JOYELLE MCSWEENEY
2 CHAPTERS (from Nylund, the Sarcographer)
Chapter 3
Overhaul
The sea snake struggles through the concrete, stuck; its sea has paralyzed around it. It exists
in hemi-arabesques; half, by half, by half and never progresses or seizes up out of this moment.
The five brown towers rise like sepals around this unpromising bed. Windows open sideways high
as the grimy cloud ceiling; here and there a woman rests her elbows on the metal sill and
contemplates this monster geometry, which is colossal and exact. Any child’s hand can grasp it:
The sky baffles the ground. The sky is a ground for what hieroglyphs may be tossed there by
the vagaries of the human candle, police lights, premieres. The woman turns the light on herself
like the spray of a shower. She slowly turns her pretty head. Some stories up, the flat curl of
the tire plant is pinned in place with the shrewd dart of a jet.
Any child’s hand can manage the way the buildings scratch at the cloud-jerkin as at an itchy back.
This is a sleep without invective but with tiny discrete infections wallowing in shores, in the
pedal antipodes, the feet poking free of the quilt as if to touch down into another life, there
to fasten on the cloudy doublet, grip the scimitar and ride off after the lady whose persimmon
trousers sink in the far distance. Or the hand thrown up on the cool pillow half open, where a
tight scroll or trombone slide or revolver might fit. At the morning alarm the body jackknifes,
slaps hand to ankle, swivels its bit into the life that was nowhere in the night’s divers
collection.
*
Nylund in his bed. The sheets’ sarcography. Last evening’s events battening him like something to
be regretted. Why? How he passed the dim alley of silhouettes. How he witnessed the usual congresses
of hands and hips and throats. Then a gathering of nightshade blue uniforms by the stoop of the
brown midblock building. On the lintel, numbers had fallen away and left pale eidolons, each empty
space punched with a nailhole which asterisked the building. Across the street, he placed his
hand on a railing caging the base of a tree and drew the leafy blackness around him. Silverbuttoned
and then trenchcoated men emitted from the house. They shut themselves into cars and were drawn away.
And then replenished and sped up the stairs on the gust of an ascending angel. The cop on guard turned
his flashlight on Nylund’s face. Hey moonface, over here.
Nylund breathed for a moment before willing himself to separate from the shadow which put its hands
on his cheeks and kissed his face. His upper body went stiff and paperlight as he rose and fell
across the street. The cop just watched him approach, his features thick as a slow schooner turning around.
“Whatch you doin out here tonight, paper-moon?”
Nylund could think of no answer. Practicing sarcography.
“Well look there’s been some bad business in this house. I don’t suppose you know nothin about it?”
“Nuh-no. What kind of business?”
“The kind of business that’s none of your business, if you don’t know nothin about it.”
“I was just wuh-walking by, really.” In moments of stress, Nylund’s chin made a motion like a typewriter
when someone’s punched return. It jerked right, then jerked left to its angle of incidence. The cop’s eyes
narrowed, and stayed narrow as his mouth relaxed.
“Alright buddy. I’ll take your word for it. But I’m taking down your name. I don’t like how you were
watching this house. You should keep moving on a night like this.”
Nylund gave his name and the address of the newspaper where he no longer worked to the policeman,
who recorded same with a stubby pencil on a ludicrously small pad. Nylund turned and took a few
steps away. It was as difficult to turn his back on this lit up house as to turn his back,
permanently, on the sun. The lamplight placed firm hands on his shoulders. But he kept walking,
with effort, away from the scene now still as fruit on a table, whores on a lawn, away from the
house of bad business.
*
Three blocks away Nylund stopped. He was huge and furious, his carapace big as the sky’s.
He shoved his feelers in his mouth then vomited out a thick beam of blackness. On a night
like this you should keep moving! he screamed at the windows. He shoved himself through the
walls. On the second floor, he scuttled up the sill to the wainscoting. He trundled along;
dropped down amid the boxes in the pantry, touching every grain of rice. On a night like this!
He skittered the floors. When light fell on him from any source, he moved faster and more efficiently.
Like information, he melted through the wall. Appeared to screams on the table, on the open book
littered with black unhygienic looking-specks. He whispered into the hand of a baby asleep in a
crib, and the baby breathed in response. He scaled its pink cheek, crawled across its pink wooly
hat, with difficulty. YOU SHOULD KEEP MOVING he bellowed to each limb as it sunk in to the
resiny stuff, finally clambering off the hot dome and onto the cool rail of the crib, then
over the wall paper’s humid cranial ridges. He reached the fireescape like a railroad of
diamonds, he arrived back at his own shoes again. They held his human feet. He was wet and
panting. On a night like this.
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