arthur

It began with a massive trapazoidal structure, floating in spanless ocean, built entirely of ivory. There's some sort of international summit being conducted, with delegates from different cultures sequestering themselves into a central hexagon of small rooms. Each room has a one foot by six inch sliver cut into their inner most wall, where one the other side, directly in the center of the hexagon, perch military men with automatic rifles. These mostly younger soldiers, probably only just out of boot camp, are practically twitching for the order to spray the delegates' enclosures with a hailstorm of bullets.

Arthur notes reality is bending in weird tidal waves so that every few minutes the visual spectrum twists like a fun house mirror into a contorted skew where black shoes turn red, the crescent moon is now Neptune, grudges and justifications are worn like royal jewels. After each distortion, there's a brief temperature heave that leaves him with a relaxing mollification.

One such crooked warp sends the midsection of a Nigerian Chanchangi Airlines Boeing 727 spinning into a hurtling descent towards the summit. Arthur hears a meagphone amplified voice yell out, "Stop the summit! The Nigerians are attacking!" A crowd forms on the aft of the ivory structure to witness the 727 plummit. Kyle, Clark and Diana are there. The airliner chunk strikes about a thousand meters off the ivory aft, but just as it does so, another reality distortion strikes, smothering the wreckage. All the passengers shapeshift into a school of baracuda, torpedoing forward to attack the summit.

The riflemen waver, ready to pull triggers. Arthur knows they won't until the order is given, but where are the orders coming from? He can't find the megaphone or any out ranking soldiers on board. As the baracudas close in, another wave strikes, blurring and granulating visibility for a second. Arthur feels that heave of warmth again, under his armpits and between his toes. He realizes with that fizzling calm, that it is he, somehow, who is causing the reality shifts.

Just as the relaxation ebbs, feeling a little like the end of an indian burn, he concentrates and focus it into Diana. A brief second, contained in the crystaline warp, and then her eyes bulge with internal pain. She morphs, goes through a visually disturbing metamorphosis; head elongating, teeth sharpening into rows of razors, skin densifying to a sandpapery gray. She lets out one last guttural squealch, what could have been a thorough scream if her lungs hadn't mutated into gills. In final conversion, the gap between her legs solidifies into one mass, pelvis starting at a dorsal fin, extending a good seven feet to the caudal.

Diana, now a twenty-four foot Great White, topples overboard into the school of approaching baracuda. She chomps and snaps, gnawing them down to swallowable morsels. The remaining few dart away back towards the sinking 727 wreckage. The shark begins a chase, but pauses, turns back and rushes the ivory summit. The bulk of the beast slams into them, tipping the summit to one side, where she waits, maw agape for tumbling children or other bystanders to fall.

To Arthur's side Kyle shoves a little girl, perhaps twelve years old, down the increasing steep, making room for himself on the tilting decline. Arthur swats at Kyle, enraged by this action. He proceeds to beat furiously, kicking Kyle in the face and guts. "Clark!" Kyle cries out and Clark comes over to break it off. Arthur pounces, then wrestles Clark, a considerably bigger man, until they both topple off the edge into the dangerous waters. The brawl stops, both of them afraid now of a bigger fish to fry. But Diana is nowhere to be seen on the surface.

It is eerily calm. The salty waves lap into the now sinking ivory summit, soldiers still poised, albeit uncomfortably diagnal, waiting for that one simple incendiary word, as to open up a can of what they quaintly refer to as "whupass". Suddenly a form bursts forth from under the depths, flapping wildly. Clark and Kyle scramble, trying to clutch whatver purchase they may to pull out of Diana's newly razored jaws. It turns out instead, to be a famous forty-something Hollywood actor. Arthur can't remember his real name, but all involved feel compelled to refer to him as "Dude" or even "Mister President".

Arthur says, "Excuse me Mister President, but I didn't know you had any children besides Clark here."

"Oh no. He's my only."

To which Clark replies, "Uh, Dude that's just not so."

"Oh really?"

And the two argue insisently until, in the end, the answer is actually determined to be "no."

The summit outpost is rapidly submerging and Diana (as shark) has yet to be sighted. Kyle proposes an idea; that everyone kick paddle the ivory structure forward towards the mainland before it sinks. Arthur agrees to jump out and lead the summit, in an exquisite backstroke, acting as bait for sharkly Diana, should she decide to nip at their multiple working feet.

Arthur came out of his room seven times, groggily looking for the phone on it's black cradle, before he gave up and locked himself in the upstairs bathroom, running an extension cord under the door so he could hook up a stereo. He spent his last twenty dollars on a record, using the change for a kiwi/strawberry drink from Marty’s Fresh Fruit & Real Estate on Packard and Market. He wanted to seclude himself in the bedroom, shrouded under his down comforter and whisper over the phone to Mera about this dream he had just woken from.

In the bathroom, the tub filling with hot water, steam wafting up behind him, he felt a growing melancholy. He tried to examine his beard through the detritus clinging to the sink mirror. Thousands of white flecks, probably from splattered toothpaste but just as easily, he knew from experience, could be popped pimples. It was probable, Diana had been in here, preening for hours, leaving miniscule juicy bits of her forehead and cheeks across her reflection. Tiny blonde hairs, probably facial, also adhered to the mirror surface. Some, held in place by spackles of more white filth, maybe hairspray, shaving gel or dried witch hazel. The sink was a quarter full of scummy liquid: half water, half shaving cream, with little flecks of either Clark's or Bruce's black five o'clock shadow clinging to the porcelain.

The bridge of the first song came in, thundering, and Arthur turned the volume up another rotation. He started off playing guitar, forming power chords into the steamy air, then switched, to drums. He sat on the carpeted toilet seat, trying to keep time with syncopated beats, really wailing on several non-existent cymbals. He could have continued like this, hammering away, looking like an epileptic in grad mal, had he not felt the piercing headache of abundant hours of online scrolling catching up to copious liters of caffeine.

He felt, like his computer must when he ran too many programs on too little memory and the mouse sort of froze then dragged into a stunted trail of itself. A lack of memory, bearing in mind, to understand which parts of applications get slower conditions, is to maintain a temporary nature of sluggish idiocy. Was he, like his CPU, becoming temporarily stupid? The headache swooned and combined with the steam, he started to get floaters in his vision: large transparent bacterial projections, and then flashes of blackness.

Arthur held his temples by his first two fingers on each hand, imagining he suffered some sort of telepathic swell. Previously in life, he experienced what he believed were pseudo preternatural behaviors before: deja vu, empathy, psychometric flashes. At age sixteen, he had come down with a terrible intestinal pain and fallen asleep on the family couch with a pejoration of discomfort. He awoke, the pain abated, to his sister crying at the television. Kurt Cobain had killed himself.

"I don't know, it feels like some sort of... vortex," he had said to Jann, her face still streaked with drying tears.

"It's best not to think about it," she replied, now assuming the composure of the eldest sibling, "The more self-introspection you do, especially concerning matters of tragedy like this, the more negative your mind-set will become."

"But what if it is supernatural or something?"

"Probably not."

"But what if it is?"

"Then there's no point in thinking about it. You'll never know for sure. You could be just having a subconscious reaction. Maybe you're just looking for attention. Did you ever think that?"

"No."

"Well, look. Let's say you are psychic or something like that, right? There's no way for you to confirm that it's actually occuring, because no one else around you has experienced it. And if you did mention it , to Mom or Dad, they would just send you back into therapy."

"So I shouldn't think about it?"

"Contemplation won't get you anywhere. If there's something you want to accomplish, you should just go ahead and do it."

"What is there to accomplish?"

"I don't know. Get a job, go to college, get married, have kids. You decide. But saying you're psychic... that's like saying you can prove God's existence. It's beyond the boundaries of conventional goals for someone our age..."

But Arthur had barely heard anything she said after that one gem was dropped. God's existence. He never mentioned it again, not to Jann or anyone, but Arthur was convinced that perhaps this was somehow a gift from God. And maybe he could use it to communicate with his benefactor. So twice a day, every day, for the last four years he tried to meditate in such a way as to extend his mental capacities.

He had been doing it earlier, before he had fallen asleep, when Clark had knocked on his door, "We're having a house meeting. You might want to join us, since the oil was shut off today."

Arthur had not responded, sitting cross-legged on his bed. If he had, it might have disrupted a potential connection into the fathoms of thought. He pictured himself, to be internally filled with a viscous orange substance, almost like a transmission fluid. Slowly, he imagined the fluid draining out of his hands, feet and rectum, like faucets on a slow, pattering drip.

There was no ordinance or cognitive practice he followed for this exercise. He had read somewhere, that when the first yoga gurus were creating poses and breathing routines, that they had done it from instinct alone. Each pose merged into another one, until it felt just right. Arhtur was convinced this was how he should proceed with everything, especially his divine investigation. Waiting until something felt right and then just going with it. It may take decades, but he didn't care. What was a calling if it wasn't a life's work? He had found his vocation and would proceed, no matter the turbulence to his family or peers.

Now, pissing though wafts of bath steam, blasting fecal debris off of the inside of the toilet bowl, he began to lose any corollary development he had made with the previous meditation. Who left this filth behind? Was it Clark, or god forbid, Diana? Somehow the thought of her, as a female-being leaving behind clods and streaks of her digestion was worse than if it had been one of the other guys in the house. The image of her bare-assed, rising from the bowl without even a single flush, flashed into his mind but he shook his head back and forth to violently shake it away.
But the image remained. Diana stuffed wads of toilet paper between her legs, locking her knees together and hopping around the bathroom, stunted like a sort of rusty pogo yelling, "Lah-di-dah! I'm a bunny!"She twisted on the bath mat and almost fell and would have probably cracked her head if she hadn't braced between the sink and radiator.

Arthur knew where this depravity came from. It was no vision or phenomenon. Jann had done something similar when they were very young and their parents still gave them baths together. He remembered the toilet paper spilling into a free spool beneath her.

He climbed into the tub.

His quest, for the divine wink, had started to have some scaling effects upon his external resources. And now it was effecting him physically. Brief flutters of memory lapse or fantastic imaginations had started to undermine him. Up until this, his body had seemed unimportant. After all it was his body that needed to pay the rent and bills, not actually him. Which begged the question, if he was not his body -- who was he? Some ethereal collection of imitations and other people's ideas? A soul attached by some astral twine to this slightly impoverished body?

To incur a loss, whether it be from either the disposal of his securities or his assets, was a sacrifice he was willing to make in pursuit of these questions. He already owed his mother a good fifteen hundred dollars when he went to her last week for some more, just enough to get by a month. She had made him do a trade. His father knew about none of it. She would hold onto Arthur's disc man until he could pay her back at least two hundred.

"This way you can get a loan. Learn some responsibility without having to actually part with your belongings." she said when he begrudgingly handed it over. Now, nothing to listen to when he took the bus back an forth around town. He had to sit and listen to the ramblings of the sweaty overweight and often aged passengers.
"I don't want a VCR in my life. I don't need that stuff. Passive stuff. I get enough of that," a crinkley looking old woman said loudly to him on the way home before she disembarked with a, "Muchos Gracias Senior. No Habla Espanol" to the bus driver who was actually, Arthur believed to be, ethnically middle eastern.

Arthur heaved upwards, feeling a little disgusting as wifts of tub water streamed through his knapped happy trail before he again fully submerged his gut, feeling it settle on the inner plastic bath mat that someone else must have bought. His head lolled, dipped into the bath and emerged.

As he reopened his eyes, his vision focused and then converged on a reflection of the bathroom fanlight on the posterior of the tub. His legs kicked up out of the water and he slid himself so that his knees rested in the basin, while his face sunk halfway beneath the water line. Still concentrating on the glaring reflection, he crossed his eyes and made the light patterns seperate. When he relaxed his vision, the light blobs reformed into one larger blob. He breathed underwater, the bubbles popping up into his pupils, making him blink.

Again he compressed his vision, this time stopping the reflection's course from seperating into doubles by forcibly holding his eyesight between straight and cross-eyed. He held them there focally, two floating baubles of light on bathtub plastic, just barely hanging together by a fade of elastic beam, like cell divisions or a wad of chewed gum pulled between fingertips.

Above him the moaning had ceased. There was the patter of feet, a pause, and then he could hear a melodic whistle, some sort of woodwind. At first it sounded like random notes played in patterns of fours, but then Arthur realized that the variable tones were just beginner's mistakes. Someone was playing "Paranoid". On shakuhachi.

Arthur dunked his head again, screaming a piqued burst of air bubbles. He lay motionless for a bit, listening to his sister's playing. After she got the hang of the verse, he could hear that foot patter again, combined with the repitition of notes. He pictured her sauntering back over to the bed and wondered who was laying there waiting for her, sheathed in her bed sheets, lumped against the giant stuffed E.T. she slept with.

The words house and orgy flashed through Arthur's mind as he first envisioned each of their roommates, beginning with Clark and ending with Diana, in various sexual positions with Jann. And then, uncontrollably a brief flash of himself, on bare knees kissing and licking at a her. He burst forth, pushing himself up to a dripping half stand in the tub. A shudder ran down his spine and Arthur raised and flexed his shoulders in spasmatic flinch. The shudder was gone and goosebumps were now forming on his triceps and the back of his neck. He went twitchy, over sensitive to the cool bathroom air. It felt like there was a small semi-solid ball stuck just below his throat.
The shakuhachi stopped and went silent. And then the drawn sighs and grunts began again. He quivered there, feeling his ankles begin to buckle, pulling his face into a sour grimace. And then he reached over and flipped the faucet back on in one quick motion. The water burst in a blast of luke warm at him from the shower head, instantly blocking out the moaning of his sister's pre-orgasm with an encompasssing hum of pipes and plumbing.

Arthur breathed deeply, feeling the shower spray heat up, steam filling his diaphragm and lungs. He grabbed a bottle of someone else's tea tree oil shampoo and began to lather up, hair first. He applied an apricot facial scrub, probably Diana's. He smothered his chest with herbal essence lotion. He scrubbed jojoba conditioner into his scalp, fingernails digging trenches between his folicles. He poured a mentholated bubble bath mixture into the rising bath, saturating the steam with icy fumes he could feel on his uvula. It was another fifteen minutes before he could even bring himself to apply any of the various hygenics to the area between his legs.