Caleb Murray: RANDOM PRECISION • Cleaver Magazine

Caleb Murray
RANDOM PRECISION

I woke up in the morning with a hemorrhage in my brain that made me think that life is some kind of nightmare even though, logically, such a state of affairs would be irrelevant to life—after all, if life is a dream, or if there is no such thing as reality (there is and there isn’t, as it were), it would make no difference to how we think about practical matters. Through the kitchen window I saw my neighbor, a heavy woman with dark hair, standing in the road with a black blob in one hand and a stick in the other. The stick opened into a wide, flat scoop against the asphalt. It was a snow shovel. The black thing seemed to be a small duffel bag. She tried to scoop up some unresponsive, wiry lump in the road. Her face was wet, and it took me a long time to understand what was happening. She had to hold the thing with one hand while pushing the shovel with the other. She lifted the shovel with both hands, although it couldn’t have weighed more than ten or fifteen pounds, because then she held it in her armpit while she unfurled the trash bag with her free hand. Then she dropped it in the bag. It was a trash bag. She wiped her face with her forearm and went inside.

The spot where the cat had been looked like an oil stain. I stood at the window and looked at the spot for a while. In my head it grew—from a mirage of desert oil to a psycho-sexual inkblot to a monster that tried to strangle me, the same thing I fabricated for Yang the first time I met him—while it stayed the same in the road.

The coffee in the pot was done. It smelled like tires. I’ve always enjoyed the smell of tires. As a child, I would lie in the driveway, next to the car, looking at the sky, and my father would say, “Craig, what’re you doin’ on the concrete?” Later, I would be so up-ended I couldn’t drive, and I would lie there, before the stars, answering to all my childhood concepts and beliefs, no matter how remote—whether infinity was a number, whether my mind was a thing able to be controlled, how far away something has to be from earth until we cannot see it anymore—as if the four-foot tall version of myself were there, standing before me, asking me questions. I used to think often about my childhood. The reason I think I don’t as much anymore is because it used to be so much more immediate, more of a living memory, and now my entire childhood is like a stack of cassettes I’m trying to get to play on the screen of my phone. How stunning, how immediate and visceral it is that I can watch a video of Charles Mingus showing off his shotgun on a phone the size of my palm! Culture is so self-aware it no longer has imagination. All I think anyone would say, looking at me now, would be, “Craig, you’re sitting there, all relaxed-like, drinking coffee out of your blue abstract mug, thinking too much about yourself. Why don’t you tell us a story?”

Why don’t you go to hell? I turned around, but no one was there, and I couldn’t remember if I’d yelled those words or just imagined myself yelling them. I stood up and poured myself another cup. The porcelain cow clock on my kitchen counter read 15:15. The Beaujolais was on top of the fridge. I held it in my hand, passed it to the other, looked to the ceiling, and set it down. Early afternoon was too early and, after all, I was not trying to be an alcoholic.

My phone rang. It was on the coffee table in the other room. I didn’t recognize the number or area code.

“Hello, is this Craig Perkins?”

“Yes. May I ask who this is?”

“Mr. Perkins, this is Alyssa from Pacific Gas and Electric calling to inform you that, unless you pay your bill from the last three months by the end of the week, we will be shutting off your power to your residence.”

My power to my residence? What was this idiot trying to say? “I’ve paid that. I’ve been paying you people online for months and haven’t heard a single word until now.”

“Okay, well, let’s see if we can’t find some information on you, Mr. Perkins.”

Mr. Perkins.

“It looks like you set up online bill pay with us back in November. Is that correct?”

“November? Yes, it was November.”

“Okay, sir, let’s just see.” I could hear her tongue and lips smacking together and pulling apart. “Hold on a sec, okay?”

“Sure, but, what’s your name again, please?”

“My name is Alyssa.”

“I’m Craig.”

“Okay, Craig. Hold on a sec, okay?”

“Okay.”

I imagined her, the way her voice reached out to me, her melancholy eyes pleading up to me, her plastic-blonde hair spread over her hands and shoulders. I reached for my blue coffee mug and touched the bottle of wine—still on the phone, I walked the Beaujolais to the kitchen and found my coffee on the counter. If this were a dream, I thought, then how would I react to such sleight of mind? Would I try to run but be stuck, as if in water? Or would someone appear, one of my friends with another’s face, or would I start to have sex, dirty, mean sex, with some childhood friend even though I knew I was back together with Cara? I would never get back together with Cara, that addict bitch, and therefore I would know it was a dream, but assuming that I wouldn’t and didn’t—would it be any different? I can’t think so. It would make no difference to how I lived my life and no difference to how I thought about practical matters. My dilemma, the wine on the table, was much more immediate, a thing in fact physical and real, and thus not even analogous to a dream. My mind had slighted me. That was all.

“Okay, Craig? Are you there, Mr. Perkins?”

What?

“Craig?”

“What?”

“Mr. Perkins, our records show that we have received no payments for the past three months.” She was silent.

“What does that mean?” I said.

She said, clearing her throat, “Well, sir, it means either there is not enough funds in your account to withdraw—”

“There are funds, there’s funds there, that’s not the problem.”

“Okay, Mr. Perkins, okay. The other option is that we are unable to withdraw funds from your account.”

“Why?”

“Why is that an option or why would that be?”

“Why would that be? Why would that even be an option?”

“Excuse me, are you…”

“What other options are there?” I was pacing. “Someone is controlling my account and taking my funds? Is this a case of identity theft?”

“Mr. Perkins, perhaps I should transfer you to my supervisor…”

“Because if my identity has been stolen, I’m gonna need all those funds I paid you back.”

“I cannot speak to that,” the girl said. “If your identity has been stolen, you’re going to need to contact your bank.”

“I’ve been sending my funds to you, not to my bank.”

“Let me transfer you to my manager, Craig, okay?”

“Because I’m not gonna repay all those payments.”

“Okay, Mr. Perkins? Okay, here you go.” She pressed a button, and I heard a ring.

I went to the kitchen, pulled the cork out of the wine, poured myself a glass and drank it. I wished I had strawberries and brie. Maybe dark chocolate, and grapes and dried figs.

Click. A male, faintly Hispanic voice said, “Hello, this is Todd Phillips. How can I help you?”

“I assume my employee told you that my identity might be stolen?”

“Your who?”

My whom. “Your employee. Lisa or Susanna or whatever.”

“I believe you spoke with Alyssa.”

“Alyssa. That’s her name. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Todd said.

“I’m not sorry. I’m just trying to remember.”

“Why don’t you tell me what the problem is?”

“What?”

“How can I help you, sir?”

“Are you a machine?”

“Excuse me?”

“Who are you?” I screamed. Then I hung up.

I pressed play on the stereo, and some acoustic bass banged through the surface of the speakers in an alien rhythm, soon followed by piano and drums that, had I not recognized, however belatedly, Sir Duke, would have made no sense to me. My shoulders and knees kicked at unseen targets as I made my way across the room. I uncorked the bottle to let it breathe even though it was a few days old and thus nearly vinegar. All that remained in the fridge were green grapes and cheddar cheese, which I scarfed with my wine. The milk, bread, and eggs would wait for the morning—and the Samson and Delilah Seasonal IPA for the following evening. It was unbelievable that a racial enigma and Human ATM such as Mr. Todd Phillips would ask me what my problem was. If he knew what it was like to be a real human being, he wouldn’t ask so many questions. I laughed, and with my head back, spine arched, and arms raised like a goblin, I poured the rest of the wine from the glass into my mouth. An awkward splash in my throat made me cough, and even as I tried to breathe, even on my knees, I could only choke and cough, and I spit a little bit of red on the carpet. I was sweating by the time I finished and could breathe again. The stereo was playing something I couldn’t understand—random drums, then piano parts, back and forth, while the bass played continually though not, apparently, the same song the other two were playing; if understanding and “appreciating” music like this is what studying music or what being a clinical musician is all about, then I would rather be self-taught, well-versed but nonacademic. I turned it off. I stumbled past the table until I could sit on the couch. I imagined Yang saying, “You’re so drunk you can’t stand up.”

Such a deep interpretation of my current state of mind, you hack! No wonder you aren’t getting any more payments.

I ran a bath and opened the IPA. Next thing I remember I woke up on the couch with all the lights on, in my underwear, while in the bathroom the bathtub was half-full of cold water. An unopened bottle of beer lay flat under the water next to the bar of soap.

◊

The pattern on the pillow at my feet ebbed and pulsed so that everything around it was flooded with a golden light that mashed everything out of my vision. I kept hearing the phone ring, but when I turned my head it stopped. This happened a few times. I was lying on the couch, trying to read some propaganda assigned to me, but the patterns kept changing, like constellations, though flickering and rearranging out of impulse, not convention. My eyelids were difficult to hold open—when I was a child I didn’t know how to describe blurry vision, so I said, “Just make everything look like dots,” and then I would cross my eyes, slowly at first, then quicker and more relaxed while dropping my eyelids.

I was awake. An intruder was in my apartment. Maybe he’d kicked in the grate while I was asleep and had slid between the sidewalk and the windowsill. I jumped and looked behind the couch. He was gone already. A few blueberries remained in my refrigerator, the “fridge-berries,” those trite little monsters with inflamed eyes like vaginas that popped and tasted like dirt, blood, and sugar between the teeth and on the tongue. As I ate them, the intruder kept jumping back into my apartment, behind my couch, and even as I turned and beheld the room empty I would hear him say something, some inaudible and wordless version of, “Crab-leg, I am here in your room whether you like it or not.” I tossed my hands in the air and walked to the stereo. I pushed play, and some clunky piano music came on that I remembered liking. Someone was making goat noises in the background along with the piano solo. The rhythm kept stopping, suspending a chord in the air as a delirious, audible self-portrait. Every time I looked back a different song was playing. When I looked up, the album was over and the sun was going down on mother earth. Before long her great monolithic eye closed in ecstasy and her billions of synapses flickered into view. Their intimate, unconscious connections—Ursa Major, Cassiopeia, Orion—were barely apparent and profoundly beautiful. An entire LP had passed while I mouthed the words, “delirious, audible self-portrait,” and the lights of Polaris, Betelgeuse, and Sirius were all there. I lay behind the couch, but no one showed up. If I moved he would be there again, so I stayed. The phone rang, but when I turned my head it stopped. Otherwise the sky was still and the room was peaceful.

I awoke in bed with all of my clothes off. The sheets gently scraped my crotch. I went to the kitchen for orange juice and decided to put wine in it because I didn’t have a job. Through the kitchen window, I saw a garbage truck lifting my neighbors’ industrial-size dumpster—I watched for a cat-shaped trash bag in the load but saw nothing. If I owned a cat, I would never let it outside to die in the street.

The garbage truck drove away in the fog. It was a little after 5:30. The second glass of red wine and o.j. was more difficult to finish because I kept imagining myself in the street in the earliest hour of the morning, crying, scooping my dead cat up in a snow shovel that I kept in a corner of the garage.

The phone rattled against the glass table. I imagined alarms going off, trying to scare my subconscious away, flashing its lights at me as if I had just walked through an emergency door. If I had known who was calling, I might not have answered—although, more accurately, if I had known what she had wanted, I wouldn’t have answered because I might have assumed she wanted something else—had I only known who was calling.

I answered the phone.

“Hello. Mr. Craig Perkins?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry. Is Mr. Perkins available?”

“Yes. I think so.” I put the phone against my chest. Somebody was singing some version of Gershwin’s “Summertime” on the stereo, but that’s all I remember. “Hold on a sec.” I opened the front door, went outside, looked at the bug-eyed puppy making its way toward me on the sidewalk, walked around the block, through the door, into my apartment, and said to the phone, “This is Craig Perkins.”

I overheard her saying something like, “Na, he’s not there,” to someone. After a while she said, “Mr. Perkins, this is Alyssa from Pacific Gas and Electric, calling to inform you—”

“Wait,” I said, closing the door. I poured myself a cup of wine and sat on the couch. “What is it?”

She cleared her throat. “I’m calling to inform you that you’re three payments past due. Therefore we will have no choice but to shut off your power if you fail to take action within one week.”

When she finished the statement, I could feel my heartbeat in my fingertips. I exhaled and was static until I reminded myself to inhale; then I couldn’t find a rhythm natural enough to become involuntary, so I had to breathe as if manually controlling my lungs, and the longer I consciously controlled my breathing the more aware of it I became until I imagined I could never forget the breathing process and let it become unconscious—perhaps, after enough time, my lungs would no longer work involuntarily—and I would be stuck this way for the rest of my life.

“Didn’t I pay that already?”

“According to our records,” she said against some moist background noise, “you set up online bill pay in November, and yet you haven’t paid the funds in three months.” It sounded like she was chewing.

“Three months?”

“Yes. Our computer wasn’t able to pull your funds. They were not available for them.”

What in God’s name was this girl babbling about?

“Are you there, Mr. Perkins?”

“Yes.” Again with the Mister Perkins.

“If you think there’s been a mistake, you might want to contact your bank regarding your account.”

“You mean if my identity has been stolen?”

“Exactly.” Bingo. “Or something else.”

I had her. “Who are you?”

“My name is Alyssa. I’m with Pacific Gas and Electric—”

“No,” I said, scanning the list of last names that scrolled in my head: Alyssa Mubarek, Harquist, Aronson, Moehler, Krugher, Jarvis. “Do you know me?”

“Mr. Perkins, I—”

“Let me speak to your supervisor.”

“But I—”

“Put him on.”

“I’ll put her on,” she said quickly.

I heard a click and then realized my bathwater was still running. I turned the water off, opened a can of beer, and undressed. The phone, on a towel on the floor, was set to speakerphone. When I awoke, however, the bath was a quarter full, the water lukewarm, and my beer can was floating at my feet.

◊

The neighbor scooped up the dead animal carcass with a snow shovel in the road in the afternoon. I watched her while drinking a soda. I wiped my face. Underneath the road’s surface people were scooping up our debris. The floor sank, the walls lifted, and as a person was scooping a pile of trash another was pointing and screaming, “Move faster! Work harder!” The man kept scooping, without wiping the sweat from his eyes, until his back was unable to stretch taut, whereupon he was thrown into the furnace by his coworkers, and his sizzling flesh smelled like steak, and his screams, loud at first, were subdued and drained. I beheld this kind of thing beneath the ground’s surface and felt like a tourist—this ancient, bizarre, impossibly magical place, this cathedral, this mausoleum—this underground tradition, the disappearing act. I watched the man’s flesh peel from his fingers until the gleaming light revealed bones like talons. When I blinked, the fire’s negative was suspended in directionless, spaceless black. Horseshoed by a series of fire pits in massive asymmetric gourds, packed in between hundreds of workers sweating into their shoes, without a view of the street or the walls that rescinded from my house, I was lost. A man screamed from his gut, then another from his nerves and tongue. A woman herded children behind me. They were gone before I could see them. I sat in the lounge chair, the big brown recliner, and watched the parade—Dmitri Shostakovich, Thelonious Monk, Syd Barret all walking in procession, angrily, chained together, their hands oily and black and spider-webbed. I shook my face of it.

I pulled the telephone from the recliner’s furry armpit and dialed the number for Pacific Gas and Electric.

“Hello?” a female receptionist answered.

“May I speak with Alyssa Eliot please?”

“Speaking.”

“I’m calling to inform you that I think my identity has been stolen. My bank contacted me the day before yesterday and said I’ve been withdrawing payments for electric bills that have not been delivered to the electric company. Now, I’m confused. Should I take action to see that my bank pays what I owe, or are you responsible?”

“Let me transfer you to my supervisor.”

“No,” I said, watching as snow began to fall through the windows—the snowflakes looked like falling coals against the sooty orange background. “I want to speak with you.”

“Me?” she said. “Why me?”

“Because you know who I am.”

“Who are you?”

“Craig Perkins.”

“Mr. Perkins?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know you.”

“Crab-leg.”

“I still don’t know you.”

I laughed, and another man threw himself in the furnace.

“How do I know you?” she said.

A piece of fingernail broke off between her teeth, and though it may have been painless, I imagined her mouth full of blood, her finger curling under enormous pressure, blood dripping on the keyboard.

The intruder was back in my apartment, this time in one of the back rooms where he couldn’t be seen, and he was screaming through the vents so that his voice resonated throughout like brass, “Crab-leg, I’m here to eat your soul.”

Only he would say such an impossible thing.

Thus I don’t know why she said, “What are you talking about?”

“Um…”

“I’m here to eat hers, too.”

“Craig, you’re scaring me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, my hands waving in the air like swords—if she were there in the room with me I could have explained myself better.

“You need to stop calling here.”

“Just give me your home phone number, and I’ll call you there. I promise I’ll stop calling you at work.”

“That’s not possible.”

“Are you still there?”

The snow had put out all the fires. All four sides were glowing so that my skull squeezed against my brain and I could feel my heartbeat in my temples. I decided to walk to the store to buy more red wine and cheese and perhaps some dark chocolate. I grabbed my jacket and scarf. In the mirror I looked like I could be a legal aide or a medical intern. I took the phone off the couch—

“Are you still there?”

The phone’s screen was black. I set it on the end table by the couch, zipped up my jacket, and left my apartment. The first person on the street likely worked for an advertising company, but the second person—dumpster-snatched jacket, untrimmed beard, wool cap, milkshake eyes—was a junkie. I walked to the store with my hands in my pockets, filed alongside my money clip, watch, and keys. The faces I saw were unreadable, but I hadn’t come here to analyze humanity—even when we do, it doesn’t amount to anything substantial because we got it wrong in the first place: we are never not human, we are never not real, and therefore certain analyses are impossible. I watched an old woman, wrapped in curlers, a robe, flip flops, and bracelets, as she pushed a cart carrying several frozen dinners, a bottle of lotion, a box of wine, and a can opener. She paused at a couple different aisles before going down the frozen foods and dairy aisle once again. She checked an entire row of milk for expiration dates before picking one half-gallon carton and putting it in her cart. A man walked past the aisle, but I didn’t realize who it was until he was out of view. The woman began to walk toward me. I didn’t know what to do. I stood still and tried not to look at her, but she kept staring at me and wouldn’t look away. She had dark eyebrows that almost touched above her nose. She wore a retainer where saliva had pooled and would flap against the roof of her mouth as she breathed. The underwear under her sweatpants was loose-fitting, with large elastic bands on the edges. Her eyes darted around an awful lot for someone with not much going on upstairs.

Caleb Murray is from Montana and currently lives in Western Massachusetts. His fiction has appeared in Cleaver Magazine, Fiction Southeast, Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, and Garfield Lake Review.