Archive for the ‘Kat Beyer’ Category
Dont Frget Oracl
Friday, January 8th, 2010
Sandra texted me just as I left the Time Warner Building. “Doz eggs, cig lightr. Dont frget oracl.”
I had forgotten. Mazy Maxie under 96th Street Station was the most convenient, so I got off there and turned down the stairwell everyone pretends not to know about. Down and down, into the dark that smelled of old subways and new biodiesel trains and recent piss. It got cold then warm. When I couldn’t see my way any more I heard her voice.
“What’d ya bring, supplicant?”
“A carton of cigarettes and a bottle of crème de menthe.”
“Oh, it’s you, Dave. Finally somebody who knows what I like. It’s been rare unguents all day, fachrisayks. Hand ‘em over.”
I held them out in the dark and felt them lifted out of my hands. She flicked on an old clerk’s lamp and eyeballed me. She isn’t blind, though her milky eyes look like a blind person’s; just sees further than most.
“Question?” she growled.
“Oh yeah. Sandra wants to know if we should try to look for a new apartment.”
She glared into our future for a minute, then lit a cigarette and took a long drag.
“Beware of men wearing camels,” she snapped. “Have a good evening.”
Some newbies might ask, “What the hell does that mean?” but I know better: first, you get what you pay for in this town, and second, usually you find out what she means sooner than you want.
“Thanks, Maxie,” I said. “Have a good evening yourself.”
“Whatever,” she shrugged, and turned out the light.
Sandra got home ahead of me. I told her about the oracle while I cracked eggs for an omelet.
“I’m thinking next time you should try the one in Astor Place,” she said.
We didn’t find out what Maxie meant until my brother-in-law came over for dinner. Luke’s OK for someone so annoyingly hip, and his weird DJ projects make more money than we ever will. When we asked if he knew a good realtor, I couldn’t read his face, which was new. When he got up to go to the bathroom, Sandra grabbed my arm. Unlikely as it was for a guy so into his appearance—and after all, our apartment isn’t that dirty—he had an empty Camels package stuck to the seat of his pants.
FYI, the guy he recommended got arrested a week later.
The Topaz
Monday, December 21st, 2009
It was a great golden topaz. A man in rags carried it in his last pocket across the hundred-year ice, until he came to the watch house at the mountain’s foot. The sentry took him in and gave him soup.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Jim Carrys It,” he said. “I’ll tell the story of it later; it ain’t a disease. Your name?”
“Annie Watches,” she laughed. “That’s the story of it, too.”
“Well,” he said gently, “someone else will have to watch, because you have to carry this now,” and he pulled the topaz out of his pocket.
Her eyes got round as soup bowls.
“The stories are true?” she asked.
“They are,” he nodded. “Except nobody knows if the ending is gonna be true.”
In the morning they decided he should stay and watch, as if they had a choice.
“You have enough food here till I get back. Feel free to carve,” she laughed, waving at ice walls covered in old stories about iPods and fields of grain and so on, and new ones, like the one about the topaz.
“It’s true?” she asked. “I just have to give it to the next person?”
“We hope it’s true.”
When she got to the village we all went down to the longhouse; she said, “Now I’ve got here the topaz that we heard the stories about. The man who gave it me is watching for me. We might be the last people to get it. The stories may be true: if we pass it to every person who was born when it was found, every person on earth…” She stopped there, too scared of hope.
We passed it hand to hand round the circle, like people had all over the world.
My name was Nicky No-name-yet. I sat by Annie, so I was going to be last, and I worried I might really be the last person of all, because I thought it should be somebody special.
When the topaz came to me it felt warm from everybody’s hands. Then it got warmer. It burst into light like the sun we’d seen once. It vanished.
Nothing else happened. Later Annie went back. A month after, she and Jim came over the peak and said, “the ice is cracking.”
“Look by your foot, Nicky Topaz,” said my sister. There was a tundra-pea sprout there, the first we had ever seen. We quick put a seal bone fence around it. Then we started dancing and shouting.