~distant electric vision or: a sexual unconsciousness. lchristopher.

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Jersey City Office Westside off Communipaw; the photo that got me greenlit in VA Corrections

10 of many
Prose Submission to 5trope, Zoetrope - A Sexual Unconsciousness, LChristopher.

l.christopher<___________@gmail.com>
Mon, Dec 29, 2024, 12:57 PM
to editor./Zoetrope Magazine

To Whom It May Concern,

Thank you for your consideration.  I have been published by the Santa Fe Literary Review, After The Fact, The Anthologist, and have been rejected nearly everywhere.

All best to you.  


-LC.

---------------------------------------------->DISTANT ELECTRIC VISION BEGIN.

Routine is the beginning of downfall.  

            "Charlie, tell me a story."
            "Hm?"
             "I don't want to think tonight.   I don't want to.   So make things go away.   Make things eclipse for me."
            "I can't eclipse when I'm happy.   You know that."
            "Before me, were there many?"
            "There were some."
            "Eclipse for me."
            "I told you I can't.  Not tonight."
            He is lying.   He can make anything dark.  It is the reason she loves him.

              ***

            "Remember when you used to read to me?"
            "Yes."
            "Read to me now. Read me a story, please. My head is so bad."
            "Why is y-"
            "Please. Just do as I ask.
            "All right, all right," he said, and put his arm around her. She felt small and hot.
            "Will you start with a cliché?"
            "All right.  But you have to end with one."
            "I can do that, I think."
            "Are you ready?" I ask, tracing her eyeline, her line of sight with the tip of one finger.
            "Go," she says, chin out, stubborn, ready for it. That's my girl.   
             I let her have it. 
             I give her what she wants. 
             She asked for it, after all.

                                                            ***Hana***

            It was a dark and stormy night. It was how Madeline L'Engle struck out the first pages of the tenet A Wrinkle In Time; and hell, even Snoopy named his whole BOOK after that work of sheer genius. Fuck me, where'd my mind go? Grab onto that beer son.
            Her name was Hana and her hair short spikes that wanted to impale me, or I them.  She was a cozy rhinoceros when she turned in her sleep. The night was old and each hallway of the apartment complex in which he lived would have been blind without the slight hum of a single phosphorescent bulb.   The tenants steal these occasionally when work is slow.  The doors look like oak but are in truth spackleboard laced together with heavy varnish. Room 230 is where it happened; where she began to change the world around her. 
            Hana was a working architect, 23 ans, spent two hours in the gym each day and carried a PhD in English, of all things; and she was in love with Frank Lloyd Wright.   Her father had been a carpenter and when he died she had inherited his tools and had added an education to the box they had come in. She smoked red Marlboros like a boy would, cut her own hair short as a boy would, walked through the halls to do laundry or make tollphone calls in the hallway bare-chested, as a boy would. Late nights power tools could be heard slicing through the night inside her door - a night that was different from my own, completely severed from each disparate life that made up the six hundred residents of Hammerfield Gardens, in California, the Bay Area.

          She had been building apartments inside of her apartment for two years.  It was like a Russian nesting doll, each dwelling smaller than the original edifice that came before it.   Squaring the square.   She was a small girl, and soon no one would be able to go inside but her.    I imagine a door two feet tall, I think of Alice and the rabbit hole.   It was like when I was feverish, four years old with a temperature of 105 F.     Hallucinating everything growing smaller and trying to get to my parents bedroom, watching the door shrink like cellophane.  Falling asleep outside of it, an outline of my sweat staining the hall rug, a stain that never quite washed away.
     One day she told me that there's no room here anymore for you, and it was true.   I couldn't get in the door. I do not know what finally happened to her. Management, probably. A pipe burst or there was an electrical short, and they sent the superintendent or the local handyman in, and that was it. Hana's womb twenty-four years post-utereo explaining itself. I can't imagine eviction not being the result.
          I liked that she slept on a bamboo mat and lit Thai stick by the halved windowpane.   The music she played was unlike any melody I had ever heard. It was Indian.   She ate only vegetables and couldn't quite spell, but her voice was soft and patient and there was no reason to be afraid.   She was never quite bothered with shirts when she was working at home.  There is nothing lovelier than a woman wearing jeans and no shirt, breasts free. You know I like sexual ambiguity.  Barring that, there is nothing lovelier than a woman earning a speeding ticket, but I would not find that out for years to come.
          "What did you talk about?" she asks.  "Be specific".
           "I don't remember," I said.

          Time passes.

            "Try," she said. Her french exhale fills the world.
            "All right, I said."

            ***Post-coital conversational interlude vol. 1***

            "I want you I want all of you."
            "I want an Ivy League designer education. I want to fly to Europe. I want a Maserati."
           "What the fuck's that?"
            "It's not a pronoun, thank Christ."
            "Will you?"
            "Won't I?"
            "Do you like yourself?"
            "What else is there?"
            "There's me."
             "You're incredibly drunk.  If the state would deem it illegal for someone in your state to operate a car, what is that to say about your ability to jaundice emotion?"
             "I know my feelings."
             "Yeah, well, I knew my mother once."
             "What happened?"
             "She moved away."
             "Where?"
             "Somewhere else."
             "Did you lose the address?"
            "They don't have addresses for places like her. Just checkbooks. If they did have addresses, I wouldn't be able to read them anyway. Because of my pride. Understand now?"
            "No."
            "That's all right, then.  I can fuck you."
            "You're naked and I can't see all of you do you know how strange that is to me?"
            "Pronouns again."
            "Fuck pronouns."
            "Can you cook?"
            "Can you?"
            "Eggs sometimes."
            "Your legs you'll have to move them over a bit."
            "Is this okay I could..."
            "Yes.  As per usual.  Ad per infinitum."
            "Are we fucking now?"
            "What do you think?" 
            "You're inside of me, sure.
            "Hm."
            "Inside of me."
            "Mmhm."
            "You're incredibly drunk, aren't you?"
            "Yes yes I am."
            "Would you be fucking me if you weren't?"
            "Weren't what?"
            "Drunk."
            "No."  Her words are slow, a suicide hotline hold. "I don't think so." Her rhythm speeds up, It's not unlike being caught in the safest, warmest spot in a giant Mixmaster. The way she says my name when she comes makes me think of the sorts of loops they put on rap albums of different phrases spoken in this film or that one. Like 1996. Like Hov's "A Dream" which opens  Jay-Z's album on the Blueprint 2: The Gift and the Curse.*

            *                                              *                                              *

            "Apartment stories."
            "I like stories with apartments in them."
            "Why?"
            "Because an apartment is so hard to hold onto, these days. Landlords are no worse than the sharecropping, indenturing forefathers of two hundred years ago."
          "They'd be a lot easier for you to hold onto if you'd stop firing bullets into the wall."
        "That was unfortunate."
        You're lucky you're not black.
        "What does my not being black have to do with anything?
        "Apartment stories."


                                                                       

                                                            *Elisa*

            "They're going to burn my fucking house down," she, Elisa, told me.  Hers is a stereophonic monotone.    She was behind on her rent and the month was March and the rain was coming down in torrents.  Gales of wind have turned the streets outside into a graveyard of television antennae and overturned garbage cans.  And it was so warm here, holding her hands in my own, twisting her silver rings as if I was trying to unscrew her fingers.  Three blocks away, an electric bolt from the lightning storm explodes a transformer on the telephone pole there.  There is a blackout.  We wear the swaddling clothes of darkness, we are pupae, larvae, infants whose eyes cannot adjust to the light or lack thereof.  Blind, this synapse closes between us.

            Jewish lightning fires, they called them, these men that wrapped malcontent tenants in shower curtains and left them out in New Jersey swamps; Staten Island landfills.  I sip a glass of water and watch her light a cigarette and ready the coffeepot.   She fixes us a light lunch.    I can hear heavy machinery being used on the door outside.   It sounds like a woman screaming.

Her bedroom was miniature dollhouse chic and her underwear was fancy and lace and felt like doilies.   A cramp hit my stomach as a diver struggling for air and light, overcome by the bends, his body wishing to expand into the breaking waves.  Candles eschewed for twin cigarette embers.  Clock hands crucifying themselves at nine-fifteen.  A small child's plastic turntable plays warped seven-inch folk albums.  Elisa has owned it since she was four.  She is twenty-five now. She tells me a story about her father's convertible, his hand on her leg, feeling her child's flesh through a short sundress, but she can remember no more than that.   I wonder if this is normal.   I decide at that moment - and rightly so - that all sexuality is truly this lunatic.

            Incomprehension marries itself to fascination.  She is licking my nipples away with her tongue, which feels like an edge of class and smells of tobacco and musty drawers. She was a native Kansan.  Blonde hair tickling me; vacuous brown eyes.  It feels like there are a myriad of papercuts strafing their way across my chest.  In the corner there are demons on the television eviscerating young Asian schoolgirls with Western breasts and impossible wide blue eyes.

            "What's this?"
            "Anime."
            "Anomie?"
            "No, anime.   It's Japanese animation."
            "Oh.  I've never seen any before."
            "Lots of sex.  And demons."
            "Fucking hell.  Naked cartoons?"
            "Yeah.  The girls are young.  They haven't any hair, yet."
            "The hair thing is inconsequential.  They cannot show pubic hair in Japanese pornography. Also, their dildoes cannot look like penises. It's a national law of some kind."
            Her shirt was riding up the cleft of her breast.  This felt very deliberate, to me. Unfair, even.
            "What are you going to do when they get inside?" she asked
            "I think I'm going to go home," she said and stretched the length of the doorway, riding the doorframe down with her bottom in a practiced arc.   "I'm going to eat pumpkin pie and vanilla ice cream and drink scotch." Her back is arched, lithe like a dancer, her body one supple curved line. 
          "In the bath," she said.
She is taller than me in her heels and makes me feel like an amateur. Things like this just happen.
            It was the most decadent, beautiful thing I had ever heard.

                                                      **carver and shelby**

            *                                              *                                              *
            
           "Were you ever with a man?"
            "Were you ever with a woman?"
            "I asked you first."
            "I asked you second."
            "Truth."
            "Truth?"

                                                            ***Leon***

            Twenty-five thousand dollars is a lot of money. I hadn't said yes just yet. Note to self: It is the men most assured of their masculinity that advocate the fucking of other men. The tough ones, more bestial."I used to fuck guys like you in prison."  Delectable lines out of late night tv drama. Leon's full name was Leonard, but he didn't allow anyone to call him that just yet.  He was an investment banker but black as the ace of spades and it drove 90% of the place batshit that he brought in 2/3rds of the new business. Simple economics. Word of mouth on the street. So Leon was into investment banking and had not yet made firm partner.  When he did so, he would know he had truly arrived at where he wished to be in his life.  His full name would allow the who to follow.

            What he required was consensual homosexual sex for a period of three hours.
            When was an option we could both agree upon once the lease had been affixed.
            How?  Anyway he pleased, although I had privately written in a clause that would not involve my sleeping there after the transaction had been clinched.  The New York Third Merchant's Bank of Chelsea – in Manhattan, where I lived at the time - would take care of the rest.  And the IRS would never hear word one.  I reminded him beforehand not to mark me down as a tax write-off.  Because he would.   We had met at a luncheon in Montana when I was working as a phonograph salesman.   He was 32, dark-skinned, so dark he looked red by the firelight. Motherfucker had a Napoleon fireplace the size of my garage.

            "You have beautiful hands.  Are you an artist?"
            "Are you on fucking drugs?"
            "Are you?"
            "Not nearly enough."
            "Your fingers are long and thin.  Do you play an instrument?"
            "Piano sometimes."
            "A drink?"
            "Bourbon."
            "Glass?"
            "Bottle."
            "Oh," Leon said. "An aristocrat."
            "You talk a lot, don't you?"
            "I didn't think I was saying anything.  White noise and all."
            "Let me take your shirt off."
            "I've been doing it since I had hands, thanks."
            "No jewelry?"
            "What for?"
            "It's pretty."
            "Right."
            "Will you touch me?"
            "The money's on the table do you have to ask do you?"
            "It feels right to ask."
            "What are you, a fucking woman?"
            "Sometimes."
            "Balls."
            "It feels right to have music.  Do you have a radio?"
            "No.  Just cassette."
            "Fuck."
            "I think I'd rather be touching you, anyway.  Do you mind?"
            "Not at all.  Not one centimeter, decibel, millisecond."
            "Wonderful.  Sit back.  Press your legs against me."
            "What the hell for?  Don't you have any books here?"
            "Because it makes me feel needed.  No.  Why?"
            "What the hell do you do all day Leon without books or radio?"
            "I make money."
            "Ah."
            "Why are you talking?"
            "Its something to do, isn't it?"
            "But there's so much to do."
            "So show me."
            "I'm trying."  He looked as if he might cry.
            "But you can't, can you?  You can sit there and suck on it until it turns
purple and falls off, but you can't show anything.  There's nothing behind the great curtain, dear Leon. Oz is invariably fucked."
            "Please don't shout at me."
            "You're telling me you expect me to prostitute my sweetness, and you don't even have the decency to get it up?"  I cracked him one on the side of his head.  Hard.
            "Please, please stop it."
            "Please?"
            And I hit him again. I didn't stop until I felt I he had earned the right to keep his money, which is to say, a very long time. My head hurt from yelling. I felt sour.
            I understood now why prostitutes never kiss, and why courtesans always would.

            *                                              *                                                          *

            The questions come like a prosecutor's closing barrage, now.
            "Were you ever pregnant before?"
            "Corinne, what the hell…"
            "Were you?"
            I sighed.

             ****
            "The gas-bill we should pay the gas-bill this week."
            "The abortion makes that hard doesn't it?"
            "Seems."        
            "Well the little fucker was warm for one trimester, anyway."
            "What?"
            "Reflecting on quality of life issues."
            "What quality?"
            "What life?"

            *                                              *                                              *
         
             She yawns.  Thank god for small favors.
            "When was the first time you fell in love?"
            "I was 23."
            "Did you think it would last forever?"
            "Doesn't everyone?"
            "Do you miss her?"
            "I have you, now."
            "But do you think of her?"
            "Of course.  At least once each day."
            "That's normal, I suppose."
            "Yes."
            "What did you do for fun?"
            "We listened to Chopin together."
            "What did you love about her?"
            "I loved that she would never admit there was love.  So she never got old, never got boring, never got sick, never recovered.   She was a constant in a world of distress and catharsis."
            "What happened to her?"
            "I told her I loved her.   And she fell in love with someone else."
            "Why?"
            "I guess Chopin wasn't enough anymore."


                                                            ***Miranda***

I was sitting in the living room watching the war on the video, right?. Distant electric vision, Miranda called it sometimes, when we had taken in the tea late nights. Back when television was invented, it was called distant electric vision. The Democrats are still in power, today, pretending not to be acting like Republicans. We don't believe them but there is nothing really we can do, so she makes popcorn and we eat and watch the green array of tracer anti-aircraft fire fill each and every channel.

She had no religion but her mother was Jewish.  Miranda's hair would have been kinky but she shaved her head.  She devoured the New Testament but lived beyond its means.  She took me to church and we unbuttoned inside the pews.  She opens her legs for me and I reach between them.  Her hair is gone down there, like fallout.

            "For God.  For Something, anyway."
            "What would your parents say if they knew we were fucking?"
            "Dunno.  My mother would probably ask me if I was being careful."
            "Careful?"
            "Like diseases and such.  The HIV and all."
            "Well fuck the HIV.  I'm no prostitute."
            "Neither is one-sixteenth of the rest of civilization."
            "Hm.You're a whore though you fuck all the little girls."
           "They ask me to."
            "I didn't ask."
            "You didn't have to, love."
            "Don't say that. Don't mean that."
            "Love?"
            "Love."
            "Well, fuck then," he said.
            "Yes," she said.

                                  
                                              ***Charles & Corinne D' Arcy***

            When I am forced to talk to her this way, I feel that I am talking to myself.   Sometimes I feel that I am thinking in curves.  A thousand icicles seem to break from their moorings and shatter into the sidewalk as the morning sunshine melts the dawn, and I hate you so much.   I have written the reasons down upon a stretch of wall in a white room, this quiet place.  I cannot speak Latin if I could I would read it to you.  But instead I will breathe a different sort of air, from a different room, off-white.  The umpire strikes us out.  The doctors honor all living wills.  Thoughts that shave alabaster and rosewood from your eyes.  Vaginal canals that widen, then drift away like continents.  We never speak; our tongues walk the line of a most peripatetic passive aggression.   We do not speak and therefore cannot ever know how we truly feel.  Write this message down, love.
            My father was a meteorologist after his career as a butcher.  My mother was a farmer. It was no wonder they blamed each other for everything. I had met my wife by the side of the road. She had pulled over for a policeman and he had molested her.   She was frozen in fear, and when I leaned in to ask if she was all right she pulled me inside and had her way with me. She passed the feeling of helplessness. We were married 14 months later. Romanian gypsies. I'm lucky to be alive, I tell you.
            "One more, love.  I'm almost there, I promise."  It was true.  Her eyes were lidded heavily, her lashes beginning to knit themselves together.
            "All right," I say, resigned.

                                                            ***Sara***

          We are making love and it is raining outside. I am 26 and she is two years my senior, and we are in Champaign, Illinois. I can hear the sounds of snowshovels scraping along the concrete of the walk. Bob Dylan is on the stereo singing "My Back Pages." A cello draws a bow across itself on the late radio night. I have just gotten off of work at the newspaper stand downtown, selling cigar tins to scarred black men from the Ford motor plant. Some nights I have gotten no sleep and can barely take inventory or push coins. I can't understand the fucking conductor, these nights. Can't count up to Opus 57. Best to think of the instrument as armless. 

            "Tell me something." Sara said, her motions fluid, her eyes darting, unfocused. You just had to stand back and watch. Like that rabbit beating on his drum into ostensible infinity in the lead-acid battery commercials of the last fifty years.
            "What would you like to hear?"
            "Whatever comes out?"
            "I'm not sure I can."
            "Please try."
            "I love you when I love you cause of the rain and the auto and the central heating and the radio in the foyer and the job you hold that gives you something to do and you're educated and undebonair cannot seem to just fucking shut up when it counts even though you can't do it very well without your fingers can you?"
            "When we fight this is how we are," she said, arching herself in twos, her legs clamped tightly around me, and she is well-rested but I find it in my heart to believe her anyway. "Quickly now. We will be adults soon." She began to sing a cradle song in Yiddish, mounting me effortlessly, treating my cock like a metronome. This woman is using my body to keep time. How on Earth would you explain this to a non-English speaker without getting a shot in the mouth, I have no idea. I parse this concept deliberately for the next seven minutes. When Sara rocks backward gets on her heels I lose the last of my self-control. Seeya later.

                                                      ***Charlie (Ariast)***

            So, in times like this, after she falls asleep I take my keys and tiptoe down the four flights of stairs. I drive the car we chose together around the town and the life that had chose us. I cannot help but think, late nights. The bartenders know my name, my car, my brand of cigarettes, what I drink, silly things that indoctrinate young adulthood but so often choose to stay on in the decades that follow.

            "How's the baby coming?" This man should know better. Tonight is not the night. 
            "No love yet," I tell him, and leave the obligatory dollar on the wet bar.
            She can't or I won't. The doctors don't know for sure.   There are pills and surgery and positions and calendar pages marked.   Elastic gloves and barium cocktails, the smell of white powder and clear medicinal alcohol.

          On the drive home, I think of my father the day the slaughterhouse finally closed.   He came home four blocks and he was laughing so hard tears were running from his eyes, his mesh gloves of chain mail still jingling from the studs on his wrists. Our house was too far away to hear the animals baying but the machinery had slowed to a stop and the smell had vanished from the air. In high summer they would pour chemicals that smelled like violets into the furnaces that smelted the meat into lard, so that the stench would not be there, erupting from the brickwork chimneys but all of the young men in this town, poor or not, we take up smoking anyway, if only to deaden the nasal passages to the smell. It was cloying and I would wake up in the mornings thinking I was drowning in a field of flowers, and Miranda had taught me that, even before I learned to swim, that sleep should not be without a happy ending. I awake these nights wondering if I can feel a child growing inside her through the slip of cotton she wears to bed, I put my hand on her belly and my ear to her heart and think, there is comfort in the slaughterhouse, mother, can you hear me, there is comfort in the slaughterhouse.

 And sometimes I can smell the sky through the rain.   And the girls are pretty here.  Men have soft hands that feel like comedy.  I'm smiling now.   There is a metronome slowly unbalancing itself into silence around the local drunks and Wall Street alcoholics.   A scarred Steinway has been rudely pushed into a corner.   It is tinkling softly as one of the patrons muddles badly through "Heart and Soul", which sounds as if someone had dropped it from a great height, then whitewashed it before hanging it up to dry.
            I come in late nights, fourth floor apartment, drunk on the stairwell.  I fight my way up the steep back stairwell with the determination of those who had tackled Everest, Jonestown, Kennedy. I hold my wife very close to me.  The night is long.  Her snores are light and feathered and feminine. There is comfort in the slaughterhouses of the urban Northeast. All that I am, all that I have, is to serve this woman.
            "I'm sorry," I said.
            "That's okay," she replied.  Her voice is strong and clear. She is a light sleeper.   "Tomorrow is another day." This is her fertility mask. This is how she sleeps each night. This is why I can never quite see the future. But tonight she settles back to bed easily as I get undressed and make up my toilette in the next room.
            I am thinking that there was another car, a gray Lincoln coupe with a large engine, 460 cubic inches, made in 1968, five months before she had come into this world.  We were driving through the New Jerseyian fields and had pulled over suddenly, and that look had been in your eyes, and we pulled into a shady farmlot off of Route 9.   We had stained the hood in a foam of menarche and semen, and the boy I borrowed it from blackened my eye.   Do you remember that?   It was when we were courting, ten years ago.   When we were young.   We were aged 29 years and you told me about Italy, where girls would still show the blood on bedsheets the mornings after their wedding nights, and there was no shame, it was a matter of pride.   Nine months later there would be children.   There would be children, you would say, and I don't know exactly what it is I am doing here anymore.  I think that we are unemployed but cannot be sure.  The tiny windows from the attic reflect a sky that is part clouds and part moon.  Precipitation seems eminent.   It is probably beautiful on the other side of the world, that side we had never quite reached.   I slide my arm past my wife and turn out the light.   The light waits for tomorrow to begin again.  It is not old.

 

 FIN

-A Sexual Unconsciousness, lchristopher. 

----------
*It was all a dream, I used to read Word Up! magazine
Salt-n-Pepa and Heavy D up in the limousine
Hanging pictures on my wall
Every Saturday, Rap Attack, Mr. Magic, Marley Marl
I let my tape rock 'til my tape popped
Smoking weed and bamboo, sipping on private stock
Way back, when I had the red and black lumberjack
With the hat to match
Remember Rapping Duke, "duh-ha, duh-ha"
You never thought that hip-hop would take it this far
Now I'm in the limelight 'cause I rhyme tight
Time to get paid, blow up like the (World Trade)
Born sinner, the opposite of a winner
Remember when I used to eat sardines for dinner
Peace to Ron G, Brucey B, Kid Capri
Funkmaster Flex, Lovebug Starsky
I'm blowing up like you thought I would
Call the crib, same number same hood, it's all good
And if you don't know, now you know, nigga....

-Notorious B.I.G./Ready To Die
-Jay Z, The Blueprint 2 - The Gift And The Curse
-The Dream