(Being an attempt to write short fiction in even shorter increments…)
dead bird, no. 1, no. 2, no. 3, no. 4, no. 5, no. 6, no. 7, no. 8, no. 9, no. 10, no. 11
The doorbell woke me. I’d fallen asleep on the couch, listening to the old R & B station and half-reading about the Mbuti pygmies in National Geographic. Then there was knocking. I found a police officer in the hallway. He had puffy, pocked cheeks and hard eyes. Monica stood next to him. She’d been crying. She was holding a box of brownie mix.
“We thought she was soliciting,” he said. Monica squeezed silently past me into the apartment.
I was taken aback. “Carrying a box of brownie mix?”
The officer looked embarrassed. “That’s what she said. She was quite drunk, though, and very lewd. She kicked me.” I glanced at the clock on the mantle, next to our mother’s ashes. Monica had been gone for over two hours. “We were forced to ticket her,” he explained.
After the officer left, I took my contacts out. I had to work in the morning. Monica sat at the kitchen table, reading the brownie box. I thought again about what the dead bird had told me, and felt tiredness course through my body like ink dispersing in water.
(Being an attempt to write short fiction in even shorter increments…)
dead bird, no. 1, no. 2, no. 3, no. 4, no. 5, no. 6, no. 7, no. 8, no. 9, no. 10, no. 11
As soon as Monica left, I washed the blood from my knuckle. Then I turned on the radio and rolled a joint. Whenever we separated, I felt a change in consciousness, a portion of my thoughts returning to a private domain. Ray Charles was on. I nodded gently with the music as I smoked.
I’d started getting high a year before I left home. It was summertime. My mother decided that I was the one to attend college in the city the following autumn; Monica would remain at home and run the store. I spent most of my time at Billy Tiernan’s, listening to his stepfather’s record collection, playing backgammon, and getting stoned.
One night, we all went to the lake. Monica and her friends, too. Billy and I had smoked a joint in his truck. Monica didn’t like pot. As we plunged towards the water, through the woods and between sheets of fireflies, I instinctively looked for her in the dark ahead of me. She was gone, then. From me, I mean.
(Being an attempt to write short fiction in even shorter increments…)
dead bird, no. 1, no. 2, no. 3, no. 4, no. 5, no. 6, no. 7, no. 8, no. 9, no. 10, no. 11
The mail was still in the mailbox, all junk. There was an American Express offer for me, and I had not lived there for over a decade. I’d gotten lost on the way over, and it was almost dark. The house outlined in the mild, pink light, I squinted at the familiar facade. When my eyes focused, I realized the whole left side, from the kitchen up, was caved in; missing, like a dark chunk from a waning moon.
The fire had started in the living room, they said. I stood at the edge of the yard and looked at the first floor’s dim skeleton. As a child, I’d imagined fires in the living room many times; not fires that I’d started, but fires I envisioned at their peaks, flames lapping cruelly at the drab, off-yellow drapes. I wondered how this matched up.
I sat on the warm hood of the car for a few minutes before I headed back to the city. The coroner had given me the option of picking up the ashes in the morning or having them shipped. I gave him my address.
(Being an attempt to write short fiction in even shorter increments…)
dead bird, no. 1, no. 2, no. 3, no. 4, no. 5, no. 6, no. 7, no. 8, no. 9, no. 10, no. 11
“You told the coroner about the brownies?” Monica asked, cross-legged on my couch, drinking her third screwdriver of the night. She cradled the paper cup gently in one palm. Her head rested on the other.
“No,” I explained, “he brought up the brownies.”
“Do you want to make brownies?” she asked. It was after midnight. I was on my first drink. “Come on,” she nudged, “The corner store’s open all night, right?”
Three days after she’d arrived we had our first fight, a silent feud that lasted a week, about whether we could afford a funeral. We couldn’t. I had little desire to communicate with my mother’s sister. Monica wouldn’t do it, either, so I won, as it were.
After that, without discussion, we slid into a natural co-habitation. I’d readjusted to Monica’s whims, all of them impulses that existed close to my own surface. Thinking about it right then, I wanted brownies, too. I didn’t offer to go with her, though. That was my fault.
(Being an attempt to write short fiction in even shorter increments…)
dead bird, no. 1, no. 2, no. 3, no. 4, no. 5, no. 6, no. 7, no. 8, no. 9, no. 10, no. 11
The wallpaper over the urinal repeated infinitely: a house, a river, a moose contemplating the dwelling from the opposite bank, some woods, another house. Somewhere between the woods and the house, the image began again, like an MC Escher illusion. This was the wallpaper in the bathroom at the coroner’s office.
My mother looked more or less like herself, except dead, her blonde-grey hair still in a ponytail. It had been a terrible fire, to be sure, but it was smoke inhalation that had gotten her, in the attic, while firemen below tried to put out the blaze.
“Yes,” I told the coroner, “that’s her.”
He nodded, and said he’d bought brownies from Mom at a few school bake sales.
“Yeah,” I said, “Brownies,” thinking about chocolate and looking at my dead mother’s still face out of the corner of my eye. I was still imagining the sugar on my tongue when I drove by the burnt house at dusk.
(Being an attempt to write short fiction in even shorter increments…)
dead bird, no. 1, no. 2, no. 3, no. 4, no. 5, no. 6, no. 7, no. 8, no. 9, no. 10, no. 11
“Well, what did they tell you?” she asked. She meant the bird’s parts. There was a time I could have answered the question, when Monica wouldn’t have even needed to articulate it. The idea of telling her of the abstractions I’d read in the mangled pigeon seemed shameful to me, like reverting to the provincial dialect I’d trained my tongue to avoid. She would understand it, though, whatever I said.
“I don’t know,” I muttered. “I really don’t.” I said that second part with more conviction, even though the blood was starting to cake on my fingers and I desperately wanted to wash my hand.
“Oh,” she said, sounding hurt. Feeling hurt, I’m sure. I knew exactly what they meant, and dead birds don’t lie. Then she asked again about what it was like to identify the body.
(Being an attempt to write short fiction in even shorter increments…)
dead bird, no. 1, no. 2, no. 3, no. 4, no. 5, no. 6, no. 7, no. 8, no. 9, no. 10, no. 11
I’d already been in the city many years. She’d not visited. When she arrived, still smelling of smoke, she walked around my cramped living room. We’d hugged, of course, and probably made one or two inconsequential remarks, but she got right to it. All with her eyes, she examined the magazines on the table (National Geographic, Newsweek), the plants hanging by the window (unwatered and dying), the contents of the trashcan by the television (a few receipts, maybe; I never remembered it was there).
In the next weeks, the room changed shape, meeting her will. The couch, now opened to a bed, was pushed permanently to the wall. Aside from her duffle bag, she brought no objects into the space. At the end of it, it felt right and natural, my arrangement only a temporary diversion from whatever the truth was, whatever I was escaping by moving to the city to begin with. It felt like the room we’d shared as children.
(Being an attempt to write short fiction in even shorter increments…)
dead bird, no. 1, no. 2, no. 3, no. 4, no. 5, no. 6, no. 7, no. 8, no. 9, no. 10, no. 11
My hand happened to be covered in fresh blood when the conversation began. I’d been chewing on my knuckle for some reason, and I’d broken skin. It was odd, I thought, but didn’t seem like a big deal.
We were talking about sundials, Monica and I, because we both agreed that calculations (especially of this nature) took time, and that we were better off just waiting for all the business arrangements to work themselves out. I explained to her that I’d marked time since the fire with the passing of the bird’s limbs across the cement.
“Oh,” she asked. “Like augury?”
“Yes, I suppose,” I told her. I’d almost grown used to her again, which was strange enough, but she would soon be leaving.
(Being an attempt to write short fiction in even shorter increments…)
dead bird, no. 1, no. 2, no. 3, no. 4, no. 5, no. 6, no. 7, no. 8, no. 9, no. 10, no. 11
The dead bird moved a little bit every day. Or, rather, parts of it did. It was separated — a wing over here, something unrecognizable over there — on the weed-cracked sidewalk outside the wonton factory I passed while jogging each afternoon. It was a mostly deserted street.
Late in the bird’s disintegration, I passed someone a little further down the block, walking in the shadow of a warehouse. “Hey!” I wanted to ask him — a prematurely balding Puerto Rican kid who worked in the tire yard –“did you see the bird? It’s been there since March!” It was the end of May then, and I was wondering what the summer sun would do to it. But I kept jogging.
That was the same week I told Monica about the bird.
I’ve already posted my photos and field recordings of my adventures at the 2006 edition of the Consumer Electronics Show, but my reason for being there — the piece I was supposedly writing — kinda fell through the cracks. I pitched this story and went to Las Vegas thinking I was writing a tech-oriented travelogue, only to discover upon my return that my editor had wanted a simple review of the Show’s hottest new gadgets. After another publication promised to run it, it got bumped for adspace, with the intention of running it on the website, at which point it officially fell through the cracks. Half a year later, here it is.
Searching for the Next Little Thing (or A Consumer in a Strange Land)
by Jesse Jarnow
The only reassuring thing about the chaos across the 1.6 million square feet of carpeted exhibit-space at the Consumer Electronics Show, held January 5th through 8th in Las Vegas, is that nobody among its 150,000 participants seemed to know what was going on — which is exactly how I found myself offering fanboy suggestions to one of the dudes from San Jose who invented the iPod’s trademark clickwheel.
We’d both come upon the same CES woman in a yellow information shirt, who’d told us (with stunning inaccuracy) that it was “about a mile” to the other side of the building. She explained why we should wait for the next shuttle bus rather than walk — as we did — down the service driveway and past loading docks stacked high with wooden crates that resembled stage props.
“Tell me,” I asked Clickwheel Dude promptly, “the next generation of iPods is gonna be a cell phone with a faux-modernist rotary dial clickwheel, right?”
“Where’d you hear that?” he asked, mildly taken aback. “No, no,” he said, hinting that a virtual clickwheel could potentially be “extremely tactile.”
“We really need this kind of feedback,” he added.
Once he finally made it through registration and onto the floor of the Las Vegas Convention Center and into the teeming ecosystem of buyers, exhibitors, press, and other non-consumers (mostly dragging roller-suitcases), he would get plenty more.
***
To tramp from the Convention Center’s monorail stop to its furthest rim, attendees crossed more than a mile, from the two-level South Hall (starring Google and their giant Legos), across the massive Central Hall (featuring a Sony floor installation that required its own sub-map), through the bass-booming North Hall (where bikinied booth babes demonstrated the hottest backseat subwoofers), and into the Hilton next door (whose modest stalls sported clever Asian miniaturizations). And that’s not to mention the additional floor at the Sands (conventioneers mingling with silicone-enhanced attendees of the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo, held next door).
Feedback for Clickwheel Dude came on like locusts in a plague. One could barely step without crunching down on the sleek plastic exoskeletons of imitation iPods (like SanDisk’s sporty Samsa, pimped by toned pep-dancers) and artifacts from its attendant cottage industry, including mini-speakers (mostly mimicking Altec Lansing’s popular inMotion), crazy protective shells (H2O Audio’s waterproof pod-cases and earbuds), and teddy bears (Sakar’s SoundPal). If iPods are the present of music, then its future is undoubtedly a world of variations, and — eventually — commonality, cheapness, and Salvation Army bins.
While pundits pontificated about an “iPod killer,” the most innovative products recognized music tech’s new paradigm of flexibility. With ATO’s iSee, users can store videos on regular iPods, dock them in the iSee, and watch them. Many forward-thinking products served as reminders of the entertainment industry’s ongoing copyright wars. Timetrax’s TraxCatcher allows users (with perhaps questionable legality), to snatch individual mp3s from satellite radio systems like Sirius (now starring Howard Stern) and XM (whose roster includes DJ Bob Dylan).
As always (as demonstrated by the latter), the future includes cars with TVs in them (possibly in their trunks), screens that are bigger, and speakers that are louder. The main halls were characterized by a nearly comical largesse that suggested a World’s Fair without the nobility. Utopian living room sets (such as CyberHome’s wireless video network) were interspersed with displays of fantastical architecture (such as DirectTV’s cube-dangling high modernist dreamscape), as well as temporarily constructed meeting rooms that recalled conjugal visit trailers.
Google’s presence was a breath of fresh air, stocking their booth with real live engineers to showcase the Mountain View wunderkinds’ fabbest inventions. Likewise, following a canned Friday morning keynote-cum-product-roll-out from Yahoo CEO Terry Semel (abetted by token celebrities Tom Cruise and Ellen DeGeneres), Google co-wizard Larry Page took the afternoon by storm.
The deliciously geeky opposite of Semel and his fake living room set, Page (in a white lab coat) spun a science fiction vision, pleading for industry-wide standardization in hardware and power supply and inter-gadget communication.
“One wire should do everything possible,” he said. “If you plug a wire into something, you should be able to do anything you could possibly do with that device -– run software on it, charge it, power other devices from its battery, or whatever, just with that single wire. We could basically do that with the hardware we have. And it should work the same whether you plug that wire into your house, your neighbor’s house, or all the way around the world.”
Following the help of his (gloriously freestyling) celebrity, Robin Williams, Page soon introduced Google Video — the search company’s first foray into retail, and their response to Apple’s iTunes store.
Featuring CBS shows, day-old NBA games, and Charlie Rose interviews, Google Video will also sell content by anybody who cares to create it. Much of the major programming will only work on Google’s proprietary viewer, however, preventing users from watching their purchases on their iPods (bummer, Clickwheel Dude).
But the most mindblowing product described by Page wasn’t the integration of Google Earth into mobile phones (though that’s pretty rad), nor was it even made by Google (though they donated $2 million dollars to its development). It was a mock-up of MIT scientist Nicholas Negroponte’s hand-cranked, wifi-enabled, open source $100 laptop. At a convention dedicated to making the world move faster, Google seemed committed to moving the world quantifiably forward.
After Page, the hum of the Consumer Electronics Show — a din of voices, bleeps, and New Age music blasting from demonstration speakers — seemed literally meaningless. Page had veritably declared it: nobody knew what was going on.
***
Somewhere in the acres upon acres of the Las Vegas Convention Center, there must have been the perfect gadget, that front-of-the-curve device that won’t be really profitable for another few years, and will soon be on the road to ubiquity, but — well — a consumer can get dizzy.
In the immaculately ordered Asian displays at the Hilton, surreal devices like clothing-hangers-with-inboard-dryers, CD shredders, and folding keyboards sat between infinitesimal variations of keychain USB drives, wireless toys, and microscopic neon-colored mp3 players, spiraling smaller and smaller and smaller.
When I found myself gazing woozily into a TV that was playing Revenge of the Sith (stretched, for some reason), my eyes glazing into the CGI, it was time to go. I reached for my iPod, put on George Harrison, and headed for the monorail.
