Marvin, part 4 (468 hits)
Category: GeneralLabels: Marvin
Rating: 1.28 on 13 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by Caulfield (View user info) at 2008-04-07 22:18:18 EDT
Part 1: http://www.ubersite.com/m/115848
Part 2: http://www.ubersite.com/m/115906
Part 3: http://www.ubersite.com/m/115953
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Snitch had her own house. It had two floors, 6 rooms, 2 bathrooms, and ample closet space. Marvin wanted to be jealous because that was a wonderfully artistic emotion, leading to great works and greater artists; but jealousy, like many of his haphazard endeavors, was a fleeting thing that quickly evaporated as apathy, invariably, took its place.
It was early morning and Marvin stood in Snitch's well-apportioned living rooming room staring at the walnut coffee table with it's five-card flush of Womanly Magazines. They were spread on the far corner over a spot where Marvin had left a singe mark during his cigar period, cigars seeming, at the time, to be the ambrosia of the intelligentsia (his coinage). But Snitch, put off by the smell and the smugness that accompanied them, referenced their phallic nature and not surprisingly Marvin quit that very day.
Snitch had disappeared to the bathroom after letting Marvin in and Marvin couldn't help but wonder if she was talking to anyone on the phone while she was evacuating. He couldn't hear any noises, and this was a blessing; for besides the sounds of muffled speech he feared he might eavesdrop on a splash or a tinkle, or worse, a gluteal fricative.
The walls were adorned with paintings and various hangings that were not paintings. One of Marvin's own framed works presented itself over her off-white cushiony couch. It was a picture he had made years ago with a rudimentary computer program. It was small, the size of a post card, with simple clouds, a square tractor, and a blotch of green at the bottom, which supposedly represented grass. He pardoned himself knowing he had drawn and printed it out when he was only 12, but it still annoyed him, knowing he had given her better things since then. One painting, which he called forest, was hanging in her guest room not a few feet away and he was certain it would look better displayed out in the open. Snitch hated Marvin's tendency toward the avant-garde, so he deliberately held off and made forest to be the spitting image of a real forest, with light cascading through a lush canopy, motes twirling in a meek zephyr, and a tent pitched low in the background. It was so ordinary he positively hated it, but it was her sort of ordinary and he was disappointed that she kept it hidden way in lieu of Tractor and View, grd 6.
He sat back down on the couch; it was the third time since he arrived that he had risen and sat back down.
Not staring at his picture made him feel better, but looking down the hall, where the bathroom lay, wasn't much better. This made him remember why he couldn't keep still, for somehow this view was forgotten each time he stood up. Feeling at the whim of his neuroses, Marvin closed his eyes and leaned back in defiance. He didn't realize that he had fallen asleep until Snitch began smacking his shoulder with a slightly ruffled Ragazza Bella.
"You were sleeping," she said, her hands smoothing out and replacing the magazine back on the table. Glancing around, Marvin was still a little unaware of his surroundings. The sparkle of dancing rings was the only thing he really perceived.
He spoke to them. "Aren't there better ways of waking someone up. I might have been having a nice dream and now there is no way I'll be able to remember it." He sat up and put his head in his hands. "Nope. Nothing." He dropped his hands. "I don't remember a goddamn thing."
Snitch shook her head and walked over to the kitchen, the broad shiny appliances separated from the living room by an invisible boundary. She was wearing socks and sweats, so she made very little noise on the wooden floor. "Swearing sounds so forced when you use it, Marvin. You have no knack for it."
"What time is it?"
"Nine in the morning. Is this the earliest you've ever been awake? You sleep like a bear."
"I don't know how bears sleep."
"Do you want some orange juice? Cereal?"
He was lost in a daydream, staring at a spot on the floor unblinkingly.
Snitch began pouring the extra glass and heaped a pile of cornflakes in a clear plastic salad bowl she had stolen from college. She had three of them.
"Marvin."
Still mesmerized, "What?"
"Breakfast."
Closing his eyes he broke the stare. Snitch was already seated across the room, watching Marvin over the top of her spoon in a way that made him feel self conscious.
He pulled his T-shirt out and straightened it around him. Snitch continued to watch him until he ambled over to the table and took the seat opposite.
"Why are you here? Suffering a 'Ghastly Depression?'"
"If I were, you certainly wouldn't help. You're too blunt. I need someone made of feathers and you're made of..." he gestured toward her hand "...diamonds."
"How sweet!"
"He furrowed his brow and spoke through a mouthful of cornflakes. "It wadn't a coblemen"
"Perhaps not, but I'll take it as one." She smirked. "What happened?"
"You'll only make a joke of it."
"Probably."
"See."
"See what? That's the risk you take with a friend like me."
"Do you ever make fun of me when you're with What's-his-face?"
"Never." She said it so strongly that he had no choice but to believe her.
He took a spoonful of cornflakes and mumbled something.
"What was that?"
"One of my tourists may not be real."
She laughed and returned to her cereal.
"I just had one of the corner stones of my belief system ripped right out from under me! That's karmic upheaval. I feel lost."
Snitch nodded absently and let her eye drift over to the sink where the dishes from the previous night floundered in soapy irresolution. She would have to do those, she thought, before Fred arrived.
"Are you listening?"
"Yeah—"
Marvin stirred the remaining flakes around and sighed. "What should I do? I couldn't work at all last night. I sat there staring at my toothpicks and couldn't bring myself to touch them. I'm scared that this is going to be the thing that completely messes me up. I've heard of similar things happened to other artists, but they were already luminaries by that point; otherwise I wouldn't heard of them. You know what I mean?" He sighed again, louder this time. "They could afford to have a little doubt. I have no room for it. My head's already full of too many other things."
"Do you want a Xanax?"
"I knew it. No help!"
"What do you want from me?"
"And golf, like that would do anything..."
"You really need to calm down."
"So you ARE trying to pacify me!"
"Of course I am."
"You want me to fail! You want my..."
"OK, Marvin. Up!
Snitch stood up and grabbed his bowl and hers and threw them in the sink. They clattered roughly against an exposed pan handle and one of their spoons, Marvin couldn't tell which, rebounded and landed on the floor. He reached for it.
"Come with me."
"What."
"I said 'up.'"
Marvin rose, caught in her unwavering grip. She pulled him through the living room, down the hall and into her office. His arm hurt. "Sni..."
"What's that?"
She was pointing at a little clay dish on an oak bookshelf. It had a cracked rainbow glaze and was filled with green-stripped peppermints wrapped in light pink cellophane.
"It's a potpourri dish I made that you. Evidently you use it for candy." He sounded annoyed. "Where's the cover? Did you break it."
She didn't answer, but tugged him to another end of the room. "And that?"
This time she was pointing at a two-foot wooden statue of a aborigine crouching next to a fire, the fire connected to the weary-looking tribal leader by way of a small round pedestal. He was dusty and Marvin wanted to tell her this, but held off.
"That's Burnu."
Snitch chuckled. "Oh yeah."
"What?"
"I'd forgotten. I call him Frank now."
"Are you done?"
"Not quite."
Through the house they went until they had identified a great many things of Marvin's. There was a book of poems that weren't really poems but character studies for stories he never attempted to write. A doll made of masking tape wrapped around a skeleton of wire sat next to another made of old shirts and dressed in toddler clothes. A copper Coke can resided in the bathroom (for whatever reason); Corpa-Cola—words that meant nothing to Marvin but seemed necessary for a thought piece, as all art needing meaning—stood out on the surface in a dull, blotchy patina.
Marvin had an idea what this was all about, so he resisted less, hoping she would just get to her point and let him leave her mad grasp.
"And this."
Marvin scratched his neck. "That?"
"Yes."
"Tractor and View"
"—grd 6"
"Yes, whatever."
"Well—"
A knock came a the door, three successive beats followed by patient silence.
Marvin was glad in a rational sense. Who else could this be but her outlandish beau. His arrival would end this It's-a-Wonderful-Life moment. But he was also angry, because he wanted to be told he was great and that he had done so many great things. His ego, if anything, was definitely an artist's ego.
The knocks reverberated once more, slightly less patient this time. Snitch released Marvin's arm and went for the door. If Marvin were to admit it he would say he didn't like Fred. In fact, he was so below Marvin's esteem he thought he wasn't worth the time it took to say his name.
Fred, though, appeared to hold no ill will toward Marvin. He walked in boldly, extending a strong hand toward the decidedly weaker hand. Marvin took it indifferently and went through the ritual—up, down, up down, smile, nod—watching the whole thing play out outside himself as an anthropologist would and sitting down when it was completed. Fred kissed Snitch again, the second time since arriving, and Marvin imagined that they had done the very same thing on that couch. Maybe more.
He stood up.
"Sit down." Snitch tried to make it sound like a suggestion for Marvin's sake. She was holding a bag Fred had slipped in her hand and was vaguely waving it at Marvin's shoulder. She stared at him, eyes wide. Marvin sat down.
After returning from her room where she had relieved her self of her gift, she collided with Fred (intentionally) and they duck walked in each others arms all the way to the kitchen, laughter sputtering out of them like water from an old garden hose. Marvin felt so awkward and out of place he thought he would be sick from it. He took a shallow breath and tried to look to the right as far as he could without appearing like he was trying to do so. His peripheral vision was awash with moving shapes and he swiveled his head an additional quarter-inch, pretending to look at the front door as if expecting another person to bound through it at any minute. When this didn't happen, and when he realized that they had stopped laughing and had begun muted conversation, he risked a glance back.
Fred's ass stood prominently out of an opened refrigerator. It danced back and forth while the top of his head appeared now and again like a mushroom. Snitch was reaching in the cupboard for a plate.
"So..." Marvin began but too low for anyone to hear.
Fred was putting packages of ham and mortadella on the table, followed by a jar of dill pickle wedges and a loaf of bread.
Marvin forgot his awkwardness for a moment shocked by the lunacy of eating cold cuts for breakfast. They were called luncheon meats, after all. He sighed pompously.
"Hey, Marvin, do you want anything?"
The words "To leave" rose unbidden into his mind.
"Nope."
That he would eat the mortadella, which Marvin considered his own was not so bothersome as Fred asking if he himself wanted some. The whole world felt so out of whack that Marvin imagined he would turn sideways and fall off as soon as he left the house, spiraling end over end until he emerged in an endless sea of black. Cartoons, he thought glumly, are but the fantasies of aggrieved minds let loose on children. Then he realized that in his own way he was producing, with his toothpicks, an animated picture. While confirming his own worries it did little to satisfy the sense of injustice growing in his chest, like a trapped breath squirming to get out.
Fred wandered over with a plate in one hand and a ginger ale in the other. He sat down next to Marvin, placing the plate on the table and the can of foaming pop on the slightly curled cover of Ragazza Bella. By way of a hello, he gave a large meaty smile to Marvin and began eating while Marvin scooted to the right and leaned on the arm of the couch hoping, perhaps, that Snitch would fill the void and separate him from this maniac. Instead she took a seat on the opposite side of the table in one of her shabbily upholstered chairs, a green pillow wrapped into her stomach and legs crossed Indian style, socked feet disappearing into maroon fabric and gray cotton.
Nobody spoke. Fred was munching on his sandwich, the sounds of chewing obnoxious to Marvin's ears. Eyes watering with indecision, Marvin rubbed his hands together and stretched his arms out, delaying the inevitable conversation. Snitch, as per usual, seemed content to sit and watch with nary a movement, though Marvin knew she was quite impossible to quiet once she got going. She was a chemistry experiment that needed only a micron of particulate matter to trigger a cascading reaction.
"So..."
Fred looked expectantly at Marvin, his jaw working steadily on half a dill.
"So...a cow," Marvin began, "has to chew it's cud four times over until it visits each of its stomachs. The microbes within the animal need this time to fully consume and breakdown all the necessary proteins, in effect, feeding it with their own secretions and wastes. Right, Snitch?"
Fred raised his eyebrows as if this were an interesting fact, albeit bizarre.
Snitch meanwhile lowered an appraising eye on Marvin, who quickly broke off and returned to watching the door.
"I had a farmer friend back in college," Fred said, a thoughtful expression casting over his face." I went with him to his parents' house one day and an old horse tried to eat my leather jacket." He smiled. "I was a real goof back then. Of course, after that, I left my jacket in my car and traveled with at least five feet separating me from any other living thing, my friend included."
Snitch smiled and Marvin rolled his eyes at the door.
"Was that the time you went to that fair?" Snitch inquired.
"No that was another time."
"When was that?"
"Before, that. I was only 15 when that happened." Fred took a large bite out of his sandwich and quickly drained a measured gulp of ginger ale.
Snitch took a leg out from over her and leaned over. The leaning over was relatively useless considered how far apart she was from Marvin, and she only did it for effect. "He got a tattoo at the fair." She said silkily.
Marvin looked over, and Fred nodded glumly.
"Drunk. Really drunk." He explained, sluicing the words around half-masticated mortadella.
Marvin had thought about getting a tattoo once. He hadn't been drunk, though drinking was taking place. His thoughts at the time dwelled on the finite existence of all living things, a sense of crushing mortality weighing on him so onerously that he stayed in bed for four days, a cooler full of beers at his bed side disappearing at the rate of one per hour ( he was a light drinker and would get sick otherwise).
Back then, lying there, he had tried not to think because thinking led him invariably to the inevitability of time. Once this path had begun he would drift to thoughts of himself and perplexing notion that even he was susceptible to it's immutable truths. Time held no favorites, with the exception of the grand canyon which was aging well all things considered. Instead he tried to slip into a semi-lucid aphasic sort of dream...
"—of a tuna fish."
Marvin emerged from his reverie. She was telling Fred about his almost tattoo.
Fred laughed. "Really?"
Marvin said nothing.
She nodded. "Didn't get it, though, since he didn't know where to put it or how to orient it.
"Orient it?"
"Oh, you know. Arm or leg; Head up or down; facing left or right. See, he thought he wanted it on his stomach aimed right; but then it would look upside down from his vantage point, and if he looked in a mirror it would be facing in yet another direction."
"Why would it matter?"
"Marvin is very particular about his art." She said it kindly.
"But why a tuna fish." He looked at Marvin and Marvin answered him as if he were reading a page out of his own autobiography.
"Because a tuna doesn't know he's a tuna; he doesn't know he's a fish. He doesn't know that the water is safer for him anymore than he knows the air is dangerous for him. When he's caught he doesn't regret his life's choices, and in the end, when he's canned and is no longer the shape of a tuna, he serves a purpose far greater than himself. He is immortal in his progeny and lives on in the cells of the animals to which he is fed."
Marvin nodded to himself.
Fred mulled this over for a second and took a sip of his ginger ale. "Well you could say that about any fish, couldn't you?"
"Say again?"
"All fish are like that."
Marvin thought about it.
Then he punched Fred.
It should be known that Marvin had not participated in a fight in some 20 years, and even then had not thrown his punch in anger. Startled desperation would be the best way to describe it.
Nor could you call what he had delivered a punch, then or now. Years past, it had been a mislaid elbow directed at a precocious girl who only wanted to hug him. Now, sitting as he was, leaning slightly away from his intended victim, he had only been able to half-punch, half-slap his target, his fist not a fist but a pancake, fingers drawn in at the second knuckles.
Marvin didn't have time to ponder whether it had been a successful blow, because he was slumped down, on the ground, holding forearms over his head in another impressive display of startled desperation. Fred, his sandwich still airborne, was standing over Marvin trying to dig through his shoddy defenses, arms flying like pistons. He probably would have succeeded, had Snitch not jumped over the table and separated them.
Marvin sat on the floor.
Fred stood across the room, breathing hard.
Snitch was standing between them, unreadable.
After a few weighted seconds she said,
"Marvin get out."
She said it evenly, not looking at him but the mess the sudden eruption had caused. The sandwich—what was left of it—lay resting against the wall; and she scanned through the air and then at the ceiling, trying to trace the arc of its flight path.
She looked back down. "Marvin."
He shook his head as if he didn't know where he was, or how such a bizarre series of events could have taken place. Curious, he brought up his hand and found a slight scratch on the back of his middle finger. It had had happened all right. At length he stood and sheepishly searched for something. He patted his pants and flicked a few magazines here and there. Not finding it, he coughed a tenebrous weight out of his throat or maybe it was phlegm.
In the end, he walked home, because he didn't have the courage to stay and look for his car keys.
User Reviews
Submitted by experima (user info) at 2008-04-09 23:39:04 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by orphelia (user info) at 2008-04-09 04:59:27 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No, haiku, this isn't sico, are you kidding, it is nothing like his writing. Have you read it? Are you drunk? Go to bed young man!
Submitted by haikumikoo (user info) at 2008-04-09 04:51:02 EDT (#)
Ranking: -2
God damn it, Sicosemen.
Submitted by orphelia (user info) at 2008-04-09 04:22:32 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Well I am looking forward to it.
Submitted by Caulfield (user info) at 2008-04-08 14:52:33 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
Orphelia, you're awesome.
Anyway, only one part left. After Marvin there is Mike. Or Mark. I forget his named because it's written in the first person. I think it's Mark.
Submitted by monkeyswithguns (user info) at 2008-04-08 08:54:40 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by HurtByTheSun (user info) at 2008-04-08 07:21:16 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
They're OK, but the Shielded Land stuff is better.
Submitted by orphelia (user info) at 2008-04-08 07:19:46 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
I know, but I have read them all and they are so good it is just such a shame.
The poster needs to change their name, camwhore and leave controversial/bitchy reviews.
Doing that = attention. So I am told.
Submitted by EmissionImpossible (user info) at 2008-04-08 07:15:23 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by HurtByTheSun (user info) at 2008-04-08 07:12:42 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
Chill out Orphy!
Submitted by orphelia (user info) at 2008-04-08 07:09:09 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
This needs to be read you people!
I am getting so angry
Submitted by orphelia (user info) at 2008-04-08 03:18:02 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
This part is the best, so far. The tuna tattoo thing is awesome.
I don't like Snitch much.
Submitted by rob_berg (user info) at 2008-04-07 23:54:04 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
As promised.