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by Michael Jarrette-Kenny


There are no second acts in show business, but this is not show business. This is serious. You might call it the reinvention of a particular slice of space-time.

In the parlance of cinematography it begins with a long tracking shot, ala “Touch of Evil.” Crime scene tape, a white hearse escalating backward in a keystone cop’s zig-zag, terminating just short of a circlet of police cruisers. The door swings open and ...oops, he’s falling out of the cab. His short legged stride is normally comical but even more hilarious in reverse; a bowlegged, crablike stutter over the bloodied tarmac halting at the rear of his vehicle.

Stop.

Hmm. An interesting face. Somnolent eyes in a nest of sagging flesh. A desolate cap of gray hair combed ineffectually over a clear canvas of pasty skin. At a certain level ugliness is more interesting than perfection. Say cheese. Harold Mortamore, born 1/15/42. Thrice divorced, his children hate him for no good reason. He’s not a happy camper but we won't hold it against him (after all, look what he does for a living). What else is there to say? That he is a myopic, squirrel of a man who likes to talk to the dead (without realizing that they’re listening), not bothering with any pretense of witty discourse with his captive audience. Nothing but petty complaints and grumblings. If the dead could only yawn...

He also happens to be wearing a pair of white cotton panties stolen from his neighbor's dresser drawer.

Enough about Harry; he’s a bit player. In another 3 years 11 months and sixteen days, he’ll get his day in the spotlight. It’s the passenger, the black bulge he’s pulling out of the back that we’re here for, right?

Harry returns the body indelicately to the curbside with the help of a bespectacled apprentice. On the count of 1 boys....3...2... They lay her out where they found her, about twenty feet from a chunk of abstract sculpture that has been inexplicably erected in the exit lane. The bloom of wounded flesh that was once a face materializes into the open air from the cocoon of the body bag, swathed in a shroud of pale gold strands, blood braided around her neck. Across the lane the onlookers slowly rewind themselves back toward morning coffees and warm beds, the image of one colt-like leg extended from beneath a white sheet erased from their sleep-dulled minds, the dim shock of their own mortality forestalled until the 11:00 news of the night before.

Harry steps back into the ambulance and retreats into the distance as the sun sinks along the horizon.

Nothing much happens. You could say that the bulk of time is made up of these nondescript moments. Rewinding through them is almost as tedious as living them. There is a cataloging of particulars, the documentation of the minutiae of the crime scene. Figures hover over the ruin like cameramen at a pornographic movie, angles of impact calculated and defined with little regard for the personhood of the object in the question.

Finally, the lights of the police cars begin their dance back towards their destinations, swimming through the darkness like land-bound flying saucers, celebratory coronas of colors almost festive in the starkness of dawn silence, leaving only a single vehicle as witness. A bald and bloodied man is removed from the back of it, placed against the trunk. After checking his body for injury, they release him. Apparently exhausted, he falls down to the ground and the officers pile on top of him in an effort to return him to his feet. He gratefully flashes back toward the gnarled cave of red metal from which he has emerged.

There is a again silence. The bald man fades into unconsciousness and they are alone save for a few stray travelers in the crossbound lane, salesmen in search of cheap hotels, a solitary drunk weaving like a stunt driver along the periphery of the slow lane. A cloud of black smoke begins to coalesce along the accident site collecting around the remains of the hood and the exposed metal of the engine. The hood begins to stir as the front end of the vehicle heals into its original shape, leaning back from the concrete as the headlights flicker on.

The body twitches from its position, down the road. The blood-soaked ground begins to trail into the exposed flesh as skin and tissue splash backwards into a face.

What can you say about this face?

It is feminine, feral, wild-eyed and amazed, crashing both literally and figuratively, swimming backward through the intervening space, the crash of her skull forming out of the concrete and floating gracefully back into the wave of watery glass. It is a serene picture: the body pirouettes and swerves impossibly through the air, the gymnastics of death into life.
Neither asleep nor awake, the eyes are at once terrified and accepting of this fatidic meeting of concrete and automobile, the blank blue of T.V screens. The expression indicates an acceptance, an acknowledgment of the inevitability of this moment.

Stop

What else? She is tall for her age (16), a bit uncomfortable in her own skin, a girl in a woman’s body. The face is delicate, high-cheekboned, full-lipped. It has been a few weeks since she had a chance to wash her clothes and they are worn and dirty from the road, a black tank top with the words party girl stamped in faded silver lettering, jean shorts ending on the upward edge of thigh. Her posture as she sails into the windshield is vaguely reminiscent of a scene from the ceiling of the Sistine chapel, her left arms extended, reaching toward the divider.

She turns to face the driver, fingers clutching the steering wheel in an almost charming pantomime of four-year-olds fighting over a toy car. These are the moments that are rehearsed by the survivors. The if only’s. Somewhere along the continuum of possibilities, Monk (let’s give them names) sits on death row at the Ossining state penitentiary replaying it, his sleeping self begging the girl (Iris) to let go of the wheel as if this simple action would have forestalled her premature death and erased all his previous fuck ups.

Monk’s bald head is polished to a high sheen, reflecting the concave monotony of smoking spires and ghost town factories. Iris unfastens herself from the passenger seat of the primer-colored Chevy pick-up as they move west on Route 80 East. The boy (he is hardly more than that) gaunt and ghostlike, goatee braided into a noose, regards her briefly with a semi-lecherous gaze. His blue Aryan eyes framed by the receding moonlit sky wink at her from the rearview mirror.

The billboards announce all is well in a relative sense, 99.9% purity. It is life affirming in its freshness, pink fleshed model cooing into the distant neon, never-falling pearls of moisture framing the edges of the mask/face. There are other components to this picture, however, of which the girl is unaware; A recently fired chrome plated 38., various household cleaning agents used in the manufacture of meth amphetamine, a gasoline soaked copy of Mien kampf, a flashlight haloed in the dried blood of a state trooper. He asks her if she wants to get high but it comes out as more of an atonal sprechtsang. The truck decelerates and she climbs out of the cab, returning to the darkness of the roadside.

Is this enough to undue our heroine’s premature end?

Unfortunately, despite evidence to the contrary, the act of getting in the car in itself is not the cause of death. The crash is simply one among millions of possible endings to this particular day. In Aristotelian terms you might say that death is the substance; the means by which it occurs is merely (pardon the expression) accident. Its expression is incidental. A probability distribution graphing the manner in which Iris dies on the night of June 5th 2002, yields a remarkable array of stabbings, shootings, explosions, etc.--all adding up to a single fact: nothing she does will undue her death. So much for free will.

Flashback six months.

At this speed the world is just a mess of color, the days and nights, the dance and whirl of time’s movement. There’s no need to get metaphysical about it; it’s there in the dirt and magic of the streets, arrested in the stagnant air of a traffic jam on the Harlem River Drive. At the speed of light anything with mass reaches an infinite weight, but there is nothing heavy about this picture show. Faces dance in communal quiddity on a crowded street like some many-headed beast, dispersing again in to the chill night air. This life is as light and impersonal as a blank greeting card.

The house is a gray colonial, the upper floor converted into a second apartment. The general picture is one of neglect, an objective correlative of the owners' spiritual decline. Pigeons have pulled away a section of the gutter along the upper-right-hand side and there is a significant amount of water damage to the ceiling of the downstairs porch.The lawn is nothing but longish strands of dry grass, interspersed with weeds and patches of emptiness that have turned to mud.

As Tolstoy says, “All unhappy families are unhappy after their own fashion,” but a fist is a fist is a fist.

He’s laying into to her, her being Iris’s mother Leona, he being the sad cliché of abusive alcoholic stepfather. There are insinuations which need not be repeated here, midnight visitations to the children’s room, drunken grapplings unobserved in the moonlight. Iris appears in the doorway, her face a bloody ruin of tears and blood. A few moments earlier she was in the middle, bearing the brunt, trying to divert him away from her mother, but that was then. There is a peculiar expression on her face, like a photographer arranging the backdrops of a portrait. She locks eyes with her mom and there is a wordless exchange, a pleading look followed by the realization that this is one in an ever-expanding series of variations which will be repeated again and again through an endless procession of households. A second later she is gone, the image seared into her mind's eye for the remainder of her short life.

At the rate were going we’ll never arrive at the critical juncture, so let’s get the ball rolling. This time (time being a mere convention of speech) there is nothing to distinguish one object from another, everything dissolves into everything else, the faces of the old and young indistinguishable from stormclouds and skyscrapers. Smog-stained sunsets, the grills of trucks, the spires of minarets and clock towers, squirrels and garbage cans, the ugly and the beautiful merged into a cacophonous symphony of discord and consonance. And then we are back.

Stop....Everybody out. September fifth 1988 6:45 P.M. e.s.t

There’s Leona again, remarkably trim compared to her future self, the bitterness and strain erased from the edge of her mouth and eyes. But there is something else there...a freshly laid imprint of disappointment. She's at the dinner table with Steve and Erwin (named after his maternal grandfather), Iris’s older brother. Leona and her son don’t seem to be enjoying their meal. There is a brief flickering of defiance that almost imperceptively dulls into resignation. The boy is weeping bitterly into his plate, face reddened and bruised. His father, minus the beer belly and the graying hair at his temples appears much the same. A hand surfaces from beneath the table and connects ever so briefly with the boy’s face before returning to the place mat. They continue to remove the worm like strands from their mouths, assembling them into mounds and returning them from their plates to the stove tops. Iris sits before the television in the adjoining room playing, unaware that her fate had been decided mere moments before. Next to the couch is a stashed suitcase. Leona’s pockets are wadded with her savings a few hundred dollars in small bills.

Rewind.

She is removing clothes from the suitcase, calling out her son’s name. This time she is leaving but there is only a few minutes left before he will be home and the chance will be lost. She calls his name again but he is not there. His cat is missing. He runs out of the house and down the street looking for Blackie (not the most imaginative name) and in that brief moment Leona’s plan is undone. The Toranado pulls into the driveway and it’s all over.

For want of a cat the kingdom is lost.

Blackie, the cat in question, a domestic short hair, unbeknownst to Erwin lies dead above the sewer grating at the corner of fifth and main approximately 200 feet from the Richard’s residence.

For the sake of brevity will cut through the quantum mechanical rhetoric and distill the question down to its most basic structure; is the cat dead or alive?

The cat is most definitely dead.

Returning to a point ten seconds earlier we arrive at the moment we’ve all been waiting for.The cat flies back through the air to meet the tire of a black Lincoln continental driven by a legally blind octogenarian (Katrina Jacobs), a card carrying member of PETA and ardent cat lover. He skitters backwards from under the wheel, back towards the curbside, where he rests silently contemplating the oncoming traffic.

Pause.

Can we rightly hold the cat responsible for the death of Iris? Shall go back one step on the chain of accountability and put the old woman driver on trial for involuntary manslaughter? We could keep going backward undoing the moments without ever arriving at a satisfactory conclusion and none of it would do Iris a bit of good.

More importantly, do cat’s have freewill? An interesting question. The same might hold for human beings. Within the cracks and crevices of gray matter, across the synaptic pathways and within the chemical interactions; where do we end and our nervous systems begin? What does the cat have to say about the matter?

Dipping into what might be called the subconscious of said feline one word reverberates, a foreign language to him, but a word we can all understand. It tastes like mother’s milk and feels like the familiar stroke of a loving hand.

Instead of dashing out into the traffic there is a millisecond delay, perhaps owing to a dim intuition on the part of the cat in question. It has been said that by the very act of observation the state vector of subatomic particles are changed, . The same might be said about masses of particles like cats, or even humans. And if we are good at anything we are good at watching.

A few moments later he is in the Richard’s front yard, scooped up by Erwin and and loaded into the family station, along with Iris, very much alive and on his way home.

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The Story of Stupid Girl
by Ellen Hewlett

Hold Steady the Raft
by B.A. Myint

Cold Milk
by Gina Perfetto

Scenes from the Metropolitan Museum of Art
by Amy Munno

Beast
by Mauricio Rosales

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by Chrystine Webb Shearouse

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by Michael Jarrette-Kenny