Day 44

            Charles stared into the long tube, with a giant pipecleaner in his hand.  Mr. Pulp stood behind him, encouraging him to continue his work.  The moon refracted a pumpkin orange onto the lake nearby the banquet hall.  The rest of the crowd pretended not to watch through the glass windows as

            Charles said outloud to himself:  “It’s ok we do this every day we’re used to it.”  He turned his whole body around, facing forward and propping each elbow up in the long tube.

            “Just do it, get in there,”  Mr. Pulp groaned in a droll patronization.  He stared curiously into the hole, a narrowing tube which got darker toward the end.  It disappeared into the night past its giant opening that stood feet above ground level.  “Everyone will see what you’re so good at.”

            Charles had the big yellow arm long gloves pulled up to his elbows, and his suit was damp but not dirty.  He scurried in with an army man’s crawl, unconcerned about his own wellbeing.  A reassuring light shone in his inner ear, the island of the area of his frontal lobe sat hovering independently.  A man sat on a rock on this beach, with a fishing pole in his hands and the bobber buoyed on top of the water. Anne and her brother gaped with astonishment at his sudden bravery, although he could see neither of them as he concealed himself in the conduit.

            “Charles,”  An eery whisper telephathically glossed into his mind like a decrepit hand with skinny white fingers writing on a foggy bathroom mirror.  “Come to me.”  It wheezed like wringing out a sponge.  Charles scraped his elbows against the tube, rustling along like a pig.  A hand gentle touched his ankle from behind, perhaps he was doing what only he knew how to do, but didn’t understand, incorrectly.

            He pulled himself upwards into a sideways world.  Shadows danced on the sewerlike maze of the inner ward.  Incandescent lightbulbs flickered like lanterns trapped in the everlasting fire.  Charles stood like a pilgrim, with implied significance, grasping his pipe cleaner and slowly shaking his head to get the water out of his ears.  He thought he looked more like a seal at this point than a pilgrim, but forcibly identified with human archetypes.

            He stepped over steel gratng onto a security ladder that looked like a swimming pool ladder.  The caw of a crow came from inside the chamber at an irreducible location, responding to unseen signifiers.  It flew by in the shadows, and Charles recoiled but poked his head back out from underneath his jacket after it passed. 

Charles called out, “I’m Charles, I’m here for some reason.”  His personal and professional life both had vague ideas of him as a person, neither of which he earned.  The man on the island was waving his hands in S.O.S, a burgeoning nightfall encompassing his lightless island.  Something bit and snapped the cable on the fishing pole, listlessly howling from the other side of Charles’s parietal lobe.

            He followed a sinuous riser onto a well-lit suspension bridge, fluorescent lights flickering over his head.  A drip from the ceiling followed him along like a personal raincloud, sending shivers down his spine.  A bright artificial light shined from the end of the hallway, and Charles threw his pipecleaner down as he proceeded into the end of the corridor.  He looked ovr the sides, black empty space that was surely tepid sticky death.  He could sense a figure waiting for him in the chamber at the end of the hall, a personaized demon sitting with its interlocked hands on its knee in front of a facsimile firefly in an overstuffed yellow chair.

            In the future the demon asked him what he truly wanted out of life and how it could help.  He felt guilty for considering the thing a demon before he had even seen the true nature of it.  It may offer him cookies, beverages, shelter, piece of mind.  He knew it might treat him better than Anne ever had, it wouldn’t pretend to understand his insecurities or oversimplify his wishes.  It did not have to invite itself into his place and wiggle its way into a crevass, hissing like a wounded cat each time he would plead with it to exit.  If he offered it fish in a can to attempt to draw it out, it would return day after day with the expectation of more.

            No, this demon led a real demon life.  The crows would caw to it in support, with rising intonation at the end of their phrases.  Whichever unsavory nitrogen based lifeforms lived in the sewer water did not hide their presence, the demon just knew better than to stick a toe in or else it would be bitten off.  The little man hammered away at a concave sailboat, fashioning a tarp which he turned into a sail and eagerly pushing the thing into the sea.

            “You’re doing well in there!”  He heard Pulp’s voice echo from the safety of solid ground in a different district.  The voice continued on with a string of endorsements and considerations, none of which made a lasting impression.  Charles lost his footing on the bridge and grabbed the thin hand railing that suspended from the suspension bridge, slipping slowly down the side of it like a rope in gym class.  The disembodied voice cautioned Charles to be careful, rebuking him in a motherly tone.  Pulp’s voice from the other direction shifted and twisted into a safety net that would be unable to catch him if he fell.

            Luckily, Charles was much higher up than he had originally perceived.  He fell for minutes, the air leaving his lungs and being reallocated and assimilated to the commonwealth of dingy dispelled air.  He collapsed into a fetal position in midfall, grabbing hopelessly for a release string to a parachute he was not wearing.

            Suddenly, his fall stopped, and he found himself resting on soft sinewy tissue.  A hand careful not to turn or twitch rose directly up like an elevator.  The ceilings and tunnels deserted Charles, his physical world was vanquished, and when he righted himself and stood up he was staring directly into the face of smiling red giant.  It’s horns were miniature, and its smile was true, Charles offered it a weak “hey”.  It responded to his “hey” with a powerful “Hey yourself, cowboy”, and as it snapped the fingers on its opposite hand he was outside again.

            He was holding a caulk gun, and removing rats by the tails.  He yanked them through the portion of the pipe that wasn’t blocked and chucked them insensitively into the nearby lake.  Pulp stood clapping with his hands in front of his face, but the rest of the party had already returned inside.  “You truly are the youngest and the finest we have,”  Pulp offered and returned in through the front door.

            Charles pulled himself up one knee at a time like yanking giant radishes out of the ground.  He patted the dirt off of his knees and yawned for a second before pulling himself back upright. 

            He returned into the party like an unwanted wet dog.  He shook himself off in the doorway, but the partygoers were concerning themselves with a game of trivial pursuit.  At the end of the bar Anne was crying about something sitting on a stool and her brother was leaning over the bar attempting to make eye contact with her.  A bartender dressed in a black T-shirt with an animated slug on it wiped out the inside of a glass with a rag.  The moon shined off porcelein jugs sitting in a row above the bar.  The glass bottles of expensive scotches and whiskies looked fake, like they were filled with water.

            “She been crying like this all night, since you went in that tube.”  Her brother pulled Charles aside as she sat there sobbing.  “You really should worry more about what she thinks.  Or atleast be more careful.  For me, anyway.”

            Pete was talking to himself, practically.  Charles felt like he was observing the vessel carrying his mind around with it from a distance.  He stared up at the separate square panels of the ceiling, unable to concern himself with the events of the night.

            He grabbed Anne by the collar of her jacket and said, “Hey, what do you say we get out of here?”  The smiled returned to her face in an instantaneous transmission, like a hologram.  She turned again and it was gone, as she looked back over at her happy family, half a world away buried in scholarly pursuits of trivial topics.

            Charles shook Pete’s hand and Anne walked in front of him, ahead barely far enough where they wouldn’t collide each next step he took.  The car ride was a quick one, while Charles had no idea how to get to the banquet hall he was led by a guiding light home.  He stared up at the apartment building, now looking like an ill-fitted cage where he was simply allowed to spend the night.  He understood the desire some men had to buy and own a home, at this point, and felt a calming wave surface over his beachy head, unearthing eashells that he was no longer afraid to step on.

            He sent a pebble probing inwardly in his mind for the hand of that giant red man, he wondered where he had come from or what his purpose was.  He was not nieve enough to think a demonic entity would appear to reassure him, but it certainly was kind.  He smoked a cigarette, taking long drags as the rain settled into puddles on the block around him.  Anne sat on the couch, not by the window, and he was able to breath in deeply for the first time.  The old man holding the fish was far away on a dock, with an ocean now standing in between them.  He clapped his hands twice softly and pushed the heavy door of the building open.