A rain of parrots came down on us. Bright turquoise birds with orange heads alighted on us. Some of us had two and some up to five birds. They did no violence to us, and no defecating, which we discovered were our two chief anticipations if a large bird were to land on you. The beaks of these things were as large as cow horns. We discovered that we were, festooned with parrots in this way, the only colorful spot in the landscape of the village. The village was a drab black and white, like a movie before Ted Turner got to it, someone said. Someone else said, “Get out of here.” Someone else said, “That girl who came by, smiling, who Larry said he was going to get, what a hound dog he is, never caught a rabbit and he ain’t no friend of mine, that girl had a red mouth.” This seemed to have been so. We concluded that the parrots and the girl’s mouth had color. The rest, to include us, was bleached out, or never filled in. To say, we did not know if our condition of colorlessness represented a removal of a quality or if colorfulness was an addition to a basal state of colorlessness. “We’d better be content,” Fenster said, “to just be cautious empiricists, given. .”
“Right,” Larry said, “Whoever said I ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog, fuck you.”
“You two should fight.”
“Right,” Larry said. “Who said that shit about me?”
No one could remember. Whoever said it was not afraid to confess but he was as unable as the rest of us to recall if he said it. We could not identify him partly because we could not remember what happened two minutes ago and partly, we thought, because we did not know our own names, beyond Fenster and Larry, who, having known names, suddenly looked to us, and even to themselves, very suspicious, as if they were plants or spies or some other stripe of interloper among us normal guys. We decided to have a roll call. We gave ourselves five minutes to recall or make up the name we would go by. We agreed to abide by whatever we came up with, as you agree to sit the entire semester or year in the same seat you first choose in some classrooms.
“Fenster.”
“Larry.”
“Fuck you two guys. Bonhomie.”
“Travis.”
“Turk.”
“Tork.”
“Sam.”
“Turl.”
“Teal.”
“Tod.”
Okay. There were ten of us. That made things handy. We might as well use a base-10 numbering system if we got around to that.
When it was full dark, the parrots removed to the trees, we longed for girls like the smiling one to come out of the village and visit us but they did not, and airplanes rolled in issuing thunder and lightning, black-and-white brimstone and fire. This, we knew, should have frightened us, but it did not. We did not take cover. It would be a better learning experience to observe the damnation with our full attention. Our full attention would be compromised if we were to scramble under, say, pieces of tin and culverts and banana trees. So we sat there as if at a noisy picnic. No one got hurt. The village went up in flames. The villagers danced in silhouette against the orange mayhem.
Fenster yelled, “Take me down to funky town!”
Larry said, “Shut up.”
Tork said, “Teal, that is the gayest name I ever heard.”
Teal said, “I don’t dispute it.”
“Look at that,” Turk said.
The woman with the red lips flew by on a flying carpet doing this Egyptian dance thing, her palms pressed together and her head doing that side-to-side thing. It was a joke dance, a cartoon of some sort of cultural irony, we thought. We think we thought this. It was a big thought, unsafe for empiricists, and difficult to entertain even in calm tranquility, and we were not in calm tranquility, we who were being bombed.
“She’s goofing,” Bonhomie said. “She is not doing that as a serious expression of herself.”
“What I want to know,” Turl said, “is is that number serious anywhere? I mean how does someone presume to know how Egyptians moved?” This was the position we held. She flew on into the jungle, into darkness not illuminated by the exploding ordnance, her bright red mouth decreasing and disappearing like a taillight.
We awaited her return, and we knew that awaiting her return was at once what we could not avoid and what would paralyze us and doom us. There was nothing for it. Paralysis and doom and belief in something better than paralysis and doom is all we are given, men with assumed names and occasional parrots and bluster and bad memories in a black-and-white landscape. We were hound dogs who would never catch a rabbit and we were no friends of ours.
Confidence
I don’t think, today, that I think much or have much to say. But let’s sit here and see. That is a compound verb. I do not have a compound eye, or brain. Some people do, the latter, some insects the former. They look menacing and intelligent. The dragonfly in particular looks like a small but lethal military unit.
Now I am thinking of turds, small and lethal non-military units. It is snowing so I do not have to go to the gym. I should want to go to the gym, and maybe I do, and maybe I will, go.
The snow looks like blown rice. I am new to snow. I like it when it resembles popcorn and floats back up, and thwartwise, at points on its way down. I wish I had a place to plant five thousand trees on. Blue trees, perhaps. I would like it most if they were from seed in good rows about five inches high, no bigger than annuals, blue, in perfect grid array, a tree carpet. One of the benefits of living alone is unguarded farting.
Another is no one watching when you sleep, and when you don’t. You may pursue whatever is mindless until you yourself are tired of it. You may control the density of stuff in the refrigerator. If you find your fly open, you may leave it so for a bit. No rush.
Lonely and a little chilly, I go down to the Thumb and Thumb Lingua Spanka Academy for some human intercourse and convivialismatic rompromp. Earl Thumb gouges my eye not five feet in the door, and Wonka Thumb comes over with a broom and pretends to sweep me, trash on the floor, back out the door. “You fuckers,” I say, and Earl is at the computer telling me I am not paid up, and Wonka drops a knee on my stomach and hisses viciously, “I bet you think you need a woman!” He begins outright beating me with the broom as Earl hands me a dues bill. It’s always good here, always fun. A child runs naked screaming through the room with a smile on his face, looking for approval, and disappears into the locker room. “Who’s that?”
“That’s a boy we are going to adopt,” Wonka says, “as soon as we decide what to rename him. Negotiations are underfoot.”
“Don’t you think Eel is a good name?” Earl says.
I say I do or I don’t, it depends on the boy’s character. If he is an Eel, well then maybe. You have to wait it out, as with a dog. “Great character-warping injustice is done at the maternity ward with the birth certificates,” I say.
“Eel Thumb,” Wonka says.
“Eel Thumb,” Earl says.
“He belongs to one of Earl’s ex-wives.”
“Can you lend me ten dollars?” Earl says, apparently to me. They want to buy supplies to make pull-candy to entertain the boy, and I contribute ten dollars.