"Like a cheap hotel sign..."
I'm raw, prone, compelled.
Jack rose from the warm-chocolate-fresh-corpse sofa and began to pace the office, leaving trails of clacking aural sunshine in his wake...
The Capgras Dinner Theater presents: Marching on Fences, a comedy in three acts.
Act 4, Scene 1:
Jack was naked at the dinner table again. Arranged around him were his three great loves, three great losses. Their apartment - his apartment - was rotting. Soiled clothing, festering food, roaches performing circus acts on shards of broken glass.
When Randy had seen the state of the place two weeks prior, he’d insisted Jack see a psychiatrist.
In the living room, stiff with Amish comportment due to a neglected electric bill, Randy put his hand on Jack’s shoulder, “I think you’re really losing it, buddy. You need help. Professional help. Listen, man--there’s no shame in it. Shit, I was seeing one the whole time I was running around losing my mind trying to be an artist in this shithole city. I know a doctor. He’s good. I’ll even set up the appointment for you.”
And so, Jack had nodded and Jack had gone. Every MondayTuesdayThursday.
The shrink’s office was bland; walls painted the color of liver sausage which, Jack supposed, was meant to be calming. Endless rows of hard-cover books stood at attention on tall, sharp shelves. There were too many degrees on the walls and a plush, coffee-colored couch sat proudly in the center of the room.
Careful not to wrinkle his clothes, Jack settled into the perpetually warm leather of the couch. Warm, like a body. Like three bodies, before their blood was drained and replaced with holy water.
“How are we doing today?” The doctor was nothing but a mustache and tweed jacket.
Jack detested that we.
He was dressed in an homage. A Halloween costume from six years prior that nobody had been able to guess, anyway.
You’re supposed to be what? Vegetable who? I don’t get it.
Trousers of blue velvet, such a deep and inviting sapphire that he could not stop rubbing the tops of his thighs. A turquoise waistcoat thrown over a shirt of bold paisley. Nylon socks, black watch. And, in hard saffron plastic, shoes so sunny that they even sounded yellow as they clipped against the wooden planks of the office floor.
“I’m perfectly fine," Jack started, "I don’t even know what I’m doing here, my family is more insane than I’ll ever be. Sadie’s been insisting on wearing the dog’s collar and tags. Our Golden, Lucifer Sam. What kind of little girl wants to go by Lucifer?” Jack found himself supine on leather after a beat, forgetting to fret over his clothing. His dark curls were perfectly disheveled.
This is how the rock gods do it; don’t shower for a month.
“Mmhm.” The doctor studiously folded his hands in his lap. “I think you should know I’ve been studying your case, Jack. I think I know what’s going on with you. It’s called Capgras Syndrome. Well, a variation thereof. It’s born of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Do you understand? You've been replacing your deceased family with inanimate objects...”
That word, deceased. It flicked Jack's senses off. The doctor went on for nearly thirty minutes with Jack lying in stoned silence.
Jack startled the man by springing up suddenly, blooming non-sequiturs, “where do you keep the milk?”
“Pardon me?”
“Milk. Milk. My wife asked me to bring some home.”
Disordered thinking. Check.
Paranoid-hallucinatory schizophrenia. Check.
Though he knit his eyebrows in exaggerated concern, the doctor’s nonplused tone betrayed him, “This is Doctor Oscar McKennitt’s office, Jack, not the supermarket. Do you know where you are?”
Jack rose from the warm-chocolate-fresh-corpse sofa and began to pace the office, leaving trails of clacking aural sunshine in his wake.
The doctor sighed and rubbed the end of his pen between his brows, intending to bring his client back to Earth, “that’s an...interesting outfit, Jack.”
Jack stopped in front of one of the black-framed degrees.
“I’d have never thought to pair those particular pieces,” the doctor went on.
“Yeah?" Jack's eyes ticker-taped irascible, "Well, what the fuck are you? I don’t need a goddamn stylist. I came here for eggs. Mona needs eggs.”
Irritability and aggressiveness. Check.
A muttering Jack made his way for the door. Doctor Oscar McKennitt probably should’ve stopped him from leaving, “milk, you mean?"
“Yes! What the hell kind of fascist asshole grocery store doesn’t carry milk, for crissake? This is America, isn’t it?” Jack tried several times to push the door open before realizing that pulling the handle was more effective.
A glance at the clock on the wall told The Good Doctor McKennitt that their time was up, anyway. He didn’t protest except to raise a hand as Jack slammed the office door behind him.
The 13th of December. It was - would have been - Mona’s birthday. That evening, Jack had a pack and a half of Marlboros for supper. He vaguely recalled spending the afternoon chattering uselessly at a mustache and tweed jacket, sprawled on a couch of mahogany leather. Just like in the movies. It must’ve been a MondayTuesdayThursday.
Jack tasted a vague, ages-old memory of cocaine in his throat. His trachea burned with too-many-cigarettes. He was naked at the table again.
He’d pulled from the fridge the last derisory gift of casserole, given by Mona’s mother at the wake, and clapped hunks of it onto four plates, fleetingly noting that it had rotted green and black. He wondered briefly if his three little loves had begun to do the same inside their gaudy coffins six feet underground.
The Capgras Dinner Theater presents:
Lights up, and cue Jack: “Eat your vegetables, Prudence. How many times do I have to ask you?”
Tonight, the roles of Sadie and Prudence Callahan will be played by Lucifer Sam and Surecock the big white bear, respectively.
Mona was a dry-cleaned black skirt suit, draped carefully across what-was-once-her-chair. It was the closest Jack could come to taxidermy while still keeping within the realms of leg(re)ality.
Jack tapped dead ash onto his dead meal and engaged the stuffed bear - who stared him down with black button eyes from across the table - in sitcom supper conversation.
“Why can’t you be more like your sister?”
One of the four plates set out was being lapped clean by a golden retriever in a sleeveless violet dress, all buttons and bows. Moist slurping, cold casserole, plush with green-grey mold. Watching this, Lisa flitted slyly through Jack’s mind.
“You see? Sadie likes it.” He glimpsed the ceiling, awaiting canned laughter. “How was school today, Dear Prudence?”
The director came running from the wings to inquisition his sanity.
“They teased you about your name again, my poor baby?” He leaned across the table to slide the Prudence-bear’s plate instead to his gluttonous dog-daughter, “Fuck the fucking Beatles, Prue. I’ll tell you what--if I’d had it my way you would’ve been plain-old Angela, after my favorite porn star.” An intentional pause, “ Is that pederastic?”
HAHAHA said the air.
You’re really losing it, buddy... Randy’s voice echoed in his head.
“No, Randy, I am reborn. Witness.” he answered the empty room.
He’d realized long ago that he’d be irrevocably reduced to nicotine fits and nude astral projection. To daily to-do lists. A life in bullet points.
Could you stop at the store on your way home, honey? Honey, we need milk. Honey, we need milk. Honey, we need milk...
The sight/smell/sound of ebony flitted through his consciousness.
”Is this infidelity, now I’ve started thinking of you in song lyrics?”
“Is infidelity a possibility with a dead wife? ” Lisa had answered.
He remembered a sharp, feminine cry after that. Had he struck her?
The dog in the purple dress stepped down from his chair, loping across the room to lie near the sliding glass balcony door, in the last weak rays of daylight.
“Sadie," Jack called after the animal, "I don’t believe I dismissed you, did I?”
He only wondered briefly why the dog wasn’t responding to the name Sadie.
“I have to tell you, girls, I never wanted any of this. Any of you. I’m supposed to be in Soho, falling in love with an ingenue and crying my confession all over her skin in orange, red and blue fingerpaint.”
He rose and circled the table, leaning down to kiss the skirt suit, the stuffed bear.
Jack opened the balcony door and breathed deeply. He picked up the phone on the wall next to him and dialed Randy. He was relieved to be greeted by the drone of an answering machine. “Randy, it’s Jack. Randy, I’m calling to thank-to ask...did you kill my family? You ran them off the road? All that shit about how Mona bled me dry. About how I was living the American dream and it was killing me. Did you do it? Are you my Judas? Are you my savior?”
And is this what Christ felt like, when he finally realized and accepted who He was?
“You want to get a beer later? Call me back. Okay, bye.” He hung up the phone and glanced at the dog, lying at his feet.
“Lucifer Sam.” He stooped down to pat the animal’s loyal head. “Everyone dies, but tell me, how many fly?”
He ran for the open door, he leapt, he fell five stories forever.
He fell through a hail of torn legal pad to-do lists. Through showers of technicolor paint. He fell for hours through rivers of Mona’s soft red hair, through dirty diapers and sleepless nights. He tumbled through little clay pots and broken vows. He was falling, and he felt more artistic, more genuine, more human and alive than he could ever put into words or onto canvas.
The sharp crack of bone on pavement registered in his ears long before he felt the impact shoot through him like light through a prism, projecting red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet-white pain onto the his retinas.
Naked idiot fails at suicide, film at eleven.
He opened his eyes to what was not Heaven. Was not Hell. Was not Nirvana. He opened his eyes to a dog in a purple dress barking down at him from several stories up. A ringing phone.
“For fuck’s sake...” he hardly recognized his own shattered voice.
Muted only slightly by the distance, he heard familiar voices, sweet voices:
"This is Mona."
"Sadie"
"Pwudence"
"And Jack. We can't come to the phone right now. You know what to do."
Beep.
"Jack? Pick up the fucking phone." It was Randy. His anxiety melted the telephone wires. "I know you're there, pick up the goddamn phone! Have you lost your mind? Jack? What the FUCK! I'm coming over."
Click.
Jack could not move, but he could manage a sour chuckle. "Lucifer Sam, I'm the Vegetable Man." He stared at the darkening sky as distant sirens wailed a minor key harmony to a barking dog and his own defeated, beatific laughter.
Jack rose from the warm-chocolate-fresh-corpse sofa and began to pace the office, leaving trails of clacking aural sunshine in his wake...
The Capgras Dinner Theater presents: Marching on Fences, a comedy in three acts.
Act 4, Scene 1:
Jack was naked at the dinner table again. Arranged around him were his three great loves, three great losses. Their apartment - his apartment - was rotting. Soiled clothing, festering food, roaches performing circus acts on shards of broken glass.
When Randy had seen the state of the place two weeks prior, he’d insisted Jack see a psychiatrist.
In the living room, stiff with Amish comportment due to a neglected electric bill, Randy put his hand on Jack’s shoulder, “I think you’re really losing it, buddy. You need help. Professional help. Listen, man--there’s no shame in it. Shit, I was seeing one the whole time I was running around losing my mind trying to be an artist in this shithole city. I know a doctor. He’s good. I’ll even set up the appointment for you.”
And so, Jack had nodded and Jack had gone. Every MondayTuesdayThursday.
The shrink’s office was bland; walls painted the color of liver sausage which, Jack supposed, was meant to be calming. Endless rows of hard-cover books stood at attention on tall, sharp shelves. There were too many degrees on the walls and a plush, coffee-colored couch sat proudly in the center of the room.
Careful not to wrinkle his clothes, Jack settled into the perpetually warm leather of the couch. Warm, like a body. Like three bodies, before their blood was drained and replaced with holy water.
“How are we doing today?” The doctor was nothing but a mustache and tweed jacket.
Jack detested that we.
He was dressed in an homage. A Halloween costume from six years prior that nobody had been able to guess, anyway.
You’re supposed to be what? Vegetable who? I don’t get it.
Trousers of blue velvet, such a deep and inviting sapphire that he could not stop rubbing the tops of his thighs. A turquoise waistcoat thrown over a shirt of bold paisley. Nylon socks, black watch. And, in hard saffron plastic, shoes so sunny that they even sounded yellow as they clipped against the wooden planks of the office floor.
“I’m perfectly fine," Jack started, "I don’t even know what I’m doing here, my family is more insane than I’ll ever be. Sadie’s been insisting on wearing the dog’s collar and tags. Our Golden, Lucifer Sam. What kind of little girl wants to go by Lucifer?” Jack found himself supine on leather after a beat, forgetting to fret over his clothing. His dark curls were perfectly disheveled.
This is how the rock gods do it; don’t shower for a month.
“Mmhm.” The doctor studiously folded his hands in his lap. “I think you should know I’ve been studying your case, Jack. I think I know what’s going on with you. It’s called Capgras Syndrome. Well, a variation thereof. It’s born of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Do you understand? You've been replacing your deceased family with inanimate objects...”
That word, deceased. It flicked Jack's senses off. The doctor went on for nearly thirty minutes with Jack lying in stoned silence.
Jack startled the man by springing up suddenly, blooming non-sequiturs, “where do you keep the milk?”
“Pardon me?”
“Milk. Milk. My wife asked me to bring some home.”
Disordered thinking. Check.
Paranoid-hallucinatory schizophrenia. Check.
Though he knit his eyebrows in exaggerated concern, the doctor’s nonplused tone betrayed him, “This is Doctor Oscar McKennitt’s office, Jack, not the supermarket. Do you know where you are?”
Jack rose from the warm-chocolate-fresh-corpse sofa and began to pace the office, leaving trails of clacking aural sunshine in his wake.
The doctor sighed and rubbed the end of his pen between his brows, intending to bring his client back to Earth, “that’s an...interesting outfit, Jack.”
Jack stopped in front of one of the black-framed degrees.
“I’d have never thought to pair those particular pieces,” the doctor went on.
“Yeah?" Jack's eyes ticker-taped irascible, "Well, what the fuck are you? I don’t need a goddamn stylist. I came here for eggs. Mona needs eggs.”
Irritability and aggressiveness. Check.
A muttering Jack made his way for the door. Doctor Oscar McKennitt probably should’ve stopped him from leaving, “milk, you mean?"
“Yes! What the hell kind of fascist asshole grocery store doesn’t carry milk, for crissake? This is America, isn’t it?” Jack tried several times to push the door open before realizing that pulling the handle was more effective.
A glance at the clock on the wall told The Good Doctor McKennitt that their time was up, anyway. He didn’t protest except to raise a hand as Jack slammed the office door behind him.
The 13th of December. It was - would have been - Mona’s birthday. That evening, Jack had a pack and a half of Marlboros for supper. He vaguely recalled spending the afternoon chattering uselessly at a mustache and tweed jacket, sprawled on a couch of mahogany leather. Just like in the movies. It must’ve been a MondayTuesdayThursday.
Jack tasted a vague, ages-old memory of cocaine in his throat. His trachea burned with too-many-cigarettes. He was naked at the table again.
He’d pulled from the fridge the last derisory gift of casserole, given by Mona’s mother at the wake, and clapped hunks of it onto four plates, fleetingly noting that it had rotted green and black. He wondered briefly if his three little loves had begun to do the same inside their gaudy coffins six feet underground.
The Capgras Dinner Theater presents:
Lights up, and cue Jack: “Eat your vegetables, Prudence. How many times do I have to ask you?”
Tonight, the roles of Sadie and Prudence Callahan will be played by Lucifer Sam and Surecock the big white bear, respectively.
Mona was a dry-cleaned black skirt suit, draped carefully across what-was-once-her-chair. It was the closest Jack could come to taxidermy while still keeping within the realms of leg(re)ality.
Jack tapped dead ash onto his dead meal and engaged the stuffed bear - who stared him down with black button eyes from across the table - in sitcom supper conversation.
“Why can’t you be more like your sister?”
One of the four plates set out was being lapped clean by a golden retriever in a sleeveless violet dress, all buttons and bows. Moist slurping, cold casserole, plush with green-grey mold. Watching this, Lisa flitted slyly through Jack’s mind.
“You see? Sadie likes it.” He glimpsed the ceiling, awaiting canned laughter. “How was school today, Dear Prudence?”
The director came running from the wings to inquisition his sanity.
“They teased you about your name again, my poor baby?” He leaned across the table to slide the Prudence-bear’s plate instead to his gluttonous dog-daughter, “Fuck the fucking Beatles, Prue. I’ll tell you what--if I’d had it my way you would’ve been plain-old Angela, after my favorite porn star.” An intentional pause, “ Is that pederastic?”
HAHAHA said the air.
You’re really losing it, buddy... Randy’s voice echoed in his head.
“No, Randy, I am reborn. Witness.” he answered the empty room.
He’d realized long ago that he’d be irrevocably reduced to nicotine fits and nude astral projection. To daily to-do lists. A life in bullet points.
Could you stop at the store on your way home, honey? Honey, we need milk. Honey, we need milk. Honey, we need milk...
- Prue’s got a cold - call doctor, pick up cough syrup.
- Sadie’s soccer practice is tonight. She’ll need a ride.
- Parent-teacher conferences Wednesday
- Honey, we need milk
- Review contract negotiation for next school year
- Mona’s parents this weekend
- Car needs emissions test
- Honey, we need milk
- Honey, are you losing your
- Mind
- Yet?
The sight/smell/sound of ebony flitted through his consciousness.
”Is this infidelity, now I’ve started thinking of you in song lyrics?”
“Is infidelity a possibility with a dead wife? ” Lisa had answered.
He remembered a sharp, feminine cry after that. Had he struck her?
The dog in the purple dress stepped down from his chair, loping across the room to lie near the sliding glass balcony door, in the last weak rays of daylight.
“Sadie," Jack called after the animal, "I don’t believe I dismissed you, did I?”
He only wondered briefly why the dog wasn’t responding to the name Sadie.
“I have to tell you, girls, I never wanted any of this. Any of you. I’m supposed to be in Soho, falling in love with an ingenue and crying my confession all over her skin in orange, red and blue fingerpaint.”
He rose and circled the table, leaning down to kiss the skirt suit, the stuffed bear.
Jack opened the balcony door and breathed deeply. He picked up the phone on the wall next to him and dialed Randy. He was relieved to be greeted by the drone of an answering machine. “Randy, it’s Jack. Randy, I’m calling to thank-to ask...did you kill my family? You ran them off the road? All that shit about how Mona bled me dry. About how I was living the American dream and it was killing me. Did you do it? Are you my Judas? Are you my savior?”
And is this what Christ felt like, when he finally realized and accepted who He was?
“You want to get a beer later? Call me back. Okay, bye.” He hung up the phone and glanced at the dog, lying at his feet.
“Lucifer Sam.” He stooped down to pat the animal’s loyal head. “Everyone dies, but tell me, how many fly?”
He ran for the open door, he leapt, he fell five stories forever.
He fell through a hail of torn legal pad to-do lists. Through showers of technicolor paint. He fell for hours through rivers of Mona’s soft red hair, through dirty diapers and sleepless nights. He tumbled through little clay pots and broken vows. He was falling, and he felt more artistic, more genuine, more human and alive than he could ever put into words or onto canvas.
The sharp crack of bone on pavement registered in his ears long before he felt the impact shoot through him like light through a prism, projecting red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet-white pain onto the his retinas.
Naked idiot fails at suicide, film at eleven.
He opened his eyes to what was not Heaven. Was not Hell. Was not Nirvana. He opened his eyes to a dog in a purple dress barking down at him from several stories up. A ringing phone.
“For fuck’s sake...” he hardly recognized his own shattered voice.
Muted only slightly by the distance, he heard familiar voices, sweet voices:
"This is Mona."
"Sadie"
"Pwudence"
"And Jack. We can't come to the phone right now. You know what to do."
Beep.
"Jack? Pick up the fucking phone." It was Randy. His anxiety melted the telephone wires. "I know you're there, pick up the goddamn phone! Have you lost your mind? Jack? What the FUCK! I'm coming over."
Click.
Jack could not move, but he could manage a sour chuckle. "Lucifer Sam, I'm the Vegetable Man." He stared at the darkening sky as distant sirens wailed a minor key harmony to a barking dog and his own defeated, beatific laughter.