teacup_of_infinity

Teacup of Infinity

Zach Hamilton

(Dream theatre, polar bear, green carpet)

Twos and threes carve through your mind in this room. The numbers have no meaning, but staring into them, they turn and turn. A schoolboy enters into the theatre, blossoming into a handful of blinding paper and torn pieces come off, so awfully sudden that boy.

A shadow blinds me too, paper falls to the floor, stagnant a moment, wiggling. The shadow of my wrist and fingers sneaks in through my vision. My heart for a moment flutters butterfly wings to the roof, tattering to the floor at last like a blinding paper petal.

I can’t see, no doors, no screen, nothing.

“They’re on motors, connected to a timer. That’s the only way.” Famous last words... The butterfly evaporates. This has been a puzzle to be mathematically, geometrically or scientifically figured out. The doors hang open, letting in the frozen dollars. Last thought; puzzles. The schoolboy appears at the door and stands silently. He can hear it having a seizure, the motors for the doors, for the screen. There’s a tea bag melting on a woven lawn chair. It snows lightly outside, and he reaches for the door handle, closing the door.

The light runs out of here, its angle almost perfect as it escapes just barely out of the wall and the eyes, as if in peephole slats, folding out from their casings and hiding inside as the film starts. Steady and ominous grey light comes in through an ornate pane glass window on a far right wall. The trees are a dark, vague, bent line, cutting up through the grey sky. The iron peephole eyelids shut, rolling over retina, a heat warms the inside.

On a movie a sliding glass door is open and a blanket’s out harboring rain in water and spider eggs, bugs and woodchips. A wheel chair sits in a mirror and what does it see? An orange armchair soaking in rain puddles gathering in the button folds, in the seams of a peat moss pot.

The carpet in the house is light green, and I walk over it, to the glass door, lighting a match and pressing it to a candle.

“Hello? Is anybody there?”’ I say, fumbling with the long wick as someone would a table and chairs, a mouse-tail, or a date seed.

Green carpet. Wax falls out, settling in through the fibers.

The boy sits in the woven lawn chair, careful of the tea bag if it’s wet or not, and he notices the forty different peepholes on the door. The iron lids are shut around some kind of circular obulesce. Pennies melt into the carpet from the wax candle.

All framed in movie screen, I say my line.

“Death is so subtle,” leaning to touch the melted copper in the mint green carpet. Vomit green edges line the holes opened by the copper.

My next line:

“The eyes of the carpet,” I feel over the pupils, over the lids, over the fiber, leading my hands over them, a blind man.

“Wall of eyes, square with brilliantly punctured circles.” I say my next line. I light my cigarette and smoke it fast, closing the glass door leading out to the porch. The cigarette’s been behind my ear this whole time while watching the candles melt. The copper candles…

The schoolhouse glows in dreary afternoon light, and he looks out through the paisley jigsaw puzzle frame. At the trees blowing dollars off the limbs and yawns covering his tiny boy mouth.

There was this one time that I missed the “lady fire eyes” show as my cigarette hid from my fingers under the chair, outside my backyard is always full of surprises like this.

“Lady fire eyes" is supposed to be my favorite show, it is written in the script. My bladder is full and I got to see “lady fire eyes” or the scene is cut, so, I sit down in the living room and try to remember my cues, “Lady fire eyes” his favorite show, that’s all I need to remember, okay. I fiddle with the prop remote and television comes on. That familiar awful frequency hums, the sound of a lucky rabbits foot on chalkboard. Blinking eyes and shutter show, Lady fire eyes.

I’m trying not to show it, but I’ve got to piss so badly. The urine’s burning in me, it feels like it has leaked over in my fat, pooling in the cells, I almost miss my cue and remember to laugh. This is my favorite show. I laugh again, completely natural, totally believable. I can’t miss it, but I’ve really got to urinate, badly. That’s not in the cues or the movie for that matter.

My bladder is going to turn into an art film, 56 minutes of gouged balloons in an array of medicinal colors, a whole cabinet of antipsychotic', antidepressants, amphetamines, the "D.E.X” (the red pill pouring from latex balloon skin inside me). This is what is going through my head as I play my character in “Portal to humans,” A neat little feature under the direction of D. Lincoln Selman.

I can’t miss the show; I’ll be fired immediately.

“Lady fire eyes,”

I say in my head, trying not to picture leaking valves, Multnomah Falls, the red pills pouring out of gouged bladder.

“Cut!”

“Oh, thank God!” I shout to a confused group of bustling people. Running through cast and crew cluttered around back of stage, into the makeshift bathroom in the makeshift house, the sounds of flickering plastic stick to his mind. Schoolboy, all he sees is the next scene of the movie, after a moment in dark screens, the way they pasted one moment to the next in editing.

Door belt having a seizure, white urine drains from my bladder into the makeshift toilet, while white makeup is put on my wrists and hands.

“Action!”

Sitting in the same worn out foam green sofa again, I’m dragging my hands through what hair they have allowed me to have for this film, I say my line:

“What?” I mutter, perfect, subtle tone.

The boy shifts in the lawn chair, studying the screen. I look around the makeshift room, careful not to strain my neck. Makeshift boys room, posters, video game console set up on the floor, TV, Lady fire eyes comes on and I act interested. My eyes are focused on, my lips, the camera’s go through cues.

Opening, the peep hole covers fold off of multicolored eyes on the door. The boy slicks his hair to one side and looks over at them scanning his direction. Rolling back and forth, the silhouette of his brain exposed in the light coming through a dirty window. Where he adjusts his weight in the lawn chair, making squeak sound and can see himself (through a pair of eyes in the wall) doing that. Silhouettes of his brain cased in clear fluid, clear skin, clear see though hair is examined. He makes a bunched up face, distraught by this. It appears grey in his scalp, functioning on some kind of faint, oblivious subconscious level. He sees as the brain tenses up on the right side, where he’ll suddenly move his foot and kick it over the other leg. And then, there is a pounding sound from one of the walls in the theatre. It could be a knocking hand, one that is confused if they are knocking or running, accidentally, into the door. Schoolboy doesn’t know. The peep hole covers droop back over, relaxing shut.

The lawn chair and the movie screen, the window, ornately carved in paisley and the knocking, a vibration, pounding away like a nail at a construction site, like a nail pounding through iron, explosive and repetitious, but then with no rhythm suddenly.

Frozen stiff with fear the little schoolboy holds his pale, cotton hands together, watching his breath as the room becomes colder.

Cash is sneaking in through the cracks in the floorboards beneath the wall of eyes. A five-dollar bill passes through the high door seal. The pounding gets rougher, violent abstract and definitely not human.

A sort of mans voice is heard on the other end, shouting. For a moment the boy puts his hands to his face and rubbing his eyes, begins configuring a half decent start to a plan.

Suddenly the odor of urine wafts into the schoolboy’s nostrils. He looks down, and sees piss darkening his dark blue suit pants, at the same time ominous grey daylight and dollar bills rush into the room as the door of eyes slams against the adjacent wall.

He recognizes it, a beast he learned of in school one time. Frozen solid, he gets into one of those “life flashes before your eyes things, he sees Selma, his decrepit grandmother catching a fish with her bony wrinkled hands as the large white bear lunges. He sees Selma pulling the fish from the hook, the poor thing leaking a small drop of dark blood. She just rips the hook out and sets the thing down like a watermelon, or a potato, hitting the fish over the head with a large grey rock.

The bears fangs are covered with blood and it enters the theatre, panting. Standing up on its hind legs and wandering to the lawn chair, it swipes the dinky thing to the side and shouts.

Now hiding behind a black curtain near stage, schoolboy watches as the great Bear ransacks the place, crashing into boxes and swiping them until crushed thoroughly. Hazelnut wood seal saturated once on the stage reflects schoolboy almost as clear as a mirror. He looks down and sees himself, in a fetal position standing up. The Bear growls and scrapes things aside, the lawn chair, boxes, and cans of film stray across the wood floor. He perches near the screen, and sniffs over schoolboy, pupils the size of its whole eye.

Little schoolboy can smell his own gaping open fear, as it wafts up from a basket of butterflies near his suede shoes.

Dollars drift in, carried by a careless gust of wind. Suddenly the bear takes a turn that had been unanticipated by schoolboy, leaving an open shot straight to the door. He watches the polar bear from behind the screen, checking the door, and then runs out, swinging the wall of eyes shut, bear shut inside.

Over wind tossed piles of dollars, he runs to the swings and rushes a mixed version of the story to the chain links, watching his predator’s cub lurking outside near the schoolhouse window.

After mentioning the wall of eyes, he watches the cub climb away into somewhere invisible to his eyes, and no bears anymore, he glimpses a pile of bones and flesh lying across the street covered in ice and dollars.

A wind shoots through town, picking up fives and twenties and brushing him on the shoulders.

He runs, disappears into invisible darkness, swallowed up from somewhere behind him, to nowhere, and the town is quiet. In the distance groves of pines and cedar trees sway back and forth, subtle shades of green against a wall of painted grey.

For a long time there is the sound of wind coursing through everything, eating up the dirty dollars from out of the street and spilling them through the air.

A segment of discolored lines cuts a glitch out of the chest and eye, and tooth level, followed by a missing sound, one that represents the sound in a place where nothing exists, where “nothing” is even something and where there is far greater absence of nothing, than nothing.

***

Zach Hamilton is a nineteen-year-old undergraduate in Portland, OR, where he primarily studies linguistics and French literature. He has newly founded a blog http://zachabstract.blogspot.com/ where he will keep updates on his writing and further adventures in blissful poverty