Face a Week

To be a town, you don’t need all that much. You don’t need plumbing, long as you’ve got a river and a bucket. Hell, if you’ve got those two things you can pretty much do without a fire department too. Electricity’s a shameless extravagance, and you can get by without cops as long as folks are generally decent, or so thoroughly horrible as to guarantee mutually assured destruction. But if you ain’t got any of those other things, there is one element that you absolutely do need: you need a Lester.

We call him “Babyface,” because he’s got one. You can search and search that round head for wrinkles, and all you’ll turn up is a lazy eye and a hole where a nose used to be. This thanks to the fact that the nerves in Lester’s face are all dead, the way Hollywood models pay to have done. There’s no electrical signals to tell Lester’s face to age, or to do anything, really. And he’s our hero.

Eighteen years ago was when a gasket burst on the vat of high-pressure phosphene gas Lester was cleaning at The Plant. Paralyzed everything between the hair on his head and the hair on his chest. Rotted away his vocal chords when he breathed in, and his nose when he breathed out. And the smug bastard just turned on his heel, gas still reaching for the high ceilings, walked to the break room and punched out.

See, The Plant budgets for this kind of thing. End up paying settlements to two or three employees a year, just to keep things running smooth. Lester couldn’t see too well after the accident. He couldn’t smell, taste, or talk. But he could hear fine, and his future sounded like a god-damn cash register.

They gave him a hell of a lot more than they give any of us what actually work there. And he gives it right back to us. Sits stiffly at the pockmarked bar in the Blue Tip, night after night, buying drinks and listening to stories. Folks come from all over town with their troubles, and he buys ’em off them. People say he’s a martyr – they see suffering in those wilted eyes of his. But I know better. His face is only frozen in that frown, and he’s got no idea what his eyes are doing. Cause lemme ask you something: If Babyface didn’t get the joke of it all, why the hell would he wear his hair that way?

For all the towns and hearts she’s set ablaze with her performance, Kali Durga’s name is the only element of her that remains consistent across all of them. She appears in a dazzling variety of  costumes – gifts from her lovers, lucky finds, windfall purchases, pasted-on scrap leather, improvised hurricanes of repurposed curtain-fabric bright as the fire she eats. Her face is always painted. When she runs out of a certain color, she replaces it with a new one, so that her pallet shifts gradually across a neon spectrum. If she were on the run from something, hers would be the perfect cover.

She isn’t running from anything, though. If she’s running at all, it’s towards something. She doesn’t have words for what the thing is, or any clear idea of where to find it, and so she spends her time searching in the thorough and methodical way her mother taught her. In the mornings, while her conquests sleep the sleep of the satisfied, she tiptoes around their bedrooms, opening every drawer and fingering its hidden trinkets on the off-chance one might hold a clue to what she’s seeking.

From Tokyo to Topeka, the women she leaves behind perpetuate her legacy, and only her name marks their stories as parts of the same story. They describe her clothes, her face-paint, the constellations of fire she weaves about her with her props, but never anything she can’t change. When she dances, she blinds her audiences with flame, and when she makes love she is always back-lit. She is reluctant to let anyone see her until she’s figured out what she’s supposed to be.

Bashir Muhammad knows every avatar of fire. When he was 23, he made love to a Djinn in the alley behind The Sultan of Swing Jazz Club. Djinni are fire made flesh, and Bashir’s flesh was bathed in that fire until his skin bubbled and his nerves sang confused rumors of frostbite. By the time he could bear to open his half-melted eyelids, his lover had gone up in smoke. “Literal smoke,” he would tell friends for weeks after, in a voice that seemed incapable of anything below a scream.

That furtive rendezvous with the djinn ignited a corresponding fire in Bashir – a tumor of red heat that grew in him like the glowing eye at the tip of a cone of incense. It spread from his heart outward, reaching with rosy fingers to touch the perpetual fire in his scarred skin, which never healed. His constant screaming increased in pitch and volume, until screaming was no longer enough, and he began to sing.

That’s what they say, anyway, and how else do you explain the music he makes? The stuff that leaves whole stadiums feverish, frantic dancers collapsing beneath thick clouds of sweat? They say he’s lost seventy-four fans to heat stroke so far, and his tour is far from over.

He’s hell to manage. He can’t negotiate contracts – can’t even read the things through the flames in his black-brown eyes. He lives lavishly because his handlers know it’s their job to keep him alive, to give him something to consume besides himself. The fans know they’ve only got so long to see him before he crumbles to ash. They know, too, that no matter how red his voice glows in the furnace of his throat, what he’s singing is the very definition of the blues.

Garfield is big for his age. He has a barrel chest, a martially erect posture, and feathers orange like the sun seen through a piece of root-beer candy. He’s eaten his share of root-beer candy. Potato chips, too. He rips apart disks of salami, and enthusiastically pecks away at clouds of cream cheese, so that they vanish to nothing by pinpricks. He eats, in short, anything that they bring him. In the morning, when he has not yet had his breakfast, he reprimands his many keepers with adolescent squawks still struggling to navigate the architecture of his throat. He is the triumphant boy-king of the Park, and he will accept no excuses.

Roosters don’t have much of what we call memory, so there’s no point inquiring about where Garfield came from. Instead, look at where he is: perched atop a one-man shanty built of cardboard and carpet remnants, in the exact center of a public park, in the exact center of the most notorious drug spot in the city. The neighborhood is named after the park, which is named after Garfield – you might say it’s the other way around, but Garfield would peck your eyes out if he understood what you were saying.

Garfield belongs to the pockmarked patriarch who owns the shanty. The man is a sort of father to the junkies who congregate in this shaded section of the park, offering them a place to fix away from prying eyes, a place to do deals -as long as they don’t fight too loud – and a place to sleep on nights when they can’t make it anywhere else. Garfield is familiar with the needle and lighter, the scraps of cylindrical glass repurposed for crack pipes, the inedible crumbs dribbled out the open ends of hand-rolled cigarettes.

He does not mind these things, or particularly care. They are not edible, and so he busies himself with other things. Whatever else might be said of the junkies, they keep him fed. And when they don’t, he picks fights with the pond-rats and squirrels for their meager takings. He is a brilliant alien in their midst – a natural-born king if only because they do not understand what else he could be. He is not even old enough yet to fear the Chicago winter, and when he folds into himself to sleep each night in a plastic crate beneath his master’s pillow he does not dream, because he cannot imagine a richer life than the one he leads. You might say that’s because roosters haven’t got enough imagination to be discontent, or to dream. But if you did say it, it’s not as if Garfield would understand you.

Poetry is a hell of a drug, but even a die-hard addict will warn you against scripture. Scripture, for God’s sake – the stuff that started all those wars and religions, and you’re gonna beam that shit straight into your cortex uncut? Insane, that’s the only word they’ve got for it, and you better believe the poetry-addicts know them some words.

Fuck ’em, says Joe, and does it anyway. Been doing it for decades, longer than some of those junkies even been alive. He’ll sit for hours on a plastic crate on the second floor of the empty tenement they all share, head hung low and seeing sermons. His Kortiko is an old one, a mosquito-whining relic that clings to his half-shaved scalp with sucker feet. Has to be old – they build limits into the new hardware specifically to stop shit like this. He loads whole sacred codexes onto the thing and lets the neuristors translate it into a synaptic-spike language his brain can metabolize. He lives the visions of the prophets in real time, high def, twenty-four seven.

And in spite of this, he takes care of the other ones. Shows up some days with whole cakes from Lord-only-knows-where, hands them around between stupors. Teaches the younger ones how to spoof blown-out contacts in their Kortikos with gum wrappers and an exacto knife. And when they brag about the monitor they just shoplifted, or throw a wild tantrum because the flash drive they copped is corrupted, he looks at them from under heavy lids and

“Whatever you plant, baby, that’s what’s gonna grow.”

And when they get embarassed by his candor, when they turn that brittle rage on him, try to protest or shout him down, he just shakes his head and says, with periods like paragraph breaks,

“It’s not about that.
It’s not from me.
I’m just delivering a message to you.
From god.”

Then he lapses into open-eyed sleep and says nothing.

Guy like Joe might have been a prophet himself, back when that kind of thing was big business. It’s tough times for revelation, though. These days the best he can do is sit tight and watch his predecessors on the instant replay.

Rocketface doesn’t just win, he dominates. Some say that it’s because he only plays at stuff he can win, but the truth is that it’d be damn near impossible to find a contest Rocketface can’t win

He was born fully-grown, the miraculous offspring of a derby girl and a jet engine. He’s got nitro for blood and hair product for hearts. That’s right, hearts – he’s got three of them: one for his body and one for each of his fists. One time, a hydraulic mining robot challenged him to arm wrestle. He crumpled it up and fed it to his hair.

He can drink ten barrels of Sirian Supergin and keep drinking. He can eat rat poison and shit plutonium. He can hold his breath at least three minutes in hard vacuum – he could’ve managed at least a minute more, but his opponent had already been dead a while. When he dances, grown men weep.

This is the point in the biography where the tone shifts, where we learn something about our subject that undermines his invincible image. There is no such thing to learn about Rocketface. He will continue barreling joyously across the galaxy, winning bets and turning the tides of wars, until he finally manages to find something that can kill him. And when he does find that thing, whatever it is, it’ll be so preposterous and noteworthy that merely encountering it will count as a win for Rocketface. That’s how hard he wins: he even wins at losing.

She won’t tell them her real name, so they call her Grandmother Dust. She won’t tell them her name, not because she can’t remember, but because she refuses to be tied to anything she used to be. There was a time, not so long ago, when she believed that she had reached the end of her history, that she would accomplish nothing more of consequence in this life. She predicted for herself a dwindling half-life, sitting in a rocking chair unable to talk of anything but what once was. She refused this.

Alzheimer’s, they call it, and a disease. They assume she values the same things they do. But she has simply broken the habit of remembering. If she tried, really tried, of course she could remember. Instead, she sits propped up on the eastern edge of her enormous canopy bed – anyway, she assumes it’s hers – and draws patterns in the dust on the bedside table. She watches the gray film gradually accumulate on all the bizarre knick-knacks in the room: a globe, a mandolin, a taxidermied crocodile, an unfinished painting of an enormous, dessicated hand, beckoning…

People come and bring her food. They attempt conversation, but have difficulty sustaining it. They are all so dreadfully intent on discussing the past, and she has nothing to say about it. When they are not on about the past, they want to know her opinion on their futures, as if she has some special insight. But how can she talk of futures when the dust-currents in the sun-stained air surprise her constantly?

Instead, she describes to them the grandfather clock by the door, or the teeth of the crocodile, or the timbre of the young boy’s voice outside the window, yelling in a rapid, yodeling language she might once have understood. They do not hear her. They are too busy twisting her words into answers. Then they leave, and the tunnels their bodies cut through the dust heal immediately behind them.

Ronald Nurgle has got the secret to immortality, and he’s not sharing. Well, he would share, probably, except he doesn’t really know anybody worth sharing it with. Most people think Ronald is pretty stupid. That’s because of his secret.

Ronald hasn’t finished a damn thing since he was twenty years old. Not a book, not a job application, not even a sandwich. He doesn’t even finish his thoughts. The space between Ronald’s ears is a wasteland of half-formed sentences, their purposes now unfathomable. He works odd jobs – construction, mostly – and he always leaves early.

He never sleeps through the night, and he rarely sleeps in the same place twice. He dreams in wireframe and storyboards, and wakes up suddenly. Then he’ll wrestle free of whatever trash-nest he didn’t finish building for himself, and walk the streets. Sometimes he spends weeks marooned on the same city block, reluctant to finish crossing the street.

The people who know him have a kind of fondness for him, though none of them can figure out why he’s not dead. All the bums who have just a little more money than Ronald like to buy him a beer or a sandwich every once in a while, knowing he won’t finish it. They learn not to be disturbed by the way his sentences always trail off. Some even learn to finish them for him. The conversation’s always a little one sided, but Ronald does seem to listen.

And Ronald does listen. He listens and he watches, because listening and watching are two tasks that can never be finished. He listens to his friends complete the arcs of their conversations, and watches them drift away to other tasks. He watches the horizon give birth to the sun in the morning, and receive its corpse at night. He stands on streetcorners and observes the uncountable tiny deaths that men call resolution. This is his secret. By never finishing anything, he’s made himself into a living manifestation of Zeno’s paradox. As long as he keeps it up, he will always be asymptotically approaching the end. And if by some mistake he ends up dead, his glut of unfinished business guarantees him at least a ghosthood.

Miss Val doesn’t look it, but she used to be a killer DJ. Back in the day, she spun it all: Funk, Soul, Blues, Hip-hop. She could scratch so smooth you’d never know she was mixing the track, or so fast and freaky you’d swear the beat was shaving your head. In competitions, she murdered. Other DJs did a lot of talking, but Miss Val said not a word. She let the music speak for her. Knew the exact position of every word on every record in her stack, and stitched them together like a ransom note.

After that, she worked six years in the rooftop restaurant at the Art Institute. There’d be three waiters on staff, a dozen empty tables, and a line out the door because all the regulars were waiting for an opening in her section. She had a heroically high tolerance for bullshit. Her meanest customers always ended up tipping the highest, and by the time she left she got more mail than her manager. More fan-mail than she got as a DJ.

Miss Val works a diner now, and looks the part. She’s got a solid frame and looks right in an apron, and she has to get one of the busboys to help her get the glasses down from the high shelf. She doesn’t miss being a DJ. These days, most of her time is taken up with the foster kids.

They’re tougher customers than any she’s ever had to serve. For going on twenty years now, she’s been cooking meals and changing diapers and convincing big brothers they don’t need to secretly stockpile food for their little sisters. She’s got to keep an exterminator on speed dial, but she loves those kids more than anything.

She’s got her own kids, too, and she still keeps in touch with some of her regulars from the Art Institute. Still stops by the clubs she used to DJ from time to time, and savors the weird looks she gets from the young kids. Every bartender in the city knows Miss Val, and if she drank at all she’d sure as hell never pay.

The question she gets most is how. How does she find enough love and patience for all these people? The secret is simple. Miss Val’s love is a peaceful, reactive love. It’s inexhaustible because it contains no moving parts to be exhausted. She saves her passion for herself, and responds to the world’s shit with a kind of emotional Aikido. She takes the bad, and without seeming to move, she flips it.

Snopes Varley is not quite a fortune-teller. Fortune-tellers have booths. They have cards or dice or bones. They charge a fee, and they do not intervene. Most of them are fakes. Snopes Varley has no booth, carries nothing but a hollow cane, takes no customers, and intervenes constantly.

Last week, a boy scout helped Snopes Varley cross a busy intersection at night. The light changed before they were halfway across, and six cars were forced to wait. Thus the intersection was clear when the drunk driver ran his red light, and no one was killed. The boy scout was three minutes late getting home. The man with whom his father is secretly sleeping was safely gone by then. The boy’s innocence was preserved. Snopes Varley places great stock in innocence.

The hollow cane raps a slow, measured beat against the pavement at all times. The black cloth slippers shuffle across blacktop, grass and gravel with unhurried ease. No facial tick or nervous tension betrays the whirlwind in Varley’s head. It is a benign whirlwind, and Snopes is in the eye of it.

And so the figure in the black hooded sweatshirt glides easily from potential crisis to potential crisis, deflecting each one with the suppleness of a tai chi master. There is no time for sleep, except while walking. Food, when it is needed, is incidental to the path that fate requires. The constant pace and the hypnotic rhythm of the cane combine to make Snopes better than invisible. Invisibility implies some supernatural agency, and raises suspicion in those who notice it. Irrelevance is more like it. It is the joke of this seeming irrelevance, the dramatic irony generated by a thousand secretly-averted deaths, that keeps a smile hidden in Snopes Varley’s weathered lips.