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the End of the World
cc&d, v279
(the January 2018 issue)

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the End of the World

Bird Island
Chapter 10
The New Yorker

Patrick Fealey

    “Bird, can you say, ‘Nevermore’?” Scott says.
    “How ’bout ‘Fuck-off, asshole’?” Ivelli says. “Get the fuck out of here. And take your Dungeons and Dragons dice with you.”
    “I buy books,” Scott says. “All the time.”
    “Poe is dead and Bird isn’t a raven.”
    “PENTAGRAM!”
    “See, he only says it when he wants to. Right now he’s telling you to leave your ring. He wants it. You like him so much, you gonna give it to him or you not goth enough?”
    The boy Scott brushes Scott’s hair out of Scott’s eyes and looks at Bird. “He says—“
    “PENTAGRAM!”
    “Give it up,” Ivelli says. “You taught him.”
    Scott twists the silver pentagram and pulls and places it on the counter.
    “Sterling,” Ivelli says, picking it up. “Bird, you’ve scored.”
    “Yeah.”
    Ivelli pushes the pentagram at Bird. Bird looks, but it’s Ivelli. Ivelli puts it on the counter. “It’s yours, Bird.” Ivelli slides it closer to Bird. Bird steps aside.
    “Look, he doesn’t want it,” Scott says.
    “Come back for it when he gets tired of it - in about a year. And take this. It’s about time you graduated from wizards to fist-fucking.”
    “Our Lady of the Flowers.”
    “‘Genet sucks on Ramon’s dick/The guy in the bunk above gets sick/the lunatic in the cell next door starts screaming for his mother.’
If your mother tells you to bring it back, tell her to bring her fine ass.”
    “I don’t think he wants it,” Scott says.
    “He will,” Ivelli says. “Look how it shines, Bird.” Ivelli picks up the ring and holds it up to Bird. Bird turns. “Fucking crazy bird. He asks for it and now he doesn’t want it. Maybe he’s a she.”
    “Can I have it back?”
    “Fuck off!”
    “ . . .”
    “If he hasn’t touched it in a week, you can have it back.”
    “You promise?”
    “Tom, tell him.”
    “I’ll hold on to your ring,” Wawp says.
    “Alright.”

    Wawp and Ivelli are smoking and drinking coffee. Ivelli is pale and tells Wawp to do things. Wawp and Ivelli sit most of the day and sometimes a human comes in. This place is like other places Bird has gone with Wawp where Wawp sits and talks to humans. Bird doesn’t know why and there is no food here. Just coffee.
    “You get books at half price, so if I find you stealing, you’re gonna get the same baseball bat all the thieves get, but worse,” Ivelli says.
    “You have a lot of shoplifters here?” Wawp says.
    “No. I’m paranoid from the city. If you have any suggestions, I’m open,” Ivelli says.
    “Sure,” Wawp says. “If I think of any, I’ll let you know.”

    “Ivelli, we have any Dostoyevsky? A guy wanted Notes from Underground. I sent him to fiction, philosophy, searched everywhere, but I couldn’t find him.”
    “Dostoyevsky?” Ivelli says.
    “Yeah.”
    “What do I want Dostoyevsky for?”
    “Because he’s one of the greatest authors who ever lived and you own a bookstore.”
    “Dostoyevsky is dead.”
    “People are asking for him.”
    “Dostoyevsky?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Forget about Dostoyevsky. I gotta go meet my wife.”

    The meat is on Ivelli and Ivelli’s mate when Ivelli and its mate come back sucking on buckets . . . The smell of melted cheese and charred beef.

    “We should at least have Notes from Underground in this store,” Wawp says.
    “I’m about to have a second stroke and you’re still talking about dead Russian writers? People on this island aren’t interested in that book. The bourgeois scumbags on this island need to see a simpler story. They need Diary of a Rapist, The FBI Homicide Investigation Manual, they need smack, they need mutilation, they need murder, they need chaos, they need despair, and at the very least, they need to know what a Freddy Corbin looks like.”
    “You think a picture of a dead body is going to have an effect on a Republican?”
    “This bland homogenous fortress town needs to be turned around. They need to see the darkest depths of their human souls. Have you looked at that book? There’s a photo of a boy who’s been strangled and sodomized. His ass is still in the air with his reamed out asshole facing the photographer. A gigantic maggot is crawling out of his mouth. You know the first thing I think of when I see that? That he’s black. That they found him in a hotel room in the city, that he’s poor. This island is a part of that crime scene. This is the hideout, protected like a prison, furnished with mansions and yachts. Show me a man in this town with clean hands and i’ll show you the token bum. The walls are high here. The last thing anyone wants is a maggot-infested corpse of a poor city kid in their home. Well, we’re gonna bring it to them. We’re going to bring them the kid whose pocket their yachts came out of.”

    The pentagram is not of Scott. Ivelli talks. Wawp listens.

    “I met my wife when I was a punk rocker, that’s how we met. I was the singer. She was the groupie who wouldn’t let up. She stalked me in my Queens hotel room. That was before Queens got ugly. When she showed up at gigs, I told her to fuck off, but she kept showing up at every one of them. I couldn’t shake her. Go ahead and laugh, but we were brought together by the music. We called ourselves the Hemorrhoids and we were the most outrageous fucking worst band in New York. That’s saying a lot for the 1970s. We could clear a room in under a minute. We repulsed. Did you know I was the first person to ever hit himself with a microphone?” Ivelli waves Ivelli’s arms and hits Ivelli on the head. “Boomf! Boomf! Boomf! When Norman Mailer was going through a divorce and needed cash, he wrote a bunch of quick books, one of them on the punk scene. He interviewed me after a show one night and asked about the microphone. ‘Why are you hitting yourself?’ he asked me. I told him, ‘Because i am the closest victim.’”
    “Do we have any Mailer in this place?”
    “Of course not.”
    “I got my ass kicked after a show in Connecticut. There had been a story in the news about a guy who had had his dick cut off by his girlfriend. I made a joke about it onstage. Turns out his sister was in the audience with a bunch of his friends.”

    Bird drops the lighter into Ivelli’s coffee.
    Wawp laughs. “Bird’s tryna tell you something.”
    “What?”
    “Check your coffee.”
    “You little bastard.”
    “I was gonna say something, but it was an act of nature. He’s never liked fire. I used to use matches, but they were too easy for him to grab and run with. He’d dunk them in his water.”
    “Bird,” Ivelli looks at Bird. “You owe me a dollar for the lighter and about the same for the coffee.”
    Wawp says, “Bird doesn’t have any money and what he has nobody knows where it is.”
    “He has the sterling silver ring.”
    “He hasn’t accepted that. You can’t sue him for more than tin foil, bullet shells, clothespins, assorted pieces of metal, you know, crow treasures.”
    “I’ll take it out of your pay.”
    “You hired Bird separate from me and as his pro-bono attorney I must point out to the court that your coffee is still drinkable.”
    “You win. Bird, if the lighter dries out, I won’t fire you.”

    “I don’t like guns,” Ivelli says. “Bet you wouldn’t have guessed that. I like to see what they accomplish in the hands of people I like, but my own experience with them was a failure. It was a long time ago. Out in Texas. Doing the cowboy thing, living on a ranch and drinking a lot and asking myself the big question: ‘Are you gay or are you straight?’ There were plenty of guns around, but one of the guys staying with us had a pistol. He would go out back and shoot bottles like he was Doc Holliday, though I think he also shot small animals like birds and frogs down at the pond. One day he was out and I borrowed the gun. I was convinced it was the right thing to do. I knew it was the only thing left for me. I went out back . . . And there was this mess of shattered bottles just blown to pieces, ripped tree trunks and pocked rocks . . . That’s when I realized what the gun would do to me. Then I wasn’t so sure I wanted to be a dead person who couldn’t tell his story, maybe. So you know what I did? I took all the bullets out of that revolver, all of them except one. I was going to see, you know, if it was meant to be. The odds were in my favor, so if they went against me, then fate had spoken. With one bullet in I tried to spin the cylinder. But it wouldn’t spin. Then I figured it out. You had to pull back the hammer a little and then it would spin. I spun it, like in Deer Hunter. I cocked the gun. One bullet. One shot. I put the barrel up to my temple. I was all set to do it and I should have pulled the trigger before I could start thinking because no sooner did I have this hard thing against my head than I get to wondering about nothing. I didn’t believe in heaven or hell. I believed that if I pulled that trigger and shot myself, I wouldn’t know anything. And that started to bother me - because if I believed in anything, it was awareness and knowledge. So, I lowered the gun and pointed it at some trees and pulled the trigger. ‘Bang!’ The thing jumped in my hand. It scared me so bad I ran back into the house and put it away. The moral of the whole story is that nothingness is a sure way to wake you up to what a pussy you are. I couldn’t take action.”
    “NEVERMORE!”
    Wawp and Ivelli are laughing.
    “FISH!”
    “Can I run up to the market?” Wawp says.
    “Yeah. Get me a lighter.”

    “There was another time in Brooklyn Heights,” Ivelli says. “The ranch wasn’t the last time, just with a gun. There was this pipe that stuck out of the ceiling of my studio. It was in the shape of a U, like this, a toilet pipe sticking out of my ceiling. It was always there. I saw it every night I came home. I saw it when I wasn’t looking at it. I felt it. That pipe stalked me. One day I pushed a chair under it and measured the rope. I cut the rope and made a noose. I tied it to the pipe. I dropped the noose around my neck and pulled it tight. I kicked out the chair and there I was, hanging. Everything was going fine . . . All of a sudden there was a crash . . . I was on the floor . . . On my ass . . . A stream of water and shit pouring down on me . . . The pipe had ripped right out of the fucking ceiling! I sat there with the noose around my neck, covered in shit. If I hadn’t been such a fat idiot! That’s when I knew I was meant to live.”
    “What’s the moral?”
    “I guess fat and stupid is how to live.”

    Bird stands on the hello so Wawp must talk to Bird. Wawp says, “Bird, you know if that rings you’re going to have to let me answer it. This place is my job. It’s your job too. This is your first job and you should take it more seriously. Do you wanna answer the phone? Can you say, ‘Friction’?”
    “DONALD’S FISH!”
    “Close enough.”

    Ivelli is bright. Wawp talks to the humans. Wawp gives the humans books. Wawp says hi. Wawp says thank you. Ivelli talks and sits while Wawp gets the humans out. Ivelli talks to humans. Humans talk to Bird and touch Bird. Ivelli talks to Wawp when the humans go.
    “I met this chick,” Ivelli says.
    “Yeah?”
    “She’s a death rocker from New York.”
    “How’d you meet her?”
    “She came in here the other day with two other girls. They’d just gotten on the island and their car had broken down right outside. She asked if she could use the phone. They were in and out of here all day. And yesterday she came back and asked me if I wanted to go out sometime. She’s here for the summer. My wife wasn’t around, so I said ‘sure.’”
    “What’s she look like?”
    “A death rocker. You know, she’s paler than me. Dresses in black.”
    “Paler than you?”
    
“Paler than me, but she uses make-up.”
    “What’s she like?”
    “She’s a death rocker.”
    “Where’d you go?”
    “Just out for a couple beers. I’ve started drinking again. Then over to her place.”
    Ivelli is bright again. Grey teeth and purple neck.
    “You went to her place?”
    “To look at the records she brought up with her. She’s got all the old bands, all the albums I used to have. It’s like destiny or something.”
    “You went over to her house - to look at albums?”
    “Well, you can only look at albums so long. Then, shtuppin’.”
    “No.”
    “Yes. It was so strange to fuck someone who, who is so light. I mean, I mean I could wrap my arms around her and just pick her up. I mean, really fuck her.”
    “What about your wife?”
    “She doesn’t know. I told her I was out with Charlie.”
    “Did she see that hickey?”
    “My wife gave me that.”
    “What? When?”
    “This morning.”
    “Dude, she knows.”
    “She doesn’t know.”
    “When was the last time she gave you a hickey?”
    “Nineteen-eighty.”
    “She definitely knows.”
    “She doesn’t know.”

    “Bird,” Ivelli says. “This death rocker will never be as deathly as you, but she is weird. I mean whacked. Tom, you know what she told me the other night? She said, ‘I am consumed by death, but I do not consume death.’ Then she asked me if I knew what she meant. It was all I could do not to laugh in her face. I just nodded and said, ‘Yes. I know what you mean. You are consumed by the idea of dying, but you do not eat meat.’ And she said, ‘Right.’”
    Wawp laughs.
    Bird laughs.
    Ivelli laughs.

    Wawp is sitting in front of the drawer where Wawp keeps the shiny money from Bird. Bird stands, waits for Wawp to open it again, but nobody comes in. The sun is bright and hazy in the glass front window. Wawp sees Bird breathe through Bird’s mouth and gets up and brings back water. Bird drinks on the counter. The door opens. Ivelli.
    “I got busted,” Ivelli says, hurrying past – into the books.
    “You already were.”
    “What do you mean? She didn’t know.” Ivelli spins and returns.
    “Whatever . . .”
    “I was over the death rocker’s, shtupppin’. It got late. Midnight. Two. Three. Three-thirty. I couldn’t pull myself away from her. Finally at five in the morning I said ‘The hell with it’ and went to sleep. Yesterday, sometime in the afternoon, I showed up at home. My wife tore into me. She said, ‘Get the fuck out! And I want all your shit outa here!’ I got busted.”
    “You didn’t get busted. You slept over this chick’s house. You gave it up.”

    Keys.

    Wawp opens the store and Bird rides his shoulder. A kill. Wawp stops, the keys in Wawp’s hand. Ivelli comes out of the books, rubbing Ivelli’s eyes. Ivelli is without his glass eyes.
    “It stinks in here,” Wawp says.
    “Really?” Ivelli says. “Like what?”
    “Like you. No wonder no one comes in here.”
    Wawp is laughing. Bird laughs. Ivelli isn’t laughing. Ivelli puts on Ivelli’s glass eyes and stares at Wawp and Bird.
    Wawp says, “Dude, you oughta take a shower at your girlfriend’s house.”
    “She only has one towel.”
    “So?”
    “I don’t want to ask her to use it.”
    “You sleep with her, but you can’t use her towel?”
    “I’m working up to it.”
    “You can shower at my place.”
    “I’ll do that.”
    Ivelli says, “Business sucks! Nobody is coming in! I called my mother for more money. She’s furious about me leaving my wife and kids for the death rocker. That’s all she talked about. She screamed at me, ‘Alimony! Child support!’ . . . Me and my girl have been talking. I’m going to have a white chalk outline of a corpse painted on the sidewalk in front of the store. It will have red paint blood in the heart and brain so it looks real.”
    “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
    “Why not? It’ll attract attention.”
    “I’m not sure the zoning board members read what we sell.”
    “We need to specialize. Giving away free condoms is only half of what we’re about. Shit! I haven’t even been wearing them.”


    Wawp says into the hello: “Is Ivelli there? Okay thanks.” Wawp puts it down.
    “A woman, Bird, young. The death rocker? What’s she doing working?”


    Wawp answers, “Friction. Slow. Oh yeah? I’m sitting here in the sun, bored. No. I gotta go. It’s getting busy.
    “The death rocker, Bird. She says the other day when she worked, it was busy. She also asked me if I was a sun person. Whack-job.”

    Ivelli is walking. Ivelli walks away into the books and then comes back to Wawp. Ivelli walks out the door into the sun and turns and walks back into the store and walks into the water room. The water is splashing and Ivelli is in the water room when the sun goes to night in the front of the store: Ivelli’s mate is in the door.
    “Is Ivelli here?” it says.
    Ivelli’s beef and cheese mate. It stays in the doorway.
    “Yeah,” Wawp says. “He’s in the bathroom. C’mon in.”
    “Tell him I’m here.”
    “Ivelli! Your wife is here!”
    Quiet. Splashing.
    “Ivelli!”
    “I hear ya!” Splashing.
    “He’s coming,” Wawp says. “C’mon in.”
    “No, I’ll stay out here.” It is shaking. A river has run under its face. Washed away and lost.
    Ivelli comes out of the water room. Ivelli looks the same. “I’m gonna be awhile,” Ivelli says in a breath, smiling at Wawp as Ivelli passes the counter. “She has a list of demands.”
    Ivelli is out the door and Ivelli and its mate go.
    Wawp and Bird sit, as on many days.
    “Bird, to sell books you need books and I cannot think of one book in here that I would buy. Ivelli has not been getting books.”
    Out of the sun a human comes in.
    It is Ivelli. The mate is not with Ivelli.
    “What happened?” Wawp says.
    “She wants half my money and then she told me to ‘fuck off.’”
    “Why?”
    “I told her it wasn’t her fault.” Grey corn teeth. “I told her I was doing this for myself. She’s really upset. She started crying and her hands were all shaking. I was in wonder.”
    “Where is she?”
    “She’s still in the café.”
    “You left her in there?”
    “ . . .”
    “Why did she tell you to fuck off?”
    “’Cause she just realized for the first time in fifteen years that I never loved her.”
    The hello phone. “Friction,” Wawp says. “Ivelli, do we have The Autobiography of Allison Wheeler?”
    “Is that some old lady?”
    “Yeah.”
    “She calls every week. It’s a book she published herself. Tell her to fuck off.”
    “No, I’m sorry, we don’t have it, and we don’t expect to have it in the near or distant future.”

    “You should come to one of these poetry readings in the city,” Ivelli says. “I got to hold Bob Kaufman’s ashes last night.”
    “What did you do for him when he was alive, living in the streets?”
    “You’re in a bad mood.”

    The ringing. Wawp puts down Wawp’s coffee and answers the hello.
    “Hello? . . . Okay, Ivelli. Whatever.”
    Wawp comes back to the couch and sits down. “We just got laid off. Ivelli says business sucks and he’s going to work all the hours.”

    Wawp and Bird step into the bookstore and a human with a red head and a face white as the belly of a flatfish is sitting in Wawp’s place. It watches while Wawp pulls keys off a silver ring. Wawp drops them on the glass counter.
    And Wawp and Bird walk out into the blue sky free. Wawp reaches into his pocket and shows Bird the pentagram. Bird takes it and holds it as Bird rides Tommy down the street.



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