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3
The Book

She opened the door. The ball of money and her panty stayed behind on the floor. The elevator door was open and she entered. She looked at the buttons, waited, and thought, how can I manage this time to deal with the landlady’s scolding complaints; to calm her of my two month’s overdue rent, given the money I spent on the mirror. She was there when the men were carrying the huge mirror up the stairs for me. I cleverly walked behind the moving mirror past her front desk. Last time she caught me, I had to listen to her nagging for more than half an hour. Her husband doesn’t seem like a bad guy, though too obedient to her. I have never seen him look at women straight in the eyes, bashful and afraid of his wife’s wrath. Apparently she is the real owner of the building, the business, and her husband. Fortunately, the couple is asleep at this time of night, I hope. She pushed the first-floor button, and the elevator door closed.

The old landlady and her silent husband were working behind the counter at the side of the corridor, exceptionally late this night. She was declaring the apartment numbers of the tenants with overdue rent with her husband bent over the countertop, submissively as always, writing them down on the day’s collection sheet paper. She used to stand at the elevator side of the counter with her husband in her shadow; by the time the elevator doors would slide back, she was there to corner the renters in arrears before they had time to escape. They would either pay with many apologies to lower her naggings as much as possible, or run away to save their eardrums from the nastiest insults, all the way through the long corridor while being followed by her and her mouth.

The elevator cabin was hot. Sometimes the heater did not work, and sometimes it overworked. The air conditioner was always broken. She had been sweaty before entering, and was now sweating further going down five stories in the heat; the perspiration had completely saturated her thin dress. It molded her body like a transparent wrapping. She tried to pull the dress out, to reshape and conceal her cleavage, but the displaced fabric reversed like a magnet to its sinful position. The confined space filled with a strange body odor.

The elevator doors slid back open to the corridor. The old husband was cleaning his eyeglasses to take a few moments away. Somebody went out the entrance doors at the same time, leaving them open. The cold air outside plunged headlong into the corridor, rubbing all the precious perfume from the elevator cabin, vacuuming it from the cabin into the corridor. The loaded air on its way out, in a hurry to steal all the loot gave a share to the old man’s nose. The man dropped his eyeglasses on the countertop, his mouth open, his nostrils widened to inhale a good load of this scent. The stream of the strange aroma burnt his nostrils for milliseconds; his mind paused, then a powerful wave of electricity flowed through his nasal paths with the speed of light to all six million of his sensory cells. The incompletely evolved human sense of smell was unable to assess it in any of the primitive rankings between pleasant and unpleasant, therefore he succumbed under the influence, and was paralyzed.

Floating in the passing current, anchored to the countertop in greed for the source, his upper body passed the visual blockage of his fat wife, and he lay his chest on the countertop, securing his belly to the inside edge of the reception desk in an attempt to get more share of the running air. His head, overhanging the edge of the countertop, faced the woman shyly stepping out of the cabin. His eyes got a blurred vision of a white feather angel parading past him. As she passed the intruding head, the man’s head and two fully open pipes of his nose were detecting her movement like the turning of radars. The unclean eyeglasses were smashed under his chest.

As she was passing the counter, she remembered the ball of money that was missed on her apartment floor at the door. She decided to turn back, but the elevator doors had closed and she heard the screeching noise of the cabin moving up for another passenger. I cannot go back and stand at the elevator with my sweaty back stuck to this dress in front of that man’s widened eyes. Besides, the landlady’s head is bent over a paper and I am fortunate that she has not raised it to see me. This is an exceptional opportunity to flee her nasty complaints. She sweated more when she remembered the money was not the only thing she had forgotten to pick up. Her panty.

She walked toward the building door, her head up, looking straight. There was no sound except the provocative sound of flip-flops on the laminate floor. The movement was waving a flower pattern over the bulge at the junction of her thighs, on and off; fanning the mystifying scent from the source. The all-the-time nagging landlady was staying dead silent during the procession. The overdue resident passed her, no complaint. She was pretending to read the paper in her hands, but actually staring from the corner of her eye at the old man who was swimming over the countertop. The woman was not very ashamed of her situation under the synchronized twist of the man’s head, but rather happy that her body solved, for now, her problem with the landlady. She rewarded the poor man a generous amount of her heavy aroma while passing him. He deserved a short vacation in paradise before going back to his life sentence, punishment being the everyday ration of his vinegar-smelling wife. The man’s eyes escorted her until she passed the building’s glass door and disappeared into the dark night.

“I am so ashamed of you,” the landlady shouted at the man, burning as though fire had scorched her face. The man slowly straightened up. Looking calmly at the broken eyeglasses, he saw that one of the lenses smashed, and the other was taken out. The man’s indifference raised the landlady’s anger to fury; she added insult to her accent, “I see you don’t recall your posture old man, a few inches further and, you would be outside the building now with your head between her wet thighs.”

“I was reading.”

“Reading?” the landlady’s mood changed a bit, as she didn’t expect such an excuse for his rudeness.

“I was reading a book together with my deceased father. A fairy tale for a four-year-old son. I was leaning to his chest, sitting on his lap, listening to his articulate storyline and repeating it while looking at the text as if I could read the book together with him. I had heard the story once and never again because during the same night my father died of heart attack while I was asleep on his chest. The same night the book was lost. For more than sixty years, I lived with the guilt that I was responsible for his death. I remember I was crouching under a table, hiding behind the overhang of the table cloth in fear, staring at his coffin in the room. I overheard a conversation between two of the guests at the funeral. They were saying in a low voice that my father had felt pain in the chest but didn’t move, afraid of waking his son up,” He paused, took the unbroken lens and placed it back. “I don’t understand; you mean you could read at the age of four? Why do you say you were reading?” The landlady asked doubtfully, her fury replaced with amazement at the sudden change in the man’s behavior. There was emotion in his expressions, imperiously glancing at her.

“I don’t know. I could not recall father’s voice, but I could see myself at that age, and could read word by word every page. It was a story about thirteen fallen angels who came to earth. As the story goes, if one wants his wish to come true he must be able to recognize his angel out of ordinary people. Unfortunately, her appearance is not different from normal people, as she is wingless. The angels live among people but there is no way to find them unless you are blind. Their body smells different, inexplicable to humans’ words. The blind shape the scent as an angel in their mind, they ask for a favor, their wish comes true,” he paused for a second, facing the landlady he continued, “I can recall the whole story word for word except the ending. Supposedly, I got sleepy and he didn’t continue. I have a strong urge to know the ending.”

“But the book is lost.”

“Tonight, the woman of heavenly scent, my angel, fulfilled my wish. The location of the book was always at the back of the mind of the four-year-old boy.”

“Where is the book?”

“The boy waited until the guests left the coffin room, went out of the room to his bedroom, took the book out the father’s chair. He then went back to the coffin room, opened a gap in the lid with all the power he had, and slid the book in. A harsh punishment, the boy sentenced me to deprivation for life,” he inhaled and continued, “I am pardoned now, my freedom is granted; I am going to take back the book and read the ending.”

“You are insane. It’s in a coffin, under tons of soil,” the landlady snapped.

“So I need a shovel.” The man stood up and went to the tool room, grabbed a shovel and came back in front of the landlady who was staring at him, round-eyed in amazement.

“But you can’t see.”

“I can see enough,” he took the one-lens frame.

“I am not going to give you the car keys.”

“I don’t need them.”

“You cannot get to the graveyard at this time of the night.”

“I do not need your help; now that I have the picture of the book, I feel strong. I will go on foot with the lens, with the shovel. I will dig up his grave, open the lid and take out my book. Then I will come back here with the book, the lens, and the shovel.”

He turned to the glass doors and walked to it. The doors slid back and he stepped outside. He looked around, the woman was not there, and the greedy air left no trace of her scent. He didn’t need the scent, he had the picture. He tightened his coat and put the handle of the shovel over his shoulder, a weak body but strong steps, holding onto the picture of his father with a child in his lap, taken from the mysterious box of lost-and-found in his mind. The man walked up to the Milwaukee graveyard.

4
The Horse

Outside the building, the cold breeze of the end of fall swirling around her bare legs welcomed her. She raised her head to the night sky, the moon was going to hide behind some scattered clouds. She wished for snow and looked down at her car parked across the street: a red Mustang, old but the silver horse was still shining. The street was dead vacant. She remembered the psychoanalyst,

‘How can you be afraid of the darkness? You belong to the wild nights. That is the time when you can communicate with your real identity in a survival struggle against the circumstances of the dark side of Milwaukee, if they surround you.’ She entered the car, inserted the car key into the ignition and turned it; the engine cranked but didn’t start. She looked at the gas tank gauge, it was full. “My old horse, I have not taken care of you well. I will wait, be calm.”

She removed her hand from the key, “Don’t rush my horse, and let the night get longer.” She unfastened the safety belt, rotated back the car seat to a relaxing position then wiggled her back onto the seat’s ridge to ridge to find a comfortable spot free of protruding springs. She lay back, reclining the seat, and crossed her hands at the back of her head. She watched the sky through the windshield. The clouds were getting thicker, no stars left; they were trying to hide the moon. I hate the sun and the moon; make for me the darkest night.

Outside the window, a man appeared when the building glass doors slid open. She leaned forward; Can I believe my eyes, the old man with a shovel? She smiled, Freedom at last. She straightened up her seat, opened the glove compartment, and took out a piece of paper and a pen. She drew something on the paper and put back the pen. The dress did not have a pocket, so she tucked the paper in the tight cleavage of her breasts.

“My faithful old horse, take off, even if it is going to be your last ride.” She turned the ignition, and the horse whined aloud.

Soon for the second time, she passed the small area of the city that she had been living in for years. The area restricted to a walking distance between her building and the psychiatrist office from one side, and to the convenience store from the other side. Tonight’s destination, the botanist’s store, was about one hour or so driving distance. Although she had driven there in confusion only once, she could find her way with no problem. She rolled the window down an inch, the cold air guided her with the familiar scents of the streets leading to the store.

By the time she had reached an intersection, a combination of pictures and scents informed her of the right direction; she could sense to turn right, left, or go straight. She stopped the car at a stop sign, the last sign before reaching the dirt road in the outskirt of the city. She smelled a dustbin with rats around it before turning onto the last paved street.

She turned left five minutes later and saw the dustbin on the left side, pulled over and parked her car across from it. She let the engine continue revving. She looked through the window to the dustbin. The lid was wide open, suspended at the back of the bin, garbage overflowing, the liquid of the filth running down and stuck to the pavement of the sidewalk and the street. Smelly residues of dried liquid waste, oil and grease accented the permanent stains all around and the rats. They were devouring voraciously, licking the dried streams, their appetizer. They were all over the place, the smaller ones were searching on and into the bin; the big ones, too lazy to jump up had marked their territory on the pavement, busy with the food until a bigger one would notice and invade to capture their territory. The gluttonous sound of their teeth chewing the dirt, and the squeaking of joy were the only sounds of the city of Milwaukee crossing the street, they together with the smell of the dirt and rats passed through the gap in the window, burning her nose and bothering her ears. Thanks for more reasons to hate.

She smiled while visualizing a scene in her mind: rats running and squeaking everywhere, a magnificent festival of glowing fires on the sidewalk and street. A huge fire in the dustbin, the jumping up and down of rats in the fire, the smell of burning dirty grease mixed with skin. The amazing show started by splashing gasoline on them, and then striking a match. The fire was burning them down, like a representation of the city people. The fat rat made a circle of fire, the mayor was burning. All Milwaukee is on fire, the buildings, and the crowd. A gift of the squeaky night to me. Her palm cupped the gear knob, moved the lever gently, and a few minutes later she was driving on the dirt road.

Feeling cold in the car she turned on the heater to full blast. The blow of hot air caressing her legs had a strange effect. It made her take notice again of the lack of her panty. The hot air was coming from the lower heater close to the pedals. The sweat of her feet in her Y-shaped slippers was accumulating, making her feet on the accelerator and clutch slip up and down. The combination of hot air and the dance of her feet on the pedals, and the friction between her massive thighs brought her a lust she had no memory of. The secreted lubricant found it easy to stream down her smooth sweating thighs to her knees, and then lower to her calves. She pushed her foot harder on the gas pedal, and the silver horse whined, throwing back pebbles and stones on the dirt road in the outskirt of the city.

Some piles of soil had been dumped unexpectedly at the end of the dirt road, blocking the entrance to the parking lot. She gradually added weight to her foot on the brake pedal to make a smooth stop before a mound. She stepped out of the car and climbed up the mound in the empty parking lot. At the end of vast concrete pavement, the botanist’s store was still lit. With some urge to urinate on the top of the mound, streams of another wild scent slipped down her legs, and she watched the liquid as part of nature with no shame. The fluid reached her feet and the greedy soil with a hundred thirsty mouths queued along her toes, soles, and arches, guzzling every drop, perfuming its entity with the long-time hope of the wild. The unsatisfied softened soil dragged her feet down, and unable to hold, the thief stole her slippers.

She descended the mount. She found walking on the parking lot pleasant; she looked down and noted she was stepping on the harsh concrete and weeds barefooted. She looked back to the dirt mound, noticing her red slippers were stuck in the soil at the top of the mound. Rough and partly spalled concrete squares were weed-tufted in the gaps between the edges. She enjoyed the scratch of harsh weeds on her bare soles.

The heat in the car and the dance of her legs on the pedals had done the job perfectly. The entirety of her legs from thighs down to feet was soaked with a bizarre combination of sweat and lubricant. As she was walking, the cold breeze was twisting around her calves, circling around her thighs, and shamelessly going up and down before departing from the back with a heavy load of wild scents. The stream of cold breeze was dumping in progression its precious cargo along her way, leaving a tunnel of perfume behind, so intense that it could distract a starved wild beast in chasing its prey.

With a heavy look around, she twisted on her heels in a sudden move. At a distance, behind the mound where she had lost her slippers, were two glimmerings of blue, gazing at her. A human, a beast, or something that I do not know. Should I have the courage to walk there and take back my slippers from it? She turned in the direction of the store, and noticed a car was parked out front. As she was walking closer, she saw it was a pickup truck with a cabin at the back. She looked through the window shield; nobody was behind the wheel. She passed the truck, opened the door of the store, and entered.

5
The Empty Room

The botanist was sitting at the cash register, head down and his index finger was playing with something on the counter top. She walked closer; it was a dead bee. She stood by him, waiting for his attention. The botanist sniffed and raised his head.

“It’s you again, I can call you my regular customer,” he said smilingly.

“This is only my second time,” she said.

“Well, look around at the store, it is vacant.”

“So I deserve a good discount.”

“Of course you do. Especially, since you are wearing a swimsuit, I guess you really deserve a reward. How was the water? I see you are still wet.”

“What can I say? Even to me it’s strange that I have sweated so much on this cold night.”

“The other strange thing is that you were not afraid to come here alone in this appearance. I should tell you something, people in solitude do strange things.”

“Like?”

“I can show you something, if you are not afraid of vaults.”

“It is just a room underground, isn’t it?”

“If I were an engineer, I would affirm this. Nevertheless, there is much more than that. It is where gods live. Have you ever thought of the original meaning of a vault: a chamber beneath a church, or in a graveyard? Vaults were the worship temples of some believers. Alas, the men of truth were chained and imprisoned in their worship place to death, in the vaults. God lives underground, placing him in the sky was the politics of masters, as religion became so popular that the myriads bowed in obedience. You may call it superstition, which means the religion of believers in the past, who were killed in the battle of truth against lies.”

“Within twelve years of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, I was never taught of this conception in the human mind,” she said.

“So you speak with a different language. In that case, the translation is ‘dogs from the cellar.’ Men stayed for long in the isolation underground, and cannot differ illusions from common sense. The only reality would be what they create in their mind. Down there, your deepest recollections of distressed childhood experiences find a way to funnel up and present themselves as current reality.”

“And then?”

“You follow the inexplicable; you don’t dare to think of upstairs.”

“Reveal your vault to me. I am not afraid of nightmares.”

The man stood up and walked through an aisle to the end of the hall where there was a huge freestanding storage shelf covering the hall as an end wall. He went to the right end of the shelf and squeezed himself sideways through a narrow gap between the wall and the shelf. She followed him in the same way. The shelf stretched to the ceiling, only a dim light through the gap could hardly defy the darkness at the back. He switched the light on; it was a large area, quiet and vacant without any windows or doors.

He went straight to the far end corner of the area, stooped to reach a trapdoor cleverly camouflaged on the floor, pulled up the handle’s ring, and opened it. He rotated the trapdoor about the hinges and gently put it on the floor on its back. She went to the opening and looked down; a metal staircase was going down. “Let’s proceed,” he said showing the way down with his hand.

“Should I be afraid?”

“Don’t worry. All you see are legitimate types of criminal horrors.”

He went down the stairs and turned the light on. She followed, him holding the handrail on the shaky metal staircase. There was a long corridor which ran under store hall, and a few doors were located along one side. He opened the first door and went in and she followed into a huge area. The floor was filled with large flowerpots in aisles. She could see the remnants of dried flowers and plants on the pots. The floor of the aisles and all the pots were hidden under a thick carpet of dead bees, in the millions. The empty artificial bee hives were suspended from the ceiling over the pots area, aligned in rows.

As he was looking at the empty hives, said, “Have you ever thought why flowers smell good? The land plants evolved to flowering plants somewhere between 140 and 250 million years ago. The biological function of flowers is reproduction, but it is not possible without the help of pollinators, the bees. The scent, a complex compound, emitted by flowers along with color is to attract pollinators. The problem is that bees had lived before flowers, and they didn’t need flowers. So my question was, and of which I could not free my mind, how flowers affected the evolution of bees to make them their slave workers. I posed a hypothesis: the volatile scent, which is a molecular compound, penetrates DNA and alters the biology of the bees. Down in their DNA had been a need for flowers in some hidden way, and when the scent activated, it deciphered the code. The translation in our language: the bees remembered.”

He pointed to the floor, “The yellow and black carpet of this room displays the practice of trial and error leading to the failure of my hypothesis. The vegetarian bees died of hunger, never changing to honey bees. At the end, tired of one year’s testing, I introduced the red-brown vulture bees for revenge; surely they didn’t care for flowers, they attacked the plant bees and took their flesh out from their eyes. I was watching their feast until they killed them all.”

“There is no horror in dead bees.”

“In a sense, you are right only if we are in a false belief that the notion of legality roots in human biology. What if does proof of a certain hypothesis necessitate human samples rather than bees? In that case, the horror starts as you go further to prove your hypothesis in practice. To avoid any debate, how about visiting the second room.”

He passed her while she was staring at the floor substituting dead insects with humans in her mind, thinking of hungry vulture bees. She imagined the large open area before Milwaukee County Courthouse; people running for their lives, climbing over closed fences, angry men following them with sharp blades in their hands. The people, terrified upon reaching the closed gates; streams of blood running down the stone stairs before the courthouse. At the end of the day, butchered bodies left for the night devourers’ feast. She imagined the sun going down, millions of tiny pink specks shining in the streets. Rivers of black charging through the area, squeaking. The rats would drag flesh out through eyes of corpses. The small ones would jump up the stairs licking the clogged blood as an appetizer, the big ones marking their territory so that none dared enter their area of corpses.

“I see sparkles in your eyes,” she noticed he was looking at her, waiting for her in the corridor. She smiled at him. He opened the second door, standing on the threshold. She looked into the darkness and could see nothing but could hear sounds.

He said with a low voice, “Before I turn the light on, listen carefully.” She listened, hearing a smooth rhythm with a relaxing melody, and the sound of a sad chorus.

“It is pleasant to the ears; I guess you have trained some exotic birds to sing.”

“Your guess of birds is correct, but what kind?”

With a smile on her face, she said, “I say you have trained some bluebirds to sing this tune.”

“Not even close.”

He turned on the light. She stepped inside. It was a room as large as the previous one with birdcages fixed all around to the walls. She walked in, looking at the cages with an open mouth, and stood in the middle of the room.

“Crows? Is it possible?” she asked.

“This time my brutal hypothesis has not failed, but been proved in practice.”

“It is beautiful; I don’t feel any horror in that.”

“For us, yes. In contrast, maybe for the birds. Look closer”

She stepped to get closer to one of the cages; the singing crow’s toes were glued down onto bamboo, the feathers of the tail were also glued down to more bamboos at its back so that the bird was fixed in the cage. A glass tube containing a yellow liquid penetrated its stomach. Staring at the bird, she said, “OK, I am seeing a hypothesis in practice. Yet how could you make a crow sing?” He enjoyed her curiosity, went close to the cage, and pointed to a bulge in the neck of the bird,

“All is here, but before I quench your curiosity, I have to present you a brief narration.”

“Since you are accompanied by an elegant soundtrack, I have no objection.”

“The carnage scenery of non-obedient bees relieved me of facing my failure for a few days. The relaxation lasted until some crows chose the remote location suitable to settle down. In contrast to my habit, their day began early in the morning, and with loud noises. Finally, they have paid the price for the early wake-up call,” he stepped to the middle of the room. She turned her body to him, his voice became articulated, and the narration continued in lecture mode. She seemed to be enjoying the performance.

He continued, “Well, another hypothesis was going to be created. The power of their sounds amazed me, I mean in terms of the decibels. Testing with an application in my cell phone, some crows could produce a ratio of 100 in decibel level, the same as a military helicopter. Note that the permissible noise level for an industrial area is 75 for a commercial 55. Annoyed at the error in God’s creation, I was going to fix it. Having visualized a crow as a 100-Watt speaker, I remembered an advertisement on TV. ‘This tiny gadget turns anything into music.’ I bought the gadget forty dollars plus tax; too expensive and too big, it did not work on a crow.

“I came up with a brilliant idea, when I threw a stone at a crow’s head, the whimpering crow did not sound bad. The second room door was opened. Waiting for evolution to do the right thing takes millions of years, for God to rectify his design forever. I bought 150 cages. Crows are cheap: you can find them everywhere and the stupid people in the Captive Animal Protection Society don’t have crows in their listing.”

“Nor bees,” she replied.

“Exactly, I am beginning to like you. Two unrelated evolutionary pitches developed the two-sided vocal cord, the syrinx, of the songbirds resulting in a pleasant performance. Believe it or not, crows are among the birds that can mimic the human voice, so a small fixation was required to enhance their syrinxes: a Gillette razor. I bought plenty, 30 cents each. I divided each one into small parts with the blade at on side. All that was needed then was perseverance.

“I installed the blade into the bird’s throat, piercing half into the syrinx and half out of it. I tried multiple strategies, among them the angle of installment, piercing depth, and then a source of continuous pain. Do not forget it should be a whimpering crow after all. Thanks to the latter factor, the blind crows could sing better. Two hot needles in their eyes and the addition of a low voltage battery for constant burning pain did the job quite well. Voila, singing birds at your service.”

“I am amazed; and all legal. Sorry, but I am still not frightened.”

“A tough one, but I assure you the third room will terrify you.”

“Cannot wait.”

The botanist and the woman left for the third room, and as they came out of the room of crows, he closed the door and turned off the light switch of the room. They walked to the third door; he turned the light switch of the third room on and then opened the door. She stepped into the room and he followed. He stood by her, facing her to observe her reaction.

She looked around, “But nothing is here besides emptiness.”

“Are you sure?”

She turned around, this time carefully paying attention to the floor, ceiling, and white walls, in the end unable to figure out the significance of the room. “What is it?” she asked.

“My third project, this time a real horror,” he paused intentionally for a moment to enjoy of her questioning stare, then said, “You,” There was a long silence in the room, well conformed to the emptiness. He waited for her response.

“You have decided to imprison me here.”