The Art of Blindness: Part 3

(Part One. Part Two.)
Once, Blue Baby had actually written about the time he first met Chim.  Strictly speaking, Blue was, chronologically, a long way from that point in his life in his memoirs, but what made this autobiography so good, he thought, was that, within its pages, time really meant nothing.  He jumped around as he pleased, wrote what he felt like writing, and knew that he would never feel the need to rearrange everything at some point so that the narrative would flow more easily.  So he had cut into some anecdote about a professor he had once known (not an instructor of his own, but a friend of his father's).  Blue had been young when the incident took place.  This professor had collected blades:  knives, swords, lawnmower blades, and so on.  He taught history.  One morning, Blue had awoken, looked out the window of his room, and saw the professor standing in front of their house, three blades somehow attached to the ground, pointing up at a slight angle towards the professor, who was wearing a nice suit.  Blue’s mother and father stood a little to the side, arms folded, watching.  The professor then let himself drop forward onto the blades.

            It was a much more involved story than that, but he cut into this in order to talk a little bit about Chim.  Chim would have been deeply flattered, Blue guessed, as long as he never actually read any of it.

            It went:

There is a man who lives very near me.  He is small and yellow and I hate him.  His name is Chim.  As a rule, I do not like meeting people, and I did not exactly like meeting Chim.  But it was sort of a hopeless situation, because I was entering my home early one morning when I didn’t think anyone would see me, with two dead dogs, one under each arm, and though I could open my own door easily enough this man decided to be neighborly and help me with my packages.  He was drunk, I saw at once.  Returning from a binge, I concluded.  Drunk, yes, but the dogs did not cut through his liquor haze, as one would assume they would.  Instead, he took the Dalmatian from me, sank a little under its weight, and said, “These’re some pretty dogs.”  I thought he was long, long gone, but I said, “They’re dead, you know.”  He said, “I know.  I can see that.”

            I really should have taken the dog back after opening the door, but for some reason I didn’t and he followed me into my home.  He asked where he should put the dog.  I put my Rottweiler in a corner, and instructed him to stack the other dog on top.  He did, straightened up, smiling.  “Chim,” he said, reaching out a hand.  “Blue Baby,” I said, not extending my own.  “Quite a joint you got here,” he said.  “I’m and artist,” I told him.  “No shit.  I can see, looking around.  You have some beautiful things.”  Most of my pieces on display utilized animals or garbage, and Chim asked me, quite out of the blue, I thought, if I ever used human skins or human organs in my work.  I said that yes, I did.  He then went on to tell me, in that utterly charming way drunks have of talking well before they are aware of what they’re saying, that he actually ate human flesh.  That he was actually a cannibal, and that was how he sustained his life.  I said, “No kidding?”

            Blue thought of that meeting, and his once-growing fascination with Chim that had long since tapered off, as he went on his errands.  What a strange beast to get to know, to allow into his home and to, for God’s sake, watch him work.  Blue still couldn’t believe that he had allowed Chim to watch him paint his blood-on-skin mural.  But he’d still been very caught up in Chim’s way of life at the time.  He had hoped to learn something from the little insect.  He hadn’t.

            Anyway, today was a good day for Blue.  His business took him downtown, and negotiating his great bulk through subway stations, let alone the subway itself, had always been an ordeal.  Blue liked to carry himself with a quietly superior dignity, and for much of his life he had assumed that the darkness of the city’s subterranean levels lent itself favorably to this projection, made his stature seem sinister and unapproachable to others.  But the subways, perhaps, cloaked him too much.  Not only did no one else seem to notice him there, but he barely noticed himself.  For the life of him, he couldn’t imagine why this should be.

            He could get through it today, though.  His spirits were too high for anything so minuscule to affect him.  Last night, as he wrote and wrote, a man had called, a man Blue Baby knew named Meezik.  At first Blue Baby had felt terribly angry and impatient at the interruption, but as Meezik explained the call Blue’s head began to swim in glorious disbelief.  What Meezik said, what he offered, such a thing was impossible for someone like Blue.  Yet Meezik did offer it.

            Meezik was a man of the Arts.  Not an artist himself, and not even a man whose artistic tastes Blue trusted in the least, but one day some months back Meezik had come by Blue’s home, completely at random, the two having never met before, to hand out fliers and to explain to Blue what it was exactly that was written on them.  Meezik very much wanted Blue – wanted everyone in this area of the city especially because he, for some unexplained reason, felt it was a very Bohemian district – to know about an upcoming show that he was producing.  The show, Meezik explained, and the flier confirmed, was called Guillotine Nation, the performer’s name was Lightbulb Annie, and past that, Meezik said ominously, it would be imprudent to continue.  Blue would have closed the door in his face, but Meezik had stopped talking suddenly, on his own.  It turned out his eye had caught Blue’s mural, the one in blood that he called Hometown.

            “Are you an artist?” Meezik asked.

            “I am,” Blue had said, nodding.

            “Jesus, that is amazing.  What is it that you painted that in?  Is that paint?”

            “It’s blood.”

            “That’s what I thought.  It’s beautiful.”

            Blue had agreed that it was, although he doubted that Meezik really understood the piece.  Still, his enthusiasm seemed genuine.  Blue would not let him inside to show him any other pieces, though he did assure Meezik that his output was prolific.  Meezik had given Blue his card.  Blue wasn’t really sure what he was supposed to do with it, but he thanked him and shut the door.

            Then, last night, the call.  Blue didn’t know how Meezik got his number, but the question soon became unimportant.  Meezik told Blue that he could set up an exhibit, a small one that was part of something larger, that would be held in an abandoned meat-packing plant downtown.  If Blue was interested.

            Blue wasn’t interested at all, and that was partly why he was so elated; so elated that he was subjecting himself to the indifference of the subway in order to get a look at the beginnings of what must be one of the greatest artistic monstrosities in the planet’s endless, unabated history of aesthetic debacle.  It had to be bad.  Meezik came off as a door-to-door salesman for Guillotine Nation, and come to think of it Blue now remembered reading a write-up on Guillotine Nation and Lightbulb Annie after opening night.  The piece had not been so much a review as it had been an account of the subsequent riot.  The stage, and Lightbulb Annie, had been rushed, though she had escaped with nothing more than a chipped bone in her ankle.  Annie had apparently been attempting to urinate on the audience, who had been unappreciative.  The article was a bit vague.  But it told Blue that if Meezik’s spiel to other potential attendees had been anything like the one he pitched to Blue then he should probably consider being less cryptic in his description next time.

            But none of that really had anything to do with why Blue was sure this current exhibit would be such a joke.  No, the reason for that could be put far more simply:  Meezik was trying to get people to go.  For at least the second time in what must have thus far been a ludicrous career as an Art Promoter, he was making the mistake of trying to surround the work with humanity.  And the work was almost certainly shit, which didn’t help matters any.  Every artist worth his salt – and Blue Baby’s instincts told him he was the only one – knew that anybody who might, by accident or on purpose, lay eyes on one of their creations didn’t matter in the least.  Had no connection with it at all.  Were about as important to that piece of art as a praying mantis is to the boot that crushes it.

            So all of this made Blue Baby positively giddy, and as he pried himself out of the subway onto the dark and smoky platform, he still wasn’t entirely clear why that was.  Worthless art, the few times he’d wasted a second or two to glance in its direction, had never affected him positively before.  It was worthless, after all.  He knew it wasn’t just the prospect of laughing in Meezik’s face, although he planned to do just that once he’d gotten his fill.  No there, was something else, not yet unearthed in Blue’s mind, some larger purpose and reason behind his happiness.

            Those eyes Chim has, he decided, even then not sure what those eyes had to do with anything.  But those eyes were part of it.  Something to do with what he had planned for those eyes.  Whatever that was.

            Ah, well.  Things always came to Blue Baby eventually.  If he didn’t have the answer now, he need merely wait until he caught sight of the leaf on the tree that would somehow fall into place in his mind and complete the mosaic.  Or words to that effect.

In any case, it didn’t matter right now because he hadn’t even seen any of the show yet.  Today was not the beginning of the public exhibit, of course.  Meezik had said, I can set up an exhibit here in my new museum.  Interested?  Then Blue Baby’d said, Yes, when does it start?  Meezik told him.  Not too long, he’d said, so get on the ball.  Blue Baby said, Well, could I drop by and look at what you have so far?  Get an idea of the flavor of the show?  Capital idea! had been Meezik’s ringing endorsement of the notion.

Standing now above-ground, cleansed of the thickness of the subway by the revealing daylight, Blue Baby looked down Juke Street, and down Juke Street a few blocks would be a great big white building surrounded by a ten foot-high chain-link fence.  In this part of the city the snow had been swept into piles and choked with blackness, and everything managed to retain its declining industrial feel.  This building would look like the area’s centerpiece.  Meezik had said that there would be a bunch of trashcans in rows, one row on either side of the front door, leading from the front of the building to the front gate.  These trashcans would be filled with something – Meezik didn’t know what, because he’d delegated the job to somebody else – that would burn fiercely, but would also burn long.  Two rows of constant flames.  Meezik’s version of a red carpet, leading into the meat-packing plant.

Or, The Meat-Packing Plant.  It had been a steal, this place, Meezik claimed, and he had converted it into his very own gallery.  Before the place had shut down, it had been called Chinchine’s Meat-Packing Plant, Chinchine being a rather powerful name in the meat-packing industry.  But for one reason or another, this particular plant couldn’t stand the heat, and Meezik managed to snag it.  Other than dropping “Chinchine’s”, Meezik couldn’t think of any good reason to rename the place, and Blue Baby had to admit that he couldn’t, either, and he even admired Meezik’s restraint in not simply replacing “Chinchine’s” with “Meezik’s”, although Meezik was probably just waiting to see if the place caught on.

Now Blue Baby began his slow walk between the rows of flaming trashcans, enjoying the gutter regalness of it all.  The lack of movement or sound, apart from the snap and flicker of the fire, made him feel like he was about to enter the grand fortress of some ancient and feared cult that liberally practiced blood sacrifices and animal orgies in praise of whatever it was they praised.  It was an oddly nice feeling.  And what was Chinchine, anyway?  Meat-packers.  Not just meat-packers, either; surely they ran their own slaughterhouses.  What went on in those places?  Like everyone else, Blue had an idea, but in his current frame of mind it was pleasant to imagine nine-foot tall men, edging into their tenth decade, decked out in great red and white robes – red for blood and meat, white for sinew and bone – standing above the killing floor and shouting and spitting down to their acolytes that the blood-heat must grow and burn, and that the panicked, fearful lows of the round-eyed, foam-mouthed cows must reach the wailing-pitch of the maniacally religious.  Pluck out the eyes, he would tell them, because the eyes of the dead were as full of life and light as those of the living, it was the body only that died, and once you hold those eyes in your hands, squeeze, crush them into glue, and smear that glue onto your axes and saws and knives, and cut the throat of the next dumb-faced cow.  Blue Baby had heard that in the old-time slaughterhouses, during the real, deep-down cutting, the slaughterers would slice out the anus of each dead cow and, for whatever reason, slip them up their muscled biceps.  So, at the end of the day, they’d have built up this sectioned, caterpillar-like armband of these, well, these cow anuses.  Who knew why, but there’s a cult for you!

But, sadly, no.  He wasn’t stepping through the doorway of any beef-oriented cult.  It was just some shitty art museum.  Blue Baby wouldn’t know the machinery of meat-packing if he sat on it, but he could still tell that all of that stuff had been cleared out.  Maybe Chinchine still owned it, but if Meezik had any brains he would have bought it off them.  Meezik’s mistakes just kept piling up.  Those machines, and their history, would have been a nice antidote to the cloying presence of people that had turned the building into a shopping mall.

The place was gigantic, and people were everywhere.  Blue couldn’t understand it.  Giant white walls with black and gray scuffs low along the walls, and gritty black floors.  Without the people this place would look surprisingly like an empty factory.  Or perhaps an old meat-packing plant.  And where had all these people come from?  Today the opening of the show.  That wasn’t for a few days, yet, still, people.  There must have been exhibits set up, but Blue couldn’t find them.  Couldn’t find Meezik, either.  Blue stood just inside the door, looking around helplessly.  What the hell was this?

Then he felt a tug at his sleeve, and he looked into the face of a young woman with white lips and a black nose.  It may have been make-up, maybe not.  But she was holding up a flier, the same kind of flier Meezik had presented him with as an invitation to see Guillotine Nation.  However, this flier was purple, and the other had been pink, and it was advertising not Guillotine Nation but a different art show called Righteous Shit!:  The Artists for Today.  It gave the date the show began, and Blue was right, it wasn’t today.  And, wup, there it was, at the top, Meezik’s Meat-Packing Plant.  Couldn’t go five minutes without fucking it all to hell.

“Be sure to come,” the woman said.  “It’ll be like nothing you’ve ever seen.”

“I plan on putting up and exhibit myself,” Blue told her.  “I’m here to see Meezik, to find out more about that, but I can’t seem to find him.”

“Oh, shit, okay,” the woman said, and she pointed up.  There was a flight of stairs that led up to a second-floor which consisted entirely of a mezzanine that ran around the interior perimeter of the building.  And there, with his back to the railing, Blue picked out Meezik’s distinctive white pigtails.

“There he is,” she said.

“Thank you.  And what are all these people doing here today?”

“A lot of them are artists and their friends and like that.  They’re getting all set up.”

“Oh, I see.  Thank you.”

Well, that was perfect.  Well-wishers.

Blue went up the stairs.  Up here there weren’t very many people, and Meezik spotted Blue right off.  The bone-thin white creature clapped his powdery hands, and his flashlight eyes went from the sleeping slits of a clap-wearied loser to half-dollars as soon as Blue filled his vision.

“Oh my God!” Meezik breathed.  “Sir, I didn’t think you’d come by.”

“I said I would,” said Blue.

“I know, but – “

“Do you not believe me to be a man of my word?”

“No, of course not, but – “

“I can’t see anything down there,” Blue said, peering at the main floor of the plant.  “What are all these people?”

“Well-wishers.  A lot of our artists are young men and women, and this is their first exhibit.  It’s a big deal, so, you know, I thought I’d, for those who wanted to set up early, I said they could have friends or family come help out.  Say good luck, you know.”

“Yes, I know how it is.  Still, I wanted to take a look around, see what kind of show I’d be associating myself with, and I haven’t seen a single painting.  There are a lot of people down there to just be well-wishers.”

As if he doubted Blue, Meezik turned and looked down to the floor below, at all the milling heads.  Blue didn’t bother, but he kept his ears open to catch the complete lack of nuance in the conversation that drifted up.  Everyone seemed to be talking, and not a single word was intelligible.  So many words were pouring fourth, so many people seemed to feel they had so much to say, but all you had to do was listen to realize this wasn’t true.  Otherwise, some of that good-will and enthusiasm would filter through, Blue would be able to tell that some mother was saying to her daughter that her paintings were very lovely, the colors were very nice, very pretty, or someone’s friend or lover telling his artist-associate that their giant clay erection statue was really quite stunning.  But there was none of that.  It was merely the whir of machinery, the hum of a great press.  Blue couldn’t help wondering – in a purely metaphorical way, of course – if machines left ghosts, because he felt deeply that Chinchine’s old robot workers were still hanging around somehow, and still drawing in the meat, sucking it in from the outside, into this room, where these ghosts then, smooth and coldly, pack it.

“Well,” Meezik was saying, his pigtails hanging towards the crowd, “I suppose my only answer is that I guess my show is going to be bigger than you thought.”

Meezik’s grin was extremely satisfied.

“Apparently so,” Blue smiled back.  “It’s very impressive.  But could I squeeze in, do you suppose, and take a look?”

“Absolutely.  Absolutely.  I’m sure everyone would be just very honored.”

Meezik led the way back downstairs, and all the way down he would throw occasional glances back at Blue Baby.  Then, on the floor, he motioned for Blue to join his side, and the two of them cut into the crowd.  People parted for Meezik.  Blue looked into each face he passed.

“Let’s begin here,” Meezik said, and Blue saw suddenly that they were standing in front of a wall.  Set into that wall was a series of masks.  These masks would be at eye-level for most people, but Blue had to look down at them.  The colors were strange, sort of a swirl of colored oils, and Blue could vaguely tell that each face – they were a man’s face – got older, and, apparently, angrier.  The colors in the masks seemed to shift as he looked at them.  Beneath the masks was a small black card with white lettering that said:  THE AGE OF RAGE.  The artists name, listed below the title, was Pop Bykhunt, which sounded made up to Blue Baby.

“Pop’s not here today, which is a shame,” Meezik said.  “But isn’t that something?”

“It’s horrific,” said Blue.

Meezik looked at him, and Blue looked back.  He could tell that Meezik wasn’t sure how to take that critique, and Blue wasn’t about to elucidate.

“Let’s move on,” he said.

Meezik nodded.  The next piece was a sculpture.  It consisted of a bent and horribly bashed-up car fender.  This fender was twisted into a circle, and trapped in the middle of that circle, trapped in the metal, was a crude granite rendering of a nude woman, her head thrown back, legs kicking out desperately.  This piece was called FEMINFINITY, the artist was Ula Munk, a woman who happened to be there now, at Meezik’s side.  She was smiling, trying to seem detached and proud at the same time.  She had sunken cheeks, and she was topless.

“This is Ula Munk,” Meezik said.  “This is her sculpture.”

Blue looked at her.  Her own glance was defiant.

“This is a waste of a good fender,” Blue told her.  Then he moved on, able to find his way from exhibit to exhibit without Meezik, who, in any case, now stood a bit stunned while Ula said things like “Fucking fat bastard” to Blue’s back.

A giant painting, very detailed, of a seaweed-green man, thin from starvation, with bloody genitals, was next.  This one was called MY LOVER.  The painter’s name flit by his eyes like a subliminal message that didn’t quite do it’s job.

There was a lot more after that.  A lot more.  It was indeed a large show.  Blue no longer talked to people, wasn’t aware of any of the hungry young artists watching appraise their masterworks in the time it would take them to strike a match.  Titles became a blur, except for the ones that bore the appropriate name, UNTITLED.  There were fewer of these than Blue Baby would have expected.  He did linger over these, but even then he focused on the title card more than anything else.  One painter had three works on display.  The first painting showed an angel, sort of, the top half bright and blonde and heavenly, while the lower half seemed to have been sunk into a well-used toilet, excrement dripping down into some vaguely defined, but clearly interested, maw.  The second painting was less clear, but there seemed to be a flag involved, and this flag, through what appeared to be a rain of coins, was evidently oppressing something in the lower half of the painting.  Meanwhile, the final painting was pretty well indecipherable.  Very dark colors showed several rows of ragged, skewed columns.  Stepping back a bit, Blue Baby saw that they could be dozens of outstretched, pleading arms.  Whatver they were, the point was that these paintings were titled, respectively, UNTITLED #1, UNTITLED #2, and UNTITLED #3.  Blue couldn’t say much for the paintings, but he loved those titles.

Many paintings, many sculptures, some hints that there would be live artistic performances when the actual show began.  One piece of floor was roped off, and a card on the wall proclaimed that this spot was set aside for Lightbulb Annie (herself!), who would be performing something called Cucumber Train Ride three times a day, every day of the show’s run.  This would involve nudity and live sexual acts, the card warned.

It was a while before Blue found what he was looking for, though he didn’t know he’d been looking for anything at all.  Set off there, in a corner.  The artist, perhaps, was in the bathroom.  In any case, no one seemed to be there ready to claim it, and if not for the black title card it could have been mistaken for a piece of trash that hadn’t been swept up when Chinchine left town.

This piece was a statue, of sorts, and it didn’t appeal to Blue because of what it was, or what it was called.  He liked it because no one appeared to be watching him right now, and it was small enough to steal.  Even so, the tiny statue, called MAN RISING, was an amazingly weak effort.  Hodling the tiny man, it felt to Blue that it was made out of sugar, rice, and glue.  Some little boy probably got a check-plus for this.  Blue could actually hear little grains falling to the floor and the stool on which it had rested.  Blue held it in both hands, then hefted it in one hand.  He let that hand drop to his side, and a little behind him.  Then he began to edge towards the front door.

“This show, and this museum,” he suddenly called out, “are doomed to failure.”

Everyone turned to him.  Meezik caught his eye, and looked as though someone had just murdered his favorite uncle.  He stared in shock and wounding disbelief at the giant blue man, the man he still felt was a fine painter.

“The only way this show can succeed,” Blue went on, opening the door with his free hand, “is if you all lock yourselves in here and burn the place down.”

Then Blue was out the front door, and he raced to the front gate before the fire from the trashcans could melt the statue.

The Art of Blindness: Part 2

(Part One)

Blue Baby was content there, at his desk, and he had his completed pages spread out in a seemingly haphazard way, as if once a page was finished he tossed it indifferently aside so he could leap to page 2, or 47, or wherever.  It was nice to make it look that way, in case anybody happened to be watching, but really, he knew where everything was, the pages weren’t slung about randomly at all, and in any case they were numbered.

Besides that, any effect he was shooting for was lost even on him, because just at the moment he was writing, ducked there into the pool of light, one of a thousand worn pencils gripped in his fat blue hand, the yellow paper crumbling up like a caterpillar with occasional clumsy shifts of his steadying arm.  He kept his face down very close to the page, and he imagined that he probably looked very charming and childlike, bent over the paper like that.  All that was missing was his bone-white tongue poking between his lips:  universal symbol of slow-witted concentration.

But he wasn’t slow-witted, and anyway he wasn’t concentrating.  He didn’t need to.  It all came, poured, gushed from the open vein in his mind.  He wrote very fast – though his handwriting was amazingly small and tight – and had, thus far, amassed over four thousand beaten, tattered pages.  Sometimes he liked to flip through those pages and mark the dwindling life of one of his pencils.  Like the first page, words beginning sharp and black, as though they were written with fresh coal.  Then flipping along, you could watch the words growing dimmer, graying with age as the pencil wore itself down, the graphite blunting from a black knife-point to a rounded, glossy, silver stub.  The words hazy and almost meaningless.  Then that pencil’s gone, dead, and a new pencil appears, fresh and young and piercing.

Feeling the need to be consistent, Blue Baby had tried for a brief time to write in blood.  Not his own.  He bought a bunch of those old inkwells, and the pens you dipped, and he thought it looked really nice.  And, from various sources, he’d get his blood, and he’d fill up one of the inkwells.  But, metaphor aside, blood was not ink.  Blue Baby was patient with his paintings, and if you were patient enough you could paint with blood, but he was not nearly so lackadaisical with his writing, and trying to make, for instance, the main line of a capital K took a ridiculously long time.  He also discarded the finger-painting style of writing, as it made the work look like that of a caveman.  You could hardly read it.  The upshot was, at the end of the day there was only so much blood in the world, but pencils seemed to be everywhere.

It all came down to writing fast.  He thought fast, had to get it down fast.  Perhaps one day, when it was all done, and he had all the time in the world, he would copy it out again, transfer what he’d written in pencil on paper onto sheets of human skin, written all in red.  Someday, maybe.

Until then, though, he was plenty happy with his current setup.  He felt it was romantic.  Working with primitive tools, an unpublished writer writes his memoirs at a rickety desk in a dim pool of light.

And while he’s there writing, you can flip through these discarded pages, see what he’s been working on all these years.  What sort of strange and beautiful things he’s seen and heard and thought, see how he’s written it all down.  What Blue Baby thinks about everything.

Here is how it begins:
I see so many people every day who do not know who I am.  I like to sit up high so I can see everything, and in this city there are many statues with tall bases, and I carry along a little folding step-ladder to help me climb up.  The statues themselves mean nothing to me.  Are they statues of famous mayors, or wife-beaters, or generals, or child molesters?  Who knows, who cares?  Not me, certainly.  But to a one, the bases are solidly made, which I don’t suppose is a rare feature among statues.  Still, there are so many of them, and from these bases, where I sit, I can see every wide open space in the city.  I just turn my head, which is like a giant melting blue basketball, and I take it all in.  Buildings, yes, and storefronts, in the windows of which I can see my enormous self reflected in the white of a young lady’s wedding dress. But the people mainly, of course.  The strange thing about the people, however, is that not a single face makes a connection, not a single face, or walk, or swinging lock of hair, tucks itself away in my mind for later recall.  I find this, the non-descriptness of the people, particularly interesting.  Everybody exists for the simple purpose of being meaningless, it seems.  Every man and woman is a joke that is ignorant of its own punchline.  And in each and every face, I can see them trying to remember how the joke goes.  In my youth, I was fascinated by blood – and I will go into this fascination in greater detail later – but in my adulthood I have come to realize that all blood, whethere drained from a human jugular or squeezed from a mouse, is all the same.  I smile at my young self, and how angrily defensive he would get at this idea.  “No!” my young voice would pipe up, “No!  It’s not all the same!  Some is dark, almost black, some is like wine, some is bright red and beautiful…” And so on.  I don’t even know no if any of that is true, if there really are so many shades, though I certainly believed it at one time.  Color, though, shades…these worthless subtleties no longer matter to me, thank God.  No, it’s enough that it is blood, that it is what it is.  That it is the life force of banality and uselessness.  I take this fuel, fuel for a wind-up toy, and I put it to use.  I create what never before existed, and from it all I’m somehow able to wring a kind of ironic meaning.  Perhaps that’s the punchline.  If so, I’m the only one who gets it.

            It went on like this for some time.

 *  *  *  *

            Chim left the man alone, even though he knew he probably shouldn’t.  He’d been coming out of his numbed stupor when Chim burst in, and maybe, in Chim’s crazed state of violence, he hadn’t administered a strong enough dose.  He was actually pleased, Chim was, that he was able to even consider this possibility.  He supposed that the next step would be to no only consider it, but then actually act on it.  But he wasn’t in the mood right now.  He was hungry, however, another reason for him to have stayed.  Before leaving, he had scooped up off the floor a few of the Man’s teeth and swallowed them like aspirin, something he’d never done before.  Even though there was blood on the teeth, they had done nothing to satisfy him.  They were just pebbles.

            Still, he wanted out of there, so he left and headed over to Bozz’s.  It was getting very late now, but the bar would still be open.  Chim wasn’t sure if the place ever closed.  He tried to remember if there was a single hour of the night or morning when he had not, at one time or another, been in Bozz’s, and he couldn’t think of one.

            Bozz’s was a large, empty hole in the middle of the city.  The bar itself was big, a giant circle of wood that wound around a large pillar that reached from floor to ceiling, as if the entire place was a wheel rolling across the city, or spinning through space.  The sides and top of the bar were so battered and chipped that it looked like they were kicked nightly by a pack of angry hoofed animals.

            Along the walls, nothing hung.  No photographs, no paintings, no mirrors, not even lights.  What light there was came from above.  The ceiling was white, and shone down.  And because it shone everywhere, you’d think it would make things far brighter than they were, but Chim figured Bozz kept things dim because, after all, it was a bar, and bars were dim.  It would be very strange and disconcerting to get flat-ass drunk and then find yourself looking up into the sun.

            Behind the bar stood Deuryde, and she was about the only person left.  There were a few shapes lost in the shadows, lifting glasses to their lips, but it was very easy to forget they were there until they tried to leave without paying.  Even then, it didn’t concern Chim, so as he walked across the room, dim as whiskey, he felt like it was him and Deuryde, that was it, and that Deuryde was there to tell his fortune.

            What Deuryde was really there for, however, was to be beautiful, and this she accomplished with ease.  She was very young, maybe not even twenty, and her hair was long and brown and lovely.  She sometimes tied it in a ponytail, when she wanted to look like a schoolgirl.  Her skin was like lightly shaded crystal, delicate and hidden.  And tonight, she was just beaten down – she’d been working who knew how long, and she must be figuring at this point that she’d never get home, wherever that was.  She looked half asleep when Chim reached the bar.  She didn’t flip her hair or wink when she saw him.  She didn’t angle for a big tip.  She was past that tonight.

            “It’s late, Chim,” she said.  “You should be home.”

            “Doing what?” Chim asked.

            “Whatever you do.  Sleeping.”

            “I can’t sleep much.  Never could.”

            “I almost envy that,” Deuryde said.  “I’d feel a whole lot less like shit if I couldn’t sleep.  Or if I couldn’t get tired, anyway.”

            “Well, I’d sleep if I could, but my place, I can’t even stand my place,” Chim said.    “It’s such a fuckin’ pit.”

            “I got a pit, too,” said Deuryde, pouring Chim a double Scotch.  “It’s comfortable, though.”

            “I bet it’s not a pit.  I bet you got a nice place.  Probably keep it clean and it smells nice.”

            “Well.  I guess it smells fine.  But it’s a pit.  Everybody lives in a pit around here, even Bozz.”

            “Shit,” Chim snorted.  “I don’t buy that.  Bozz’s place gotta be twice’s big as this place.”

            “How much money you think he makes off’a here?  He used to sleep in one’a the back rooms, till he needed it for storage.  No, Bozz’s place, I mean it’s nicer than mine, but it’s no, you know – “

            “Then I guess he pisses his money away, then,” Chim said.  “I drop enough’a what little I got into this hole that he shouldn’t, uh…”

            “Whatever,” Deuryde said, shrugging.  “It’s late, and I want to sleep.  That’s about all I got on my mind right now.”

            Chim drank his Scotch, pushed the glass out to be refilled, which she did.

            “And not everybody lives in a shithole,” he said, as though she hadn’t just changed the subject.  “You know a guy named Blue Baby?”

            “I know who he is.  I think I’ve seen him.”

            “His place ain’t big, but it’s nice.  It’s got character.”

            “My place has character.”

            “Mine don’t.  Place looks like a fuckin’, like one’a those, like a storage room.  You said that Bozz slept in.”

            “It wasn’t a storage room when Bozz slept there.”

            “Well, that’s what my place is like.  A fuckin’ storage room.  All with boxes an’ shit an’ clothes everywhere.  Gray floors, gray walls.  It’s why I can’t sleep, who can sleep in a place like that?  I got a bed, but, well, a mattress.  But I lie there with the lights off an’ I feel like I broke in, like I’m some bum who crawled in through a window so I don’t get rained on.  I, it’s just – “

            “Chim, clean it up, then.  God, you got hands.”

            “I do clean it up!  I keep it neat, most times, but I don’t even like to go there.  I go there to eat, that’s all.  And to sleep, when I can.  Otherwise, I’m out doin’ stuff, or out over with Blue Baby.  I should be able to sleep there tonight, though.  I’ll be drunk.”

            “I bet I could sleep there, at your place.  I can sleep anywhere.”

            “Why don’t you try and see?” Chim asked.  He couldn’t even muster a smile.

            “Pretty weak, Chim,” she said, and she didn’t smile either.

            He shrugged, drinking his Scotch, then saying, “You said you could sleep anywhere, I thought why not with me,” and he thought of her back at his place, lying naked on the floor where the Man used to be, and he wouldn’t have to stick her with anything, he could just lie on top of her and she’d be warm, and he could lay there all night, taking bites out of her.  Only when he was deep into her throat would she start to move, but it would be reflexive, involuntary, and would end soon enough.

            “I said sleep,” she said.

            “It was just a stupid joke.  Fill me up again.”

 *   *   *   *

Sometimes I wonder [Blue Baby wrote much later in his memoirs] why there are so many people in the first place.  All of this talk about Crowther and myself, and out time spent on board the Patterson, our aloneness there, and the fact that I still wasn’t completely ate peace until Crowther succumbed to his illness, reminds me of this question.  I now understand that that if Crowther had not died it would have been necessary for me to kill him.  His presence had managed to grow unbearable witout him ever having to do anything.  And yet, when I finally reached shore and was greeted by a blnking field of stupid eyes and squawking mouths, why didn’t I grab my blade and go into a mad spiral, try to wipe everyone from the planet, save myself?  Well, I was a bit of a loon by that point, no doubt, but I wasn’t that far gone.  If the thought did cross my mind – and it is likely that it did, though I can’t remember now – I must have known it would have been fruitless.  I know of men who did mean to rid the world of everyone but themselves.  I even know of one man who wanted to murder the world, and then kill himself, after which he felt he would become God.  An ambitious goal, to be sure, but I’m afraid that particular fellow has missed the point.  After dumping Crowther’s disease swollen corpse overboard, I very briefly knew the exquisite bliss of an empty planet.  Just me and the planet.  If I didn’t think it sounded like the title for the autobiography of some star of the musical theater, I might even use that phrase, Just Me and the Planet, as the title of these memoirs.  But really, who could take me seriously with a title like that?

 *   *   *   *

            Chim sat in a chair and smoke a cigarette and looked at the Man stretched out there like a corpse, or body that had never even been alive to begin with, and that those goddamn fucking eyes were just something the manufacturer screwed into the plastic sockets, and somebody along the factory floor had forgot to paint.  He wanted to pluck them out and swallow them or crush them and tell Blue Baby, when he got here, that No, he’d forgotten, it had been some other guy, an earlier one, who’d had the eyes.  This guy actually had no eyes.  Sorry.

            “You awake?” Chim asked.

            “Yes,” the Man said.

            “You know we’re gonna have a guest today?”

            “Are we?

            “Yep.”

            “I don’t care.  Why bother telling me?  Do you expect me to prepare for company?”

            “I’m just telling you.”

            “Well, I don’t care.”

            “It’s Blue Baby coming over.  He wants to take a look at you.”

            “…He wants…what does he want?  He wants to look at me?”

            “Yeah.  He wants to check you out.”

            “For what?  Who is he?”

            “He’s a guy I know.  He’s an artist.  He wants you eyes.”

            “…My, he wants my eyes?”

            “Yeah.  You can’t see out of them, can you?”

            “I – “

            “So he wants them.  He wants to paint with them, or write about them, or some fucking thing.  I don’t know.”

            “Good God.  God, just let me go!  Why’m I…why, just let me walk out of here!  I’m blind, what can I say?  I can’t do anything to you!  Please, Jesus Christ, I just want tot leave!”

            The Man was managing to cry.  Chim hadn’t known he was able to do that.

            “Yeah, well,” Chim said, “he’ll be here soon.”

            Then, just like on TV, someone heavy started knocking on the door.  Chim looked around to the door.  Blue Baby had actually shown up.  He must be really interested.  The only other time Blue had come to visit Chim was when Chim had a woman there who had been naturally bald and had an artificial nose.  Blue Baby had left disappointed for reasons that were still unclear to Chim, and Chim had tried several times to lure him back with descriptions of other oddities and deformities found on different parts of the people he kept, but none, until the Man, had interested him.

            So now he’d succeeded, Blue Baby was here to pay him a visit, and he’d take the eyes and say Thanks, and then leave.  So long, Blue.  Let me lookit what you did to the eyes when you’re done.

            He got up and went over to the door, turned the knob, let Blue Baby in.  Blue’s wide grin was close-mouthed, concealing his toothless gums.  This was the only part of his appearance that seemed to cause him pain.  Or, at any rate, the only part he could conceal.

            “Hey, Blue,” Chim said, mustering a smile.

            “Hello, Chim,” Blue Baby said, himself mustering a patience before getting on with things that he didn’t actually possess.  “How are you?”

            “I’m fine.  Didn’t sleep much, but I’m fine.”

            “Oh, I never sleep myself.  But I’m sorry for your, you know…your discomfort.”

            “Thanks.  Come in.”

            Blue Baby had to turn his body slightly to slip into Chim’s home.  Once he did that there was nowhere to sit, which hadn’t occurred to Chim before, but struck him now.  Yet it didn’t strike him with the force it normally would have, with the same swirl of shame and fear that would wash away any of the joy he might have derived from the situation, because now he felt no joy, or very little joy, and what little he did feel sort of clung helplessly, out of nostalgia.  Sort of, Wouldn’t it be nice if this was making me happier?  In place of his nervous happiness was depression and jealousy, and he felt this deeply as he watched Blue Baby stare transfixed at the motionless body of the Man.  And it wasn’t the Man he was jealous of.

            “My God,” Blue said.  “Look at that.  I’ve never seen anything like that before.  His eyes.  My God.”

            “Sorry I don’t have a seat for you,” Chim said.

            “No, no, that’s fine.  That’s, I don’t even think I can stay that long.”

            “Why?  Where do you have to go?”

            But Blue moved past Chim, his giant shaking sides pressing against the walls and knocking empty soda cans and liquor bottles onto the floor.  Chim looked with a new wondering disgust at Blue’s size.  Instead of making his meager home look even smaller, Blue somehow mad the place look vast:  any place that could contain him must be big.

            “Son, are you awake?”  Blue was talking to the Man, but the Man didn’t answer.  “Son?”

            “He’s awake,” Chim said.  “I was just talking to him.  I don’t – “

            “Son,” Blue said sharply, and kicked the top of the man’s head with his heavy black shoe.  “Talk to me.”

            “Get the hell away from me,” the Man said, and Chim heard that strain of rage that had never been absent from his voice, even when he was begging for his life.

            “You can’t see, can you?” Blue asked, ignoring the display of defiance.  “What happened to your eyes?  Did something happen to you to make them like that?”

            Nothing from the Man, but Blue still didn’t seem impatient or put out.  Instead, he began to circle the Man’s body, his foot brushing roughly over the Man’s face, stepping on his arm.  Blue’s giant legs bent slightly, and he peered with an amazed intensity into those blank domes, those eggs, those golf balls.  That’s all they were to Chim, just that, but to Blue Baby they were what?  They could be anything, presumably.  They could be everything.  Maybe to Blue there were two separate planets, complete and individual, and once he go his hands on them he would proceed, very carefully and with great attention to beauty and magic, to plunder them.

            Maybe that’s what Blue planned to do.  Chim didn’t know.

            “Those are marvelous, those eyes,” Blue said.

            “They’re hard as rocks and I can’t see at all,” the Man said.  “And they’re mine.  If you want them, I can’t stop you, but I hope you choke to death on them.”

            Smiling, Blue said, “Chim told you I wanted your eyes?”

            Nothing from the Man.

            “Well, I do,” Blue went on.  “But you seem to be confusing my motives with my friend’s.  Chim swallows things, not me.  I’m going to make something quite beautiful with your eyes.  But I don’t guess you care much about that.”

            The Man remained silent.

            Blue Baby kept grinning, and now he straightened up with a heavy sigh and turned his smile to Chim.

            “Wonderful,” he said.  “Just what I’ve always wanted,” and he laughed a little.

            Chim grinned back and said, “I’m glad.  I’da probably just thrown them out.”

            “Well, they’re wonderful, and I thank you so much for letting me have them.  I can’t take them now, however.”

            “Why not?”

            “I’ll be gone all day and almost through the night, and I don’t want them to get damaged along the way, or leave them alone at my house.  I could come by again in the morning to get them, that would be perfect.  Then I’ll have all day tomorrow with them.”

            “Oh, that’s fine with me,” Chim said.  “Either way.”

            “Good.  Thank you again.  They’re amazing.”

            “Okay.  Nice to see you, Blue.”

            “Yes.  See you tomorrow.”

            “Right.”

            Blue Baby stumbled to the door and let himself out without another glance or wave behind him.  Chim had to shut the door himself.  Then he looked back over at the Man, and he no longer saw his survival stretched out on the floor, but precisely the opposite.  What a monster I’ve let into my house, he thought.  What a putrid, disgusting monster.

            His eyes drifted to one of the Man’s hands.  One gray finger, the index finger of his right hand, was beginning to twitch and curl against the floor.  Chim stared at it for a long minute.

            “I’m goin’ out,” he said, and he was gone.

The Art of Blindness: Part 1

             Chim crouched down and peeled a bloody strip of flesh from the Man’s side, folded it, and put it in his mouth.  He wiped away the blood as he chewed, and licked more from the back of his hand.  While he chewed slowly – trying, for once, to taste something – Chim looked at the Man, laid out gray and naked on the floor of Chim’s kitchen.  The Man was not only alive but conscious, and his eyes were wide, white and blind.  Chim was fascinated by those eyes, those buffed and rounded pieces of chalk screwed into his head.  He poked with one long, yellow finger at the Man’s right eye and said, “You feel that?”

            “No,” said the Man.

            “You feel me take that bite outta you?”

            “A little bit.”

            “Well, I couldn’t taste it at all.  I don’t know what it is.  Maybe it’s something about you.”

            “I don’t know.”

            Chim shifted his legs – short and bony, with black hair like wire sprouting from his dull yellow skin – so that he could sit, his legs stuck out in front.  He planted his hands on the floor behind him.  His glasses were still steamed, his dinner-plate eyes trying to look around the lenses.  It was still snowing outside.

            “You don’t know nothin’,” Chim said.  “What do you know?”

            “I know a lot,” the Man said.  His voice was a defensive murmur.

            “Nothin’ does me any good.”

            “Well, why should I care about that?”

            Chim shrugged, still chewing.  But the Man couldn’t see the shrug, of course.  All over the Man’s body were scabbed-over patches, red and black and oozing, where Chim had ripped food from him.

            “If I’m, if you think I’m so defective,” the Man said, “then why not let me go?  I mean you could – “

            “All I said was – “

            “ – just let me walk out the door.  You could go for – “

            “I just can’t taste you, is all.”

            “You could get anybody else,” the Man finished, raising his voice to be heard.

            “Will you shut up?” Chim said.  “You think that’s an easy thing for me?  To get somebody else?”

            “Was it so hard getting me?”

            “You looked at yourself in the mirror lately?” and Chim had barely finished the sentence before laughter and hacking coughs followed each other from his throat, doubling him over where he sat.  “Kid,” he said after a while, “you were a snap.  But how many’a you’er out there?”

            The Man had never seen snow, but he remembered when Chim had found him as being a snowy night, with the flakes sweeping against his face, cold and prickling.  But maybe it hadn’t been snowing.  Maybe he remembered snow because it seemed to him now that it had always been snowing.  Every day, Chim came in complaining about fresh snowfall, stamping his boots, and in the early days the Man could feel blasts of cold air and drops of melted snow landing on his face as they flew from Chim’s body.  Time was skewed now for the Man.  Remembering was sometimes like trying to mount icy steps.  So it could have been snowing when Chim found him, or it might not have been.  And if he thought now that it wasn’t, then maybe that came merely from his desire to believe there was something else, some other time in which he’d lived and could get back to if he could only talk to his captor, outsmart him.  Chim was not smart, it didn’t seem, but he was skeptical and distrustful, which was almost as bad.  The Man was smart, though perhaps not in the way he now needed to be.  However, he was physically strong, or at least stronger than Chim, who he sensed was very small.  So, if the Man could move, he could conceivably kill Chim.  Yet he couldn’t move except to talk and sometimes eat, could barely even feel, and, of course, he couldn’t see.  All he could really do was think, and so far that hadn’t done him any good.

            Something light, ticklish, someone, maybe Chim, running something small, like a pen, over his chest.  All along there was a gentle tug as his flesh pulled free.  The Man wished he was deaf, as well as blind, so he wouldn’t have to hear Chim eating.

            “I’m goin’ out,” Chim said, and the Man could hear the food in his mouth.  “Goin’ out to see Blue Baby.”

            “Why do you even bother telling me?” the Man asked.  “What difference could it make?”

            “It’s just for something to say,” Chim explained, standing up.  Again, the door opened, and again the sound of wind coming in, blowing and bouncing off the walls and sailing unfelt over the Man’s skin.

            “I’ll be back in a little while,” Chim said.  “We’ll talk more then.”

            “What – “ the Man began, confused, but the door had closed.

*  *  *  *

            Sometimes it seemed to Chim that he was walking a white road that never ended and that was surrounded by silent, starless space, and he could float forever if he just took five steps to the left or right, and left the road’s path.  It would be okay if somebody would just flick on a light, but nobody did around here.  Or maybe it was that they didn’t open their windows.  Blue Baby, he knew, had no windows, but plenty of lights.  Plenty of lights to see that fat blue body and all his bottles and other things.  But did noe of these buildings have windows?  No, they had to; Chim had been inside some of them.  There were windows.  So open one of the goddamn things, or turn on a fucking light.  It made Chim feel like he was it, just him, and moon for light, and anyway, all the moon did was show him the white road more clearly – it gave him no other guidance.  If he looked hard enough, stared long enough, then some of the buildings would start to take on half-ghost shapes, but that just made it worse.  When he saw those shapes break through the night’s surface, how could he be sure they were just buildings?  That there wasn’t somebody in those shadows who didn’t have yellow skin like Chim, skin closer to Blue Baby’s, so they could hide better?  Chim knew he was small and could be killed easily by somebody even half as big as Blue Baby, so If somebody came out and wanted him for something, wanted this nice black coat he was wearing, Chim could only run.  And he was slow, his legs weak, his back stiff.  He would get nowhere.

            Even though he liked Blue Baby, actually going to the man’s home, close though it was, was not something Chim looked forward to – it was always something he did late.  Late was when Blue Baby was around.  If you tried for him in the morning, his little house might be shuttered up, door nailed closed, sorry, place’s been condemned for months.  You get there when TV starts running shitty old movies and commercials for sex numbers, then Blue Baby might be there, you might see a light under the door, but he wouldn’t let you in.  When there’s not a TV on, or light, and barely even an eye open anywhere in town, except maybe Chim’s own, when the noise from the sewers is all you hear, and now you notice voices along with all the running water, and if you hear anything louder than a whisper then it’s a gunshot, and then boots, and then nothing but whispers and running water again, at that hour, Blue Baby might let you in if he knows you.

            At Blue Baby’s front door, Chim knelt with a slip of paper that said ITS CHIM in pencil, and slid that under the door, into the darkness.  Dark, but there might be a light on somewhere in there – when Blue was alone, he liked his lights dim.  When he wrote and read, he still kept things burning low.

            Chim tried to be a little noisy, in case Blue Baby was dozing off.  As soon as the paper slipped under, a light clicked on, and Chim sighed; Blue had probably been working at his desk, with his little desk light on.  He heard Blue Baby moving around in there, and when Blue Baby moved, everything everywhere seemed to creak.  Whether it came from the floor or Blue himself, Chim didn’t know.

            Now all that Chim could see was half of a thin, bright rectangle, picking out part of the door’s outline.  Then the doorknob turned, and part of the blackness began to shift away, opening up the light, which now outlined Blue Baby, who stood in front of Chim, so much taller and so much wider than the yellow man, his sides almost touching the doorframe on either side.  And bald and blue, like a bloated infant getting no oxygen.

            Blue Baby wore glasses as well; his – unlike Chim’s, which were square and clunky, awkward, like there were the first ever pair of glasses – were round and rimless, professorial.  He wore them rarely, though.  Chim hardly ever saw them.  He wore them, apparently, only when he wrote.

            The lenses were clouded over by finger-smudges that he had not yet bothered to wipe away.  Chim thought he must appear to Blue Baby as a thick blur against the darkness and snow outside.

            “Lemme in, Blue,” Chim said.  He was cold.

            “’Please’?” said Blue Baby.

            “Please, come on.”

            Blue Baby slowly stepped aside.  He was wearing a big blue coat that touched the floor and hid his feet.  It was buttoned clear up to his throat, but its sleeves were short, letting his great blue arms and blue hands breathe and swing.  The hem of his giant coat swept quietly against the floor.

            The place was small one room, really, with another little room that Blue Baby slept in, and another where he went to the bathroom and, presumably, washed up, because Chim never detected any objectionable odor from him, or from his home.  Which Chim thought nothing short of miraculous.  And Chim was also a little fascinated by the bedroom, which was just a floor.  Not even a blanket, no pillow.  It was so completely barren that Chim wasn’t sure why Blue Baby couldn’t just sleep here, in the main room.

            But the main room could get cluttered.  There could be jars and shit everywhere, bowls of whatever, green stuff, and red, and brown, and sometimes jars full to the top with mouse heads, or one time just a cat head, eyes closed and sleeping.  All types of hair kept in bags; animal horns over his desk, like in the den of a hunter; a dead sheep one time, the whole fucking thing, right there in the middle of the floor.  Freshly killed when Chim saw it, cleaned and bloodless, no odor.  Blue Baby also kept sheets of skin pinned to his walls, like artwork.

            Human skin? Chim had asked once.

            Some of it, Blue Baby had said.

            And there was artwork, things Blue Baby had created himself:  little houses of bones, finger bones, and teeth for bricks, if he was getting really intricate.  Little God’s-eye-views of the lives of people who lived in homes, all white and shiny and buffed.  At one point in Blue Baby’s life, he had painted pictures with blood – sometimes with his fingers, sometimes with brushes – but that got fairly boring, and he felt the possibilities were pretty limited, so after a time he quit it altogether.  Still, he had one almost mural-like work on the wall across from the door.  Strictly speaking, it wasn’t a mural because it was done on skin, but it still covered the entire wall, and it showed every day life as Blue Baby saw it.  It was all very crude, with stick figures and smudgy child-like caricatures of the sun and cars, and cotton like puffs of smoke from the chimneys of square houses.  The women in the picture had smeared triangles over their waists and legs – there were skirts.  Many of the men had pipes.  One of the men, the one buying a newspaper, had eyeglasses.  Again, all very childish and crude, but Chim thought that was part of the charm.  Although Chim has used that word once, “charm”, while talking about the painting, and Blue had cussed him out good.

            Over time, everything in the painting had darkened, and now it looked as though it might have been done in crayon or some strange charcoal, but Chim had been here in the room, sitting cross-legged on the floor, watching as Blue Baby painted it, had seen him dipping his hands into the opened veins for as long as that lasted before moving into the stored jars, warm and sealed.  Everything else that he kept, the mouse heads and such, Blue claimed were materials for later works.  He just hadn’t figured out yet how to use them.

            There was also paper everywhere, and every time Chim had managed to sneak a glimpse at the cramped, ruler-straight writing he couldn’t decipher it.  It might have been a whole different language, for all he knew.  Well, usually the paper was there, but apparently Blue Baby had cleaned up recently, because the papers were all stacked neatly on his desk, under the animal horns.  Chim stood staring at the clarity of the floor and the two chairs set against the wall adjacent to the painting, and nodded his admiration.  He liked a clean home, and he knew the struggle of keeping things neat.  Esepcially when your home was so small, and you had as much stuff as Blue Baby.

            “It looks nice,” Chim said.  “You cleaned up?”

            “Yes,” Blue Baby said.  “I was having trouble moving around.  I didn’t want to damage anything, so I thought maybe I should tidy up.”

            “Well, it looks nice.  I can stand and not feel like I’m stepping on something.”

            “Yes,” said Blue Baby with disinterest.  “Well, have a seat, sit down.  Do you want anything to drink?”
            “No thanks.”

            Chim took a seat, and Blue Baby kept standing there by the door.

            “So…what’s going on?” he asked.  “How’s the new one?”

            “Okay,” said Chim, nodding in agreement with himself.

            “Does he have a name?  Do I know him?”

            “No, I don’t think so.  I just picked him up a week ago.  Just grabbed him at random.”

            “Why?”

            “He was easy.  He’s blind.”

            “Oh, I see.”

            “It’s fucking weird, though, you know,” said Chim, settling into his chair.  “His eyes are white clean through.  I have trouble looking at him, he’s so weird.  At his eyes, anyway.”

            Blue Baby glanced around his room, and, his eyes landing in a random corner, said, “You don’t need the eyes, do you?”

            “Not always.  So, not this time, I guess.”

            “You could give them to me.  I could, I don’t know what.  But I feel like I could do something with them.  I don’t think I’ve ever had blind eyes before.”

            “Oh, you must have.”

            “Well, perhaps, but not like you say his are.  So if you’re not going to use them…“

            “No, yeah, sure.  They’re yours.”

            “Thank you.”

            Blue Baby looked at the melted snow that lay in gray lumps and puddles around Chim’s boots.  If he hadn’t just cleaned the place up, who knows what Chim would be ruining with his carelessness.  He wanted to go get a towel, make Chim lift up his boots, but he reminded himself that it was just the floor getting wet, just wooden planks, that’s all.

            Chim sat there, all huddled up in his over-sized black coat, making his yellow face light up, turn on like a lightbulb; his square, stupid glasses, the lenses shining opaque and white against Blue Baby’s lamp.  Blue Baby had never actually liked Chim, though the little cannibal had been the source of some fascination for him.  But now the son of a bitch came over too often, like this was where he lived, not back in that dungeon, that basement kitchen, where he actually ate and slept.  He came over about three times a week, Chim did, which wasn’t really all that much of an imposition, especially considering that the two of them lived close enough together that Blue Baby could, should the mood strike him, stand at his front door and put a .45 slug in the middle of Chim’s forehead when that yellow head first popped out in the morning.  But Blue Baby himself was only home three or four times a week, or at least at this home, so it was like Chim was there every night.  And what made it worse was that Blue Baby never knew which nights he’d spend here, so of course Chim couldn’t know either, but he was still there almost all the time, which led Blue Baby to conclude that the pathetic little shit was there every night, knocking on the door, or slipping notes under it, which was his new thing.  Who knew how many notes cheerfully declaring ITS CHIM, slipped inside on nights when Blue was away, had been unwittingly shuffled and wadded up with all the other papers on the floor.  Again, if he hadn’t just clean up, once Chim left, Blue Baby might have been tempted to dig through and see.

            “So,” Blue Baby said, hoping to at least keep the conversation on a topic he might find interesting, “what is it about these eyes again?  They’re…?”

            “They’re white,” said Chim.  “Clean through.  They look like I could crush ‘em into powder.”

            “Really.  Well.  That’s odd.”

            “I know.  Probably wouldn’t taste a thing if I went ahead and an’ ate them, but – “

            “Chim, they sound pretty interesting.  Why not go ahead and let me have them?  I’m sure I could find some good use for them.”

            “Okay.  Fine.  That’s fine.”

            “I could come by tomorrow.  Take a look at them.”

            “Yeah, that’d be fine.  You ain’t been by in ages.”

            “Yes, it’ll be nice to be by again.”

            “Christ, it’s not like you live just down the street!”

            Blue Baby forced an apologetic laugh and said, “Sorry, but you know I’m hardly ever around.  I barely even see my own home.”

            “I know, I understand,” said Chim, and to Blue Baby he seemed to be emphasizing his forgiveness a little too strongly, like he couldn’t bare the idea that Blue Baby might think he was angry about something.  Which was probably exactly what it was.  This idolization that Blue Baby sometimes sensed passing from Chim to himself was something that he could not understand, unless Chim had some sort of artistic ambitions that Blue Baby didn’t know about, which, in any case, seemed extremely doubtful.  Chim had always at least pretended to be fascinated with the countless paintings, sculptures, and other works of art the flow of which Blue Baby seemed unable to discontinue – or so he’d written in his memoirs – but Blue knew Chim to be someone utterly lost in his own somewhat sleazy drive for life.  In fact, the very paints and canvases that Blue Baby used to create, Chim used for primitive sustenance, to bar the path of his own death.  Chim believed he was, at any give time, only a few hours from death.  Considering his body, a clumsy jumbling of discarded chickenbones, this was understandable.  Som vague disease of the bowels did indeed appear to be waiting to suck him dry.  As if disease wasn’t enough, Chim also seemed to be certain that a stray, or perhaps not so stray, bullet was cutting its way to him, or that a gas truck would suddenly lose a wheel on a sharp turn and then slide over him as smoothly as it would a leaf pressed into the street.  To Chim’s credit, he seemed resigned to these possible accidents and acts of man, and therefore focused himself on staving off the treacheries of his own body.  But to call Chim’s physical state the result of anatomical treachery was, apart from being wholly unoriginal, also being terribly kind to him, something Blue was not ordinarily inclined to be.

Blue Baby made it a point not to know too much about how Chim had spent his past – his interest in Chim rested solely in the grotesquely monotonous way he spent his present.  To know something about Chim’s past might offer up some explanation for this creature’s existence, and that was the last thing Blue Baby wanted.  Blue Baby avoided the possibility of hearing Chim’s life story by, if not exactly nurturing, then at least not crushing Chim’s apparent interest in Blue’s own life.  By talking about himself, and a little about Chim’s current activities, Blue managed to remain ignorant of Chim’s history, if he even had one, which Blue sometimes tried to doubt.  In any case, Chim’s rickety state of decay had to be the result of some hideous and repeated activity from years gone by, and had probably reached a level so advanced that no remedy, demented or otherwise, could possibly make a difference.

This was what Blue Baby though, anyway.  The point being that such a man had to be too stupid to be an artist.  And if not too stupid, then at least too wrapped up in his desperate fight for survival to spend any time creating anything.  Blue Baby had certainly never seen any evidence of any form of artistic endeavor during his very few visits to Chim’s home.  The place couldn’t be more drab or spare.  The only splash of color Blue had ever noticed was the insectile yellow of Chim himself.  Some depraved fools would see that hopeless emptiness as evidence of some quiet artistic genius – anyone that indifferent to outward appearances must be busy conjuring up something glorious.  They would deduce that the reclusive Chim was squirreling away his paintings, plays, sculptures, and novels in a secret room, or in the home of his friend or mentor.  Or, even better, maybe he destroyed them once they were completed, either our of some depressingly romantic modesty, or a kind of crazed vanity.  Either one, it didn’t matter.

Still, Chim was one of a very small minority that Blue would spend time with.  He found Chim fascinating.  Repulsvie, certainly, but why else would he be so interesting?  Not interesting as a person – the man never had anything to talk about – but interesting because of his way of life.  Such an animalistic desperation for life, and why?  For what?  He fought for life so that he could continue to fight for life.  It was wonderfully pathetic, Blue thought.  When a man channeled his energy like Chim did, that is, when every step and breath was only taken in order that he might continue to step and breathe, he would hardly take time out later to stew over some ongoing creative masterwork.

Well, it was silly to dwell on such things, because Chim hardly knew anybody.  Especially anybody in the art world, if you didn’t count Blue Baby, which Blue didn’t, because he had yet to display his work publicly.  This was by choice; showing his work around to people was not something that exactly appealed to him.  And besides, he had a feeling that, if he ever did attempt to exhibit his work, he would probably meet with resistance.

“So,” Chim said after a nice chunk of the kind of silence Blue had grown used to around him had passed, “what’re you working on?  Anything new?”

“No, not really,” Blue Baby replied.  “I’m a bit run down at present.”

“Really?”  And Chim for a moment seemed genuinely concerned.  “Why?  What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.  I’m a bit run down, I said.  That just means I’m rund down.”

“Run down?  You mean tired?”

“No, I mean I have throat cancer.  That’s what ‘run down’ means.”

“Hey, Blue, usually when I come by you’re always painting something, or, I don’t know, mixing paints or whatever.  You’re not for once, and I’m just wondering if anything’s wrong.  I’m just being a friend.”

“Yes, I know.  I’m touched.  But I’m fine.  Quit trying to foist your hypochondria off on other people.”

“My what?”

“Nothing.”

“Boy, you’re in a mood.”

Blue Baby shrugged and turned around to his desk, gazing longingly at the stacks of handwritten pages sitting there, waiting very patiently.  He would love to plop himself back down in that chair, where he’d been before Chim came knocking, and just let his pencil go.  Let the words pour right the hell out, until they grew so lound in his head that Chim’s horsefly whine sounded like a radio playing three doors over.  He wasn’t run down at all.

“Well,” Chim went on, “you know what happened the other day?”

“What?”  Blue kept looking at the desk.

“Actually, this is – no, I had the new guy.  When was I last here?”

“I don’t know.  Last night?”

“No, it wasn’t last night.  Jesus.  No, it was last week sometime.  Anyway, I guess it was just after I got this new guy, and I’m out hoppin’ around all the regular joints – “ Blue Baby had no idea what regular joints Chim was referring to; Chim went to Bozz’s, and, as far as Blue knew, that was it “ – and eventually I end up at Bozz’s, and in Bozz’s they got a guy behind the bar who, he’s always done this, he pours the drinks out before anyone even gets there.  You know this guy?”

“No, I don’t go to Bozz’s.”

“Well, he’s this youngish-lookin’ old guy, his name’s Creak.  And when he gets there, busy or not, he starts pullin’ the drinks.  He’ll do like four or five of the complicated drinks that only like one guy drinks, and then maybe eight of, eight martinis, say, then when he’s got all those done, he starts on whiskey and stuff, doing maybe ten shots of each of whatever, then pourin’ a thousand beers.  And he’s got ‘em all layed out there on the bar in front of him, like he’s a salesman.  But he doesn’t go hawkin’ this stuff.  When the bar start to fill up, a guy’ll come up and take whatever he wants, and he’ll leave his money in place of it, or if this guy knows you then he’ll nod when you take what you want, and he’ll keep track in his head.  Creak’s always done this.  Used to drive Bozz crazy.  Used to think they must’a been getting’ ripped off left and right.  But this guy didn’t, you know, he didn’t, he didn’t pour the drinks and then go out and get a sandwich.  He watched things.  It just went quicker, and people drank more, I guess.  I guess that was what he thought.  So anyway, last night I go in there, into Bozz’s, and there’s Creak behind the bar.  Place’s empty.  Not, I mean, not even, like, not even a stool cushion’s dented.  I say, ‘Creak, what’s goin’ on?  Where is everybody?’  Creak says, ‘Naw, it’s nothin’.’  I say, ‘Creak, this place’s – ‘, I mean, Blue, this is Friday night, right?  The place should have guys poppin’ out into the street, it’s so crowded.  So I say, ‘Creak, it’s Friday.’  At first he don’t wanna tell me.  Then finally he says, ‘Well, I got fired.’  ‘Fired?’ I says.  He says, ‘Yeah.’  He says, ‘Finally bit me in the ass.’  ‘What did?’ I says.  ‘The drinks,’ he says.  He says, ‘Some bunch of motherfuckers got it into their heads they could rip me off.’  I asked if they did, and he says, ‘Yeah, they did.’  These guys come in, Blue, and, like, fifteen of them.  And the owner’s there on Fridays, right?  And these fifteen guys come in.  They all grab an armful’a drinks.  Pfft!  Out the door.  Spilled half the drinks goin’ out, but by then I guess the owner was already busy chewing Creak a brand new asshole.  So.  But Creak, man.”

Blue Baby wasn’t sure why Chim had just made up this story, but clearly it was all lies.  While it was true that Blue didn’t go to Bozz’s, he did know it.  He knew all about the city, especially at night, and Bozz’s had never had a bartender named Creak.  Their current Friday night – and most other nights – bbartender was a very beautiful woman, in fact, to keep as many men hovering over the bar and drinking as possible.  Her name was Deuryde, or something.  She’d been there several months.  Apart from that, if Creak had just been fired, why in the world was he the only person in the bar?  Normally, Blue would guess that such a poor story had been made up on the spot, but he had a feeling Chim had painstakingly planned it out beforehand.

“Poor guy,” Blue said.  “Well, he’ll find work.”

“I don’t know,” Chim said.  “I mean, this great idea of his that he’s always braggin’ about, now it gets him fired.  He doesn’t sound like the smartest guy in the world to me.”

“No.  Maybe not.  Well.”

Chim rubbed his thumb over his nose, now uncomfortable.  Lying didn’t sit well with him, maybe, though this was hard to believe about someone like him.  His uneasiness had more to do, probably, with the fact this story didn’t seem to have gone over very well.

“Anyway, Blue,” Chim went on, “I think I’d better get back.  The new guy might be starting to move.”

“Okay, Chim.  I’ll come by in the next couple days about the eyes.”

“Yeah, that’ll be great.  Come by any time.”

“Okay.”

Chim got up from his chair, and waved quickly at Blue as he headed towards the door.  Then Chim opened the door, letting the cold air back in, and Blue watch his black coat disappear, leaving his head to shine like the head of a candle before the door closed.

 * * * *

The Man felt a tingle begin to spread through his legs.  It was accompanied by bright spots of pain along his legs, stomach, and chest.  He could hear his breathing growing fast and broken, and his fingertips were rubbing over the floor.  He was aware that his body was slowly coming back to life.

His fingers soon began to move more freely, his nails scratching audibly across wood, but for the most part his hands were still dead.  Yet the more he moved his fingers, the more life his hands seemed to gain.  In the blackness of his vision, he saw the veins in his wrists and the tingling life coursing through them.  He tried to move it, to increase his control with his mind.  Perhaps it was just an illusion, but it seemed to be working.  The tingling intensified up past his left elbow, and he felt and heard the skin of his forearms slide across the floor.  His legs, he tried to pump this life into his legs, but they wouldn’t move.  They just tingled and itched and felt pain.  But his fingers, hands, and arms were moving, so soon his legs might be bending at the knee, while his elbows began to pry his peeled body off the floor.

Chim’s front door blasted open and the Man actually felt what seemed to be a mildly cool breeze over his face and chest.  He wondered how cold and harsh that wind must really be to pierce his numbness.  But he felt it.  And as he felt that, he heard Chim stomping across the floor and felt Chim’s heavy boot smash into the side of his face.  The Man sensed the shock more than he felt it, but he felt it, too, along with a bright flash of pain.

“Motherfucker!” Chim was shrieking, and his voice was so harsh, high and wild that it sounded to the Man like he was being attacked by something, some snake-quick monster that was trying to pull out his lungs.  “Piece’a shit motherfucker!  I’ll kill you!”  Chim’s boot came down, stomped down square against the Man’s face, and he heard his nose break.  The Man opened his mouth in confusion, to ask what was wrong, but he was silenced by another kick, and after that one he could feel some of his teeth rattling around in the back of his throat.  The teeth seemed to be swimming, and soon he was gagging, his throat hitching frantically, his mouth bubbling over, his head somehow turning sideways to allow him to vomit out the whole mess.  As he did this, Chim leapt on top of him, straddling his stomach, and began pounding his fists against the Man[‘s broad gray chest, each impact making Chim wail in pain.  The Man was feeling things better now, unfortunately.

“Jesus, I’m breaking my fucking hands,” Chim blubbered, and he stopped punching.

“God, you broke my teeth,” the Man said.  “What’s wrong with you?  What happened?”  He somehow felt dizzy, even just lying there.  His voice was swollen, and he wasn’t sure if the words had actually come out as he’d intended them.

“I gotta get some’a this shit into you,” Chim wheezed, and the Man felt the whisper of Chim’s weight float off him.  He could hear Chim rattling around, could hear bottles rolling across hard, flat surfaces, could hear something being uncorked.  All the while, the Man was marveling at the movement of his own tongue inside his mouth, over the empty and broken sockets in his gums.  He was aware that somehow his hands were balling into fists at his sides.  How long would the whole process take?  To come back to life?  And bounce this son of a bitch off the ceiling?

Chim fell to his knees beside the Man, and what the Man felt when the needle slid into his arm was hardly anything at all.

“Next time,” Chim said breathlessly, “I’ll eat your fucking heart.”

END OF PART ONE