You won’t find it.
You wouldn’t want to.
So, I won’t tell this as a study. I’ll frame it as a comedy, or better yet, a dollar-store tragedy. Cut the house lights, tune the bassoons, shoo the rats out of the orchestra pit.
On Tuesday, I was sifting, as I always do, in the document-filled shoebox I generously call my home: 200 feet of worn floors, every inch covered by boxes upon boxes that no soul other than me would strain to glance over.
I work with information. Not the kind people like. The folks who come to me realize something is missing, but they don’t quite know the shape of it.
Finding this Missing Thing Without A Given Shape is a matter of digging down deep and narrow, where it’s hard to dig. Oftentimes, the answer they need is scribbled on a moldy scrap of paper that’s been shoved in a drawer, guarded by some confused old woman in a forgotten office who is unaware that it’s being eaten by mice, let alone that it exists.
Every answer is coated in obscurity. A noxious substance. So, I cut it down ruthlessly into two or three remarks. I send them off, and a handful of cash is wired into my cage with no talk. I envy the academics. Their subject matter is so clean—sharp edges and ornate handiwork. The professors handpick whatever truths they like to identify with and defend them ruthlessly. Meanwhile, the students are at work vomiting alphabet soup on one another, picking the fanciest words to wear to the pageant, unbothered by their meaning.
They walk around on and study the lettering of a beautiful map, blissfully unaware that the terrain is filled with dirty needles and fiddler crabs flipping them off.
This must be a fun game because none of them seem to realize they are doing nothing but putting themselves deeper in debt. Rhetoric speaks louder than the great proboscis of the upper faculty.
But I am grateful for the rough and battered corner in which I work. I have collected the most hideous artifacts. Here are some of my favorite papers from my box of deep cuts:
- Boiler explosions unreported due to typos
- Ant-induced hair loss in sugar cane harvest workers
- Human fat traces found in vegetable shortening
- 11 townships that do not exist
I know full well the nature of obscurity. It is eating me, cutting needle-thin worm tunnels through my brain, hollowing the marrow from my malnourished bones.
But one has to pick their undoing, and hey, I don’t smoke.
A voice, sharp and yellow, cuts through my fragments and murk, bemused on the skin, blood running with what’s to come. “…Just getting further and further away.”
It’s Liza. How long has she been in here? I look down and find us seated at my cheap dinette set with steaming cups of tea. I guess I made them for us…
I focus in a bit, and the here and now, a tough and rocky place. “I’ve been distracted.” Out the window, magpies scream. They sit in a tree that had grown fat on a hundred years of acid rain. She chirps back without a beat in between. “Is that abnormal for you?” This was not abnormal for me. I continue. “A lot of bits and, uh… bric-a-brac from other projects are starting to stick together in a certain way…”
“Like details starting to fit together?”
I sift and twist my hands around, trying to form something like an answer. “…No.”
I grab a printed document from forty years prior that I stashed on top of my fridge, pointing to a highlighted paragraph.
“Here… Mention is made of a certain hospital building. I know the one, and yet… Everyone has managed to avoid communicating anything at all about it. When it was built, even its name. No record of patients at all. I looked into a list of records that could fit the criteria… There’s one document from the town hall, but the part is only handwritten, and it’s spelled differently. It’s the least clear place I’ve ever encountered.”
Liza, to her credit, indulges me. “How do you know it’s even real? Couldn’t it be an insurance scam or something?” I shake my head and point past the trees to a monolithic rectangle on the horizon. It stood over a canopy of semi-abandoned industrial facilities. One’s eyes did not want to focus on the hospital building; the first instinct was to view it as a heavy slate ground, against which the comparatively less obscure figures were arranged.
“That’s it over there,” I say, pointing a finger as Liza squints.
It was only then that I noticed that she was wearing all black. A heavy sweater, her third layer despite the mild weather, hung over a scratchy business casual skirt. She looked like two librarians fighting in an inkwell. Her attire reminds me of the event late this evening.
Two weeks prior, Professor John Bourgeois was put out by a fat little blood clot in his lung. Liza had filled in as his teacher’s aid once or twice for his literature class. John was a soft little pile of a man who lived on Irish coffee and things that fell out of the vending machine; it couldn’t have taken much to put a stop to him. I wonder about the final score: How many thousands of words he spoke, wrote, and railed against between his entrance and exit?
Anyway, for some reason, I agreed to come to his funeral. Liza said it was the right thing to do, and I like the path of least resistance. It was to be held at his house, which was close to mine and downhill, so I would be an easy drag-along. Besides, my friend would be there, and we could play in the corner.
Night falls without fanfare. Liza and I enter stage left through a gate held on by one metal hinge. The wood has halfway returned to the ground with the help of insects. She is birdlike in her posture, a rod in her spine, and a keen sense of the right things to say. She goes off, reverent and formal, to greet the host, who receives her with the affect of lukewarm instant oatmeal.
The widow, Melanie Poulis-Bourgeois, is still in her pajamas, a thermos in her hand and a therapeutic back pillow around her neck. She stares through a haze of prescription painkillers past Liza, only just registering her elegantly rehearsed condolences. She nods along.
I scan the scene. Living room furniture—tobacco-stained lazy boys and white plastic standing lamps fed by a tangle of extension cords—has been dragged outside for guests to sit on. Most seem to be John’s old writer friends. I register one of them, emaciated with long tangles of witchy hair. He’s in his 40s, with a face ten years older and an outfit fit for a teenage refugee. A three-legged terrier hobbles around, picking up dropped food scraps and coughing like an old man.
Beyond this entity, staring into an overgrown koi pond in the corner of the yard, is my friend.
Cortez is never hard to pick out. Lightbulb of a skull for a head, old-world attire: dark coat and long scarf. His features indicate he smiled once, and it never wholly faded nor returned. I was, since long before I met him, a fan of his literary work. This meant that I hardly wanted to interact with him. I don’t like playing the role of the needy little orphan child, looking up to the elder for approval, nor have I had much to contribute to his great mind.
Through our correspondence over the years, I have come to understand that he is, for the most part, a distracted and overwhelmingly ordinary man who just so happens to be able to see certain things no one else has ever written about. He was like a friendly tortoise that had wandered into Chernobyl.
Mr. Cortez wrote fiction, allegedly. The truths he delineated were far clearer than most of the non-fiction out there. He had a hand for the most wicked subtleties. He could reach around and hit antipodes of your experience you thought no one else ever saw. Reading his work was like being browbeaten by your own peripheral vision and taken somewhere all too familiar in the process. His oeuvre had the just-so-ness of a two-ton boulder and the obscenity of a donkey’s bray. Horrible and perfect.
I make my approach.
“What’s up, you old pile of bastard garbage?” Over time, my interactions with Cortez have become less formal. He turns to me, in the middle of a conversation in his mind.
“Did you know they can live up to 30 years?” He gestures to the koi. Thirty years is a long time to do what occupied them at the moment: open and close their mouths in two feet of muddy water, just now melted from a recent freeze.
I gesture. “Beautiful animals, well evolved.”
He nods. “Well adapted, yeah.”
Quickly, pleasantries are out of the way, and we move to the topic of the hospital building. He tries to recall its name. “St. Idris? What street is it on again?”
“I’ve given up on calling it anything, and trying to place it at an address, or even a latitude and longitude, defeats the purpose. I know it's there. I’ve seen it.”
The two of us grab paper cups of hot toddies and lean on the rotten fence. We look across the street at a gourmet restaurant. Inside, a family is hunched over their meal. Their vacuous little eyes stare off into nowhere as they tear at their plates. The party reminded me of bears pawing through torn-open garbage bags. A toddler at the head of their table squirms and contorts himself, screaming and red in the face. He has smeared tomato sauce all over a tray that was given to him, and grains of rice stick to his face like skin tags.
I go on. “Every now and then, one finds a nothing statement, just a full paragraph of nothing but hearsay and jargon. Like a… sort of lard and library paste of rhetoric, you know? I have seen more and more and more of these statements as one gets closer spatially and topically to St. Whosey-Whatsit, whatever one wants to call it. No trace of any medical professional having worked there. It’s just a tall, windowless box.”
Cortez is distracted, playing with his watch. He’s trying to set it by the moon. He indulges me. “So, have you found anything about when it was built?”
“Nothing. They just treat it like it was always there, and their words crumble apart in its vicinity. It… eats meaning.”
Cortez takes on a fatherly tone. It’s rare that I remember the decades he has on me. “My suggestion would be not to pick at it.”
He knows I will. I know that. You know that.
I notice that a stage has been set up. A clashing pile of grocery store flowers adorns a paper set on which stands a preacher. He has no microphone, so he has been droning on for hours to no one in particular. Something about the glow that John added to the room. He was fine, but he didn’t glow; he just sort of swayed and sometimes coughed. Liza, a dedicated Catholic, is standing at attention and nodding sagely. Her support lends this hapless man his sole ounce of credibility.
I tune my attention in for a brief moment. “…And truly we all know that Professor Borhees only wanted the best for his community. His cultural…”
‘Borhees’… Really? All this pomp and circumstance, with the flowers and the cultural community, and he didn’t even double-check the name? I react to this in the way I feel is most sensible.
I approach the front of the stage and give a well-executed pratfall. My body falls like a rigid board, and I plant my face into the overgrown lawn. The newly defrosted ground squishes audibly and gives a half inch of forgiveness. Through the corner of my eye, I see Liza looking a bit worried. I hear Cortez deeply engaged in telling the emaciated man about a brand of windshield wiper fluid that doesn’t leave smudges.
That night, I have a dream.
I sit curled up for perfect space efficiency inside an egg. It’s cramped, but I wish to stay inside as long as possible. My cells, on the other hand, have a perverse willfulness to multiply. I feel my delicate form contort and bulge. I feel my neck lengthen itself, and my limbs sharpening from dull little nubs into long, fleshy appendages. Soon enough, I am forced out. Noise and light flood my newborn orifices. My needly talons swipe at the air as my former sanctuary falls apart. I am so thin and unwieldy. I ooze spite and viscous yolk.
I really could be a magpie, I don’t feel clever though. I can’t even find my center of balance. My very first scream squeezes through the depths of my translucent body as my pupils shrink to pin points.
At first, all I have for context is interior and exterior. The dark, thick sanctuary of my egg and the air, harshly clear and thin.
Through this, my newly formed brain starts to learn about its surroundings. I sit in a dull room, lit from above by harsh industrial fluorescents. Out my window is a landscape of leaden oblong buildings under a dark mustard yellow sky. I recognize some of them… I am across town from what I call my home in waking life. I see myself in a thrifted-looking vanity mirror.
As it turns out, I really am not clever enough to be a magpie, I am a human or something like that. I look similarly to my waking self, only half naked, severely underweight, and flecked with a scattershot of sores across my face. It takes me a moment to notice the plug of flesh missing from my side. I have no idea how I feel about all this, so I try to read my expression: An unseen force tugs at the corners of my mouth that widen and widen into a strained smile.
I wonder what I am smiling about. What a contemptible creature. The shell I have hatched out of has turned into little scraps of paper and refuse. My eyesight never sharpens enough that I can fully apprehend my surroundings, but I start to be able to see fat little black bugs walking around my feet. These must be my friends and source of entertainment. I guess I’m easily amused.
A trap door swings open from the floor. It’s Cortez, dressed in industrial coveralls, with a box in his hand. He tips the box over, and a few chrome oblong pebbles spill onto the floor. I studiously sort them by a criteria I could never communicate in waking life. Cortez takes note of this arrangement and places corresponding numbered labels on each one.
Through the omniscience of the dreamer, I am aware of what goes on downstairs when Cortez descends. A confabulation of constantly failing machinery churns and pumps violently. The room is crawling with big clumsy weevils that crawl all over Cortez as he operates. They seem drunken somehow, falling off of him, unable to grip very well with their odd sideways feet. Screws and parts fly off the machine, clanging against the walls and floor. Cortez tends to this machine, speaking to it as if it is a dear relative in need of care.
All around, a milky, blue-white substance spills out of the machine, which the weevils gather around and suck up. One particularly large one twitches, falls onto its bag, and its body splits open, revealing another chrome pebble. Cortez stops the machine, which whirs in pain, to pick up this artifact. “There we are…”
On Wednesday, Cortez and Liza visit my home.
The first thing the two notice is that I have not changed out of my dress shoes or any of my funeral outfit from the previous night. The next was that said shoes were scored with cuts as I was curled up in a ball playing mumblety-peg with my switchblade through them and between my toes. I find this soothing.
“How we feelin’?” Liza asks cheerfully.
“I’m only stabbing between my toes, I didn’t hurt myself yet.”
“Smart!” She says, ever supportive.
Cortez looks around, taking notice of the moldings. “Nice place.”
I respond matter-of-factly. “It’s really not.”
“Well… It has character. The place I’m staying is just brick and white pillars… Hedges… Just sort of… Clean and blank, so this is a relief for me.”
Liza pipes in, “We were thinking the three of us could do a dinner since Cortez leaves in the morning. Maybe 6? …-ish?”
I take two steps to my bathroom sink and study an irritated spot on my face, not sure if it’s just a stain on the mirror. “Why don’t the two of you go and I might swing by and make an appearance?”
No response.
I splash some water on my face and call out, “Where are you thinking of going? I don’t need a say in it, I’ll eat what’s in front of me.” Again, no response. I head into the kitchen where they are.
Eleven dead magpies. Mashed and mangled on the floor.
Liza's face has darkened. Cortez simply looks transfixed, his head is tilted as if an adjustment in angle will bring clarity to this situation.
Liza dutifully grabs a plastic bag from under my sink and kneels down to start to address this development. I gently hold her arm back. “No no… It’s okay… You’ll hurt the weevils.”
And indeed, gathered around every magpie, feeding off some substance that coats them, are clumsy black weevils.
Cortez pipes in, “...This is like a plague.”
I respond mockingly, taking the plastic bag from Liza’s hand and stuffing it in my pocket, “Well let’s not be dramatic here, this isn’t a biblical event. It’s just an… occurrence of magpies… And they’re sticky.” I shrug, seeing both sides of this matter levelheadedly.
Liza takes off her overcoat and looks over my shoulder. “Has your oven been on all night?”
I look over and pause, “…Yes.”
That evening I did not join my friends for dinner. Nor did I sleep. In the absence of sleep and meals, the dusk bled into night and night to the witching hour. All is quiet.
You know where I went. How could I not? There is an event horizon, a point of one’s understanding in which the only direction is deeper. I am a curious little magpie.
I walk quickly through the silent neighborhoods. The only sign of waking life I saw was a few miles back, through a grimy window, there is a filthy room in the back of a bakery. A small old bald man takes a push broom to a concrete floor. Everything in this room, from the light to the old man himself, is dusted in heavy layers of gray.
I know I won’t find the hospital building by conventional means. I take two left turns, cut down an alley, and enter a door and awning placed like a fungal growth at the corner of a formless concrete facility building. I find myself in a bodega. Just like the back room of the bakery, everything is drenched in shades of dust and slate. The room is lit like an aquarium and houses coolers, sparsely stocked with rotting produce and meat still on the bone wrapped in plastic, left unlabeled. I spot a gelatinous disc filled with little black oblongs. This one, in fact, did have a label, seemingly typed in smudged letters, “Bird tongues.”
I slip further and further down the surprisingly long interior until I approach a space I can hardly fit through. Tall shelves loom on either side of me. They house tools that seem hatefully designed to lack any form or function.
On one side, I see something almost like a pair of scissors fused to a welding torch. One blade is irregularly sharpened as if to cut diamonds, the other looks warped. I find a gap between the shelves and slip through it. I have a nose for the obscure at this point. I know how it thinks, or rather, of its idiocy.
There is a misshapen doorway here. Thin and jagged. On the door, off-center in black, crudely written letters, I read more or less what I’ve come to expect: “stedled.”
Well, there it is. I enter a space. The only light I can find is a tiny red dot. At first, I assume it’s the light of a smoke detector. No.
It’s a hole in the wall. Peering through, I see… A space not unlike a room. The walls are blazing red with polka dots in diseased yellow. Various organs are suspended on strings. ‘A butcher shop?’ I think, but only the organs give that impression.
A man enters in a white t-shirt, barely held together, and what looks like a garish rubber monster movie mask.
It’s like some ridiculous sea creature, enormous eyes, feelers, and fins in purple and cyan.
I cannot make out an affect, but he is grunting heavily, in a state of excitement. He works himself up further and further, pacing back and forth until he hits a fever pitch, yanking a heart off one of the strings and stabbing it with a knife that had half of its blade snapped off. He stabs it again and again until the heart has all but disintegrated. He smears his hands around in what’s left of it.
The polka dot wallpaper rises up like the set of a play, and he stands in the dark, bouncing between muffled screams and a swaying fugue state.
And in a flash, it’s just there. Behind him, in a blink, with no noise, there is something like old illustrations of the sun anthropomorphized with a face, only this face was nothing but holes where eyes would be with two lights like pupils inside and an expressionless grimace bearing two rows of teeth.
A voice comes from it like the bellow of a gas furnace. I cannot hardly make out words, but the man in the mask seems to be listening intently. The “flames” coming off of this sun move actively, they twitch and convulse like muscular fingers without joints. The scene seems so unreal that I don’t think to fear for my safety.
I leave the peephole and continue through the hall. I find a door, painted rather conspicuously in industrial yellow and black stripes. Stepping through, I enter a corridor 20 feet wide by 8 feet tall. As I walk, the room widens in every direction until I am in a dark, ashy expanse. The ground appears like greasy coal and the ceiling mustard brown like a light-polluted sky.
I come upon a few small houses jutting out of the ground at irregular angles. I enter one.
Nothing inside but a chair and a device something like a cross between a television and an iron lung.
I sit and watch the glowing screen. It portrays a vat of water wriggling with thousands of tiny fish. A chunk of meat is thrown in, the fish swarm around it, leaving no inch exposed. Now, an obscene cartoonish mouth opens and closes and gnashes. Cut to a picnic scene. In a verdant forested area, a small group of people sit in a circle. Giant pink flowers blossom and rot, the trees are overfed, limbs contorted in a tangle.
One of them is a man so old he is almost featureless. White hair juts out of his form at every angle. His eyes are unseen, swallowed by folds of wrinkled skin. Spores or pollen, like dandelion fluff, are blowing off. It is not readily apparent, but the man is in fact disintegrating and the resulting substance is covering those around him, one of which appears to be Mr. Cortez.
In these moments, I held my mind in a state of willing paralysis. I knew it wanted to go in many directions: the implications, the nature of what I was seeing. But I knew that analysis would only crystallize upon itself and contort for as long as I let it. No sense in that.
I venture to a staircase. This leads higher up than I realized possible in this space. I push through a trap door into the last thing I saw: A large room, bathed in that sickly slate gray light, one could feel it in the air. The walls appeared to be a vague mixture of cheap white plaster and naturalistic molded stone, but this is hard to make sense of as they are heavily obscured by a patchwork of cheap curtains. Weeds push and grow through the carpet, the garish flowers under the gray light look like no color familiar to me, they appear, and if I am being honest, this is the only description I can give: Bitterly facetious.
In the corner of the room is a cot and two jugs of water. Across from it, a vanity mirror, thrown to the ground, in front of it, a plastic angel halo. Below me, up the staircase, I hear footsteps Monday.
I don’t remember how I left. Must have just wandered out.
Normal light hurts my eyes, so I suppose I had been in the dark for a while. Not of too much concern. I have to go back soon anyway. It is starting to become clear, my role, that is.
I have not spoken to Mr. Cortez since my excursion, but I will see him soon. I’m sure he knows what I know. Come to think of it, I have not spoken to anyone. Liza never liked when I got too caught up in my work, and I’d hate to worry the poor dear!
At first, I believed my discoveries were a breakthrough, but, see, that’d be very arrogant. It’s not that I have broken through to something new. I’ve simply hatched. I’m sure I could drone on for volumes about the things I have seen and contemplate this and that, but I don’t have a lot of time. I will end this comedy here.
After all, it is not easy to sit and write this as I am missing a large chunk from my side.
Written by WallaceTheMagpie
Content is available under CC BY-SA