Teaser 2

Peter juggled his packages trying to fish his keys out of his pocket. He heard the last ring of the telephone just before the answering machine sprung to life, barking in a synthetic variant of his voice that he was not home, but if anybody was interested in the apartment, or anything for that matter, please leave a message. Then came a whimpering tweet and a muffled voice. Peter retrieved his keys but dropped them to the floor, accidentally sending them down a flight of steps with a swift, slipping kick. Down he lurched spastically, almost knocking over a woman and her little girl. "Excuse me!" he belched, squeezing into the corner to let them go by. The woman held her hand over her heart as she breathed deep and proceeded up the stairs in a steady march. Scooping up his keys he wheeled around and ran tap dance up the steps, hearing the click and beep of the machine before he could get the door open.
Entering the apartment he dropped the bags of sponges, mops, toilet paper, cigarettes, vitamins, dish washing detergent, and roach killer on the dusty floor, and raised his hands behind his head to stretch. He slipped out of his coat and loosened his tie, looming over the black and gray box while he flicked on the light. When he punched the playback button the tape whizzed back and came to a popping halt, then started to play.
"Hello, Peter. This is your father. I just wanted to call and remind you to call your mother tomorrow. It's her birthday. Please try not to forget like you usually do."
The second message was from FrankFrFrFrankLin, the guy who called earlier in the week about sharing the apartment, but Peter hadn’t returned his call. Something about him bothered Peter, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Was it a mild sarcasm he detected, or just the affected stutter that mimicked a digital delay? Whatever it was, Frank didn’t sound like a person he especially wanted to get to know. He didn’t want to be toyed with.
He sat for a while and Sally came to his mind. Was she too gangly? No. A lot of upper class waspy chicks are built like that, though it was less common amongst suburban mutts. It shows she had some good blood in her somewhere, unlike himself. He tried to conjure her image, but it would come and go. One moment she was there and the next, gone, or warped by the alternating forces of anxiety and desire. It was hard to hold an image in the unruly chattering in his head, and among the nervous ticks of his body. So many times it wasn't quite Sally. It was Sally combined with his math teacher from ninth grade, or Sally and a girl he once had a crush on but never spoke to out of shyness. Sometimes these hybrids were good enough, but usually they just frustrated him.
There were so many drawings he had tried to make of her, but he wasn’t much of a portrait artist. Actually, he wasn’t much of an artist at all, but he had kept it up since discovering that it was a harmless, and sometimes pleasant, way to wile away hours wastefully. So many of them were nothing - felt pen on yellow legal pad, or pink order-forms from work. They cluttered up odd nooks of the apartment, or got mixed in with stacks of mail or magazines. Besides the ones he made of Sally there were various animals, trees, buildings, monsters, alien beings, and then there were the diagrams of the way he thought his mind worked. He would occasionally find inspiration in the idea that if he could create a schematic, he might find out what was wrong and fix it. It wasn’t even the computer programmer in him that got him going on this project, but after having spent unreasonable time alone he fell under the spell of the notion that art was a form of medicine. Out of the smatterings of occultism and psychology he had read, the Freud and Jung and Crowley and Gurdjieff and Erikson and Rogers and Skinner and Blavatsky and Horney and Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari and Regardie and Miller and Khan and countless others, including a great deal off the paperback self-help pile, all that being your own best friend, and pulling your own strings, and winning through intimidation, he concocted his own recipe for therapeutic activity that involved, mainly, pushing himself further into his fantasy world, masturbating when he was anxious, and drinking to avoid desperation.
The drawings he made of Sally were more a form of reconnaissance. He had been hoping that his unconscious would yield information about her that would get him more of what he wanted. Of course that assumed he knew what he wanted, but since he spent so much time chasing after her it seemed that she was all he wanted. But what did that mean?
He changed into his most filthy and ragged clothes and tried to imagine the place spotless and all in order. It seemed nearly impossible. Everything was in perfect disarray. Nothing that belonged together was together. Books, junk mail, and magazines lay scattered across the floor in heaps with pieces of clothing, record albums, CDs, and empty food containers like it had all been washed up from a ship wreck. Over everything was a snow-like layer of dust, sometimes partially wiped free in streaks and hand prints. The rug was faded by dust and spotted with dark stains. Against such odds Peter would usually abandon hope, or look for it out at a bar. This was a type of stress he wasn’t used to putting himself through. He stood up swaying, feeling slightly faint, and realized that he would need more help, and so he put on his coat and set off quickly to the corner grocery.
A cluster of youthful vagrants teemed outside the shop. Peter moved through as covertly as possible, not wanting to provoke a loudmouth mohawk or lycanthropist into insult flinging, since it would eventually include everyone, and make him the center of attention. The sudden swing toward extroversion would make it impossible for anything but bar-hopping, and then he wouldn’t get anything done at all, probably for days. The temptation to swing at a skateboard punk was almost irresistible. Peter centered himself, and focused on his goal, the purchasing of an inexpensive, but not too rude, six pack, and threw himself at it.


Some few days later Peter found himself, sitting at the office, once again marveling at the cathode box on his desk, the thinking machine he had newly acquired, since he had be chosen to pave the way into the digitized era for his department. And why not? His time was cheap enough. He would often trance-out trying to figure out what it was with these machines anyway. Were they intelligent, after all, and was the one he was staring into on his desk actually staring back at him, or was that merely his paranoiac delusion. Not paranoid, but paranoid-like, since it wasn’t anything nearly psychosis, but an openness he told himself he had about things most other people would never even begin to think about. It was his job to be so, not a job he got paid for, not very much anyway, though he often categorized this behavior along with a number of others under the heading of “problem solving skills and techniques” which he believed were valuable and instrumental, though they were not usually things he could talk about with his employers and peers, or anyone, in fact.
But the machine almost seemed to have an intuition, and would often get stuck on things the same way he would, though possibly for different reasons. At his most inward moments, when he was most open to possibility, and therefore to thoughts resembling the paranoid, though only parallel in content and structure to the actual diagnostic model, he even had the inkling of a belief, with some reservation, that the machine was jesting at him, that it had a superior sense of humor to his, possibly a superior, though obviously faster, intelligence, and this thought made him sink into a sour, shrinking state that punctuated all progress like the wall of a foundation a worm had run into on its merry way. He was just about at the point of stupefaction when his phone rang.
“What?”
“Boy, what's the matter with you?” It was Sally.
He briefly listed a number of distractions that had been forced on him earlier in the morning: Dave had sent him out for coffee because his secretary was out sick, and Marion, the receptionist and ice machine, was at the doctor. When Marion came back there was a delivery for the water cooler, and since they had changed temp agencies, and all the temps were new, she thought it wasn’t quite right to overwhelm them with such a task. Horace, the sixty year old clerk, had vanished, had fallen asleep in the men’s room. Three printers ran out of paper. One had jammed, and Peter had to take it apart to get at one little shred that kept it that way. The water delivery man had broken one of the jugs, which had to be dealt with right away because the water was seeping into the carpeting and into the network cabling below. A quarter of the office’s terminals had gone down in the meantime, which he had to contend with while trying to dummy up three graphs Dave needed for a meeting he was late for. Last, but not least, as he was trying to bring up a terminal for a temp, she received a call from a friend, telling her that her boyfriend, it turns out, had been married all along. She ran out of the office crying, and hadn’t returned, which meant he had to finish the work she had been doing before getting down to the monthly accounting, since the accountant had been out on a “Nervous Disability.”
“So I guess I caught you at a bad time.”
Peter sagged into his desk, leaning on his elbows. "Nah, not really. I can always get back into it. So what's up?"
“I have something to ask you.”
She told him that her parents had been after her for some time to visit. She wanted to know if he wanted to come for the weekend.
Peter, half amazed, felt his heart sink.
“Did they ask you to bring me?”
“No,” she said. “But when I said you were coming they didn't protest.”
“Last time I spilled a glass of red wine on their white rug.”
“And you left before dinner.”
“I thought they’d never want to see me again.”
“Peter, they liked you. I told you that.”
“It didn't seem like that. They seemed extremely polite.”
There was a short silence in which Peter felt a stretching and reconfiguring of his digestive organs as he held his breath. “Okay. I'll go. You just cover for me, all right?” Sally agreed and hung up. He put down the phone and smiled to himself, scratching his head. The neon images stood still on the monitor as if waiting for an answer to a question. No. It was time for another cup of coffee.


When he got home, Peter looked and saw that there were no messages on the answering machine. He'd have to hang more advertisements on Monday, or when he got home on Sunday night. He pulled out his remaining fliers from under a pile of papers and magazines he had made the night before. They were wrinkled and streaked with black from cigarette ash. Dusting them off, and straightening them out, he decided they were good enough.
He changed his clothes quickly, packed a soiled-black knapsack, and called Sally to find out where they should meet. In front of the information booth would be fine, she said. He checked his wallet and decided he needed more money. If he walked, there'd be plenty of machines on the way. Wasting no time, he turned off all the lights, locked the door, and ran down the steps.
The train left in forty minutes, so he had to rush. As he paced up First Avenue he dodged passers-by and ran between cars at the crossings. The traffic was heavy and it moved thunderously fast at times, only to halt at one light after another. His heart began mimicking its rhythm, and he checked every store front he passed for a clock. Ten blocks up he saw one on the wall in a cleaners. Time was running short. He began to panic and felt like he wasn't sure where his feet were, if they were with him or a couple of yards behind him.
About half way to Penn he realized he wouldn't have time. He started signaling to passing cabs, but none were empty. When he didn't see any for as far as he could see down the avenue he turned and fled, feeling his limbs becoming light and weak. Whatever he did, he couldn't miss the train. It was most important not to make another bad impression on the Cantors. He saw their faces floating in the air above his head, looking down at him with frowns of disappointment.
He flew across thirty-third street, dancing through the traffic. Down he went over the stairs weaving in and out of the crowd and came crashing onto the floor, the snapping of his sneakers alerting everyone of his arrival. Startled commuters scattered out of his way as he lunged toward the next set of stairs, but he stopped, noticing the clock overhead that told him he had ten minutes. She can wait, he thought, and spun around back to the ATM he had just passed. There were only two people waiting.
He fidgeted and paced over a three foot patch of dirty tile, counting each breath he took from one to ten, and over again, to keep his mind from racing. But the time seemed to stretch like a huge and bilious helium cloud inside his head making him dizzy and perplexed. Finally he got to the machine, and he tried to punch in his code, and was successful on the third try. He took out far more money than was necessary and ran out to meet Sally.
“There you are,” she said. “I was getting worried. Hurry up. Here, I bought you a ticket.”
He took it into his sweaty hand and pressed his dry lips into her face as the rushed toward the stairs to the platform. Running down the steps, he tripped over his own feet, but caught himself as he landed three steps down.
“Geeze, you okay? Watch yourself,” said Sally catching up to him and putting her arm over his shoulders. “You'll break your head wide open on one of these stairs if you don't.”
“Yeah, I'm okay.” He found pleasure in this, her caring for him this way, although the idea of a gaping crevice in his skull gave him a vague chill.
The train was crowded and they stood for the first part of the ride. Beside them was a woman with a baby in a stroller who smelled as though it needed its diapers changed. Peter realized then that it was probably the restroom, which was only a few feet away with its door open. Both were used to riding these trains at all hours of the night, when the toilets were stuffed and the sticky rank of stale beer filled the air. They were lucky the heaters were on low, as not to agitate the air any further. He began to recognize the smell of pizza drifting in from somewhere in the middle of the car, and a hotdog with sour kraut, and a burnt pretzel. All of these odors coalesced into a faint smell of rotting garbage, which was familiar enough to Peter, having lived in his apartment.
Sally was looking at herself in a hand mirror, rubbing a spot on her lower lip that seemed swollen. He adored the clumsiness with which she dealt with her face. He leaned over and pecked her on the forehead, settling for that for the time being. She glanced up briefly, raising the corner of her mouth in a half-smile.
"So, what'd you do?" Peter asked.
"Oh, I was talking on the phone while I ate lunch today, and I bit myself. That's all."
"How did you manage that? Most people bite their tongues."
"I'm especially talented, that's how. That's why you love me." She dropped her mirror into her bag and rubbed his head.
When the train got to Jamaica people got off to switch, and before the next bunch flocked in Peter and Sally took two seats facing each other in the corner of the car. Sally went into her bag and pulled out a book and started reading. Peter rested his head back and felt the vibrations of the train in his whole body, reminiscing about the days he commuted on these trains. He thumbed the edge of his paperback and the pages flipped like a deck of cards. Over and over he repeated this, listening to the quiet zip. He fell asleep and dreamed a big man was trying to break his skull open with a jack hammer. When he woke up he found he had toppled over, and felt the vibrations of the window rattling against the side of his head.

Their car was waiting at the station when the train pulled in. It was a hybrid war tank and highway patrol vehicle, with its windshield swept back reflecting the roof of the train and the sky. As they walked toward it the image of Sally's mother smiling and waving behind the glass grew clearer through the glare. Mr. Cantor sat reposed and grinned when the door opened. Sally hugged and kissed her mother, and then stretched behind her to greet her dad. Peter smiled and put out his hand to Mrs. Cantor, and was pulled to receive a kiss on the cheek.
“Oh, it's good to see you again, Peter.” She flapped her wrist after letting go of his hand, placing her fingers on his chest.
“It’s nice, you having me. Thanks.”
“Hi Peter.” Mr. Cantor turned over his hand ever so slightly with his fingers extended. Peter reached. It was large and muscular, but his grip was limp. Peter looked at him intently, trying in vain to make or gain an impression. His eyes were the very rich blue of his daughter’s. His hair was whitened, but full and coarse. It accentuated his reddish tanned skin. Mrs. Cantor had her daughter's blonde hair, but her eyes were a cat-like gold on amber, like a star sapphire, though more velvety. He had trouble looking away whenever they caught his. It was always this way. She seemed to be aware of this and invited his stare with a friendly wince that terrified him.
They both climbed into the back and the door slammed behind them. As they pulled out of the parking lot Mr. Cantor began talking about the previous week's ski trip. They passed through a small village into a larger town past the lights of a shopping plaza. There was a wooded residential area, and the car went winding up and down the dark leafy hills. It had been a long time since he'd been out of the city, several months at least, and a worm of delight bored a hole through his anxiety. Night in the suburbs looked different than in the city. It had been long enough that he took notice. The lights were often smaller and further away. They twinkled behind gatherings of trees that mingled and swarmed as they sped by. Even while passing through a busy section the sky was dark and wide instead of cut off in sections by cramped rows of buildings. Lastly they passed into another wooded section and up a hidden drive to a very well-kept Victorian at the top of the hill.
They sat around the table in semi-dark kitchen while Peter ate leftovers out of the aluminum foil they had been wrapped in a few hours earlier. There was roast beef, boiled potatoes, lima beans, and corn. On top of that, Mr. Cantor, who insisted on being called Al, had poured him a glass of scotch, and opened a beer besides, since Peter hadn't been able to decide which he really wanted. He should have felt thoroughly at home, but there was something awkward. It always bothered him when he found in himself the urge to lick the private parts of his host’s wife, and even more so if she was his girlfriend’s mother. He had been watching her as she set things on the table, her gestures, the movements of her eyes, and so forth, and now the way she looked at him across the table. She seemed to be signaling to the whole household that she had some strange and undisclosed intent aimed at Peter, and he was simmering with paranoia.
Sally had hunted through the refrigerator for whatever raw vegetables she could find and had thrown them in a bowl. She sat back and ate them with her fingers, occasionally sneaking a piece of meat from Peter, which made him feel more a part of the family.
Al was breaking up wood for kindling and throwing it into the fireplace. Helen sat at the table with Peter and Sally, competing with her daughter. Her crossed legs rode out from under her satin bathrobe, covered by nothing but a pair of blue pantyhose. Her big toe stuck out slightly through a hole, and she wiggled and circled it occasionally to make the opening bigger. Sally stood up, wiped her hands on her thighs, unlatched her jeans, and pulled them down and let them fall to the floor. A wisp of her pubic hair showed as she stretched before sitting back down again in only her briefs and sweater. She leaned over the table and resumed crunching away on a carrot. The kitchen was getting warmer from the fire in the adjacent room, but Peter decided it was best to leave his clothes on. He excused himself and got up from the table, looking for the bathroom, which he remembered was around the corner from the kitchen.
He splashed his face and dried it on a small towel, and then escaped into the mirror. It was a little dark because of the dimmer switch and his shallow pock marks were more eerily shadowed than usual. His face was more lined on the right than on the left, and this made him look like he was perpetually turned more to one side. His hair was not quite straight, not quite wavy but took off in directions of its own without regard to decency of style. He had once tried growing a beard to even out his appearance, but it also followed no logical pattern and made him even more misshapen. For moments at a time it was an average person's face, but then it began to grow odd and unrecognizable. It happened when he looked for too long.
When he returned Al stood in the doorway, filling most of the space with his tall and heavy frame. He put his hands in his back pockets and oversaw the activity in the room. A twitch seemed to catch him in the eye as he looked at his wife.
“How was that? Everything okay?” he asked Peter.
“Sure. Fine. Fine,” said Peter's disembodied voice, as he navigated the dizziness of his anxiety.
“Okay. Well, when your done I've got something to show you.”
“I guess I’m done enough.”
Peter finished and followed Al into the den. There he had, beside a pile of laundry and an ironing board, in a room that was largely white and over lit, a video camera on a tri-pod, a bunch of tapes and a large screened television.
“This is my new hobby. Helen gets annoyed having all this stuff around, but she rarely uses this room anyway - as you can tell. She usually watches TV in the bedroom.”
“Oh. Nice.” Peter bent his head downward as to seem to take an interest. Al looked at him firmly, almost a look of anger.
“You can take your hands out of your pockets and relax,” he said, raising his voice slightly. “No one around here is going to bite you.” He then smiled and resumed.
Peter, who was a little beside himself, although relieved to have been torn out of gear, thought he should try to input something of his own. “Have you done anything special?” was all he could come up with.
“Mostly just friends and family stuff. I do have about a half an hour of a squirrel playing around a tree. It's kind of interesting. You want to see it?”
“Sure.”
“You know, a lot of people don't like squirrels,” said Al, reaching into a drawer full of cassette tapes. “Most people around here positively hate them.”
“Why's that?” Peter asked.
“Oh, a lot of reasons.” Al scrunched his face and thought a second. His hand went to the top of his head and hovered above, holding a lock of white-gray hair between his middle and ring finger. When it fell he began to speak again. “First of all, a lot of people complain that they eat through the electrical and telephone wires. Some say they chew apart their attics, actually eat holes through the roof so that rain gets in. Others say that they even eat away at the foundations of their houses, but I don't believe any of that crap. Maybe sometimes they'll eat through a wire or something, but their usually not that dumb. Bats won't even do anything that stupid. And you can hear them fluttering around sometimes too. No, I think the whole thing with the squirrels started when a little girl in the neighborhood killed her little brother with her father's electric pruning shears. She'd been acting a little strange for a while. She was having angry fits in school ­– toppling over her desk in the middle of class, hitting the teachers, throwing food around the cafeteria. Before that she had been fairly quiet. Not especially so. You know, just normal.” He stopped a moment as he popped the tape into the slot and punched buttons on the control panel.
“Wow, so what does this have to do with squirrels? I mean, not to be...”
“Oh. I was getting to that.” He stood up and faced Peter, flicking the television on as he started. “They ran some tests and found out that she was rabid, but it was too late. She died in a hospital, heavily drugged and strapped down to her bed. Poor Grizboes. What a heart-breaking thing to happen. Both kids within a month.” He scratched his chin as he stared off into space.
“So did they think that she was bitten by a squirrel? Is that what this is about?” Peter twitched nervously, playing with his fingers.
Al turned his eyes to Peter. They hardened for a moment but went off into a stare again. “Yeah,” he said drawing together his attention. “They found a bite mark, or so they say. You know kids. They're always getting hurt. It could have been anything. Somebody – some specialist – said it was a squirrel bite, but I don't know how they could tell. It had been festering for some time. I just don't know why nobody noticed it before it got that bad.”
“Maybe they thought it was something else.”
“Maybe.”
Peter watched Al as he stood quietly. He seemed to be contemplating something of some moral significance. He just tapped on his chin for a while, standing tall and erect like a soldier. He could see him in buckskin, tiptoeing around the forest, talking to the animals. He thought about the times he himself had watched the squirrels playing in the park while he was sitting at a bench, either resting his feet or eating his lunch. He remembered being surprised when one ate through a chunk of his roast beef sandwich in a flash. He hadn't known they were carnivorous.
“So,” Peter said, trying to break the silence, “what do you think it was?”
“Probably something paranormal.”
“Oh. I can see why you might think that. Sure.”
He watched the snow on the screen when Al turned on the VCR, flicked off the lights, and sat uncomfortably close to him on the sofa. There were a couple of flashes of white while the tape advanced. Then there was a quick flash - not more than a fraction of a second – in which he thought he saw Helen standing naked. Al seemed to sigh for a moment, but went quickly back to his long deep breathing. Peter thought it had to be her, but he knew he better not ask. Perhaps she was wearing something after all, and he had just imagined she wore nothing. Immediately following was a tree from the backyard. The camera stayed locked on it for a couple of seconds and then panned across the lawn toward the shrubs on the left, down to someone's feet, and up to the top of a tree.
With each movement it took the picture a second or two to focus, and some of the images in between were only a blur across the screen. Finally the lens found the squirrel. It focused and then zoomed in. The image bounced as if the person holding the camera was walking. Meanwhile the squirrel grew larger, and intermittently out of focus. When it was close enough so that it took up the whole picture it zoomed back again. A blurred image of a large pink hand now and then entered from the bottom holding small white objects toward the animal between its fingers. The squirrel would shy away, dance from side to side, bounce up quickly and take the food, then retreat. This happened several times until the camera jerked forward. The animal then shot to the right, disappearing into a blur of green and brown, and reappeared when the lens came into focus again on the trunk of a tree. It clung with its legs wrapped in a small arc. The picture shook and the squirrel spun and shot back down after a piece of bread that was lying on the grass, only to run back up the tree with a piece in its mouth. Then for no apparent reason it dropped the bread, ran back down to get it, and up again, only to repeat what it had just done. This happened a few times until it forgot all about the bread and started running around in circles and sometimes in figure eights, sometimes in no recognizable pattern whatsoever. Peter, who had been watching mainly out of politeness, and partially because he wanted to understand the point of it, was getting taken in. It was like watching a child at play, running around hysterically, but stranger, more exotic, and in many ways much more graceful as if it were weaving a bizarre and indecipherable script. It was like a dream. Like the grey watery phantom that spins around in his sleep. He continued to watch as the ballet grew more and more frenetic. The squirrel was leaping from hind to fore in quick, jagged motions, scampering madly from side to side, standing up with its arms outstretched, and diving on its stomach violently. The camera leveled to the ground, and lost the image for a moment. Suddenly there was nothing but a large grey blur, with a big black dot and teeth. Peter nearly leaped off the sofa but caught himself, and the grey streak disappeared into the upper left hand corner of the picture.
Al was chuckling to himself. “Isn’t that something?” he said, standing up and turning on the lights. “I thought I was going to piss in my pants when that thing came at me the way it did. Playful little bastards.”
“I have to admit, though,” he continued after a few moments. “I peppered the bread. That's what really got him going.”