© 2010-08 Christopher K. Miller

 

 

Mortimer earns a good salary from a job that has grown less demanding over the years and now affords him time to research, write, correspond with friends and even just recreate online. Monday through Friday, nine to four, he sits among the furniture and hanging plants of his cluttered corner office at a large wooden table littered with manuals and tea-stained printouts under which four computers hum. Mornings, evenings and weekends he helps his wife, whom he met by answering her personal ad, run her family restaurant, mostly from the dish pit. He has numerous step-progeny as well as two biological sons from a previous marriage, both prescribed antidepressants, one who works for them as a fulltime cook, and an almost-teenage granddaughter with a suspected eating disorder whom he’s seen only twice in the last decade. His mother, whom he sees every week and who wears a whistle around her neck, suffers from late-stage Parkinson’s and early-stage macular degeneration, and is cared for in a sunny downtown condo by his nearly deaf father, a retired theology professor whose recent stroke has left him speech impaired though not cognitively aphasic. His maternal grandmother, whom as a boy he twice summered with at a small cottage on a saltwater bay where she taught him to catch Dungeness crabs by tying pieces of eel on strings and always mewled with joy and surprise whenever they almost caught one and who always gossiped in a hushed and conspiratorial manner that fell just short of whispering in his ear even when the person they were gossiping about was a thousand miles away and who has the same birthday as him, is 106 now, but blind and failing and not expected to live much longer. His short fiction has appeared in COSMOS, The Barcelona Review, Hopewell Publishing’s Best New Writing of 2010 anthology, and other web and print based publications.

Concerned by the cruelties of factory farming’s animal husbandry, and considering proper diet and exercise to be conducive to good health and good health to a sense of wellbeing, he eats no fowl or red meat, plays a variety of racquet sports and engages in infrequent gym workouts at a local fitness club. His story about a fat American Indian who has forgotten his name and gender received an honorable mention along with approximately 1700 other pieces in Ellen Datlow’s 2007 Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror compilation. It pissed him off that a boring excerpt from something by Joyce Carol Oates and a lengthy trunk story, possibly an aborted novel, by Stephen King, neither of which he could even finish, both beat out his, which he has read and enjoyed literally hundreds of times, even though he understands perfectly why such decisions are necessary and has tried to come to terms with his bias in such matters. Four times a year he experiences a brief crush on his dental hygienist, who softly chides him for not flossing and sometimes rests her forearm on his chest while she scales. He hasn’t seen his family physician in almost eight years. Approaching sixty, Mortimer is at his physical, mental and economic prime. It has occurred to him that he wants nothing more of life.

His second short story after a twenty-year hiatus (inspired by an evening course on ‘Writing and Publishing the Popular Novel’ that he took at the university where he received his General Arts degree) from creative writing, about his recent tooth extraction (in lieu of a root canal) and his mother’s breast cancer, failed to long-list in Glimmer Train’s Spring of 2005 competition, has never been published, but was well received in a writers’ forum he frequents. Perhaps due to many painful experiences as a child at the hands of a dentist who refused to administer Novocain, even though his current dentist wouldn’t dream of drilling into an unfrozen nerve, he is mildly apprehensive about a pending appointment to have a cavity filled. He still remembers the shrill ache of the old grinder style drills, the smell of hot enamel not unlike burning hair, the soreness of a jaw held open for too long and the crunch of silver filling tamped into a sharp-edged crater. He is also apprehensive about his parents’ potentially pending funerals and his responsibilities as executor of their will. But beyond these two (or three [or four {or five?}]) things, there is nothing he looks forward to with either anticipation or anxiety. It’s become hard recently, even squinting, to read small print, especially in poor light. Sometimes he takes his software specs out to the woman who answers the phones, whose mother had a cancerous mole removed the same day as his mother’s mastectomy but has since died, who laughs at almost everything he says and whom he’s had a crush on for over eighteen years. But he will never wear glasses. He is far at sea when it comes to matters of faith, holds no spiritual or metaphysical beliefs, has only hypotheses, most of which he further hypothesizes are incomplete to just plain wrong, but which does not deter him from expounding on them in his writing. Existence, for example, he hypothesizes to be both inevitable and impossible.

Besides philosophizing and writing and racquet sports and watching popular TV episodes on DVD while eating boiled vegetables, he enjoys driving his car. It’s the first car he’s ever owned that might be considered sporty or decadent. He likes the airplane drone of its engine as it pushes him back into the seat and how it unwinds highways in adherence to his will. In an episode of The Wire, maybe the best-written TV series ever, a group of underage, black heroin dealers in Baltimore’s West-end projects discussing what would be their favorite car, picks his, the exact same make and model except without all-wheel-drive. It makes him proud that the writers of these street-savvy, smack-dealing pickaninnies would think their characters would think his car was cool. A man driving also exactly the same car as his except also without all-wheel-drive got clocked going over 260 kph one night last year, the fastest anyone’s ever had their car impounded for under the province’s road-racing laws. Police said the car appeared to be completely unmodified, factory stock. And the man, who wasn’t actually racing anyone, said he’d gone even faster other times. Mortimer is proud to have a car that can go over 260 kph though he himself has never driven faster than about 160 kph, even down in the states where points and insurance would be unaffected and all he’d get is a ticket he wouldn’t even have to pay if he didn’t mind never going back to that particular state the way he can never go back to Mississippi where he wasn’t speeding at all but just the victim of some state highway patrolman trying to make his end-of-the-month quota. His fiction tends to have a strong sexual component. He once got expelled from a professional writer’s workshop by a semi-prominent female literary figure for submitting a piece about a pair of bisexual nurse’s aides and a severely retarded young man in a nursing home. COSMOS changed the title of his story about a couple whose consciousnesses reside in AIs on one of Jupiter’s moons to dismantle its extension of a metaphor for sex as song, and even though they mailed him a check for 800 dollars and retained a professional painter to do an oil painting for it and he got to enjoy a small crush on the senior editor’s administrative assistant, a very sweet and accommodating Australian woman, the thought of 100,000 readers all thinking the lame title was his still annoyed him.

He calls his car Charles, or Chuck for short. After his drive to work which is his favorite part of the day, he’ll say, “Chuck, you rock mountains!” or, “Chuck, you are the bomb,” and slap him on the hood. Since he has to die soon anyway, he thinks he’d like to die in Chuck. Not in an accident, nothing fast or violent that holds up traffic and leaves a big mess for others to clean up. Or where someone might get hurt. Though sometimes when he sees a transport coming the other way, even though Chuck has a five-star safety rating, he imagines veering over the center line into it. No car with the limited maneuverability and braking of these huge trucks would ever pass safety. It bugs him a little they’re even allowed on the road, though he’d never actually deliberately crash into one. He thinks Chuck would make a good mausoleum. Sometimes when he’s in Canadian Tire buying things like fridge bulbs or mop heads or extra-large rubber dishwashing gloves for the restaurant or lithium grease to smear on Chuck’s gas cap to keep the “Service Engine Soon” light from coming on or ping-pong table nets because the little kids at the fitness club keep wrecking them, he’ll walk down the plumbing aisles with their sour rubbery glue smell past all the toilets and sinks and fixtures and ABS and copper pipes and fittings and racks and drawers full of all sorts of overpriced screws and clamps and unidentifiable things in little plastic bags with barcodes to see if there’s any sort of flexible tubing one might connect up to a car’s muffler. The hoses that he used to regularly buy back when he was single for his basement sump pump because of how they kept cracking look too narrow for Chuck’s pipes. Plus he’d need two. Plus it’d be hard to keep Chuck’s power windows, which are pretty quick, from crimping or cutting them. The sales manager at the dealership where he bought Chuck said he could use regular unleaded gas. But practically everything this guy said was a lie. For example, three times he mentioned a church he’d attended. He lied where the truth would’ve worked as well, or better. It was almost like he lied to keep in practice, practice he dearly needed. So probably Chuck doesn’t really have a five-star safety rating but only four or four-and-a-half. Mortimer found out on-line that it’s better to always use premium so you don’t get what’s called engine pinging from premature ignition. One of the mechanics from the dealership beside the restaurant claimed while buying coffees once that it doesn’t cost the refineries any more to make the slower burning high-octane gas, that it’s just a way of gouging people who own cars with high-compression engines, who they figure will pay more. Mortimer’s wife’s ex husband who’s a pretty good guy and who it feels like ought to be related to him in some way even though there’s no name for the relationship between men who’ve been married to the same woman almost died of carbon monoxide poisoning soldering pipes down under the floor of the house he and his son are building. Barely crawled out in time. He said the doctor at the hospital said his blood levels were at five-point-seven something-or-others, and that six is always fatal. He said he puked his guts out and that the headache made his worst hangover ever seem like nothing. Mortimer wouldn’t want to risk having Chuck’s engine stall after he lost consciousness just to save a few cents a liter, even if it is a rip-off. There are hoses made specifically for garages that come in all different sizes with special clamps and even dual tailpipe adapters. The automotive section of Canadian Tire has a different kind of rubbery smell than the plumbing aisles: oilier and greasier, sweetened by fumes from the service bays.

Back when he used to pick dew worms at the local cemetery, Mortimer would crawl around with pepper spray hooked on his belt, a penlight stitched to his ball cap, dragging a plastic tub of wet newsprint, sometimes until dawn paled the eastern sky. Before midnight dogs are walked, lovers stroll and nomadic youths drink and revel. But after midnight the cemetery is serene. Not at all scary, even when it’s overcast or foggy. Only the living frighten Mortimer, who was always careful not to disturb anyone’s flowers. Death is another prominent theme in his writing. Sex and death. Somehow they go together in his mind, like love and life. Sometimes he hypothesizes he’s already dead, maybe always been dead, and that everyone and everything is just his immortal imagination filling in the void, and so that by wanting to die he really wants to live. All of his stories are suicide notes. But maybe that’s what art is. Once when he was crawling around in the cemetery catching dew worms to sell into captivity, torment and death, a man pulled up in a truck, got out and started playing the violin. Right there in the pouring rain, a lively requiem. The shapes of water slipping and swirling on mud and marble made Mortimer think of his acid-dropping years. At first he was afraid the man’s song might scare away the worms like light does. But it didn’t. As Mortimer crawled among the graves, the music seemed to emanate not just from the violin, but everywhere, and to be not just for someone once loved, but everything, and that for every worm he took two more emerged, joyful and good. Perhaps the last thing he will remember is how that night among the rows of stony epitaphs underlined by gravel paths like pages from some cosmic itinerary embossed on a mat of fresh-cut weeds and grass they rose and danced and waited for his hand.