Look What I Made!

Below is a short little story that I wrote this weekend for my writing class. It is not the best thing in the world by any means, but it is the sort of little piece of fiction that is fun to dash off quickly and then be all like, “Look at what I made!”

And yes, I know the metaphor doesn’t 100% hold up to scrutiny, but hey, it is just a first draft.

Also, I hope you know how to work Google, otherwise this will likely not make a lot of sense.

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Raktabija.

Raktabija

by james bezerra

        Twenty-six thousand feet above the Arabian Sea at night and the Arabian Sea doesn’t even look like anything. Not an abyss, not a maw, not edgeless obsidian the size of history, or a even metaphor. Not an anything. Just a nothing. This is the thing we always have trouble understanding about the universe, isn’t it? That it is almost entirely empty.

        We have it strapped down to a completely normal gurney in the center of the hold and the gurney is ratcheted down to the metal plates of the floor with those same wide bright polyester webbing straps that they use for any other cargo that would go in here, I suppose. Gets the job done. When we do hit the occasional bippy bit of turbulence, the floor plates rattle a little. The Payload Specialist, hunched by the forward bulkhead and the locked cockpit door, stands up each time, but doesn’t approach it. He hasn’t said a word since we left Djibouti airspace and went feet wet over the Gulf of Adan. He doesn’t like it on his plane.

I suppose saying it is impolite.

Perhaps her would be better. I’m not sure. I’ve never really understood how the Trimurti works. But then I’ve never worked any of the Indian stations. I’ve been operating fairly independently under the authority of the station chief in Nairobi for two years, but I’ve spend most of that time in and around Mogadishu. Al-Shabaab isn’t going to snuff itself out and the Company needed someone to handle intelligence logistics with AMISON.

Busy years these have been.

Made busier now by her. She was not what I needed in my life.

Out of the corner of my eye I notice the Payload Specialist stand up quick, though we aren’t bumping. He points nervously at her.

I look to see one of her four arms beginning to wriggle against the tight gurney straps. I move over to a jumpseat near enough to her so that I can look down into her face. Her skin is very dark, but the station chief in Mumbai told me over a staticy SATCOM line a week ago that it would be; that’s part of her story. When her eyes open they are surprisingly bright. When she sees me above her she stops struggling.

“I have no intention of hurting you,” I say. “If fact, you’re getting an all-expense-paid trip home. You have absolutely no business on the African continent little lady. I’m going to take the tape off your mouth and then you’re going to explain to me why I have satellite photos of you meeting with Hizbul insurgents in the desert outside of Biadoa a week ago. Blink if you understand me.”

She blinks calmly and so I rip the tape off. I always like the ripping-the-tape-off part, it is a sign of good faith but one painful enough that it makes it clear to everybody exactly who is in charge.

She licks her chapped lips slowly with her tongue. I hadn’t noticed before how hollow her cheeks are. How thin and bony each of her arms are.

“Talk,” I tell her.

“Asura,” she says.

I have no fucking clue what that is. “Is that who you were meeting?”

She smiles and its dangerous how big and jagged her teeth are. I glance over to make sure the strap across her forehead is tightened down all the way and locked.

“We used to be such good friends,” she says. She is looking at me. I don’t know if she is talking to me or about me. I think she can sense that because she says, “Asura means great and mighty. Remember, Raktabija?” And then she starts to laugh. She just laughs and laughs and she is laughing at me, this much is clear. If her mouth were less threatening I’d put the tape back on, but as it is, I can just imagine her ripping the tips on my fingers off with just the littlest jerks of her violently gnashing teeth.

I pace toward the end of the cabin and stand down near where the cargo ramp angles upward into its locked position. I take the SAT phone from my pocket and dial up the station chief in Mumbai.

It rings. Then again. The quiet in between the rings is staticy, which ain’t bad considering I’m four and a half miles up moving at six hundred miles an hour above a black ocean that’s as empty as space. Rings again. This is pissing me off because he knows we’re on our way in and is supposed to have his phone in his lap.

Rings again.

Finally he answers, “Bombay-6.”

“I keep telling you that you gotta change that. It’s way too obvious.”

“Bombay-6,” he says again.

“Bombay-6 this is Estafet-1.”

“Code in ...”

“Tandoori delivery.”

“You know,” he says, “that’s borderline racist.”

“You’re supposed to answer when I call.”

“I did. Are you still in-bound?”

“Yeah, everything is fine. We’re on schedule. Look …” I rub the back on my neck and move as far into the back as I can. “I’ve got a question. Does Raktavija mean anything to you? Or asura? She said those words and I’m wondering if there’s something very under-the-radar going on that I haven’t gotten wind of yet out in The Mog. Maybe your extremists hooking up with mine, sharing logistics or intel, maybe …” Through the pop and crackle I can hear him snickering and I don’t like being laughed at this much back-to-back. “What?”

“Man you need to read a book one of these days.”

“How about when we land I shove one up you ass?”

“I would be surprised if you had one with you. Anyway, she’s talking about a fairy tale, man. It’s one of their myths. These guys, the Asura, were like, what do you call ‘em, deities. They used to be good guys but then they got all spun out on their own power and turned into crazy assholes. You following me? One of the biggest badasses was called Raktavija and he’s fighting against the … um … shit, they’re like angels … the Matrikas, I think, yeah. So the Matrikas, they’re attacking this dude full-on but he’s like Bowser or something. Every time they stab him his drops of blood fall to the ground and each one turns into a new little Rakatavija. But the Matrikas, they just keep stabbing and stabbing and not even giving two shits about all the new Rakatavijas running loose all over the goddam place now. It’s just this dumb Hindu story. It doesn’t mean anything. Did you call it in to Langley when you went feet-wet?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Okay. Well I’ll see you in a couple hours. Let me know if she starts talking to you about Little Miss Muffet or is we need to drone strike Noah’s Ark or anything. Bombay-6 out.”

He hangs up so I hang up. I slowly slip the sat phone back into my pocket. Then I turn and I see her standing there in the center of the cabin, three times bigger now, her dark skin hanging loosely on her sharp bones but still somehow shimmering. Her huge jaw has unhinged and she is shoving the flailing Payload Specialist down her dark gullet with one arm and reaching for me with the others.

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Terraforming.

Below is a very fresh story that may not exactly even technically be a story, unless you’re really into lite-comedy that involves terraforming. Anyway, read on!

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The Tinfoil Man.

The Tinfoil Man

by james bezerra

The Time Traveler looks at his watch.

They’d let him keep it. Possibly just to be dicks.

The Time Traveler watched the second hand as it tick

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tick

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tick

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ticked around.

He was frustrated and wanted to complain that they were wasting his time. But he understood the irony of this before he parted his lips to say it. Instead he sat quietly watching his watch. Each 59/60th of a second he tried to stop the next tick with his mind.

Only he couldn’t. Because that’s not a thing.

On the other side of the one-way glass they were watching him.

“What’s he wearing?” Gibbs asked. His styrofoam blue cup of coffee steaming near his face in the blacked out observation room. They had to keep the room blacked out because the one-way glass was pretty cheap and if they had turned the lights on the Time Traveler would have been able to see their silhouettes through the silver aluminum of the mirror.

“I don’t know,” Swaroop said back, also over the warm steam of his little cup of coffee, “He was wearing it when the unies picked him up.”

“Is it a tinfoil suit?” Gibbs asked. Gibbs had never been married, had never dated seriously, his mother had died of lung cancer when he’d only been twelve. He did not know women well. They were a foreign species to him and he had done his best to keep them at bay. His father had been distant. Gibbs only knew tin foil as an abstraction. He’d never used it. The silvery jumpsuit the TT wore was similar to tin foil only in that it was silver. Gibbs was a homosexual but did not yet know it.

“It isn’t tin foil …” Swaroop said. Then he sipped his own coffee. Then he swallowed his coffee. Then he said nothing. He thought that Gibbs was an idiot. He also knew that Gibbs was a homosexual, though he had never shared this information with Gibbs. Swaroop had no problem with homosexuals, but he took offense to idiots.

“I think it is tin foil,” Gibbs said.

“Let’s go in,” Swaroop said.

The TT looked up from his watch when the door opened. Two men entered. Both in long coats. Both holding cups of coffee. One had dark skin and a graying beard. The other was clearly a homosexual. They both sat down across the table from him.

“You were arrested for causing a disturbance,” Swaroop said, scratching his beard absently.

“They were taking my vehicle.”

“You parked in front of a fire hydrant. In the middle of Central Park.”

“I’m not familiar with your laws,” the TT said.

“What’s your suit made out of?” Gibbs asked.

Swaroop raised a hand in the air, as if to hold back the question. Then he asked, “Have you had your phone call?”

“I have not been allowed to contact anyone, if that is what you mean.”

Swaroop pointed to Gibbs, who stood up, left the room, returned with a rotary phone on a very long cord. Gibbs set the phone down on the table. “Only local,” He said.

The TT had been trained in the use of such a device. He picked up the talk part and held it next to his head. He stuck his finger carefully into the spinny part on the base unit. He spun the numbers he’d been told to memorize. It took a very long time.

Finally there was a ringing in his ear. Leave a message it said to him. “This is Dusan Zrnic. I have been arrested while on my trip. They have taken my vehicle. Please help me.”

The TT set the talk part back down on the base unit. “I had to leave a message,” he said to Swaroop, who didn’t care. Swaroop sipped his coffee. He scratched his beard. He said, “Now we will just wait a little bit. I have had a very long day and I like sitting quietly.”

They waited for a little bit. As they waited for a little bit, a thousand years also passed. As he sat there looking across at the TT, Swaroop left the room and grew older and worked hard and grew more disillusioned and his daughter grew up and went to college and fell in love with a white boy and had a baby and bought a little house in Queens and then Swaroop’s wife died and in the lonely days that followed he took up watercolor painting and gardening with his granddaughter, who was growing up so fast and then his beard grew patchy and his memories started to go and then he didn’t even recognize his daughter anymore, but he still remembered vividly the TT as they sat in that room for a little while. Time moved on. Eventually Swaroop died one morning, alone in his hospital bed, not even sure who he was and not cognizant enough to know that he didn’t know. Gibbs went to the funeral. He was old then. He’d reached fifty years old before he understood that he was a homosexual. On a vacation by himself on a package trip to Scotland he’d met a nerdy little ginger librarian from Chicago. They’d been in the same tour group at Tatallon Castle. They’d fallen in love, insofar as Gibbs could understand that at the time. Gibbs had moved to Chicago, gotten a job as private security. With that, plus his pension and Terry’s salary from the Regenstein Library, they bought a small pre-war house in Hinsdale. They filled it with books and - surprisingly - more than an average amount of love. Terry was ultimately killed while biking; hit by a distracted teenage driver. Gibbs died eleven years later at the age of 68. Time forgot Gibbs, just as it forgot Swaroop. Time trudged on. That’s what it does. America fought another war with itself. It recovered, but would forever be a weak ghost. It tried to follow Britain's humble model as it grew increasingly powerless and ineffectual against the ascendant political and economic powers of Asia. Eventually Pakistan bombarded India with poorly targeted nuclear weapons. China tried to intervene, but it was no use. Asia descended into a land war with itself. America was absorbed into the North American Union. Russia and Europe fought another war, as they are want to do. Time trudged along. Climate change exacerbated by nuclear warfare forced substantial changes in political structures. Populations moved to higher elevations. There were some resource wars. Eventually things reached an equilibrium. A second Dark Age was avoided. Life went on. Time travel was invented. There were some initial cockups that may or may not have inadvertently caused Pakistan to preemptively attack India 250 years before. It is hard to be sure what caused what. Eventually things stabilized. Mankind returned to the stars, settled Mars and several moons of Jupiter. Humanity was doing well. Time travel etiquette was streamlined. Trips became both recreational and affordable. Galen Zrnic, from the Europa colony, took his birthright tour to Earth. He met Floss Sixbey, a sod farmer’s daughter from Titan. She had freckles and they fell in love. They had a picnic in the shadow of a worn ribbon of gray stone in a place that had once been called ‘China’. They pulled each other's clothes off and kissed and touched and licked and sucked and finally fell naked into the grass as the sky grew dark. Their eventual son was named Dusan, after Floss’s grandfather who had been a marginally famous homesteader on Titan. He was a bright boy and grew up to be a talented chemist working on the terraforming of Neptune, as he was particularly skilled at the process of extracting Carbon derivative from the Methane atmosphere. But he was always restless. He filed for a vacation and booked with a Martian company offering space-time tourism. His assigned agent was a man very tall and slender (owing to the low Martin gravity) who called himself Welp. “Memorize this series of digits,” Welp told Dusan a week before his trip, “we monitor every historic occurrence of these digits, just in case.”  

The TT set the talk part back down on the base unit. “I had to leave a message,” he said to Swaroop, who didn’t care. He sipped his coffee. He scratched his beard. He said, “Now we will just wait a little bit. I have had a very long day and I like sitting quietly.”

They waited for a little bit.

Then the phone rang. Gibbs leaned forward to answer it. “Hello?” Gibbs listened and then he held the receiver out to the TT, “It’s for you.”

The TT held the talk part near to his face, “Yes?”

“Good that you called us Mister Zrnic,” Welp’s voice sounded very far away, “I have arranged everything for you. It should not be long.”

“What should not be long?” The TT asked.

“My arrival,” Welp said down the thousand year conduit of the talk part in Dusan’s hand.

Suddenly there was a knock at the door. This startled everyone but Swaroop, who was too consistently tired to ever be startled.

Across the vast expanse of time and space in the talk part Welp said to Dusan, “I should be arriving now …”

The door of the room opened. In walked a very tall and extremely slender man. Gibbs looked up at him and said, “You are very tall.”

“Yes,” Welp responded in his very best and most practiced Imperial-Period American accent, “I am from Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington Dick. I am hear for the prison.”

“You can’t take our prisoner,” Gibbs said.

Welp peered curiously down into the various pockets of his long jacket, as if seeing them for the first time. He fished in all of them until he finally produced a very shiney and new looking badge.

The TT - still with the talk part to his head - heard Welp’s distant voice funnel down through time, “How is it going?”

“It is confusing,” the TT replied.

Carefully Welp placed the badge into Gibbs’ hands. “I am,” he began to say in a slow and practiced way, “of your Federal Investigation Bureau. Hear four prison oar. In accordance of patriot acting nine eleven iraq shoe bomber thank you and please.” Welp pointed at the TT and motioned for him to return the talk part to the base unit.

“I think I’m leaving now,” Dusan said hurriedly into the receiver.

Gibbs looked helplessly to Swaroop, “Are we just going to let him go?”

Swaroop sipped his coffee and the TT moved out the door. “Gibbs,” Swaroop said, “have you seen my desk? Giving this fruitcake to the feds is the easiest part of my day.”

Welp led Dusan out of the room and Gibbs hollered after them, “What is your suit made out of?!”

The door fell closed on slow hinges.

Gibbs turned to Swaroop, “I bet it was made out of tin foil.”

Swaroop sipped his coffee, scratched his beard, and said, “No.”

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Thoughts?

Below is a very short story. This is obviously a first draft and I don’t know how I feel about it. Thoughts?

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Itch.

Itch

by james bezerra

I think I could like surfing. There’s a board strapped to the rollbars of a jeep in the 7-11 parking lot and it makes me think that I could like surfing. Legs dangling, slow and calm in clear blue water. I’d be tanner then. And leaner too. My skin would seem to always be warm, somehow, from the sun it had been soaking up. I could sit there on the board and let the water rise and fall and rise and fall and rise. And fall. Like riding someone else’s breath.

I flick my burnt out butt out across the parking lot and into the 7-11 I go. The white light inside is stale. There’s no one in the 1am crowd who looks like the surfer I would look like if I had a jeep with a surfboard on its roll bars. At 1am here, this many hours from any ocean, I’d only be passing through. Why would I even be here? Probably I’d just be on my way from somewhere else. Probably I’d been in love, but it hadn’t worked. For her I’d left the ocean, followed her back to her home, so many hours inland until the air didn’t even smell wet anymore. And we’d tried our best, we really would have. But you can’t power love with just the memory of kissing in the night under the crashing white shadow sounds of waves. It wouldn’t be enough, just to remember the grains of sand that had fitted themselves into the grooves of my fingerprints as my hands had slid along her smooth, summer-singed skin. But then her tan would fade back to the pale that had once marked only the parts of her that only I’d seen for those summer weeks. Her apartment would have smelled like taupe paint. Taupe is very soothing. At first. At first it seems to be the soft tan of beach sand. But the longer I would have stayed there in her apartment -  wearing socks and using coasters and working in the office at her brother’s auto shop -  the harder and dryer that taupe would have become, until it was a flat brown rocky desert. Until we finally would have had to tearfully admit to each other that it was all just nothing anymore. So I would have loaded up my jeep in her carport and lashed my board to the rollbars while gnats buzzed around the halogen bulbs above me. On the way out of town, I would have stopped here at this 7-11. Probably I would have been hungry.

At the counter I buy a pack of smokes and I can tell that the guy wants to say that he had just sold me some this morning and that he had just sold me his cheapest wine a couple hours ago and how come I couldn’t just buy all of my shit at once? But he doesn’t say anything like that and I pull out my wallet and I pull out crumply cash and the guy doesn’t bother to notice anymore that not all my fingers are there, but there are kids in line behind me buying a paper carton of beer and I notice that they are noticing because I can just hear the way their talking gets a little slower because their brains are working now because they’re wondering where the fuck the rest of me is and I want to tell them that I fucking left it in the desert. But I don’t say that. I shove my hand back in my pocket and I don’t say anything.

I light up in the parking lot. The jeep is still there. Still. I think about how nice it was going to be to slide back into the waves after so long. How good it would be to feel the world take a breath below me. To lift me effortlessly, thoughtlessly, like a child, like a bug, like a speck of dust, as light as a thought or an atom of light. How good the water would feel on my legs. On my own skin and between my toes. And I look up and I can see me there on the rippley blue ceiling of the water, my feet dangling lazily on either side of the white board. Happy. Slow. Calm. Easy. How good it must have felt to be me up there just then in that moment; returned to the sea. Alone and empty of everything that fills me too full too often. How depressurized I must be up there. How peaceful and floating I float there. And right now I’m so envious of that me that I’m almost angry. I drop my butt and squash it very carefully under my boot.

I think that I could like surfing. I’ve never tried. I could try. I could learn and then, some hurricane night, I could watch lightning cracking over a roiling black sea like a flashbulb over so much oil. I could point my board out into it. Lay my body down onto it and paddle out. Feel the cold water slide between my fingers. And another burst of lightning and everything is gray light for just a half a second and I can see that all the tops of rising waves have gotten sharp. Then darkness and the mad clap of thunder and the shockingly dry smell of singed ozone.

My eyes are closed, I realize, but I can smell the cigarette still smoldering slowly in my hand, so I haven’t had them closed for that long, this time. I don’t open my eyes, because why? I wiggle the fingers I have left on my left hand. There’s an itch on one of the fingers I don’t have anymore. It’s seven thousand miles away and so too far to scratch.

Deep breath in through my nostrils, I take in the asphalt smell of 7-11 parking lot. It wasn’t ozone, that I was thinking I was smelling. I don’t know what that smells like. My nose was remembering the smell of sulfur. Or cordite, maybe? Whatever they could get their hands on. Maybe it was the smell of super heated air blasting out at 1,600 feet a second. Or maybe it was the smell of metal shards blowing through the desert heat. The smell of sand mixing with the blood in my mouth. Another crack on lightning behind my eyelids and its not the ocean any more. It’s just all that smoke and someone’s face above my face, screaming at me and I can’t even hear him. Maybe it’s that thick, salty smell of one’s own blood, everywhere, and the numb sensation that something is wrong with this human body.

Deep breath in through the nostrils. My ears hear the ping-ping of the door sensor and I open my eyes and he’s there and he’s just a kid. A teeanger probably. Scruffy face but a lean tan body. He looks at me looking at him. He grins big because he’s stupid, I can tell, and he hollers over, “Cool looking legs, bro.” He hops up into the jeep. Guns it and he’s gone, taking the surfboard with him. My finger still itches.

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Straw, Who Packs Light.

Straw, Who Packs Light.

by james bezerra

His manifesto advocating the minimalist lifestyle is sixteen thousand words long. In its current form. He plans to edit it down, but only ever seems to add to it.

“Look, I’m not a douche bag,” he finally ends up saying to the LBD girl at the bar.

“It just sounds kind of douche-y.” She sips slowly at her martini and looks at his card between her fingers. Simple black Courier on white:

j. straw

mnmlst

The email and number on the back.

 
“Mostly it’s about freeing your life from all of that stuff.”

“Like what?”

“Like cars … and shoes and TVs and all that other consumerist, status-symbol bullshit.”

“I have a car. And a TV. And I like my shoes.” She has a great mouth, he thinks.

“Sure,” Straw says then, realizing that her long smooth legs and glossy make-up magazine looks are a sort of excess he can’t endorse anyway. He sucks back the rest of his scotch. “Well, thanks for … letting me buy you a drink ... I guess.”

 
“Sure thing,” she raises her glass at his back as he leaves.

On the street he pulls his hood up against the cold. The hood zippered into his black jacket. He walks and types into the diary app on his phone: No point trying to convince anyone already living in the hemogency of consumerist society. Am not a prophet or a disciple. Proselytizing is not minimal in its strategy. Better to find a girl who already understands.

As a teenager there had been a girl called Viv. Her blonde brown hair already twisted into grimy dreads. She wore the most basic of Hanes cotton underwear. She cut t-shirts down into tank tops. He remembered the fullness of her body in the hallway of her mother’s house. He wondered where she was at now.

Straw had been able to find a little apartment with a window seat. It was a studio, which is what he wanted. The size of a shipping container with a door on one end and a window and window seat on the other. The window seat allowed him to get rid of his desk, his couch, and his kitchen table. He didn’t need any of that, he had the painted white wood of the window seat. He bought one cushion. He could use it on the window seat when he was reading his Kindle or he could sit on it on the floor when he used the window seat as a desk or as a table.

An email came in on his phone. The annual convention was coming up in Brooklyn. He’d hoped to have his manifesto read by then. It probably wasn’t going to happen. Despite that he books a plane ticket and starts looking for a hostel; Straw doesn’t need a whole hotel room to himself.

The decluttering of one’s physical life can translate into the decluttering of one’s mind. As humans we tend to work from the outside in in order to effect change. This can best be done by creating a safe and simple environment for the body to exist in. That peace and freedom will allow the mind and soul to blossom.

Straw rereads what he had just typed. He wonders if Viv would like it.

He thinks for a second about whether minimizing his life for the sake of writing a manifesto about minimizing is self-serving. He thinks about calling it a memoir instead of a manifesto. He shakes his head though, No, ‘manifesto’ is a much sexier word.

He has gotten rid of the box spring. He just has a mattress on the floor. He likes it. It’s clean and simple. He doesn’t know that the purpose of a box spring is to allow air to circulate. To him it just seemed like clutter.

Viv was more Punk Rock than she was Minimalist. Minimalism wasn’t really a thing yet back then. She had probably outgrown the Punk thing by now. Probably taken out the lip rings. She’d been onto something though. She didn’t have much. Her little bedroom in her mother’s place had barely been bigger than the bed she slept on. The bed had been noisey when it took his weight. The kissing had started in the hall. She was the kind of girl who kissed hard. She dragged him along the wall, never letting his mouth away from hers. Straw’s hands found her flesh easily through all of the cuts and rips in her sliced up tank top.

She didn’t smell good, he realized when he was that close to her. Her hair was knotted and thick. She smelled like sweat and cigarettes and sex. And he’d loved it.

Viv pulled her clothes away and he decided right then that no one needed clothes anyway. She was there, full and luscious and naked and she unzipped his pants and pulled them off. Pulled his shirt off. Fuck clothes, Viv said, growling a little.

It didn’t last long, once she pulled his naked body down on top of her naked body, but there was suddenly nothing in the world right then; just them, just their bodies. His body inside of hers. They were one body, moving together, moving against. That was all that there was in the whole universe. And that’s all that there needed to be anywhere.

Straw doesn’t have any pillows on his mattress. He just uses the cushion from the window seat.

He doesn’t have any plates. Instead he uses tortillas. He doesn’t eat anything that can’t be eaten off or in a tortilla.

It was time to head to the airport to head to the convention in Brooklyn.

He looked around his bare little white studio. He couldn’t think of anything in there that he needed. He grabbed his jacket off the doorknob and left.

That’s how light he packs.

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