Contents
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Esprit Fall 2006 Home
Cover Photo
Awards
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Submission Information
a yellow wash overwhelms
Reclamation
Accidents
Seagull
Computer Dreams
Pete and Me
Traduction
Exasperations
Crack
The Budding Cubist
Motion
Untitled
A Doctrine of Recollection
The Lincoln Tunnel
Soft Spot for Strays
Zeugma
Here's Johnny
Fidelity Mates with a Deaf
Spouse
Capable of Being
Television Reality
Suicide
Reminiscing as Anti-Depressant
After Dinner at McDonald's
Untitled
The Speaker's Last Thoughts
Cityscape
– Scranton, PA
Front Cover:
Untitled
Inside Front Cover:
Venerable Space - C.S.
Lewis's Desk
Inside Back Cover:
Hugs and Kisses
Back
Cover:
Breakfast
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| | Here's Johnny
Dan Mac Guill
Whereas a couple of hours ago, let's say, his soundtrack
was crickets and lawn sprinklers and delicate, subtle
orchestration—a big fuck-off spring festival of suburban,
smiling, lawnmowing, familial bliss—I'm afraid to say that now,
that continuous, humming head massage has strayed, evolved—at
quite a disorienting rate it ought to be noted—into something
altogether more like the dull, migraine RATTLE RATTLE
RATTLE of a shit-smeared radiator handcuffed to a defenseless,
chilblained infant. On this particular night out, you see, a
hostage situation has ensued.
There's our Johnny Boy—son of
John, incidentally. (Johnny has always felt unoriginal.) Trapped
on the outskirts of a town not his own, hours by foot from
the bridge he crossed to get there. Of course the roads and
pathways have long since dissolved into fields since there, at
dusk, on the bridge, taking a deep breath, he consumed whatever
was in the bag he bought from a man who was most certainly
not his friend. All delusions to the contrary evaporated once the
Man and his associates relieved the sheepish young Jonathan of
wallet, watch, hard cash, personal effects, ID. The results of
Johnny's little mixed feed-bag were immediate and emphatic, and
indeterminable time and directionless travel have wrought much
in poor, fooled Johnny Boy since then. So no surprise then,
really, that by this juncture he has forgotten, well, just about
everything that one should as a rule take with one on a hike—
who he is, for one thing, where he came from and how he got
here—slumped partly-alive at the base of a big, wide tree, in
some
farmer's field a long, long way from his mother and father's
front garden.
His head crackling like a scratched groove pinned
unmercifully under the needle, he tries vigorously to shake off
the buzz. A few hundred thousand refugee brain cells want
out—and really can you blame them—but all that happens is
that the shudder flings them from his sloppy, dribbly nose
and off the upper lip. Just an accidental glimpse of the fresh
slug-trail now glistening on his t-shirt in the moonlight is
enough to throw him into eye-peeling, breathless, mad-bastard
hysterics and Johnny rocks himself back and forth, back and
forth, back and forth in slow motion like he is his own mother.
Then doesn.t he go and keel right over onto the lovely, lush green
grass there, right there under the watchful wings of the big,
akimbo tree. The speed of his descent disarms him and thrills
him OH YES, and removes him from all that laughter, and
replaces the breath in him, and the dew on the grass is SO wet
and deep but cold that when Johnny Boy finally arrives at
his destination, blinking and crying and twitching and
hyperventilating—it is like a baptism.
But the skin his body is wearing is turned on—ten
fuckin' MILLION times more turned on than your standard
early Sunday morning, and what was born a fireside rug or a
honeymoon silk sheet is now a bed of nails. Blades of grass stab
him; stab his shivering little orphan psyche with the insistence of
a shrink. Ah, the poor little china skull that could really do
without the pounding and the interrogation now
couldn't it?.
Oh and it's well you know it, fucko!
BLINK.
And when he opens his eyes back up the world is dead
fucking black and no mistake. A dead silence ensues, no not
silence like you might think but rather the silence of a static
radio switched off. Then, into living rooms, cinemas,
apartments, pubs, funeral homes, and from shop windows onto
streets— galaxy manifests itself.
***
The motorway far below is emptying out by this time.
There is a gentle breeze at this height, and John covers his nose
with the open little plastic goodie-bag and breathes deeply in.
— Whoa!! What the?!. .
— Yeah.
He snorts and grins enthusiastically up at his brand-new buddies
and back down again into his party-mix. In one cool movement,
the Man removes his mobile phone from his pocket, checks the
screen, flips it closed, replaces it in the pocket. He spits
aggressively off the kerb, and raising one eyebrow he surveys the
surroundings efficiently then returns decisively to a very happy
customer.
— So?
— Yeah. . . yeah man. . .
— Cool.
— Yeah. . .fuck it, right?
— Right bud. . .Fuck it.
The Man places his hand on our boy's shoulder and, looking at
his colleagues, grins widely and all the new friends share the joke
as Johnny, proud of himself as proud can be, chuckles and looks
up and down from the goodies to the Man, who is laughing even
bigger and shaking his head. As Johnny reaches for his wallet,
the Man clears his throat, licks his lips, and makes one more
quick circumspection. All around them day is dissolving into
night, and another breeze blows, this time colder.
***
Johnny lies just as a corpse would lie—prone and
resigned on its back. Staring up through the SHHHH
oh—so—very—gently creaking veins of the leaves, he sees the stars.
And, let's be fair, it is becoming pretty obvious that, oh yes and
you'd better believe it—they see you too, Johnny Boy! Oh isn't
that nice?? A wink here and there from all around the fish-eye
night sky. . . Well look at THAT!! A UNIVERSE of winking,
tingling hellos for our boy.
— "HEY!! TWINKLE-HEAD!! WE SEE
YOU!!. . .YOU'RE NOT ALONE!!!!"
But out of the deep blackness of the stadium that
surrounds—a conspiracy of whispers and camera flashes.
The hand of God presses the PAUSE button, and in
that suspension of time, the world and its mother captures the
image of the young fella's ragged, wet little carcass, and the brain
whimpering within and being evacuated out the stupid little nose
and the crybaby eyes. A souvenir of the night his poor head got
too close to the candle, and crumpled like a just-dead little leaf,
blown too far from root and branch.
The hand of God pushes the video back into play, and
we now return you to your regularly scheduled program.
It's now he feels it. Through the wires, over the airwaves,
in the open-mouthed murmur of the transfixed multitude.
Piercing, prickling his too-alive skin. On the summer wind,
softly soughing through the trees that are now not all THAT far
above.
Humid tonight. In the breeze, the sweat on his face
chills him big time, and he feels a weight descend.
BLINK.
How about that—Now a deep pressure fast-forwards onto his
chest.
BLINK.
SWALLOW.
With impossible, diabolical acceleration, the world collapses
onto him like a shuddering, blustering rapist. The heavy, swollen
sky falls on him and covers him like a musty
blanket—a
marriage of light and dark, and finally just the desperate, lonely,
gasping dark.
BLINK.
Now all Johnny Boy knows are the flashing teeth and
mad-bastard, bulging eyes of a bad-bastard killer right there in
the doorway. OH NO NO NO NO JESUS CHRIST NO!!!
And on the screen Jack Nicholson is smashing and
hacking his way into his mind. Johnny blinks rapidly and
feverishly rubs his hands all over his face. The murderous eyes
and wild, widening grin stretch back the stubbly skin—stretch,
and stretch, and keep stretching all the way back as he blinks
uncontrollably now and oozes tears and blood from his wide eyes
and as sweat crawls from his head all down what resembles less
and less his face and neck, and mucus pumps from his pathetic
nose, the little kidnapped baby boy holds his own face against
the fetid, burning radiator until, quivering and giggling in
ecstasy, his eyes begin to melt and Jack announces his arrival.
When our hero Johnny Boy wakes in the meadow at
dawn, to gentle mist and birdsong, it is, however, with the
menacing, unmistakable understanding that he is lost, and his
mind is well and truly broken.
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