CITIZEN SIX

. . .

 

[CMND+ENTER]

 

   _X looked out the rain-soaked pane as the train hurdled underground, vacuum-packing into darkness like pork salami. I’d escaped my accident without injury, floating down in an escape pod, helmet fogged, head bobbling, spirit shattered. Rescued immediately - he'd made sure of that. I received only the best care and was released without admittance. But the world watched with bated breath as a search party scoured for the scientist. When and where he'd surface remained a mystery. A banner interrupted the train schedule:

​

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

SCIENTIST PRESUMED DEAD IN FATAL ROCKET CRASH

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

​

   The train reemerged into daylight. Through the window: scurrying souls. A cluttered sky crying on its greatest of parasites. And giant tits on a wall, courtesy of BMW - the notorious graffiti artist Breast Milk World.

 

. . .

 

   The waiting room was soulless but not for lack of trying. Massage chairs offered DVR showcases: cheap distractions from death. A fish tank glowed. In it a giant puffer, stripped of his aggression, toothless, reduced to a blubbery flutter, waved his little see-through flits devoid of reasons to puff.

   The paradox continued outside his tank: I wanted a cigarette but couldn't smoke. I wanted a partner but was terribly alone. I wanted to live but one day would die. On these thoughts went. McDonalds. 10^10 served. And so on.

 

. . .

 

   Rita shoved through the door and sat without words.  She looked pretty, healthier than usual, hair fuller, breasts perkier, lips devoid of that ravenous gaunt that she so regularly forced upon them. I looked to her and faced with our mother’s death saw in her a tragic resemblance to the old bird.

   I thought of her upbringing at the hands of this woman, her shaky adolescence, her proclivity for the arts and genuine talent within them. I thought of her spotty career, her drug use, her stint with prostitution. But here she was, clean, quiet, no longer a total mess. She dug through her purse and took out her HHD. Then coldly, unaffected:

   “I’m pregnant.”

 

[ERROR]

 

. . .

 

[CTRL+RES]

 

   _X mentioned Rita’s past. We’d all tried to forget it. But I did so in a spirit of manifesting her phoenix. I neglected to mention the verisimilitude of painful youth and humiliation, of suffering that all endure. People had their tendencies. Had  long entertained duality of character. Abiding with a surface act of conformity, pleasant and responsible enough, but underneath harboring some monstrosity of character, some cesspool of immorality.

   But Rita was different outside and in; she held no artificialities of character or expression. Her wild unkempt appearance was consistent with what lied beneath - a residue of trashiness that threatened to work itself out on anyone without notice. We'd seen it ad nauseum: her histrionic displays of systematic nonconformity. Thanksgivings ruined with an outcry of self-loathing. Easter brunches with audacious impiety. Verbalized refusals to consume meat - she wouldn't be caught dead with the rest of us, sacrificing flesh to false prophets.

   Part of me sympathized pitied her. For Google's sake wasn't her appearance enough: the piercings, the bleached tips on nappy strands, the tats. Combined with her vulgar language was a sexual track record eligible for an award. But you had to admire her consistency, her supreme unwillingness to compromise. Rooted deep inside she had an idea of who she was and nothing incongruent with it would manifest outward. You’d never find her in a circle at teatime lending herself right of the radical left. It was relentless and exhausting. And admittedly inappropriate.

 

. . .

 

[CTRL+REW<<]

 

   _X was at it again. Between the gum smacking and blinking fuchsia lids Rita was castrating some brute with her cunning. She looked like a trollop - didn't she always - and somehow doing nothing but leaning against a wall one might find her incredibly offensive. The body language, the paranoid glances - she didn't have to speak to convey what she was about: a Rosie Perez knock-off with a splash of vodka tonic. In fact she always had a few under her belt. I could count on one hand my encounters with her sober. These were the experiences that defined her.

   And now between monosyllabic fare she was dissolving a man's identity with a singular flush, a goddess with a sphincter luring him in then taking a fantastic shit all over him and his ideas of life.

   A devious smile curled her lips. She dragged her fingertips along her mohawk, a force to be reckoned with, a radioactive isotope, a jill-in-the-box.

 

. . .

 

[CTRL+REW<<]

​

   _X remember her in King's Cathedral. We were young then, on holiday with our father who was on business in Cambridge. At his request my mother had invited her sister, an ill-mannered woman from Chicago with a knack for sex, an eye for fashion, and a tongue for gossip gossip gossip.  

   Rita worshipped her, naturally. As it turned out she taught Rita everything she knew and was happy, nay ecstatic, to see her legacy diffused in the mind of her niece, albeit to her sister’s chagrin. My mother and aunt had a falling out you see, and their differences were irreconcilable. Then in some kind of karmic farce my mother’s offspring came to embody the qualities of the cunty kin she’d indubitably sworn off. This young girl, this daughter of hers, had by some loose screw on the DNA ladder inherited all the traits of her aunt, presumably from her grandfather who was equally stubborn and loathed.

   Mother had always had a picture in her head of what a family ought to look like and this simply wasn’t it. It didn't have to be perfect. She knew that. She was tolerant of alternative lifestyles and willing to withhold judgment in the name of that sacred bond that overcame obstacles. But this was too much. It had gone too far. She could no longer lose herself in the rapture of love and maternal care and instead found herself despising her own creation, unable to relate to it but more importantly to nurture it. She wished she could die.  

 

. . .

 

   My aunt would die of cancer years later, a climax she’d earned with an arsenal of bad choices - the bitch had it coming. But during the time between this incident and the one hereinafter described, she spent most of her energy figuratively deflowering my sister. I remember the year before she died. Her  empty seat  at the Thanksgiving table  fueled a fire in Rita's heart, the first of many, impossible to extinguish.

​

. . .

 

[CTRL+RES]

 

   _X anyway, Cambridge - King’s Cathedral. Fanny, as Rita came to call our aunt (I think her given name was Elva), led Rita by the hand into the wondrous chambers, a true architectural spectacle, an achievement of lives and lifetimes that took the viewer's breath away. Fan-vaulted ceilings, some twenty meters high, were interlaced with exquisite beams and the most intricate patterns the eye had ever seen. Stained glass was interspersed with bas-reliefs in mathematical precision: refinement at its peak.

   I turned instinctively to Rita. I did that sometimes, finding my own satisfaction secondary to watching hers. Her green eyes sparkled with wonder as her fist clenched inside Fanny's. My mother signaled for us to sit just ahead. Rita was led down the aisle wide-eyed, neck craned ninety degrees at fractals of golden ratio'd fame.

   The choir was in recital as was their custom this time of year. Their voices were pretty and young, trained but untainted by their years. The scene wafted with nostalgia, sweetly reminiscent of a past no longer available to citizens of our time.

   I continued to watch the faces of my cohorts: little Rita's, framed by freckles and pigtails, mouth ajar, quenching the thirst of her youth, and Fanny’s, rocking slowly to the harmony, humming along as if she owned the place. She nodded in affirmation as each note hit its cue. She was the real conductor in her mind. The other, with the straggly silver hair and wand - a puppet. And then there was Mother who after so short a time had tears flowing freely from eyelids to blouse. It was the only time I’d seen her cry, not because she didn't do it but because she was rarely afforded the opportunity. And so I put myself in her shoes and understood for the first time what enormous pressures maternity had placed on so fragile and traditional a woman. She noticed me staring and wiped her cheek with the back of a faux silk glove.

   "It's beautiful," she said. "Isn't it, Ricky?"

   I hated when she called me that. I normally fought it but knew in this moment not to. She was in a state of absolute tenderness. To violate her now would be to destroy her. So I nodded at her slowly, blankly, admittedly half-distracted. How I loathed the name Ricky.

   The conductor, not Fanny, led the children in the com-position carefully, masterfully, until from nowhere he gently squeezed a larger-than-life holier-than-thou specimen of gas.

   "Good God, man," snapped Fanny, a typical response from a woman with birdbrain.

   The choir kept on, a well-oiled train aware of the consequence of derailing. The conductor reddened and looked hungrily among them for a face worthy of flogging.

   Fanny broke out in a fit of laughter. She’d done all she could to contain it but alas was condemned to fail in everything she did, a woman of no class, oblivious to her dis-position.

    I don't know whose face was redder - the conductor's, neck pivoted backwards, hands keeping measure - or mine, embarrassed beyond belief by the presence of Birdbrain. Or perhaps it was Mother's, hot with contempt, sweating through her most expensive Sunday dress.

   Rita  was  caught in  the  crossfire. A  moment of truth. I squinted at her across the pew. She returned my stare unsure. To  partake  or abstain: a decision  that would  change  everything. I pressed a finger to my lips, warning her to keep quiet.

   "It's OK sweetheart."  Fanny waved me off, taking measures into her own hands. "What a stinker."

   This tickled Rita wholeheartedly. Letting go of my gaze, of the fear of Mother's glove, and of herself altogether for perhaps the first time, she belched. A full-bellied burp escaped those tiny lips, feeding in turn a burp from Birdbrain.  A bastard alliance. From that moment on, the two were inseparable.

 

. . .

 

[CTRL+FF>>]

 

   _X decade later on her deathbed Fanny found herself in the company of a single visitor: one orange-haired pot-smoking Rita Redfern. The pair, patient and visitor, were no doubt equally disheveled, the younger in the wake of a messy same-sex breakup, the older about to croak. The book was closing on all they’d shared - their fondest memories, their laughter, their general penchant for all things raunchy including a repugnant fascination with girth that harkened not only to a primordial obsession with sex but to some undeniable void within themselves. Once the biggest cock would not suffice Rita had turned to lesbianism and Fanny had approved, hav-ing herself once dabbled in pussy. Rita’s adolescence thus became an arena for mistakes that undermined the stagnation of Fanny’s middle age. Here were two women circumventing their paradigms in their worship of each other, united in consumption, in damnation, in art.

​

   Chasing shadows.

   Blundering.

   Aimless.

​

   “I’m drunk Fanny," Rita sighed. "I’m drunk and I’m tired."

   Rita had poured her heart into an installation that was two days from opening. She looked sloppy in her dress - a crimson mini-thing that slouched like her into angles of unappealing aesthetic. She barely knew our father, the subject of her art. He’d worked incessantly and she was young when he passed. So she became an artist, interpreting what life might have been like if he’d been a part of it. It was her first exhibition and would be met with lackluster reviews  at a mediocre gallery in the Lower East Side.

   For Rita artistry entailed that specific ability to pursue a craft whether anyone gave a shit and to continue doing so after they clearly did not. It was a field she knew rewarded only the few - those who could avoid defaulting into stable and less interesting careers or becoming jaded has-beens, jinxed by narcissistic questions and cruel injustices of a system that denied them. The fewer still that evaded attrition became alcoholics. And the fewest by the tiniest of margins went on unnoticed with a vague possibility of making it posthumously, too late to validate the suffering and sacrifice and shame bestowed upon them while alive. Rita presently walked the line, playing lesbian limbo somewhere in-between.

   "It was a good run kid." Fanny smiled weakly. Rita grabbed her hand and felt the nimble fingers surrender under her own. Fanny spoke again.

   "Come."

   "I'm here," Rita cooed.

   "Closer." It required a tremendous effort to push the syllables from her tarnished larynx. The cancer had eaten her alive.

   Rita leaned her head down and Fanny stroked her hair. She felt each strand with genuine compassion. It was a love she’d never reached with any man and she was grateful for the the girl.

   She made to speak but emitted only hoarse fragments. Finally she cupped Rita's ear in her pallid palm and pulled her in close, closer than death, whispering her final sermon deep into that juvenile orifice. What she said I’d never know; Rita has refused to disclose the secret to this day. Something I assumed to be supremely trivial but for Rita moved mountains.

   She backed away from the woman and made her way for the door. She grabbed her overcoat and draped it over her arm,  looking back one last time  at the  face that had changed

her forever. She sniffled.

   "Gimme a cigarette will ya?" Fanny nabbed. Famous last words.

   Rita hadn't the heart to refuse. She dug in her pocket and grabbed two. They lit them right there and smoked in silence. Rita's eyes fell on the older woman, transfixed. She sat down bedside and picked at her nails, one of several deplorable habits she’d gained from the dirty bird, holding her cigarette between her fingers all the while.

   She broke her trance and walked to the window. The metallic grays and blues of the hospital mirrored those in her heart. She was seventeen and the source of all she’d learned was just over her shoulder on a gurney. She shuddered at the thought of it, her mind and body convulsing in unison. How wretched it all seemed. She lost the strength to maintain composure as hot tears stained her overly rouged cheeks: pink streaks on red pincushions. A door opened and an orderly stood in its frame.

   “Leave us,” Rita boomed without a flinch, still staring out the glass, commanding obedience with squared shoulders and an icy tongue. The man bowed slightly and pulled the door shut.  

   Rita's  gaze  beamed ahead,  dissecting the  world  through the window. An old woman walked a puppy in a park. A self-driving car honked at a man taking too long on a crosswalk.

   She exhaled a sigh of nihilistic smoke. Her breath struck the glass with moisture. How disconcerting that both in this room and inside her loomed such darkness and yet outside the sun cast down its brilliant beams with reckless abandon. The weather was vague and impersonal, she decided, not at all as described by romantic poets but as witnessed by the naked eye: cruel and indifferent. It meant nothing to her.

   She looked beyond the stain of her breath and saw humans as fish, disillusioned in a leaded tank, harboring an invisible anchor, doomed to sink. There was no subterfuge.

   Her thoughts then turned where they usually did - to herself. She thought of her paradoxical place in this strange world. She prided herself on her virtue but was condemned as compulsive and immature. She could endure most insults but immature? What was maturity but the practice of self-deceit?

   "Monsters," she said finally, partly to herself but loud enough for the patient to hear. She smoked her cigarette and glared through the glass.

   "We’re all monsters,” she added. Through the morbidity of her conclusion shined a pride of self-expression. Eager to impress the old bird she turned swiftly, seeking approval but finding none. Fanny had fallen asleep halfway through her smoke and the thing lay burning a hole in her clavicle. She was always so dramatic. Of course her exit would be nothing less.

   In an effort to reconcile this great monstrosity of nature Rita put her cigarette out on her own clavicle. She winced in pain but suffered with a hint of pleasure. Now she and the corpse would share a wound forever. She tied a scarf around it to keep their secret safe; it was theirs and no one else’s.

   Knowing the patient would not wake up the visitor grabbed her things and showed herself out. Her pumps clacked down the hallway as she motioned for the nurse.

 

. . .

 

[CTRL+REW<<]

 

   _X why can't she be here anyway?" Rita asked at Thanksgiving, looking to the empty seat. "It's not fair."

   She was referring of course to Birdbrain. But the woman would soon be hospitalized then dead.

   "Good riddance," I uttered. The reader must excuse my harsh tone for surely no one deserved to die. But I held a grudge for this woman as her entrance into our lives came at excruciating costs. It was never my idea to include her in this tale. And my mother had gone through painstaking efforts to avoid her, carefully crafting a life in her absence. She’d never admit it but it was true - it was all intentional.

   Bullshit aside, it was my father's fault. It was his brilliant idea to bring her around. He was a snake that tricked us all, expelling us from the garden while he savored its fruit. His affair with his wife's sister was no secret.

   "It’s important for children to know their family even if they are different," Father smiled, churning soup and reading his HHD. Mother was horror-stricken. She would see to it that her extensive attempts to move away from this woman would not be in vain.

   "Charles, I…"

   "…What's that dear?" He looked up to meet her gaze.

   "I don't know what to say.”

   Mother had that problem particular to women of her class and upbringing: humility and modesty that trumped her intentions. Even when presented with an invitation to go to hell it might take her an hour to think it over before politely declining on sanitized stationery.

   "Besides," added Father, "if we have someone to look after the children we'll have more time to ourselves."  

   A lie. A bold-faced lie. He’d be busy with work and illicit affairs anyway, using what little free time he had to indulge not his family but women in the galleries for which his wife had no taste.

   "You don't know her, Charles. There's a reason we're out of touch."

   "Give her a chance," he grinned. "It can't be as bad as all that."

   Another lie. If my mother had known then what she came to discover later - that the chance intersection with her sister would foil not only her marriage but her relationship with her daughter - perhaps she’d have found it in herself to transcend her disposition and refuse her husband outright. Alas hind-sight was sharp but flaws occurred in real-time. So she sat there aghast at the dinner table juxtaposed with the empty chair like a deer in headlights. And she’d watch in horror as her own creation came to embody the very person she’d exiled. She would soon see Rita as a cruel reincarnation of her nemesis, that carnal beast that had so effortlessly destroyed her childhood.

   She sat there and took it, the marriage of the sacred and profane, falling from Eden without a fight.

 

. . .

 

[CTRL+REW<<]

 

   _X finally we meet,” Birdbrain would say, bags under her eyes and over her shoulders, fresh off the metro, leaning down to kiss the redhead on her rosy little cheek.

   “Rita.” My little sister held out her hand.

   “Ah yes. Rita Redfern.”

   “Just Rita.”  She looked up to the woman doe-eyed, ready to receive her.

   “My kinda girl.”

 

. . .

 

[CTRL+FF>>]

 

   _X now in another cold shallow room our mother lay dying, toes pointed upward to a god she no longer believed in, hair soaked in pain, in memories, bleached silver by stress and abandon.

   “You have to let her say goodbye,” I said. She and Rita still hadn’t talked. The only exception in twelve years was the phone call searching for me.

   “Do I?” Mother’s response came too quickly. Here in this very room she would leave  and never come back and forego a final visit from her daughter.

   “She's standing out there," I motioned. "Just on the other side of that door.”

   Her cold eyes stared me down, transfixed. She shifted reluctantly. Her neck moved first, all wrinkles and veins and tendons, a gargantuan effort for a ravaged soul. Her eyes were the last to land. Slowly they drifted to the door, apprehensive, as if the horror on its other side were beyond her ability to comprehend or endure. Light played on the translucent glass, shadow plays of uncertainty. She shuddered.

   “You owe her this much at least,” I urged.

   “I owe her nothing,” she said, digesting her words, confirming her decision with finality. She watched through the window, frightened, then looked away.

   “Mother,” I pled.

   But this wasn't about Rita; it was about Fanny. The rivalry with her sister ran so deep that her own daughter stood no chance. She’d die bleeding blue-black hatred for the girl.

   Still one had a mother and drank her milk no matter how sour the aftertaste. So Rita had finally forfeited her hand. She’d shown up. Wasn’t that enough?

   A truce must be reached.

   “Why couldn't you have grandchildren,” Mother croaked, desperate for an heir, dying for a second chance. All Rita had been good for were tax breaks and abortions.

   “Do you want to be buried next to Dad?” I asked.

   “Your father’s tombstone is a gloryhole.”

   As far as she was concerned her dead husband was the antichrist. And her daughter - a whore, of Biblical (dis)proportion.

   I kissed her and walked to the door, looking back on her one last time. I’d brought with me as a peace offering a photo of her and Rita as a child: the miserable crone and the thorn in her side. I crumpled it and dropped it in the trash.

​

. . .

 

   We sat in the waiting room while the formalities were processed. The room, whose repugnance was matched by an equally suffocating smell, was a purgatorial wasteland, a refuge for no one, a desolate and staunch space of gray and beige and tears  and  farts  and  sweat-stained  chairs  that could never be cleaned, not that anyone would try.

   Rita sat reading her trash-mag, thumbing  the pages nervously, legs crossed, shoe kicking, massage chair on low, an occasional bump reminding her she was there. But she wasn’t really. She sat there not as the woman she’d become but the child she once was, alone and waiting for Mother, feeling little and knowing less, a creature of constant duality, a sacrificial lamb under the horns of a satyr. Her exterior had become somewhat tolerable, fleshy, a misleading carapace underneath which dwelled an anti-silver lining teeming with a chaos that would inevitably escape its diaphanous cage, torching all in its path in a desperate explosion of emotion and savagery.

   But not today. Today she drifted. She sat beside me thumbing the pages, uninterested in our mother’s passing or feigning indifference - I wasn’t sure which. She too would be a mother now and what grounds did she have to cope with that? What experience could she bring to the table but strife and angst and rebellion. The lightness about her must be a cover, a protective charm orbiting her fragile self-esteem. I knew that she was poised but afraid. Afraid not for her unborn child but her relationship to it, one that might mimic her own with a disaffected mother. Afraid she'd come to hate herself when she discovered the same loathing for her creation. Afraid that her life up to this point had been a carefully crafted image, now jeopardized with the flood of new life.

   She was a leaning tower, thumbing and humming, teeter-tottering between expression and doubt, filled with a reper-toire of  coping  mechanisms whose relevance now faced total and irreversible annihilation.

   She was uncomfortable and reluctant. She'd have to face herself and all the terrible possibilities motherhood entailed in order to remain awake, to preserve her artful identity, to transmute the danger of her hypothesis into knowledge and depth of experience.

   Yes, she decided. That's it. She'd been but a child in a nursery with toys she knew weren’t real.

   “Great rack,” Rita elbowed me. Across the street on a seventh story scaffold a dark figure hung from a makeshift harness. He swung back and forth as he sprayed, depicting an emblem we’d seen everywhere:

   Tits. This pair larger than life. Pink water balloons in a polka dot bikini. Leaking crystalline drops onto a spoon two stories below.

   I looked down to my HHD. On it a message sat blinking. The scientist. He was alive. He didn't disclose a location or itinerary but offered only an exit:

 

----------------------

Will send jet

----------------------

 

   Rita cocked her head at the mural. The artist finished his iconic lactation and signed it B.MILK to remind us: in the age of the robot, organic fluids still nurtured us.

   Suspended from his scaffold he just kept swinging, celebrating his boobs.

   "Really, Ric," Rita smiled. “It's a great fucking rack.”

 

[ESC]