— — Read online

  ――

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  Wade Parrish

  Winchester, UK

  Washington, USA

  First published by Zero Books, 2021

  Zero Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., No. 3 East St., Alresford,

  Hampshire SO24 9EE, UK

  [email protected]

  www.johnhuntpublishing.com

  www.zero-books.net

  For distributor details and how to order please visit the ‘Ordering’ section on our website.

  © Wade Parrish 2020

  ISBN: 978 1 78904 820 9

  978 1 78904 821 6 (ebook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2020951522

  All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.

  The rights of Wade Parrish as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Design: Stuart Davies

  UK: Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  Printed in North America by CPI GPS partners

  We operate a distinctive and ethical publishing philosophy in all areas of our business, from our global network of authors to production and worldwide distribution.

  For William

  Illustrations by Jack

  Contents

  Cover

  Half Title

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Contents

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  14.

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  Guide

  Cover

  Half Title

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Contents

  Start of Content

  1.

  Today is Tuesday.

  It is always either Sunday or Tuesday in ―― and it is usually either nighttime or late afternoon. Always in Daylight Savings Time. Always at the very changing of the seasons.

  In the late afternoons on Tuesdays, Susa comes on WQQX and plays the obscure back-catalogs of small known Estonian jazz singers. The jazz singers have thin and winnowed voices and sound very far away in their recordings. Like postcards deposited into sewer grates. Or grocery lists muttered through in dreams.

  I ride the H11 bus on Tuesdays and listen to Susa through the headphones of an old gray SanDisk audio player. The ear cushions on the headphones are peeling. The people on the H11 have yellow eyes and haven’t seen a face for 18 hours. Beaten to silt. The bus smashes over potholes. Very few people have use for their pupils in ―― and most only see the world through an ooze of white sclera. Like their irises have been chipped off or smudged away or painted over with detailing paint. And their whites have all grown yellow from the glare of old bank machines and staring far away for far too long. I have the feeling now like there’s someplace I ought to be, but it is not the place I’m going. Susa is partial to a female contralto named Tuli, whose music is Post-Soviet, who slurs every 3rd pulse.

  :And how can it be? There are dreams left to dream? Before we die, or waken?

  Susa translates the lines his listeners call in for. A small coterie of shut-ins somewhere to the west of Lithuania-town. Where all they have left now is the radio. The bus dry-heaves (6) times before it reaches Oak Park. The wind is cold when the doors splay open. The air from the harbor is thinned by rows of empty blocks and blocks of empty rowhouses. And it should be said now that the sky in ―― can make you claw your eyes out. Fingers full of silt. Every time the bus stops, I think,
surely no one can live here. And each time, another one exits. Carrying a plastic bag. Wheeling a squeaking cart. Handling a cane or a walker. Reaching into their coat pocket for rosary beads or a prescription bottle or a rope of japamalas. Surely, no one can live here, I think, just before Oak Park shoots up.

  -I’ve been having a lot of problems tasting things recently, a woman tells her companion.

  -Don’t get dramatic about it, the companion replies.

  Oak Park is a cluster of apartment buildings sprouting out around a depleted duck pond, a jungle gym, a circle of interlacing sidewalks. The jungle gym is roped off now by tattered streams of yellow caution tape, flapping in the wind like jaundiced fingers. No one uses the jungle gym in Oak Park anymore. The paint on the metal is toxic. It tints the palms of what it touches a municipal green. They built the jungle gym here for the children of computer plant workers, decades ago. Low-cost housing. Brick and stucco. There used to be a school here and a churchyard and a daycare center nearby. All since gone. I get off the bus.

  :Don’t fall away without me, love, can’t you see your stain on me, broken?

  Ms Tupelo stands outside the apartments now. She is smoking and tilting her head to the side. Ms Tupelo rents me my room here. It is a very small room on the 14th floor and at first, I asked her a lot of questions about the heat and the internet connection and where I’ll go when I die but she just stared through me with her eyes yellow and softly blinked. No one thinks all that much in ――. There are a lot of landlords here. Six for every tenant.

  Ms Tupelo remembers when they used to make computer chips here and cries at night because they don’t anymore. She says three words and then coughs for half an hour. She plants Virginia Slims in the potting soil of blue succulents and lights them all like incense sticks. Sometimes I email her about the drip in the shower or the black mold beneath the sink and she sends me back old still photographs from grainy documentaries about Warsaw and Tallinn with foreign expletives in the subject line.

  -Sad day today, she tells me as I’m passing.

  -Mm.

  Ms Tupelo starts to cough. I wait until her coughing breakers into hacking, stemming up black blood onto the flat of cracked pavement. Her face purples. The old wrinkles on her neck shake and the spindle hairs on her skull shake and eventually she waves me on. Ms Tupelo is a frail woman with dark and venetian features. She wears black shawls in the winter and black shawls in the rain. She has a thin nose and skin like yellow eyeballs and a way of being like a leaf, saying maybe she’ll rot away somehow. Or like the figure of a woman alone in the painting of a minor Dutch master. She’s been sick for a long time now but refuses to check into St Killian’s. Now she leans against a rusted handrail as the sky above us darkens, casting shadows on the walls. There are no more bikes parked in the bike rack at Oak Park. Only a single rusted wheel someone has left shackled to the absent aluminum frame.

  I turned Susa off in case Ms Tupelo had something more important to say and now that he’s off, I forget he was on to begin with. I pass beneath the brick façade of Oak Park where the fire escapes curl upwards into the spines of separate and broken kitchens. I call the elevator, pushing the yellowed button and listen to the sound of gears mashing as the box makes its ascent. It is a poor thing to trust one’s life with, an elevator. But we do. And when the elevator arrives, the box is empty except for Mr Kim. He has ridden up from the garage in the basement.

  -How are you today, Mr Kim?

  -Hrmph, he says.

  There are just two people in ――.

  There are people like Mr Kim and Ms Tupelo who have lived here forever, and there are people like me who have lived for about six months. These two clans resent one another with something like a virus. They mistrust one other. They can only see each other for their flaws and there are many flaws. There are too many flaws to get into now, but slowly they will push their way up through the soil like a burning pack of Virginia Slims.

  Maybe it is wrong to say people live in ――. No one truly lives here. People exist in ―― and for different periods of time, but it’s not a place anyone truly seems to live.

  Susa can’t reach me through the elevator walls, even when I turn him back on. He is describing the winter of 89 again. His voice hums a slur of crinkled static. Mr Kim pulls out a tangled nest of dental floss from the pocket of his bathrobe and begins running the wire through gaps in his teeth. The elevator smells of cinnamon and kimchi half-digested. His teeth are like old rusted Galloway stones and soon the lights in his skull will be flipped off one by one. His gums begin bleeding. The elevator halts at (14). I get off.

  -Goodbye, Mr Kim.

  -Hrmph.

  The walls of my corridor are tilting.

  All of the doorways down the yellow hall are green chipped doors with tainted gold eyelets and tainted gold numbering. I have the need to knock on my own door but don’t. The key has to be jammed into the lock several times before the bolt can open.

  My room is small and empty. Earlier I began collecting road signs to hang from the walls but now they all slouch unguarded, with some in stacks and others in piles. I don’t like the signs with words on them very much. All my road signs are just arrows without letters and most of the arrows are bending away from each other. I don’t remember where they all came from anymore. Flat slats of iridescent metal I’ve collected showing orange. Red. Yellow. Green.

  All my furniture belongs to people who have long since left ―― and left behind their couches and chairs and ugly white armoires. The kitchen is wet and connects to the bedroom in a fluid stretch of warped hardwood. I sleep in a hammock these days. Like an organ in a sack or like blood in an organ. It makes the floor seem very empty and clean.

  My walls are yellow. They look like eyes. Like elevator buttons.

  The main room yields to a smaller bathroom with the drip in the shower and the black mold beneath the sink. The drain in the bathtub is broken. It is always in the process of draining. I’m afraid the drain is slowly shrinking the bedroom and wetting the kitchen with its sink. I stuff yellowed paper into the black hole of the drain when I want to take a bath and it works alright for a short while. The ink from the print has stained the bathtub basin to the point where every chemical will not clean it. I don’t even remember when the bathtub was clean.

  I stuff the drain with paper from an old phonebook and twist the hot handle as far as it will go and turn Susa back on through a flashlight radio I keep hanging by a hook beside the toilet. Tuli sings with the clatter of the filling tub. Taking off clothes now has been like taking off just one coat or an extra sweater or an excess scarf or shawl in the shrinking space of the cramped bathroom. It has been this way since I first moved to ――. I have been permanently dressed for about six months. My skin will not peel.

  When the water is tall enough to sink into, I climb inside. Tuli’s song is almost over. Her song is almost over when she begins to skip beats. First every other beat, then every two. Then every four. And then eight. And then silence. She repeats the dying lines as they linger off into silence and into bathwater. Like the strings of yarn they used to hold on the decks of departing vessels traveling far away. There is no rush to finish things in ――.

  :I long for you, my one my true, for now lay strangers in my oceans.

  For you, my One my True, I think, the bathwater circling my chin.

  I don’t like it when Susa forces rhyme to his meanings. I don’t know who calls in for this, but their wants are very particular. It is not the Lithuanians, it must be someone else. The tiles around the bathtub are cracked with broken brown lines and the wallpaper is made of rusted floral patterns. My cell phone rings from a limp pocket on the tile. I can see the blue-glow lighting up through the pocket. The plastic shaking violently on the floor. Like an old rheumatic landlady. I reach over the bathtub edge and open it with wet fingers. Lil is calling.

  -Hello, Lil.

  -Hello. Did you enjoy the song?

  -Yes, but I only caught the
very tail end of it.

  -I don’t like it when Susa uses metric translation.

  -I don’t think anyone does.

  -Why does he do it then?

  I don’t say anything and sit back in the tub. The water sloshes audibly around my shoulders and gurgles above the drain. The water is not hot.

  -How is your bath? Lil asks.

  -It’s ok.

  -Is the water warm?

  -Not particularly.

  Lil sighs. Susa believes silence is palate cleansing. He waits the full length of the oncoming song before the oncoming song is played. He breathes into the microphone as he waits, and I hear him breathing through the flashlight and Lil breathing through the phone and then Susa breathing again through Lil’s radio where it plays on the other side of the line.

  -What are you doing tonight? she asks.

  -Just taking a bath.

  -And after that?

  -Getting out of the bath.

  -And after that?

  -I don’t know, I tell her absently. I’ve been feeling sort of blue lately. Maybe going over Jersey.

  -No you’re not, Lil says suddenly. Don’t say that. Don’t talk like that tonight.

  -Ok you’re right. I’m not.

  -Good. Will you come over then?

  -If you’re asking.

  -Then I’m asking.

  -Then I will.

  Lil hangs up. Susa is still breathing. The drip from the shower falls between my shins where the ink curls up from the drain like twisted black fire escapes around an invisible building. No one talks on the phone for very long in ――. Few have cause to talk at all in ―― and fewer still have the need to talk with anything as warm as a voice. Many people have forgotten their own languages from going so long unspoken to. Lil talks on the phone still but only because she hasn’t been really living here for very long. About six months. I close the phone and slide it back toward the pocket.

  When Tuli begins to sing again, I sit up and claw the paper out from the drain. I hold the paper pulp in my hands without looking and fling it into the toilet. The drain gurgles and sucks away more of the room. A great deal of paper gets caught in the drain and has to be unclumped from time to time.

  2.

  I call for the elevator and catch Mr Kim on his way down from roof level. He clips his toenails now, leaned unevenly against the elevator siding like a swan crumpled along its spinal cord. The nails eject in high white arches away from where his ankle rests upturned against his knee.

  -Alright, Mr Kim?