s shuffled into an armored car. A celebrity chef announces that octopus is back on the menu for restaurant week. Old ladies wait in line for hours at the free venture-capital-funded grocery store, while influencers with early-access passes do a Honey Nut Cheerios mukbang, spilling milk into the street.
The men have finished their steak and their lobster. The fighter pilots have landed and retired to read Manga in their bunks. And across the bay in the foreign nation’s capital, all the bakeries are empty, and all the lights have gone out.
Hendrick Goltzius