108 fountains
04-01-2014, 11:41 PM
I look forward to any comments on this one.
Men Peering Down Holes
I walk out of the Metro station. It always starts with me walking out of the Metro station. Will he come up with a plot this time? Will he ever finish it?
I walk out of the Metro station. The sky is dark with clouds, and the air is pallid with a frosty, gray fog. The plaza where taxis queue up and shuttle buses line up and cars pull up to “Kiss and Ride” is crisscrossed with tiny black rivulets from the patches of melting snow left over from last week. As I step up onto the grimy gray curb after crossing the grimy gray street, something to my left and slightly behind me catches my attention. Now, that is odd, I think to myself. Half a block away, near where the city buses roll up, two men lie on their stomachs on the cold, gray pavement peering down a manhole.
They are city workers of some type or another. They’ve got on that fluorescent orange jacket-vest they all wear that attaches in the front with Velcro and with the reflective black stripe that runs around the mid-section and over the shoulders. Baggy blue pants and heavy, laced work-boots complete their wardrobe. They’ve laid their hardhats to the side, next to a long, metal toolbox that has been flipped open to reveal a myriad of esoteric implements - hammers, drills, wrenches, shears, screwdrivers, pliers, calipers, saws, chisels, and crowbars of various shapes and sizes - along with a panoply of screws, nuts, bolts, nails, electrical tape, bits, scissors, sandpaper, and coils of wire. The heavy, iron manhole cover rests next to the toolbox.
The workers hold their heads halfway down the hole with their arms reaching in, apparently working on something. It just seems so odd to me that I have to go see what they are doing. I turn and walk toward them. One of them is South Asian, possibly a Sikh. He has an amber complexion, a black beard with flecks of gray, and a steel ring around his right wrist. The other is a black man, paunchy, in his fifties, with a stubble of a gray beard on his chin and the unlit butt of a cigar in his mouth. I can’t help myself. I get down on my knees next to them and attempt to look over their shoulders into the hole, but I can’t see anything. It’s too dark. So I get down all the way on my stomach - the South Asian scrunches slightly to the side to allow me room to lie down next to him. I peer down into the hole with them.
Now I can see something. Dim light from down below. It’s smoky, and the light flickers and flashes like that from one of those metallic disco balls from the 1970s. And I hear music - strains of Hotel California. Just below us is a black woman dancing, wearing only red high heels and the tiniest of crimson G-strings, gyrating around a brass pole that glints indistinctly in the dim, flashing lights through the smoke. She is voluptuous and near enough that we can reach her, touch her, and the two workmen are reaching down, fondling her breasts. She doesn’t seem to mind or even notice as she sways to the music. I look at the two workmen. With our heads together peering down the manhole, we are near enough that I can smell their breath. Neither of them pays any attention to me. They are intent on the dancing woman. They neither smile nor show any kind of emotion, but gaze at her as if they were examining some inscrutable electrical malfunction. I look back down and see their hands fondling her breasts, and I feel aroused. I reach down myself to join them, but hesitate. Then I hear the black man say to his workmate, “Can you hand me the needle-nose pliers?” I look on in grim fascination as he reaches down and closes the jaws of the pliers on the woman’s nipple.
“No! No!” I cry as I pull my head out of the hole and stand up. “This is not right! This is too weird!”
I quickly walk away from them, pass the line of buses, dirty with the gray, black residue of ice and grime, and feel the hot hiss of their exhaust billowing out as white smoke in the cold December air. My heart is racing and I feel a rush of adrenaline. A wind picks up, and the bare branches of a young sugar maple tree on the corner quiver. High up in its tallest branches, two fat, black crows perch, looking down callously at the colorless street below. There’s an IHOP down the street, and I think I’ll go in for a cup of coffee. But as I approach, I see farther down the way two more city workmen lying on their stomachs on the sidewalk, peering down an open manhole.
This is too absurd, I think to myself. Yet I can’t stop myself from walking over toward them. They are talking to each other, but with their heads down the hole, I can’t hear exactly what they are saying, but I can hear that one of them is speaking in a heavy West African accent, and the other is speaking in the kind of a southern drawl that one hears in Tennessee and Kentucky. I feel compelled to lie down on the sidewalk and look down into the hole with them.
My pupils take a few moments to dilate, and in those moments, the darkness dissolves and I am looking down at a schoolyard from no great distance. There are groups of children running, playing, and laughing, but my attention is drawn to the nearest group, just a few feet below us.
A group of five girls, eight or nine years old, dressed in winter coats and colorful scarves, and a group of four boys of the same age and similar dress are standing together, talking with each other, giggling and teasing in sweet, innocent childhood flirtation. Two of the boys are white, one of them is Latino, and one of them is Asian, perhaps Chinese. One of the girls is black, one is white with auburn hair, and two of them are blondes. One of the blonde girls has just handed a paper valentine to one of the boys. This causes all of them to giggle and laugh, and the other blonde girl breaks out into a sing-song, “Gracie and Mathew sitting in a tree…” At this, Mathew looks down shyly and his eyes rest on the card he is holding in his hand. It depicts a smiling yellow sun and a smiling yellow sunflower with the words “Be my valentine!” His face is flushed with embarrassment, but he is smiling and endures the laughing and the jostling and the pats on his back that his friends administer. Gracie laughs along with her friends, her blue eyes sparkling with pleasure and warmth.
The girl with Auburn hair is a little quieter and stands a little apart from the rest. She steps forward, smiling, to give one of the other boys a paper valentine. The boy has a surprised expression on his face. He hesitates, but takes the card. Now all the other boys howl in laughter. They shout, “Jack got a valentine from Sophie! Jack got a valentine from dog-face Sophie! Dog-face Sophie! Sophie the dog!” Now they start to dance around Sophie, enclosing her in a circle of derision, laughing and taunting, “Dog-face Sophie! Sophie the dog! Hoo, hoo hoo!”
The other girls flush with anger, and one of them shouts, “Stop that!” The boys ignore them.
Poor little Sophie is horrified and humiliated. She turns and runs blindly, shaking, unable to see through the tears that brim in her eyes and fall like raindrops from tender petals. She runs into the school and hides, cringing, alone in a stairwell. Devastated and crushed in this moment, the small girl knows not yet that this cruel incident, brief as it was, will linger in her heart, a wound that will never fully heal – no, not twenty, forty, or even sixty years hence.
One of the municipal workers, the one with the southern drawl, looks over at his fellow worker and says, “Yep, this looks bad, alright. Ye better give me one o’ them thar pin hammers and some hardboard pins.”
I get back up on my knees and watch the West African fumble around in the metal toolbox for the nails. I’ve had enough of this. I walk on past them, feeling somewhat dizzy and disoriented. I feel the winter wind blow cold pinpricks on my face – ice crystals, droplets of freezing rain or tiny snowflakes. It’s so cold that my cheeks feel chafed and I notice a taste of blood in my mouth. The entire sky has become a heavy mass of gray clouds becoming ever darker and sinking lower to the ground.
I walk about a block and a half. Cars whiz by, and their taillights disappear into the thickening, glutinous fog. My teeth are chattering. Two crows swoop down and pick at something red and oozing in the gutter along the curb. I see two other men a little further down the sidewalk, wearing orange work-vests and lying on their stomachs, peering down a manhole. One of them has his feet extending out into the street, unconcerned about passing vehicles. Pedestrians step around them and continue on their way. I think to myself, this is just so bizarre! Maybe I should just ignore them and go get my coffee, but no, I can’t do that. I’ve just got to go see what they are looking at.
It seems strangely familiar now to simply nudge one of the men to wriggle over to make room for me to lie down beside him. He is young – he appears to be in his twenties, skinny, has a scar over his upper lip, and long, greasy, red hair that hangs down from behind his ears. His breath smells faintly of bourbon. His partner is older, with somewhat darker, wrinkled skin, heavy facial features, and a gap between his two front teeth, which somehow makes me think he must be Peruvian or Bolivian or Ecuadorean.
While my eyes adjust to the darkness, and the darkness dissolves into light, I hear voices, one male and one female, raised in anger, shouting at each other. Now, two forms appear below. A beautiful young Asian woman with copper colored skin, possibly Thai or Khmer, runs naked across a bedroom and into a walk-in closet full of clothes, followed closely by a young man wearing only boxer shorts, who appears from his pale complexion and cornflower blue eyes to be north European. She tries to close the door to the closet from the inside, but he reaches her first and continues to roar at her. I turn to the Peruvian worker and ask, “What are they arguing about?”
He replies without looking at me, “Does it matter?”
I turn back to the two people in the walk-in closet. The woman is cowering in the corner with her hands crossed defensively in front of her face. The man’s eyes are ablaze with rage. Without thinking, he slams his fist against her mouth. Her cheek is immediately chafed and reddened, and blood trickles from her lips. She collapses into a sort of semi-swoon, sitting up on the floor, with eyes open but listless, against the wall.
In an instant, the man’s demeanor transforms completely. He is aghast at what he has done. He looks at the woman on the floor and can’t believe what has happened. He feels it can’t be real – that it must be a dream. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” he says over and over again, as if feeling that full regret could somehow ever undo the damage he has done. “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!” he says as he lifts her off the floor and carries her to the bed. She sits in a stupor with her hands over her mouth, shivering, terrified, hair disheveled, eyes wild with shock, speechless, bewildered, thunderstruck. Guilt-ridden, he moves his hand to smooth her hair saying, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” but she flinches at his touch.
The man lying next to me shakes his head and his long, dangling red hair swirls as he does so. He looks across to the Peruvian and says, “No, man. We can’t fix this. We’re gonna have to call the electrician.”
I get back up onto my feet with a painful grimace. I take a step backward and turn in another direction. There, not more than fifty feet away, I see two more men lying on their stomachs peering down another manhole. “No, no! This is no good! I don’t like this,” I cry. I run over to the top right-hand corner and click on the X. Three adjacent blocks of sidewalk in the center light up with the words “Save,” “Don’t Save,” and “Cancel.” I run over and jump up and down on the block that says, “Don’t Save,” but nothing happens. I continue to jump up and down and shout, “The screen’s frozen! You’ll have to shut down and re-boot!” But still nothing happens. Does he not hear me?
A whole flock of crows draws my attention with their calling and cawing. I turn toward the sound and look around. In every direction as far as I can see, on sidewalks and on roadways, oblivious of pedestrians and traffic alike, men are lying on their stomachs on the cold, gray concrete peering down manholes. Everywhere I turn – men peering down holes.
Men Peering Down Holes
I walk out of the Metro station. It always starts with me walking out of the Metro station. Will he come up with a plot this time? Will he ever finish it?
I walk out of the Metro station. The sky is dark with clouds, and the air is pallid with a frosty, gray fog. The plaza where taxis queue up and shuttle buses line up and cars pull up to “Kiss and Ride” is crisscrossed with tiny black rivulets from the patches of melting snow left over from last week. As I step up onto the grimy gray curb after crossing the grimy gray street, something to my left and slightly behind me catches my attention. Now, that is odd, I think to myself. Half a block away, near where the city buses roll up, two men lie on their stomachs on the cold, gray pavement peering down a manhole.
They are city workers of some type or another. They’ve got on that fluorescent orange jacket-vest they all wear that attaches in the front with Velcro and with the reflective black stripe that runs around the mid-section and over the shoulders. Baggy blue pants and heavy, laced work-boots complete their wardrobe. They’ve laid their hardhats to the side, next to a long, metal toolbox that has been flipped open to reveal a myriad of esoteric implements - hammers, drills, wrenches, shears, screwdrivers, pliers, calipers, saws, chisels, and crowbars of various shapes and sizes - along with a panoply of screws, nuts, bolts, nails, electrical tape, bits, scissors, sandpaper, and coils of wire. The heavy, iron manhole cover rests next to the toolbox.
The workers hold their heads halfway down the hole with their arms reaching in, apparently working on something. It just seems so odd to me that I have to go see what they are doing. I turn and walk toward them. One of them is South Asian, possibly a Sikh. He has an amber complexion, a black beard with flecks of gray, and a steel ring around his right wrist. The other is a black man, paunchy, in his fifties, with a stubble of a gray beard on his chin and the unlit butt of a cigar in his mouth. I can’t help myself. I get down on my knees next to them and attempt to look over their shoulders into the hole, but I can’t see anything. It’s too dark. So I get down all the way on my stomach - the South Asian scrunches slightly to the side to allow me room to lie down next to him. I peer down into the hole with them.
Now I can see something. Dim light from down below. It’s smoky, and the light flickers and flashes like that from one of those metallic disco balls from the 1970s. And I hear music - strains of Hotel California. Just below us is a black woman dancing, wearing only red high heels and the tiniest of crimson G-strings, gyrating around a brass pole that glints indistinctly in the dim, flashing lights through the smoke. She is voluptuous and near enough that we can reach her, touch her, and the two workmen are reaching down, fondling her breasts. She doesn’t seem to mind or even notice as she sways to the music. I look at the two workmen. With our heads together peering down the manhole, we are near enough that I can smell their breath. Neither of them pays any attention to me. They are intent on the dancing woman. They neither smile nor show any kind of emotion, but gaze at her as if they were examining some inscrutable electrical malfunction. I look back down and see their hands fondling her breasts, and I feel aroused. I reach down myself to join them, but hesitate. Then I hear the black man say to his workmate, “Can you hand me the needle-nose pliers?” I look on in grim fascination as he reaches down and closes the jaws of the pliers on the woman’s nipple.
“No! No!” I cry as I pull my head out of the hole and stand up. “This is not right! This is too weird!”
I quickly walk away from them, pass the line of buses, dirty with the gray, black residue of ice and grime, and feel the hot hiss of their exhaust billowing out as white smoke in the cold December air. My heart is racing and I feel a rush of adrenaline. A wind picks up, and the bare branches of a young sugar maple tree on the corner quiver. High up in its tallest branches, two fat, black crows perch, looking down callously at the colorless street below. There’s an IHOP down the street, and I think I’ll go in for a cup of coffee. But as I approach, I see farther down the way two more city workmen lying on their stomachs on the sidewalk, peering down an open manhole.
This is too absurd, I think to myself. Yet I can’t stop myself from walking over toward them. They are talking to each other, but with their heads down the hole, I can’t hear exactly what they are saying, but I can hear that one of them is speaking in a heavy West African accent, and the other is speaking in the kind of a southern drawl that one hears in Tennessee and Kentucky. I feel compelled to lie down on the sidewalk and look down into the hole with them.
My pupils take a few moments to dilate, and in those moments, the darkness dissolves and I am looking down at a schoolyard from no great distance. There are groups of children running, playing, and laughing, but my attention is drawn to the nearest group, just a few feet below us.
A group of five girls, eight or nine years old, dressed in winter coats and colorful scarves, and a group of four boys of the same age and similar dress are standing together, talking with each other, giggling and teasing in sweet, innocent childhood flirtation. Two of the boys are white, one of them is Latino, and one of them is Asian, perhaps Chinese. One of the girls is black, one is white with auburn hair, and two of them are blondes. One of the blonde girls has just handed a paper valentine to one of the boys. This causes all of them to giggle and laugh, and the other blonde girl breaks out into a sing-song, “Gracie and Mathew sitting in a tree…” At this, Mathew looks down shyly and his eyes rest on the card he is holding in his hand. It depicts a smiling yellow sun and a smiling yellow sunflower with the words “Be my valentine!” His face is flushed with embarrassment, but he is smiling and endures the laughing and the jostling and the pats on his back that his friends administer. Gracie laughs along with her friends, her blue eyes sparkling with pleasure and warmth.
The girl with Auburn hair is a little quieter and stands a little apart from the rest. She steps forward, smiling, to give one of the other boys a paper valentine. The boy has a surprised expression on his face. He hesitates, but takes the card. Now all the other boys howl in laughter. They shout, “Jack got a valentine from Sophie! Jack got a valentine from dog-face Sophie! Dog-face Sophie! Sophie the dog!” Now they start to dance around Sophie, enclosing her in a circle of derision, laughing and taunting, “Dog-face Sophie! Sophie the dog! Hoo, hoo hoo!”
The other girls flush with anger, and one of them shouts, “Stop that!” The boys ignore them.
Poor little Sophie is horrified and humiliated. She turns and runs blindly, shaking, unable to see through the tears that brim in her eyes and fall like raindrops from tender petals. She runs into the school and hides, cringing, alone in a stairwell. Devastated and crushed in this moment, the small girl knows not yet that this cruel incident, brief as it was, will linger in her heart, a wound that will never fully heal – no, not twenty, forty, or even sixty years hence.
One of the municipal workers, the one with the southern drawl, looks over at his fellow worker and says, “Yep, this looks bad, alright. Ye better give me one o’ them thar pin hammers and some hardboard pins.”
I get back up on my knees and watch the West African fumble around in the metal toolbox for the nails. I’ve had enough of this. I walk on past them, feeling somewhat dizzy and disoriented. I feel the winter wind blow cold pinpricks on my face – ice crystals, droplets of freezing rain or tiny snowflakes. It’s so cold that my cheeks feel chafed and I notice a taste of blood in my mouth. The entire sky has become a heavy mass of gray clouds becoming ever darker and sinking lower to the ground.
I walk about a block and a half. Cars whiz by, and their taillights disappear into the thickening, glutinous fog. My teeth are chattering. Two crows swoop down and pick at something red and oozing in the gutter along the curb. I see two other men a little further down the sidewalk, wearing orange work-vests and lying on their stomachs, peering down a manhole. One of them has his feet extending out into the street, unconcerned about passing vehicles. Pedestrians step around them and continue on their way. I think to myself, this is just so bizarre! Maybe I should just ignore them and go get my coffee, but no, I can’t do that. I’ve just got to go see what they are looking at.
It seems strangely familiar now to simply nudge one of the men to wriggle over to make room for me to lie down beside him. He is young – he appears to be in his twenties, skinny, has a scar over his upper lip, and long, greasy, red hair that hangs down from behind his ears. His breath smells faintly of bourbon. His partner is older, with somewhat darker, wrinkled skin, heavy facial features, and a gap between his two front teeth, which somehow makes me think he must be Peruvian or Bolivian or Ecuadorean.
While my eyes adjust to the darkness, and the darkness dissolves into light, I hear voices, one male and one female, raised in anger, shouting at each other. Now, two forms appear below. A beautiful young Asian woman with copper colored skin, possibly Thai or Khmer, runs naked across a bedroom and into a walk-in closet full of clothes, followed closely by a young man wearing only boxer shorts, who appears from his pale complexion and cornflower blue eyes to be north European. She tries to close the door to the closet from the inside, but he reaches her first and continues to roar at her. I turn to the Peruvian worker and ask, “What are they arguing about?”
He replies without looking at me, “Does it matter?”
I turn back to the two people in the walk-in closet. The woman is cowering in the corner with her hands crossed defensively in front of her face. The man’s eyes are ablaze with rage. Without thinking, he slams his fist against her mouth. Her cheek is immediately chafed and reddened, and blood trickles from her lips. She collapses into a sort of semi-swoon, sitting up on the floor, with eyes open but listless, against the wall.
In an instant, the man’s demeanor transforms completely. He is aghast at what he has done. He looks at the woman on the floor and can’t believe what has happened. He feels it can’t be real – that it must be a dream. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” he says over and over again, as if feeling that full regret could somehow ever undo the damage he has done. “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!” he says as he lifts her off the floor and carries her to the bed. She sits in a stupor with her hands over her mouth, shivering, terrified, hair disheveled, eyes wild with shock, speechless, bewildered, thunderstruck. Guilt-ridden, he moves his hand to smooth her hair saying, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” but she flinches at his touch.
The man lying next to me shakes his head and his long, dangling red hair swirls as he does so. He looks across to the Peruvian and says, “No, man. We can’t fix this. We’re gonna have to call the electrician.”
I get back up onto my feet with a painful grimace. I take a step backward and turn in another direction. There, not more than fifty feet away, I see two more men lying on their stomachs peering down another manhole. “No, no! This is no good! I don’t like this,” I cry. I run over to the top right-hand corner and click on the X. Three adjacent blocks of sidewalk in the center light up with the words “Save,” “Don’t Save,” and “Cancel.” I run over and jump up and down on the block that says, “Don’t Save,” but nothing happens. I continue to jump up and down and shout, “The screen’s frozen! You’ll have to shut down and re-boot!” But still nothing happens. Does he not hear me?
A whole flock of crows draws my attention with their calling and cawing. I turn toward the sound and look around. In every direction as far as I can see, on sidewalks and on roadways, oblivious of pedestrians and traffic alike, men are lying on their stomachs on the cold, gray concrete peering down manholes. Everywhere I turn – men peering down holes.