“The Collective”

Our name is 601126 and we live on Ruth.

Our life began liquid and dark, miasmic in a brass-ringed syringe. In a series of hasty pricks, we became. Now that we’re away from the needle, we exist on a pale, dry landscape that alters and shrinks with every passing day. We cling to the elongating hills of our home to survive.

Our accommodations are terrible. We have no nose, but we feel the heavy stench. If we had eyes, we’d see horrors that would drive us to blind our self with the needle that bore us. Though earless, we sense sounds so sharp with pain, we long to burrow deep into Ruth’s rumbling and pounding heart. Her pulse is our only comfort.

On this bumping, jolting rhythm we’ve learned how life sustains on many plains. When we were plump and deloused, number 6 at the end complained of Ruth’s hips. Her full flesh pummeled 6 when she walked or ran, her forearms bumping against her sides in cushioned assaults. These days Ruth’s hips are more bone than meat, and they slap hard against us, though with less vigor than before. Her stubbled head pierces us when she cowers and raises her arms to shield herself from blows. From that we offer but pitiful protection.

6 at the end gripes the most; he is uncomfortable and out of sorts, sour and sore from abuse.

“This is our home now, 6,” number 2 said. “Stop whining, will you? You’re making it hard for the rest of us.”

“But how can we ignore these conditions?” 6 at the end asked. “We’re starving here. And have you noticed the ugly sore next to me? It’s getting bigger. And it’s not just me complaining, you know. Even Ruth moans; I feel her racking breath on me at night. I think we need to do something, 2.”

Being the most rational one among us, 2 replied, “I’m sorry, 6, but what we can stand no ground beyond Ruth. For good or ill, and I grant you it’s mostly ill, we’re part of this body and she’s a part of us. What we can do, my friends, is to move with her rather than against her. By helping her, we help our self.”

The collective self is what 2 meant. Each number enjoyed a separate identity (some with more personality than others), but together we formed a six-digit alliance.

6 at the end pouted at 2’s response. He expected a hurrah or, at the very least, a polite applause for his impassioned speech. We mumbled amongst ourselves and discussed 2’s assessment of the situation. We stole furtive glances at 6 at the end, and 6 at the front cast an apologetic look toward the last in line, sympathetic to his twin.

6 at the end felt justified expressing concern about the bloody hole coring its way into Ruth’s flesh. It wouldn’t take long for it to fester into a stinking abscess, pus-filled and oozing like a rancid jellied pastry. The larger the sore became, the greater the chance of it eating away at one or more of us. Despite 2’s calm demeanor, 6 at the front, 0, and the 1s lingered over the notion of diseased flesh looming, wondering when or if one of us might be devoured. We quieted and prepared for another day of burning labor, heated and sticky sweat, followed by an unrelenting cold.

Clinging to Ruth’s forearm, we swung rhythmically as our host walked to a workstation. She lifted the handle of something heavy and awkward out of the mud. The object made a sucking vibration upon its release, as though the earth were giving it a final kiss goodbye. The tendons in Ruth’s wrist strained against the effort. First 1 screamed as he stretched beyond second 1, frightened of losing his place in line. If only second 1 had hands and arms, he would have reached to pull first 1 back. Ruth’s body relaxed for a moment, easing first 1 back into rank, but the number had no time to rest. For every digging motion, the rigid cords of Ruth’s arm flexed and released, propelling first 1 into a relentless ride of nauseating motion. The other numbers groaned in pity, knowing that it could have been any one of us in that position. Luck of the draw, as it were, saved the others from suffering first 1’s fate that day. But any other task could have brought the same result to 0 or second 1 or 2 or even to the entire collective.

First 1 endured the heaving until dusk, collapsing at last against Ruth’s overstrained sinew, her filthy skin. “From one hell to another,” muttered 6 at the end.

The other numbers tried to encourage first 1.

“We’re proud of you,” 0 said. “You really hung in there.”

“I’m not sure any of us could have fared better,” said 6 at the front.

“Yes,” said first 1, soft with fatigue. “Thank you. I’m not sure I could have done it alone. Just knowing we were all there helped me today.”

“Do you see what I’m talking about?” said 6 at the end. “This treatment is intolerable. It’s inhuman. It’s an abomination, I say!”

“6…,” 2 began.

“No!” said 6 at the end. “I’m tired of your reasoning, your passivity! First 1 is the final straw. Do you want 6 at the front to suffer like that tomorrow? Or 0 or second 1 or me? What about yourself, there, 2. I bet you’d be forming a plan this minute if a cut or bruise shadowed your days. Yes, it’s fine for you to tell us to calm down when you’ve had it easy all along. You never seem to endure any of the pains like the rest of us. Well, I say we stand up and let our self be counted! I say we fight for our liberation this day. What say us? Are we with me?”

We huddled together and murmured our various opinions. 2 and 6 at the end stood rigid on Ruth’s tender wrist. The rest of us noticed that the lesion on Ruth’s arm had grown worse over the course of the day. We felt that the wound had become fetid and that its circular boundary, so perfectly formed despite the pollution gurgling within and churning to escape, was creeping ever closer to the collective. Our situation was serious, more so than just a few hours before. This, in addition to the daily tension between numbers and flesh, the occasional rope burn, stinging slap, or result of sickening vice, was an enemy that could not be fooled or deferred. It was an inevitable intrusion that loomed with an awful, impartial power.

Second 1 cleared his throat and said, “With all due respect, 2, I think we’re all getting a bit nervous, and not just about the general conditions here. That sore is definitely worse now. It’s much closer to 6 at the end.”

“Finally noticed, did you?” said 6 at the end.

“Yes,” said second 1, ignoring 6’s sarcasm. “It’s dangerously nearer to 6. To all of us. I think we might consider acting.”

“I agree with second 1,” 0 said. “But I can’t imagine what we could do. 2, have you any ideas?”

The buzz of agreement tickled Ruth’s arm and she scratched us with her jagged, mud-encrusted fingernails, breaking the skin over 6 at the front.

“Oh, 6, are you alright?” 0 asked, concerned as a bead of blood appeared.

“Yes, I’m fine, thank you.”

“You see that!” 6 at the end said. “Do you see? An abrasion today could easily lead to an infection tomorrow. The next thing you know, we’re obliterated. That is not my idea of a heroic ending.”

“We’re not here to be heroes, 6,” 2 said calmly.

“Then why are we here, 2?” 6 at the end asked. “To be victims? To set an example? I suppose you have all the answers.”

“No, I don’t. But I do know one thing: We’re only digits. We’re but a small series of numbers embedded in flesh, with no destination, no purpose, no reason for our self. We exist here because Ruth does. Where she goes, we go. In a sense, we are her. We have no identity other than how she has defined us and no range of motion but what she allows. And, if you haven’t figured it out already, we’re about as welcome on her body as that sore. She rubs us raw at night and presses on us, as if to push us further into her body and make us disappear. I feel the bruising; I just don’t see the use in complaining about it. So 6 at the front, do you really think Ruth has given one thought to that puny scratch she just left on you?”

6 at the front was silent.

“And first 1,” 2 continued, “do you believe for a second that Ruth minds your aches and pains, or any of our other problems? Between the beatings and starvation, I doubt, frankly, if she’s worried about us at all. My friends, we’re only guests on this flesh. We’re the company of cold efficiency, imprisoned here as much as Ruth. We should welcome some disease to eat away at us. Then we would be one less reminder to Ruth of her powerlessness. Perhaps if we simply disappeared one day, faded into tissue and bone, Ruth would cease to be an inkwell and become human again, if only for a moment. That is the best we can do. It is all we can do.”

We considered 2’s words. Until then, none but 2 had realized our truth. We all, 6 at the end especially, had taken our self for granted. It wasn’t the syringe that gave us life, but Ruth. Remembering our flow as dye through a hollow tube, each number envisioned movement, like the phantom limb of an amputee. We were worse than a series of permanent digits. We were a parasite.

We drifted to sleep on the whimpering rhythm of Ruth’s pulse. In the morning, 6 at the end was gone; the insidious crater had consumed the last digit overnight. 6 at the front wept, 0 sat stoic, the 1s cried as well, and 2 was silent though shivering in the insecurity of our new position. Our landscape had turned colder and harder still and we realized then that Ruth, too, had died. By midmorning, we were dropped into a terrifying terrain. And as another tattooed collective strained against the shovel it raised to bury us in loam, 2 uttered the last words we would know:

“Ha-Makom y’nachem et’chem b’toch sha’ar aveilei Tzion v’Yerushalayim.” May God comfort you among the other mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.

Published in The Medulla Review, Vol. 3, Issue #2 (2011)

__________________
“Cultural Emergency”

As of today, I am the new curatorial assistant at the Andrew Jackson Art Museum in Hot Coffee, Mississippi. I don’t know diddly about art, yet I’ve been given carte blanche to swipe my white-gloved fingers across expensive gilded frames. Experience, however, tells me that official attire won’t make me any less incompetent.

I sit at a used, steel-toed desk in my new office, staring intently at the first few pages of The Registrar’s Handbook, and dawdle over the memories that led me here. I consider my former employer, who ran a publishing house on the edge of town. She was a mean little thing, born in India and schooled at Tuscaloosa. She thought she was Kali, Destroyer of Illusion.

I may not know art, but I did, and do, know books. After graduating from Ole Miss and embarking on a vague career in the humanities, I’d thought, What better place for an avid reader to work than at a publishing house? I imagined sitting all day at a big oak desk under the light of a library-endorsed green lamp. I re-read To Kill a Mockingbird, Gone with the Wind, and A Confederacy of Dunces. I bought glasses to make myself look professionally bookish. I found a cheap tweed jacket and smart pumps at Sears. I considered purchasing a pipe. Then I applied for the receptionist job at Kali’s firm, figuring I’d work my way up the commercial ladder. Instead, she took one look at my getup, complete with flaccid hair and virgin brows, and assigned me to the lowest caste possible: file clerk.

Let me just say, I butchered my nails for that woman. I tore a rotator cuff wrenching open one of her overstuffed metal drawers. I got shin splints running back and forth from my office to hers, a distance that even Flo Jo would question. Every Friday I received a soul-crushing progress report to mull over the weekend and file on Monday. In her squiggly scrawl she’d write unhelpful evaluations like, “I question your ability to alphabetize.”

Eventually, my automatic pilot failed and the captain of my soul came aboard, rescuing me from further physical and emotional injury. I began applying to every clerical position listed in the newspaper’s career section.

I didn’t hear a peep for weeks, and then, a miracle. I kissed that woman’s sarid-ass goodbye and now find myself employed at the only place that bothered to contact me.

My new boss, Paul, is the curator. He wears pressed and belted khaki trousers, Italian loafers, and a crisp white shirt that barely conceals his soft paunch and the outlines of his nipple rings. He has decorated his spartan office walls with postcards he receives in the mail announcing new art exhibitions. He has a proliferation of two-dimensional nude, or nude-ish, male figures taped on the wall behind his computer monitor, forming a halo of porn. He’s also into florals. They take up the wall behind his desk chair.

Even though I have a liberal arts degree, which suggests I dabbled in art history, I am convinced Paul hired me because my über-artsy black-framed glasses complemented his aesthetic. Still, Paul assured me first thing this morning that he has every confidence I’ll do just fine. Then he plucked The Registrar’s Handbook off the bookshelf in my new office and told me that all he wanted me to do this first week was learn.

I don’t know how to take that.

***

The last curatorial assistant left unexpectedly. Rumor has it that it had something to do with claustrophobia. I can see the validity. Save for the desk and bookshelf, every inch of wall space is concealed by heavy metal filing cabinets circa 1960-something. Plus, there are no windows and the forced air smells like a toxic cocktail of asbestos, black mold, and mouse turds.

I am breathing shallow breaths over page forty-seven and trying to hyperfocus on the exactitudes of humidity control, when I hear a soft cough in my doorway. I don’t know this woman but she stands on the threshold of my stinky office with an authority that tells me I’d better find a bookmark.

I blink to readjust my long-distance vision, and when all’s clear I mentally catalog this lady’s essentials: dyed brown hair shaped like a fishbowl; a small wrinkled face hidden behind enormous sunglasses; a jazzy turquoise suit with a matching jaunty scarf knotted at the neck; suntan pantyhose, also wrinkled but at the ankles; and black patent-leather kitten heels that don’t disguise her extremely short stature. She’s a vision of southern gentility.

I smile to indicate I’m quite busy, but do have a few moments to spare.

“Are you the new helper?” Her drawl sounds like the lethargy of too much caramel cake.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Can I let you help me with something?”

Can I let you help me with something.

I’m from Walla Walla originally, but after four years at the University of Mississippi, I can say “y’all,” “fixin’,” “ma’am,” and “sir” like a native. Even my e-mail signature includes profound and pithy quotes by William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Walker Percy. Still, it takes me a second to translate her question into common courtesy.

“I want you to take a look at a picture upstairs,” she says.

“Which picture?” There are quite a few. After all, it is a museum.

“It’s the new landscape, darlin’.”

“I’m sorry, but you’ll have to narrow that down. This is my first day, you see.”

“Well, bless your heart, darlin’! It’s that wonderful Donoho. You know, the one with all the trees.”

“Oh, yes, that one,” I say.

But I still don’t have the first clue to what she’s referring. I saw the gallery once, and that was the day of my interview. I was so nervous, I concentrated on the vitals, like not tripping on the stairs or farting, or not tripping on the stairs AND farting. Who gives a shit about paintings? I could no more i.d. the art upstairs than I could the malevolent odor emanating from my former employer.

I let the jaunty lady lead the way. I’m just a hair over five foot one, but I tower over this Smurf.

We circle past the front desk, where the receptionist chats up a balding guy in a tie and sports coat whom I assume is a security guard. I nod to them both, and they stop gabbing for a second to stare in my general direction. I smile, say “Hey, y’all,” and they look away.

Jaunty Lady is halfway up the stairs before I realize I need to catch up. She’s spry for her age, whereas I’m huffing like a water buffalo by the time we reach the top step.

Slavishly panting, I follow her into the gallery space and am immediately blanketed in the solitude of culture. The air is cool and still. Paintings of every kind hang on walls colored moss green and sky blue, and the lighting…the lighting kills me. It is soft and sublime. Shadows play in the corners. I am overwhelmed with calm. This is my yoga, I decide. This is my meditation space.

“Wake up, darlin’,” she calls from the other side of the room. “The picture’s over here.”

This woman is totally harshing my mellow.

She points a bejeweled bony finger at the Donoho.

“Well, I can’t make out a magnolia from a jackrabbit’s backside. Quarter million dollar picture, and you can’t even see the dang thing. It needs more light. Where’s Paul?”

She begins swinging her head from left to right like an agitated pachyderm, and I notice she’s wearing her stupid sunglasses. If the Donoho were sitting on the sun, she still wouldn’t be able to “see the dang thing.”

I excuse myself to look for Paul and find him at his desk double-fisting a jelly donut and a cup of coffee. I explain the cultural emergency, watch him stuff what’s left of the donut in his mouth, and clean his hands with the wet wipes he keeps in his desk. He pulls a black device out of the top right drawer and motions toward the door.

We march in tandem down the hallway, past the reception desk, and up the stairs. My thighs burn. Now this is the kind of physical pain I can appreciate, unlike gangrenous paper cuts and weeping sores.

Paul pauses at the gallery entrance, a safe distance from Jaunty Lady, who is standing in front of the Donoho and blocking its view like a tiny linebacker.

“That’s Beryl Hollingsworth,” Paul whispers. “She’s a member of the museum board and a Renaissance Donor.”

Renaissance Donors give at least one hundred thousand dollars to the museum each year. Their money buys all sorts of benefits, like annual membership, a reserved table by a window in the museum café, a 20 percent discount at the museum gift shop, and a big ole swag bag of ass kissing. A hundred thousand dollars a year lets them demand anything they please, no matter how unpleasant, unproductive, or unethical, and get it. This is what Paul tells me, anyway.

“Hey, Beryl,” Paul calls out.

“Paul, look at this picture here. You’ve done such a wonderful job hanging it, but I really think it needs more light on it. Can we fix that?”

“Let me just check the light reading first.”

He pulls out the gadget he brought from downstairs, holds it near the center of the painting, and presses a button. Beryl purses her rouged lips.

“The light meter reads 25 to 28 foot candles. That’s pushing it for an oil painting.”

“Well, I don’t know about that thingamajig you’ve got there. But I do know it’s too dark, and I didn’t come all the way up here to look at a picture I can’t see.”

Paul tries to explain to her how light can hurt the art. Meanwhile, I study the Donoho and see what I never learned in school: art is a miracle of colors. I move close enough to the canvas to smell the previous owner’s dust and tobacco and the artist’s linseed and to see the individual brushstrokes in green, blue, yellow, brown, and white.  A paintbrush hair trapped beneath a swath of paint seems to me more significant than the artist’s printed signature at the bottom-right corner. This hair is three-dimensional proof that “Donoho Was Here,” that he actually held a brush to canvas, that he breathed on the field and sky he rendered.

I know nothing about Donoho but this painting, which will suffer under Beryl’s charge.

“Paul, it’s still not bright enough. Take off one more.”

Paul is on a ladder removing the metal screens that diffuse light from the 60-watt bulb. When he takes off the last screen, a harsh white hits the canvas, and all the friendly shadows shrink in this hideous blaze of glory.

“That’s better!” Beryl claps her hands, knocking her rings together.

“We really can’t do this with every painting, Beryl,” Paul says as he climbs down the ladder. “Too much light can damage them. And then we’ll have to budget for a conservator.”

“Oh, yes, yes. I know, I know. I just feel so much better now, don’t you? Would you just look at that, darlin’…uh, what did you say your name was?”

She half turns her head, and I can see one eyeball peering at me out the side of her sunglasses.

“I didn’t,” I say.

“Well, don’t you agree it’s better? Good lighting makes all the difference.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I say.

She’s right, but not in the way she thinks. Even I know that Beryl and her Confederate cash have ruined the Donoho. The artificial brightness casts a glare that wipes out the white and yellow highlights. The greens have no distinction and the blues are blah. The hair is a gaff, the signature a smear. This is a different painting altogether now.

I put my hard-learned, cover-your-ass philosophy into practice: I do not comment on the cheap art Beryl has just made. I do not knock those shades off her face and accuse her of fraud. I do not declare that she is nothing but a moneyed bitch disguised in Talbots clothing and Elizabeth Arden foundation.

***

After my “baptism by fire,” as Paul calls it, we head back to our respective offices, Paul to his porn, me to my new bible. I flip open the book on my desk and try to recapture an erudite atmosphere. My head swims with news, and it’s not just the technical jargon or Beryl’s dubious function or the fact that my boss has pierced nipples.

An hour later, Paul is standing in my doorway. “Hey, you doing okay?”

“Sure. I’ve learned a lot already, and it’s not even lunchtime.”

He smirks. “Beryl’s quite a character.”

“Better than Hamlet.”

“For what it’s worth, we’re really glad you’re here. There’s an exhibition coming up next month and I’m really going to need your help with the logistics. A lot more goes into these shows than people think.”

Paul doesn’t say this ominously, or, at least, that’s not how I take it. To me, he speaks in a collaborative spirit. I imagine tough, sweaty teamwork with the promise of a satisfying finish. Without warning I experience a moment of inspiration and, in this fertile, encouraging arena, I give myself permission to act.

“Paul, The Registrar’s Handbook says that excessive light is bad for the art.”

“You’ve already gotten to that chapter? Wow, you’re a fast reader.”

“But shouldn’t we fix it? The light for the Donoho, I mean?”

“A few weeks won’t hurt it.” Paul picks a donut crumb off his shirt.

“But, it’s like you said, if we change the light on the Donoho, we’ll have to change it on all the paintings.”

“I didn’t say that.”

I can tell he’s getting impatient with me, but I press on.

“But aren’t I sort of like the caretaker for the art?”

“Yes, that’s part of your job.”

“So why can’t we change the lighting back to the way it was?”

“Because in this place you have to pick your battles, and Beryl Hollingsworth is not worth the fight.”

What Paul says revives my automatic pilot. The HVAC kicks in, and a fresh gust of stink wafts over me.

Paul remains in the doorway with a stack of papers in his hand and beats silent time with it against his thigh. I sense a segue. Then, half smiling, he says apologetically, though I recognize a command when I hear one, “Hey, before you leave for the day, would you mind filing these? I think you can figure out where everything goes.”

My stomach sinks at the sight of vomitous yellow copies, bullying letterhead, deadly staples, razor-sharp brochures. The paper trail treads hard on my brief expectations, leaving me flatlined, saddened, and peeved. And as my elation careens off a cliff, I process my hardest lesson to date: shiny or shitty, every toilet serves the same purpose.

Published in The Subterranean Literary Journal #2 (2011)