Twisted Branch

Smoke-smell but no smoke was upon me from the minute I walked up around the landing. Detail layered on nuance layered on accrued emotional experiences hang over this “Twisted Branch” lounge and tea bazaar like the archaeological dig site that is the flyer-covered corkboard by the front door. I can’t even begin to put a genre on the music, one minute nasal Indian technoragas, the next jazz and throaty blues. True to its décor, a Japanese-fashion seating area fills efficiently the front of the shop, the windows with hand-wrought steel “driftwood" fashioned from rebar dowels covering them instead of railways. A colorful festival flag runs above one of the dark lacquered tables that leaves barely enough room below for the tea-drinkers’ knees.

A few rattan and glass tables with tall, tribal-looking dining chairs fill out the rest of the front space up to the “kitchen,” which would be called if it served any alcohol besides Sapporo beer, Heineken, and microbrews, a bar. The clerks look like characters from an off-Broadway musical, at least one that features twenty-something Bohemians who style themselves after emo kids and Loreena McKennitt. Beyond the bar lies a full-on Turkish pasha with an even lower-lit alcove and table for trysts á la the Orient.

~~~

Faces, all a lot of faces guarded by words and food and laughter. Their words, guarded by the skirling reeds in the quarter-tone thumping music, are completely cut off. She walks in, slapping her sandals along the floor and realizes, festival atmosphere in the twinkling strands lights and tall glass votive candles or no, that indoors will not really be a good place. She idly fingers the genuine native-handicraft teapots and sniffs unattentively at the temple-quality boxes of Shouyeido incense. Beside her, she notes the artificial tree trunk with all its hidey-holes and wonders how many other people in this little, close chaya have been in her position.

Finally, she hears the voices of her two friends coming up the red tomato-soup stairs and calls to them to join her on the back porch. Even there, with the bamboo matting obscuring some of the lights glimmering through the trees on the distant, moonlit mountain, there are too many faces, not even friendly ones, to ensure there would be no trouble. Hookahs bubble like little fat men thrown into pools and clouds of cigar, pipe, and clove cigarette smoke are thick but not enough in the air.

A House Inside of a Whale

The power bill came like clockwork from Skopje Municipal Power Company, printed in equisite blackletter typeface, popping through the mail slot at 3:02 PM every Saturday. The power had only gone out three times that Marisa could remember, and never for very long. But when she had first answered the ad for a house inside of a whale, she had no idea what to expect.
While she walked over the round bulge under the hallway from the kitchen to the living room, she listened to the whooshing and creaking of the krill and seawater she knew was churning past beneath her feet. She set her dinner, couscous and tender teriyaki-soaked chicken with mixed frozen vegetables, on the tiny round table in front of the couch and went back into the kitchen to answer the phone.

"Hello?" she asked, reaching for a stray cookbook she'd left out. Marisa always felt compelled to clean while she was on the phone.

"Marisa, hey! It's Öner."

"Oh hi! Yeah, I've got the audits mostly done, but," she paused at a rumbling outside that signalled the whale about to clear her blowhole, a move which would break the connexion briefly. "Sorry about that."

"Oh, that is all right." Öner said dismissively. "But was everything ok with our books?"

"As best as I could find. You might want to keep an eye on your Baku office, though. I noticed some basically negligible but possibly ominous slips in their numbers," she said, wiping down the countertop. "Can I call you a little bit later, actually, Öner? I have dinner on the table."

"Oh yes, most certainly. Güle-güle, Marisa."

She hung up the phone and ate her dinner. Sometimes she missed the companionship of living on land, but not so very much. She never questioned too much how it worked, this house inside of a whale. For a year and a half it was hers by a lease that, despite being on standard whitest-white A4 paper, was filled with references not to renter's law, but to magic spells and arcane devices. The whole thing was signed under "Landlord" by "Zhp. Ronald Marietta-Sindowski" in Gujarat script.

The dishes washed up and put away, she took back up her place in reading The False House by
James Stoddard under the light from a stained glass lamp. That was another feature of the cetaceous house, that her cherry bookshelves in the tiny study never failed to have the books she wanted to borrow. They had plates in them or stamps from a half dozen different libraries. Sometimes, if she forgot to put them back on the shelf, they would disappear from where she left them of their own accord. One book, an orange-bound biography of Mishima Yukio bearing a stamp from the University of Pittsburgh Library, had never gone the way of the others. Marisa imagined a frustrated literature student hunting through the distant stacks for a book the system said was in, but sat instead in the depths of the sea.

As she reached a particularly engrossing chapter, she heard a knock at the front door that she hadn't used since moving in. At first she thought it was just some errant junk the whale had swallowed banging up against the tunnel beneath the floor, but when it didn't let up, she stood and hurried to the tiny foyer. "I'm coming!" she yelled, cursing under her breath as she tripped over a box of old blankets left by the door. The foyer had served as her storage room since the beginning.

"Hello?" she said, pulling open the door. A rush of smelly and cold salt air blew in with a fog hanging low in it. At the door stood a skinny brown-haired young man who looked to be in his mid- to early twenties. He was holding a dish of brownies.

"Are you Marisa Alrendarian?" he asked, proffering the brownies. She nodded and gestured for him to come inside. He continued, "I'm Michael Terence George. I just moved in around here." He motioned vaguely towards the dark cavernous belly of the whale behind him and stepped across the threshold.

"There's another house?" Marisa asked, her eyes a bit wide with incredulity. She shut the door quickly and threw the bolt.

"Well, if there wasn't before, there is now." He followed her into the kitchen and set the brownies, covered in smooth tinfoil, on the white laminate countertop beside the antique-looking refrigerator. "I just moved in yesterday, and the landlord said to at least say hello. How long have you been here?"

"A year this April," she replied. "I had no idea there was even enough room for two houses in the whale."

"I was sceptical in the first place," the newcomer said. "I mean, a house in a whale? At first I thought it was one of those kitsch-type houses like you see out West (you are American, right, you sound it) or at the beach. Then I figured maybe it was some kind of extreme survivalist deal, like Jonah on the way to Tarsus or something like that. Either way I was intrigued. Five hundred a month for to bedrooms, a kitchen, study and a living room... I couldn't pass it up. How bad are utilities?"

It was the strangest conversation that Marisa had had in years. This mop-haired guy was talking as though two houses in the belly of a whale was the most ordinary thing in the world, like single-family detached McMansions in Dallas or bungalows in Canberra. She wasn't sure that she even liked the idea of a neighbor - or neighbors! "DId you say two bedrooms?"

"Yeah! My buddy Sam and this girl Sylvia are living there with me. We were going to get a cat, too, but we figured it might not be a good idea."

She had moved away from everyone so as to not have to deal with people; she held too many regrets and lost friendships, and she couldn't have sat through another minute of her parents' messy divorce proceedings. She had to escape. Now the house inside of a whale was no longer her cozy hermitage.

"What are you all planning on doing down in here?" She went to one of the overhead cupboards and creaked open the fine-grained wood door. "Coffee? Tea?" She put on company manners gone a little stiff with disuse.

"Oh, no thanks. Could I get a glass of water, though, if you don't mind?"

"Sure."

Michael took a breath before launching into his and his housemates' plans. "Sylvia's a musician. She says she does a lot of ambient and that being in a whale is inspiring. She has a mad-complicated digital composing setup in her room. Two soundboards and a bunch of instruments. I'm working on a graphic novel. You ever read webcomics?"

"There's no internet here in the whale, Michael. I used to, back in college - but that was five years ago. There weren't many out there to read."

"You don't get access in here?" He looked about, puzzling at the walls and ceiling as though expecting to find a wireless relay above the narrow kitchen table beside the now-sealed gaslight fixture. "We have a fairly decent connection in our place. If you ever need, you could come over and use my computer."

Now it was Marisa's turn to look puzzled. The solitude of the house inside of a whale was nice and far away from the modern world. Logistics of bringing internet to a moving, undersea mammal aside, it stilled seemed unlikely. She had wanted to be "off the 'net" and out of instant touchtype smalltalk. The only "digital age" material she dealt with on anything approaching a "regular basis" was the occasional flash drive of financial data that ran just fine on her 2004 Thinkpad, which she had long stopped using for leisure purposes in the spirit of the house's old-fashionedness and isolation.

"I guess I might ask on occasion to use it... some of my accounting clients even in their developing countries are getting frustrated at having to send me something less than an online form of their books, especially sending them by post." She shrugged. "Let's go sit down in the living room and you tell me some more about this 'graphic novel.'"

Michael scooted a wicker and matte-black wrought iron chair over from a corner and cleared it of Marisa's crocheting bag before plopping down into it. "It's about three farmers in Colorado who find a lost city under their fields and end up going crazy from what they uncover. You could probably call it 'illustrated Lovecraft' - have you ever re-?"

"Yes, I'm well-versed in H.P. Lovecraft," Marisa said with a reminiscent smile. "So what's your friend Sam doing? Is he creative, too?"

"He's writing a book. He claims to be the next David Foster Wallace, whoever that is, but I'm not really a fan of his writing. Too many obscure terms for me, plus Sam never knows when to let a sentence end."

Now Marisa smiled again, at her new neighbor's excitement at and opinion on everything.

this story is incomplete

A Well-Lit Alleyway

A Well-lit Alleyway

Outside the snow falls, flake by billowy wet flake. Though it is midday, the sky is a stage-light gel twilight. Tara stands under a palm tree listing to starboard. Under the crystally-clinky ice-frosted glass of the Phipps Conservatory, the weather is Florida, the Amazon, the Sonoran Desert.

Tara ties her sweater around her waist, and adjusts her bottle-green blouse. Rippled, flared sleeves cascade down her wrists towards a lightweight denim skirt and, incongruous among the verdant pathways of the Grand Palm Court, snowboots leave wet tracks behind. Sean moves up to her back, making no sound.

“Don’t look now, but I think the Chinese Fan Palm likes your ass.”

“Do you like my ass, Sean?” she replies. They laugh the laugh of the jaded. He tags her and they bolt off into the herb garden, ducking through the comfrey-covered tunnel and making the edgy yarrow quiver with their passing.

Beside the cardamom and cumin, they stop and catch their breath and wait for Helm to meander their way. When he meets them, munching on a mint sprig, one leaf tip tattling at the corner of his thin mouth, they three walk out towards the orchid garden. By now the lights are on overhead for nighttime darkness, but the moonlight and the floodlights from Schenley Park blaze off of the massy whiteness and in the plants. “The poor bromeliads must never get any sleep,” comments Helm.

夢

Two days pass, and more snow had fallen. Even though the sidewalks are coated with toilet-freshener thicknesses of salt, the walk to and from classes becomes an ordeal. The wind tears at Sean’s clear face and reddens his off-kilter nose. His red-brown hair sticks out from his Firefly beanie. Snowflakes and rasterized landscapes of ice cling to his jean-jacket-sur-hoodie-sur-thermal underwear and a wispy fog rises from his handknit blue and gold scarf as body heat hits soaked-in snow.

He bumps into Tara outside the Cathedral. All snowcapped brownstone surrounded by chapped, ice tipped trees and snow-filled fountains, the Cathedral of Learning fills the soft grey sky with a simultaneously ominous and welcoming form. “Hey!” he says, only half looking up from the flagstones of the patio.

“Sean! How are you?” He hesitates a little, so she asks, “how was your weekend?”

“Hmm, mostly I had work. We went over to Florin’s house-

“The vampire house?”

“Hnh” he snits. “Remember I’m part Romanian, too.” He takes a clove cigarette out from the jacket and a battered Bic from his cargo pocket and begins to smoke.

“That’s gonna kill you, I swear,” pouts Tara.

Sean’s eyes flash deviously. He half-smiles and closes his eyes. “’Come, sweet death.’” he intones.

“Can we go inside?” she pleads, tugging at the strap of her too-obviously Chinatown handbag and clench-releases her calves on-again-off-again. She tugs a little at her collar.

“Go on ahead, then, but I’m gonna finish this here. I never finish these.”

She looks at him, dissatisfied, from behind Sephora-darkened eyes and walks up the filthy stairs towards the doors.

From the smooth black tube, the mysteries of nicotine-filled incense mix with the sharp clouds of his breath. Crackles of burning spice pff and sparkle and he doesn’t feel the soreness of Saturday’s track workout quite so acutely. Flicking the filter into the grungy slush, Sean turns in a military about-face grinding salt under his timeworn sneakers.

夢

Inside the Cathedral it is a sauna, a blanket stuffed with pillows on a Christmas Eve, a sweater on a balmy March day when the sun cuts without warning through the gloom. Tara is twisting back and forth by the doors, listening expressionless to her music around metallic powder-blue earbuds. “What do you have left?” she asks, pocketing the headphones.

“I gotta print a few things out, but I’m done after that.” He loosens the straps on his backpack with a whir of polyester against plastic. “Why don’t we go to the South Side tonight?”

“Sounds like something to me.”

夢

Sean has exchanged his “poor college student” habit for a more vocal set of clothes. In a mockery of fashion, a three-inch height of denim is cut out from both knees, leaving only the reinforced stitching. His shirt is grey, unhemmed short sleeves frayed with a knife edge, a hastily screen-printed phoenix rising and falling with the corrugation of the shirt. Over all of this is a long raincoat, liner cut to the length of a jacket and tailing sections slashed into a canvas ocean-top behind him in the wind. Tara wears a similarly derelict costume, hers a duct tape-ornamented canvas skirt and a holey sweater both salvaged from the bin even Goodwill won’t salvage. Her hair falls unfastened over her shoulders and down her back.

On the bus, chaotic Chinese characters bar the window, a downstroke and a crosstroke, by their seat. As they pass the last of the hospitals, the already low light of dusk gives way to the pinkish amber of the sodium lamps, and down below across the bridge over the Monongahela the twinkling lights cower under the Equitable Gas sign. They ride silently until it is time to alight from the bus near the white wrought-iron gazebo of that stands off from Carson Street.

They head as though to Tom's Diner, though they are not particular. Drunks knock about, swaying in gaggles of drunken pigeons to music from the strings of bars, lurching towards the open doors of tattoo parlor upon body art shop. They pass the Vespasiana, the pay-toilet kiosk, doing brisk business after so much beer drinking.

With a crunch of broken aggregate, a man slips out into their path. Holding his hands in a gesture of good will, he stops them. “Do you want to find a rockin’ party?” he asks, his voice less-than-exuberant. He is hard to describe, corduroy blazer and jeans masking a face and form guarded by a patch slouch hat.

Sean looks at him, eyebrows arched. “Where is it?”

The man gestures again, this time towards an alley. Unlike many alleys on the South Side, this one is well-lit. The man, though odd, feels trustworthy. They nod and thank him and head for the canyon bounded by fire escapes and brown brick.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?”

Sean looks to Tara, confident smile ablaze. “Yup. If worst comes to worst, we’ve both got cell phones.”

Tara rolls her eyes. Single file they press up against the side of the alley without touching the wall, stepping over bottles here and there and other items consigned to a slow descent into obscurity. Limpid puddles of melted snow in sagging concrete or potholed asphalt ripple as they step over each one. “Where did he say it was?” Sean asks under his breath.

The first and what seems to be the only door in the alley is that dark brown that feels like black, with rust damage on the metal frame and some prominent gouges of its own. From inside they hear a happy hardcore beat, muffled, but still distinct. Sean opens the door and they enter a blacklit fluorescent-paint-spattered hallway, once medical offices or examination rooms, and follow arcanely painted black arrows (all swooping curves and points constrained by the general outline of an arrow.)

Through a door at the end of the hall they reach what must be the club. By the door a man stands casually. There is no way to tell if he is an employee, a patron, or perhaps something of both, but in any case, he bars their way lest they give him ten dollars. They figure that he is collecting some sort of cover charge. The room spreads out before them, narrow in some places and betraying larger rooms beyond. There is still evidence of walls and floors knocked out to build a dancing space, wires hanging from ragged gypsum remnants that stick out like wings cut off from the walls. Where the second floor once was, slouching precarious mosaics of tile and glass that were once bottoms of rooms now lean towards becoming the sides of the room below. A few places have been carelessly railinged to create balconies, and on one of these, more a dais built of one large plywood sheet tacked over a receptionist carrel, the DJ runs his esoteric devices and spins his turntables in an adjoining area. The floor is clean for the condition of the place, and dancers jump barefoot, turn without care for the space. Girls with glistering eyes dance in ecstasy, boys leap and kick and caress. In one corner clouds of smoke pour out of a huddled mass of people, wafting the smell of cigarettes and sundry across the entry room. To their left, through a more conventional doorway, there is a bar and a lounge, huge cushions strewn about haphazard tables. Sean pulls Tara out to the dance floor, and they lose themselves to the melody, the rhythm. Happy hardcore gives way to Paul van Dyk’s “The Politics of Dancing, Volume 2” and they are carried away for hours, BT, Oakenfold, some even more cerebral stuff but all with the beats and the riffs intensified for their footwork. No hiphop, no dancehall, no big band or ballroom mars their tantric adoration of the cascading electronica and warbling harmonies.

In the lounge, they flop down on some cushions before Tara assumes the lotus position and orders hot chai. There is no limit to what this club has. Sean stays lying on his back, stomach rising and falling, looking up at the starfield with its zodiac figures in fluorescent and oil paints all across the ceiling.

“Sean,” Tara begins, her voice small and thoughtful. “Would you ever go out with me?” She scoots around without disturbing her pose to look down at him.

Without opening his eyes, he responds, “I guess so. Like I’ve told everybody, though, I’m not going to go out with anybody until after college.”

“Right, right, but I mean, otherwise, you would consider me attractive.”

“Yeah, I guess. Why the sudden fixation?”

Tara looks at him, sighs, and shakes her head. She drinks a long, slow pull from her chai. Cinnamon and nutmeg perfume their nest, as the music skirls on.