Quatorze

In which a lover from the previous piece is seen with a new lover.

Ronnie Ziegler: This - Darla and I - will be the end.

...I imagine my mind as a great gumball machine made of skin. There is an infinite desert all around stretching to a cactus-lined dust bowl horizon, like the background in a Krazy Kat cartoon. The sun is cherry red and watches curiously. When I was born, the landscape was flat, a blameless expanse. Anything could have happened there. There were probably dust storms. Then as I got older, out of the sky came the gumballs. See, the sky, and the sun, and the immense distant desert, they're all a painted backdrop, a Hollywood Western facade. In truth, it's just a great fishbowl with a coin slot at the top, and the great circle of the bottom is stretched like a drum, and like I said, it's all sewn from flesh.

So, through the slot in the fake sky, the memories fell in like gumballs.


They rattled around the bowl at first, clinking, echoing. If you listened closely to the close, warm, wooden sound of the echoes, you could tell that the backdrop was fake; if there really was emptiness to infinity, the sound would die off, far off, each echo returning hard and full, cold. The first memory, whatever it was - maybe the doctor, or my mother's arms - landed and bounced, and where it landed, it made the slightest dent into the skin at the bottom.

Over time, that slight dent became a depression, and then a sink. The warp of the gumball machine's floor slowly pulled the rattling memories into the middle. The more rolled downhill to that middle, the more that middle sagged. The memories piled on top. Like a landfill of little orbs, billions of them. Different flavors and sizes, too. You know how memories are. Many, many of the little ones get buried deep inside the ziggurat and are never seen again. Some large ones become cornerstones, key parts of the architecture.

I believe - it may have already started - that one day the bottom will cease to hold. The heaviness will tear out, like an overload of groceries in a wet paper sack; like marbles stacked higher and higher on a sheaf of tissue until it can no longer hold. A small aperture will be rent in the bottom, and through it the memories will begin to fall out, back to whatever that real world is from whence they were taken and deposited into the gumbowl in the first place. This will be around the time I begin to go senile. Actually it will begin in middle age, or maybe earlier, maybe now, I don't know; the point is less about the process, than about the ending.

The hole doesn't get smaller as the weight decreases. The forces push outwards, stretching the tear in the skin. The gap widens, and more and more memories drain out. First it will the little things, like the taste of the chocolate cake with red icing that one of my classmates brought in to class in third grade because he had extra from his birthday party, or the time a spider was on the inside of my windshield. Later it will be bigger things, like the time I shampooed my hair in a waterfall, or when I lost my virginity wearing a straw boater.

I think, however, that the very last memory will be Darla, and the quarter, and the catwalk.

It really shouldn't be the last one. It doesn't deserve such a gigantic gumball, such that even after the memory of my father's funeral, or the birth of my child, or the car accident where the tree branch entered the top of my lung, have all dropped out the bottom, this one should still teeter across the chasm, barely supported by the ribbons of skin that remain at the bottom of my brainpan, which will not support it for long. Perhaps it has gotten big by dwelling on it so long; all my attention has made it wax overlarge with pride; swollen by undue attentions. For I swear that every day of my life since that day, as much as several times per hour, the light of my attention shines on that memory. If my mind full of memories is a gumball machine, that Darla's memory is the everlasting gobstopper perched temptingly at the top; I fog up the glass below it as I constantly stare in awe at its swirling colors, the Milky Ways spinning in its orb. It likes the attention. The gumballs containing my graduation and my daughter's graduation and my granddaughter's all shrink in envy.

The memory has no logic in it. Perhaps that's what makes it stand out; all my other memories are either tiny images, or clear stories with beginnings and ends, even if perhaps I forced that structure. But Darla is milky and confused and dreamlike, as if seen through a swimming pool. The images melt and the plot is diffuse.

The quarter spins on the tip of her nose without precedent. In the background, Tyler's face is thunderstruck. Her cheeks and her chin, with her head tilted back, are the shape of a plush heart. Her hair waggles behind her. Her laugh -

Her laugh echoes against the gray wall -

Her laugh is an infinite descent - it fills the entire memory and possibly has leaked out into the gumball machine at large - no matter how far I spelunk its depths, there is always more; it is abyssal; it is all-consuming, it consumes me.

Her laugh says she is surprised that the quarter managed to spin on her nose. The laugh says she has just been taken by a whim, one of her amazing whims, to catch the quarter I had tossed her and spin it on her nose, and had not expected for a moment for it to actually spin. The laugh says she had not even not-expected it. The impulse was quicker than expectation; there was no time for her to bet for or against herself or the properties of gravity, whether it would spin; there was merely the quarter in her hand and then her fingers twisting it on the nub of her nose. It span, and she saw back that this was unexpectable, and this made her laugh.

Her laugh says she realizes these things happen to her. She is always being whipped into the air by these impulses, like a kite left atop a windy knoll. One time I said "How are ya Darla," emphasizing the rhyme, and she punched me in the stomach. She laughed then too, because it was so unexpected. Her laugh this time says, I, Darla, realize that I am a creature made of flashes of lightning, that I crackle and never even know myself where I am going to be striking, but for every hundred quarters that would have fallen, this time the quarter has spun.

Her laugh says this is why I like being who I am. It says I, Darla, know myself, and I like myself, even though one time I punched Ronnie in the stomach, a thousand of those or a thousand dropped sudden quarters are all worth it for this one perfect unexpectable moment, when I have spun this quarter on the nub of my nose, and it has spun like a top, like a ballerina, like a cyclone, like the sun and the moon, like the universe, or like a gumball or a marble at the bottom of a drain, making one last desperate spin before it drops into the hole.

Her laugh says I know not why I was this way, why I was born like this or came to be like this, but look what it has gotten me. It says guys, guys look at me, am I not ridiculous? Do I not do these things, and is it not now paying off? Will we all of us not remember this for the rest of our lives, and tell this story? Her laugh says she is already ninety years old and telling her multitudinous great-grandchildren the story of that one time she caught a corner tossed to her by this one boy backstage during rehearsal one summer, and put it on her nose, and it spun. And her future great-grandchildren are asking Darla, in her imagination, as revealed in her laugh, in that moment when the quarter is still spinning in my memory, why has she never done it again? And Darla is saying because that moment was perfect, and never needs to be repeated. It would be like sculpting the Venus de Milo twice.

And Darla is also revealing, in that laugh, in the distant edges of it that are lapping against the upper reaches of the rafters and the hinges of the doors, the copper-hued and crackled edges of it where the laughter-paint dries, a fear. A fear of self-recognition, where she knows all the times she has done things like this, and we have watched her and said "Oh Darla, there you go again," oh "Darla does these things some times" and she fears that this is her whole being, that these moments are her pinnacles and apexes, what she is known for and how she is known, and that therefore without them she would be nothing. And since without them she would be nothing, and they, to her, are nothing because she knows not where they come from, these flashes of lightning, that means she is nothing, because the only thing that defines her is that part of her she does not control; for all she knows some Dionysian god or red little demon or momentary epileptic syndrome grips her body from time to time and is truly responsible for these flashes of inspiration. If who "Darla," the public figure of pixieish delight to her friends and playmates, is is only that, then *Darla,* the person inside who inhabits her brain - her own gumball machine - is incidental. She is as much an observer of her own amusing antics as we, on the outside, are. But unlike us, she has nothing else.

In her laugh, she realizes this will define her. There are twelve of us watching, and we will all remember "the time Darla spun the quarter on her nose." And this makes her afraid. She laughs for the sudden success, the shiny quarter and the joy of accidental physics, but she also hiccups for the space of a sixteenth-note, her face flashing with fear, the edges of that laugh momentarily rusted and sad.

There is all this in her laugh, and more. I could keep going, but it gets darker, and the cave leads back into itself, its pathways ever more minute and convoluted. If I follow Darla's laugh all the way, I may come to the center of the earth - her earth.

She laughs, and I sense her fear in her laugh, her fear that we will remember only this and that therefore she is nothing and may as well be dead; and I remember her for that.

The memory swirls like cream in coffee.

There is my hand out on her shoulder, a second or a minute or an hour later, telling her a bad joke, because that's what I do, I tell bad jokes, and I am telling her that she can be in showbiz, kid, with the quarter-spinning trick, yeah yeah, she'll be a star, a star I tell ya. She smiles half-afraid from the implication, half-amused from my humor, half-not-wanting-to-laugh because it is dumb, half-kindly, half-tickled - which is not bad math when you consider these halves can all occupy the same space.

And then, not knowing how I know, not knowing what faculty taught my all that from her laugh, I tell her "I love you even when you are not spinning quarters on your nose."

She laughs. She is sad, happy, afraid, shocked, breathtaken, grateful, resentful, turned on, distrustful, and laughing all at once, which is not bad math.

The memory swirls. There is the catwalk. The fly system. The dark recesses of the theater. There is a foam-core brick wall hung in midair with fake graffiti reading "Zooman wuz here" in faded cartoon colors like on a soap bubble or in a melted crayon box. I do not even remember what play this was, or what my part, or Darla's. There is one bright light shining six feet away, illuminating the dust of the universe swirling about in the beam, and the dust showing where the light beam is shining, neither light beam nor floating dust there without the other to show it. There is the receding, unfathomable darkness in every direction. We have both seen the theatre fully illuminated, and know the ceiling is only twelve feet above us, suspended over the steel cables of the fly system; the far wall is not that far away at all, just beyond the dangling foam-core facade; the floor, which seems to disappear beneath the black curtains, would swallow us up instantly if we were to fall, even if it seems like we could fall forever. Although we know that we are not in a bottomless pit, the sides of the building are only in our memories, not visible to our eyes, and so we may as well be. Our abandon is reckless.

There are a thousand dozen brief flashes of memories. Her skin, prickly, briefly illuminated as her thigh rises into the diffuse light of the dusty spot six feet over, the minutae of her pores and angelic vellum and the blended tones of her skin suddenly visible and then suddenly gone. There are sounds, and smells, and brief images of myself, and of her hair tangling about the bars of the catwalk, and "Zooman wuz here," and floating dust, and the wetness of her tongue on my nose, reminding me within the memory of the memory of the quarter. And at last, once more, there is the laugh, after it is over, and she realizes we have just had sex on the catwalk of all places, that amuses, frightens and defines her. Only one of her laughing eyes is visible in the light, and my own fingers on her cheek next to that eye. Her own hand reaches up to brush some hair away from that eye, and as she brushes it away, the memory ends.

And then it comes back, swirling around on itself. The laugh echoes. It becomes all. I can sense, in the deep darkness of it, the twisted shapes of its recesses. A rubbery laugh, or even the sound of a guitar or a drop of a marble in a glass bowl, can change into any other sound if reflected in the right space. Somewhere in Darla's laugh, perhaps between the ceramic bricks behind Tyler, or perhaps in the wrinkles of Tyler's shorts, that laugh becomes a banshee wail. Somewhere else in the laugh, in the minutely woven interior of the foam bricks, the atomic infrastructure of puffed-up chemicals made in some plant somewhere, that laugh becomes a siren, or the sound of a rushing flame escaping a furnace, or a funeral bell.

And further still, elsewhere, in some distant corona of the laugh, some fractal detail of it, some untouched crevasse within it, am I, for as Darla laughs, in her laugh she knows that I have explored her laugh and know her fear, that I have seen her fear of her own nullification in the quarter, that I am offering her freedom: to be remembered for who she was, not what she did; she laughs because as she looks up at me, the foam-core brick behind my head, she knows I am knowing that I will remember this; and she will remember me; and maybe we live in this; and yet maybe this is no better; she laughs and knows the memory is made; she is already dead in it. In her laugh is my death, as well.

Perhaps this is why this memory looms above all. Importance is nothing. My moments of greatest grief, experienced or yet to be experienced, my moments of greatest happiness and love (this was not it - I have certainly loved better and more deeply than I loved Darla, who was even that eve on catwalk just a friend), all the moments I experienced that any biographer would place most prominently on my chronology - born, achieved, married, lost - can make no contest with the memory of Darla, the quarter, and the catwalk, because this memory contains all. My parents are encoded somewhere in Darla's laugh; my children; my sexual fantasies; my fears; my death. My self-image, and the image others had of me.

On my deathbed, I will place my hands on the side of my head. They say when you enter a blackhole, your moments become stretched out like spaghetti, and each subsequent millisecond becomes taffied out into a thousand more milliseconds, like in the ancient paradox whereby the Greeks said you can never reach a finish line because you must first cross half the distance, then half of that, and half again, and always there will be a half remaining on into infinity. The gumball machine, which had retained some number of the larger and more important memories up until that final second - whatever the nurse and my attendant family members needed to interact with - will dispense the last few in that telescoping moment between my hands touching my head and the eternal darkness. My family will see but a split second, but I will experience it forever, or nearly ever. And the last thing, before I perish, will be that massive orb of Darla's memory. Without all my other memories, I will cease to be anything but that singular swirl of impressions and images; as it comes closer and closer to dropping through, wobbling, then rattling, then vibrating, it will become me. I will explore the echoes of Darla's laughter against the tiniest molecules of the memory; I will find everything there, even the lives of others who I never knew. In that last moment, in that last memory, I may just create the universe.

But for now, I just want to lie my head against Darla's breast, as my fingers stroke her hair, and we are quiet.