SHORT STORY: Groundwork

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Peter Donald trudged his way through the rising rain puddles as they filled Bremson Street's legendary potholes. The Muppets still lingered in his head, endlessly serenading him with their nonsensical melody.

Manamana.

Once it resurfaced, there was no way to fight it back down.

Do do da do do. Manamana. Do do do do.

Dan Danvers, KFUG's "fugliest" DJ, had played the damn thing for the seven AM wake-up call every day for the past week and Peter kept forgetting to set the alarm slider to a different station. Peter wondered what had driven Dan to select such an infectious song to open his program, but he supposed it was the same malevolent imp that had infected his own life. The city’s population had never felt so tense, so eager to tear each other down at the slightest provocation. There was a subtle, yet tangible madness on the streets. Nobody smiled anymore. Every stranger seemed to be a potential threat or at least an irritation. Eyes went wide. Teeth were bared. Yet industry continued; in fact, labor had become a hopelessly thin barricade between normality and an inevitable riot. The citizens fought back the perpetual influx of bills with equally unending labor, but without significant result or reward. A great sinister energy boiled and would soon erupt.

Peter’s old friends barely recognized him anymore. He had always been the designated driver, the reliable chaperon, and sometimes even the “go-to” guy. He had tired of predictable suburbia and had uprooted his perfect, pleasant life. Six years ago, he had planted himself firmly into the aged core of sprawling Redwater. Now he was one of its toiling machines.

Manamana.

Peter wanted to blame someone for his unhappiness. Dan Danvers certainly came to mind this week. But he knew that wasn’t fair; he couldn't point a finger without a million fingers pointing right back. It was the city itself, or rather the people infesting it, Peter included.

Come on you bastard, bite me. Do it. I’ll grind your shaggy skull beneath my heel.

The Pomeranian gazed up at him, its tongue stupidly dancing upon the humid air. Despite Peter’s silent demands, it scuttled past him without incident, its elderly master in tow. Peter pushed his own tongue into the tender gum recess beneath one of his molars and winced. Great. More money for the dentist.

He pressed forward on strained muscles that fought against the invasive cling of once-fitting, now twice-too-small corduroys. Peter was late for work yet again. An extended series of infinitesimal catastrophes had delivered him just a moment too late to his bus stop. For twenty minutes he had fumed while impatiently waiting for the next germ-trolley to pick him up.

Christ, I actually pay two dollars to be sandwiched between sweaty men every morning.

The odor of the Redwater River, swollen with catfish, laid claim to the industrial district and its bustling textile factories. Each day, Peter was expected to traverse its stinking alleys and make his way toward Galvin and Sons, Inc., a clothing distributor that had never employed a Galvin. Mustafa and Sons just didn’t have the proper ring to it, Peter mused. His boss was the son of a son of the original Mustafa, but that didn’t make him any less irritating. Peter loathed his job, but he relied on it to fund his meager apartment. Despite his continuous internal bitching about the place and the pact he made with himself to eventually leave it, but he suspected he’d end up doing some worse kind of labor if he tried to change. The city had absorbed him into its ceaseless, pumping bloodstream. Good natured, hungry-for-love, sky’s-the-limit Peter had been tainted by prolonged exposure to it. Like most of his fellow workers, he existed without ambition, without inspiration, and, despite his daily transit dilemma, without human contact.

Manamana.

Peter heard the telltale double honks of a diesel from one of the enormous garages and dashed across the street before it could creep backwards over the sidewalk. He glanced behind him, hoping to make eye contact with the driver, eager to let him know how he felt about the existence of such boisterous vehicles with a mere look. Of course Peter would never actually say anything. He knew the Neanderthals were likely to gang up on him, their own infected moods at a head and ready to burst at the slightest agitation. His anger stung the back of his throat, lifted up on a wave of acidic reflux. Something wasn’t right.

Something solid scraped along the back of his teeth and he probed it with his tongue. A sharpened point met tender flesh and Peter winced, sucking in damp air. He spat the thing into a cupped hand.

“What the fuck?”

It was the head of a rusted nail. Not a full nail, just the rounded tip and a small protrusion of the shaft. The point of separation was sharp enough; the pool of spit in his palm had blood in it.

Peter scrambled to think of where he might have ingested the damn thing. It could make him rich! He’d heard about people suing over finding severed human digits in their meals, but this was worse. Hell, he might even have tetanus. There had to be extra money to be squeezed from tetanus. For a brief moment he panicked. What was tetanus anyway? He knew it could kill if it wasn’t treated, but he wasn’t the type to get shots. His brow creased again as he catalogued his recent meals.

He had a slice of fridge-chilled pizza for breakfast, thin crust and single topping. In fact, half of a topping was a more honest description. Surely he would have noticed the chunk of metal floating on its cheesy surface. Last night? The same deduction applied because it was the same pizza. Winding the hours back even further, he could count a half dozen cans of soda, but he would have heard the nail rattling around inside the aluminum shell. Lunch had been a roast beef sandwich with mayonnaise and mustard on a kaiser roll. Just thick enough, he thought, his inner voice doing its best pompous lawyer impersonation, just thick enough to deliver this potentially fatal foreign object into my unsuspecting body. As he considered the type of bite motion required to consume a roast beef sandwich on a kaiser roll, he inadvertently mimed the process. To a passerby on the sidewalk, it looked like a distorted yawn, but to Peter it was confirmation that he had probably swallowed a large portion of the sandwich, along with the Trojan nail.

This realization came as a bitter disappointment. The local deli was a ramshackle establishment that had been teetering precariously on the edge of bankruptcy for the last decade. A law suit filed against it would probably just put it out of its misery before Peter collected any money. A slight grin rode his sweat-spattered face as he determined that there was no way to prove the object’s origins. It could have come from any one of the products he had recently consumed, and even from products he hadn’t consumed. He’d pick a large company, like the soda manufacturers, to pay for his pain and his new house. Just the possibility of having tetanus, of imminent death, should be enough emotional stress for any jury. He felt his jaw begin to stiffen.

Only it’s real. My jaw really is stiffening. All of my muscles are getting tight.

Peter pushed himself harder, believing he could walk off whatever psychosomatic symptoms his mind had conjured. He swept past the same alley he’d seen thousands of times but had never entered even once, and then stopped abruptly several feet past it. He moved closer to the wall and traced a gap between the bricks with his index finger as he cautiously stalked his way back. He poked his head around the corner to try to make sense of the nonsense he’d just witnessed.

The usual oddities were there: hubcaps strewn about, a moldy couch long abandoned by its cushions, shattered windows, and the inevitable boxes of discarded materials from the factories on each side. The nook maintained a perpetual shade due to the height of its neighbors and the fact that opposite fence wore a thick coat of wind-tossed garbage. It was an ugly site, but it had never seemed particularly noteworthy, nor did it now. Its occupants, however, were strikingly out of place.

The first was a tall, emaciated man who slunk around the area, casting his hand toward the ground as though blessing it with holy water. He wore an immaculate suit and jacket, buttoned up to his gullet. A hideous checkered tie neatly hung from his collar. As if the man wasn’t already a disturbing contrast to his environment, Peter glimpsed his naked legs and quickly looked away.

Completely insane. He’s some crazy homeless bastard.

The man was wearing no pants to match his jacket, nor was he wearing any protection on his feet. Trails of blood ran along the treacherous floor of the alley, forming bizarre, geometrically absurd patterns.

The second man slumped into the couch as if dead, but Peter saw that his head was tracking his pantless companion’s movements. The seated man was wrapped in black plastic garbage bags except for his face which peeped through a roughly torn hole. His eyes were glossy and distant, as if he were drugged. A rope of spittle rappelled from his chin and streamed down into his lap. His gaze lazily drifted toward the voyeur and his eyes bulged.

“No! You can’t let them do this again! Run!” shouted the bag man. His voice was a strained wheeze.

The pantless man stopped as if frozen in time, completely unmoving. The bag man began to struggle beneath his artificial cocoon, but made no progress. “I said get the fuck out of here!”

Peter turned to flee, the excitement causing another burst of painful liquid to ascend his esophagus. It deposited a clump of solid objects into his mouth. He let out a pathetic yelp and vomitted onto the sidewalk, eyes wide.

“Oh god. Oh god. What is this?” he whimpered, staring at the spatter on the ground--wooden shards and plaster.

“Wait.” It was the pantless man.

Peter bolted.

“Wait, Peter Donald.” There was no urgency or hostility in the statement. It was the voice of a rational businessman, trained to announce promising quarterly results at afternoon financial meetings. “We’ve need of your services.”

Peter hesitated, but not enough to completely stop his motion. He slowed to a casual jog. He’d make his way to work, he was close now, and he’d have plenty of time to rationalize what he’d seen. He was terrified of the hospital, but he vowed if anything else passed through his system, he would take a cab there immediately.

Get to work, run the machines all day, and get home. Simple. I can do this. He knew my name. How the hell did he know my name? Doesn’t matter. Get to work.

Peter’s arm began to itch. He scratched violently but his skin protested by burning glorious red. But there was more to it that just the color and pain, the skin itself shifted, as if the muscle below moved in trembling, patterned waves. He pressed his fingers hard against the flesh, attempting to massage the phenomenon away like some furious charley-horse. The skin broke, revealing a shiny, pulsating black patch beneath. Plastic.

Peter made it back to the alley with startling speed. People on the sidewalk simply moved out of his path, most likely thinking him mad. Nobody seemed to notice the odd men.

“What are you doing to me?” questioned Peter. His antagonist stood exactly where he had been when Peter left. His eyes, and only his eyes, turned to greet Peter.

“Oh, I assure you, it’s not me.”

Peter noticed the man on the couch was now completely covered in the grotesque pupal restraint, the portion now covering his face inhaled into a macabre mask.

“You killed him!”

“I think you’ve got the wrong idea, Peter. Please, have a seat and we’ll talk.”

“Have a seat? You think I’m just going to sit there and let you murder me too? What is this? Poison? Drugs? Why me?”

“That certainly is a mess of questions. You’re sure you don’t want to have a seat while I answer them? It will be easier for you.” The pantless man had resumed his ungainly procession around the alley, continuing his seemingly pointless hand gestures toward the ground and renewing the drying blood lines with fresh color. He seemed completely unconcerned about an attack from Peter and even turned his back to him when the pattern demanded.

“I’ll call the police. Your blood is all over the place. They’ll have your DNA, they’ll take me to the hospital, and they’ll get this poison out of my system while they haul your ass to prison.”

“You think so?”

Peter had no response. In fact, he did not believe his own threats.

“Or do you think perhaps the police cannot see me . . . or our friend on the couch there? Could it be that you are having some sort of mental mishap and we aren’t really here at all?” The pantless man was smiling.

“No. You’re here. You’re here and you’re going to fix this.”

“You’re right. We’re real, more real than any of those people out there. We are this city, as are you. We’re just children being brought up in the image of our father.”

“What do you mean?”

“Name something positive about your life. Why do you exist? What do you contribute? Who do you love? Who loves you? Who even gives two shits about you?”

“My parents.”

“Your parents are dead.”

“How did you--“

”Your parents are dead, you’ve only had one girlfriend, when was it--back in the 90s, if I remember correctly. Laura. She barely remembers you. Your fellow employees avoid you. Why shouldn’t they? You hate yourself! One might say you’ve been poisoned for years.”

“How the f--“

”Don’t be stupid, Peter. The walls have ears. Let’s just say I’m a good listener.”

“Who are you?”

“Hmmm. Redwater will do.”

“Ok, Redwater. What do you want from me? I just want to get rid of this, please. I’ll do my good deeds, spread some karma. Joy to all and all that shit. Make something of my life. Go to church, even.”

Redwater stopped for a moment, a look of concentration on his face as if what he’d just heard was impossible to process. “Good deeds? You mistake me for someone else, my friend. You’ve done exactly what you were supposed to do. And you will make something of your life. That’s why you’re here! This is an exciting day for all of us. Urvus is very proud of you, you know?”

“Here’s what I think. You’ve drugged me somehow and I’m having an especially bad trip. Or maybe you’re some kind of street magician who is abusing cheap tricks. Hypnotism. That could be it. You’re putting things inside my head that aren’t real.” Peter realized he was waving his arm at Redwater violently and noticed the plastic had begun to snake out of the wound. It clutched the outer surface of his arm, spiraling over the contours of his muscles.

“Believe what you will, Peter, but the truth lies with our friend over there. Perhaps you should have a look?”

The thought repulsed Peter, but he saw no alternative. He had his doubts about the reality of the situation, but wasn’t going to gamble his life on it. Redwater obviously knew how to help him, and maybe Peter just needed to play along. Peter toyed with the idea of tackling the frail man. He could easily force him to the ground and there were plenty of makeshift weapons within reach. The possibility of Redwater refusing to cooperate or even fighting back headed off that line of thought. Peter was a coward at heart and like it or not, he’d do whatever Redwater wanted him to do to get his normality back. He approached the couch and noticed the man-shape beneath the synthetic sarcophagus was misshapen and angular.

“Go on, pull it off. Just standing there gawking at it will only make it harder for you. It’s not as horrible as you think.”

Peter steeled himself and then pulled the grimacing plastic from the man’s face. Beneath was a twisted collage of brick and wire. Peter spun around to face Redwater.

“No, it’s not a trick. That’s Horace Gordon, reborn.”

“Bullshit!”

“Peter, walk over to the wall there and tell me what you see.”

Peter obliged. He scanned along the ground for some trace of the man who had tried to warn him--Martin, but found nothing but debris.

“No, not there, look at the wall.”

“My God!” Peter saw several spots in the brick that contained human remains. A row of teeth protruded, proudly displaying silver fillings. A skeletal finger pointed toward nothing. Other traces of human bones bulged and retreated into the lopsided wall. “They bricked people into that wall!”

“There’s only one person in that wall. Mary Evers.”

“Mary ... Evers? This is Evers and Company, isn’t it?”

“Yes it is.”

“Why are you showing me this? This building has been around since the turn of the century. You’re not old enough to have--“

”She was a whore. Now she is ... historic. Every beautiful bit of architecture here has a name behind it. Each one a person refined by their loves, dreams, and vices and then restructured by Urvus.”

“Galvin and Sons?”

“The sons were even more despicable than their old man. Posthumously, they made one of the most successful businesses in this area, but you already knew that.”

The plastic parasite sprouting from Peter’s arm had enveloped the full extent of the limb and now coiled around his torso to pull his arm tight against his body. His shoulder dislocated, accompanied by a horrific snap and a pained scream from Peter.

“I’m not like them! I’m a good person!” The statement sounded ridiculous to Peter, and he wasn’t even certain it was still true.

“This isn’t a punishment, Peter! Urvus looks for potential in his children, not morals. Your mind, your wondrous mind, has become your blueprint and he’s chosen to build you. I envy you. I really do.”

“Make it stop!”

“I can’t. I just prepare the lots, I don’t handle the architecture.”

With a metallic squeal, bars begin to worm their way out of Horace Gordon’s concrete body and sprout like vines across the alley’s floor. His corpse was dragged from the stinking couch and pulled along the meticulous bloody symbols Redwater had left beneath his wounded feet. It was both ridiculous and wonderful to behold--a man-sized sack of material rapidly traversing crimson guidelines as it sprouted the foundations of brick walls.

“Ah, construction begins. My work is done here. If I were you, I’d clear this lot. It’s about to become dangerous,” said Redwater.

Peter tried to mutter a protest, but only managed to blow a cloud of white powder from his mouth. The chalky substance invaded his lungs, causing him to fight for breath. He fled.

Redwater gave him a final acknowledgment before disappearing into the dark of the alley, “I’ll visit you when you’re done, Peter. I’m sure you’ll be a thing of wonder.”

Peter was soon completely enveloped by his plastic tormentor. He had tried to beg for help but the busy riverside workers seemed to ignore him. He finally collapsed, his heart strangled in coiling wire, beside an empty lot.

Manamana. Do do do do.

#

The Redwater River district eventually celebrated a financial boom as the government realized they could turn run-down factories into historic tourist hot spots. All of the great antique buildings were featured in the Redwater River brochure, including Galvin and Sons, Gordon’s Metalworks, Evers and Company, and of course, to the delight of the inquisitive vacationers, the final stop at the legendary Donald’s Deli, where the roast beef on kaiser was an absolute must.