Christian does not consider himself a rude boy, and he doesn’t care for the jazz-like music that rude boys listened to. He considers himself punk and wears his suits just to be unusual.
In other words: UNUSUAL = PUNK.
Two medieval knights are sword-fighting in Christian’s path, going clink-clink and arr-arr! He doesn’t mind to them, passing by with hardly a flinch when their swords collide. We are accustomed to walking through battles in our front rail yard. It is so common that we don’t care enough to use our dodging skills anymore — too lazy. Charging right through is the quickest way.
Nobody is afraid of dying these days either.
“Death isn’t as bad as everyone thinks,” Christian always says. “It’s just one step away from being alive again.”
He’s believed in reincarnation ever since he was a child. He swears that his little sister was reincarnated into his pet ferret five years after her death. Then his pet ferret was reincarnated into a wolf spider, and then an autocar, and then a rock. It’s always an animal or object, never another person that can say hi, I’m a reincarnation of his sister, so he’s hard to argue against. Nobody believes him, but he’ll punch your face off your head if you tell him he’s wrong.
Somebody said that Christian was responsible for his sister’s death, leaving her all alone in the kitchen when he was supposed to be watching her. But it was probably his parents’ fault or, more likely, God’s fault.
When Christian arrives at the warehouse and trips over my corpse, only half a thumb of a cigar left, he yells out my name and I awake inside of my rolling world.
His face melts out twitchy-fast words: “Figured your punk ass’d be here, always locked away, never doing anything anymore, you look like a pile of dick.”
He’s right about one thing. I’m always indoors. Everyone calls me agoraphobic, but you’d be too if you had eyes like mine. I pause, continuing with the wood-sawing sounds, staring at the sculpture-dancers.
I respond, “You’d be too if you had eyes like mine.” It’s my usual response.
Christian goes to the toilet in the center of the room. We use this toilet for crapping and as a television stand since it is situated in the middle of a room instead of a bathroom. He has to take the television off the seat before he tinkers into the tinker pot.
“You’re always bummed about that shit, guy,” he spurts. “Get on with your life. If I could trip all day without needing any drugs, I’d be cumming in my pants.”
He always says that.
And I always say this:
“You get stressed of it quick.” I scratch my shirt that says Brain Disease.
“Yeah, yeah, always complaining.” Christian grumbles the toilet water down. “Complaining, complaining, whining, complaining.”
“What’s wrong with you?” I say in a shaky, tiny-girl voice.
“The usual,” he responds, placing the television back on the toilet seat. “Overwhelmed with boredom.”
He turns the channels on the TV, most of which seem to be cooking shows and game shows.
“I think Battlestar Galactica’s going to be on soon,” I say grubulous.
Christian complies with a squint and corrects the channel, pulling up a milk crate. I hate sitting on milk crates, but they’re our only chairs.
I continue, “If I had to choose only one show to watch forever… it’d be Battlestar Galactica.”
I go into my God’s Eyes and wander the room, move around to the back of the television set and watch us as we watch television.
Behind Christian and my corpse, I see a bald, fat, middle-aged man staring at us through the window, puckering his lips, making perverted expressions.
“I thought you only liked the theme song, guy,” Christian says. “Nobody seriously likes that stupid show.”
I am actually offended by this, but nobody shows offense anymore so I don’t make a BIG deal out of it.
“No, I seriously like it.” The words leave my brain and come out of my corpse in the distance, almost like ventriloquism. “The theme song is good, but I like everything about it. You’re thinking of Hawaii Five-O. That’s the one that has a super Mr. T song, but nobody likes the show.”
The fat man begins licking the glass in our direction with a fat spongy tongue. He is John, one of the two strangers that live in the back of the warehouse who have no connection to the inside of our home, who we do not speak to, who we collect rent from and don’t like. One of his hands is sweating a palmprint into the window, but I think he has the other one inside his pants. I don’t feel disturbed by him, even though he is jerking off to my own picture. I pretend not to notice.
But I begin to wonder how many perverted old men have masturbated to my picture in the past. It is quite possible that this performance took place very many times. Before I had God’s Eyes, it could have happened all the time. Like there are perverted old men everywhere, behind tinted glass, in public bathrooms, on balconies or behind holes drilled into walls, watching, masturbating, fantasizing about you. I wonder if anyone else ever thinks about this.
“I like the Greatest American Hero song the best,” says Christian. He hasn’t seen the perverted man.
“That’s a groobly one too. We should cover that song at the show tonight.”
“That’d be killer, guy. I’ll work on it.”
Battlestar Galactica really is my favorite show. I worship it. There’s something about science-fiction from the seventies that turns me dippy, something about the mixture of disco and futurism and sexy spandex space suits.
A figure, too fast for my God’s Eyes, passes John from the outside, John still licking the glass, saliva running the dust-window scent up a nostril. The figure enters.
It is Mort, another roommate. Christian’s best friend besides myself. He’s Japanese but never speaks his birth language. But he still carries the accent with him.
I enter my natural eyes and we turn to his attention.
Christian’s greetings: “Mortician, where have you been all day? I thought we were supposed to be playing a show here tonight.”
“I was getting a new distortion pedal,” Mort replies. “The one we have’s bust, and I looked all over town for one. Eventually, I got one from Lenny.”
“How good is it?”
“Not great, but it’ll do, me matey.”
Mort says me matey because he is obsessed with pirates, or the old-fashioned stereotype of pirates. He always dresses up pirate-like with a skull hat and eye-patch. And he speaks with a mock-pirate accent, which doesn’t work very well since his Japanese accent is so strong. The combination of Japanese and Pirate form a new accent of Mort’s own. It’s difficult to understand him at times, but Christian seems to catch his words clearly.
Mort turns to me:
“Arr, did you tell him, Leaf?” he asks me, motioning to Christian. A tremor shoots through my body. I heard him ask me the question, but I can’t come up with an answer.
“What?” I respond, unsteady.
“Did you tell him the news?”
I shrug.
“Tell me what?” Christian saves me from speaking.
“We rented out the other room.”
“Really? T’who?” Christian asks.
“To Satan,” Mort answers.