That hollow, quasisadomasochistic pangness right where you assume the top of your stomach is, a couple of inches below the bottom of your sternum, when a deadline is only minutes away and if you’re lucky your project could be close to being finished in another quarter or two. All you have to show for yourself is this war-ravaged three foot by one foot still-seemingly-permanently-taped-to-the-chipboard-taped-to-your-shitty-drafting-table-by-all-kinds-of-shaped-and-sized-pieces-of-masking-tape piece of tracing paper, with pencil lines, eraser marks, some architect-wannabe handwritten text, some architect-wannabe handwritten dimensions, all information the sum of which aspires to communicate: this is what the building, in this case a house, I’ve designed would look like, in technical-type lines of drafting pencil leads of varying sharpnesses and a heck of a lot of erased ones, if you took a fictional horizontal plane and sliced through the building at around four feet from floor level, then looked down at it directly from above. But negating perspective, of course. The ambiance around you, hectic. Your sole consolation maybe the knowledge that at least ninety percent of your fellow students are in the same bind you’re in. The stench of Edsast disgusting-but-we’ll-kill-for-it vending machine coffee dominates the stale air in the studio, stale maybe as the slices of bread and pizza and sandwiches from last night, from two nights ago, from a week ago gracing many a student’s drafting table as well as your own. The smell of hot glue burning comes a close second, in domination terms. The music blasting from Turco’s Watts Up boom box here beside Jarvis is the song ‘Sidewinder’ by Lard from their just-released Pure Chewing Satisfaction.
“Yo J-Dog,” calls out Spisiak from two drafting tables over.
“Yeah,” answers Jarvis, eyes never leaving his crumply sheet in front of him.
“You still got those dowels you shoplifted from Darn’s this morning? This bitch is screaming for two more columnas.”
Jarvis is thinking to himself, what dowels that I shoplifted from Darn’s? I mean we did get there, hit on that blonde little seventy-year-old female salesman who told us to fuck off, then we couldn’t find the damn plexiglass-cutter, and then we checked the dowels out, but didn’t buy shit, then we just walked out, and... “Uh, which dowels that I shoplifted? What are you talking about?”
“The dowels you shoplifted, dude.”
“Uh…” he’s now beginning to recall that he just might have, while lost in thought, dragged his feet behind Spisiak past the cash registers and out of the store still holding on to a couple of the dowels they’d been checking for camber. He looks around. Latisha, the afroed, chubby, Zaera-Polo freak across from him slightly juts her chin in the dowels’ direction without saying a word, her own eyes never leaving the freshly-glued perpendicular union between the two pieces of chipboard she’s scrunching against one another. Looks like the shoplifted dowels are placidly resting against the side of his desk. “What the hell?” says Jarvis, to no one. “Uh, here you go dude.” He hands the shoplifted dowels over to Spisiak; arm extended in Spisiak’s direction with the dowels clutched frimly in it, Jarvis’ eyes are already back on his crumpled sheet. “Shiet...”
“Thanks, brother!”
He tries to focus. Freaking Bimwell will walk in any moment now, and that will mean Time Zero is upon him. Fuck. The liters of Edsast he’s drunk since around 8pm last night are doing nothing to counter his complete brain fog of the past three hours. Like, it’s freaking… noon? The bright fluorescent tube lights in here are blinding him. “Fuck it. Fuck it. Fuck it…”
“Okay everyone!!” a shout from the doorway. Bimwell is here. And sure enough, the world is no longer Edsast coffee, the hot glue, the stale sandwiches, his stale clothes. The world is now Brut Fabergé. “Crit time! You know the drill.”
Time zero, deal with it. As his fellow students finish carrying their sketches, drawing sheets and models out to the crit space, Jarvis untapes the yellow translucent graphite-laden segment of tracing paper roll from his desk and regards his floor plan for the last time before the crit. The shape of the house in plan is in the form of a shallow arch. The main entrance is on the concave side at the bottom of the sheet. Once inside, circulation runs along that curved bottom wall. The opposite wall, forming the top of the “arch”, is concave from the inside, and along it is placed the program of the house – bedroom, den, living, dining, kitchen, et al. Jarvis regards the yellow sheet before him for the last time. He finally scrunches up his chin and raises his eyebrows, in resignation perhaps; then finally grabs it along with a handful of push pins and exits to the improvised crit space in the wide hallway just outside the studio, hoping for the best.
***
Later, at a keg party, six gathered about the keg, all sipping god-knows-what beer from their classic white tiny plastic cups and refilling frequently. Jarvis, the man manning the keg, yelling, over the deafening rap music, “So I’m standing in front of the crits: Palau, Kurz, and of course Bimwell, our whole studio and also Azzam’s is present -- they had finished earlier -- my single sheet of crumpled tracing paper beside me up on the board, a push pin at each corner. And so I haven’t even finished saying my name when Pete Palau who, you know, is clad head to toe in Armani, says, ‘Ok, I can see it’s a house. A single-family house. From what I can tell from your, ah, blatant last-minute attempt at a presentation. Uh… that begs the question… or actually, I…’ then he looks over at Kurz and Bimwell beside him, laughs his evil asshole laugh, then goes on, ‘I answered my own question!’ And I swear he says, ‘That’s how smart I am!’”
Someone interrupts: “If Peter Palau wasn’t, like, Antonio Banderas, only hotter, I’d totally hate his ass.” It’s Rina, the too-chubby-for-hot, but otherwise scrumptiously-featured Ukranian freshman, her thick eastern-European female voice’s bass trumping out the WTC’s proud own, though her indifferent demeanor really reveals no effort to do so. “What an asshole,” she slowly rumbles. Rina’s a Steven Holl freak.
“Mr. P.P., I call him,” says Jarvis. “That’s dick in Spanish for anyone interested. Anyway, the S.O.B. goes on, ‘The answer to my own question is right in front of me. You do a house because you grow up in one, you trained for eighteen years, free… no research, no real actual effort, no investigation, nothing, so it makes sense!’ He’s agitated like hell, he’s glancing over at Bimwell and Kurz and centers dead-on back at me, goes on, ‘A slacker like yourself,’ his face contorted in disgust as he looks at me from head to toe, ‘you expect this!’ now he shoots a glance at Bimwell, goes on, ‘he goes with the easiest option. You could have chosen any building type for this assignment. You go, of course, with…’ throws both arms at my drawing, ‘Residential! Bah!!’
Then it’s Kurz is on my case. He’s like, ‘And then just BAM, arch it up like that in a feeble attempt at meaning, Mr. Orr? Correct me if I’m wrong. Why the shape? I mean, what justifies that shape? It could perfectly well have been a rectangle, right???’
Then Mr. Dick again: ‘Right, but then it doesn’t have the proverbial “IDEA” behind it!’
And Bimwell’s like, ‘Well, Jarvis and I talked about how this curve he introduced actually shortened this circulation, simultaneously augmenting the served zones’ square footage and their linear feet of potential views…’ you know, benign words emanating from that invisible mass of Brut Fabergé all you ladies know so well.
But Palau, the fucker, all like, ‘Psshh! Don’t talk to me about function. You got some stairs there, leading where???’
And I’m like, ‘The first floor, and…’
‘And where is the first floor? You’re only showing me one floor plan!!’ Palau shrieked.
‘Yeah, let’s go back to theory. Honestly, Mr. Orr, what, really, was your reasoning behind that gesture? Enlighten us? If you will?’ Kurz.
And I’m like, ‘Well, sir, ah… you see, we at the studio ordered up some pizza, an extra-large one at that, and I put the box on my desk and opened it up and this one’s greasy as a motherfucker – we paid extra for that – but then, see, after it’s all said and done and I remove the box to get to quote back to work the box, it seems, left this… arc-shaped, two-feet-long radioactive-orange stain on my going-on-three-days blank sheet of tracing paper.’
‘A pizza stain!?’ P.P. boomed, his big black eyes jutting out of their sockets. ‘WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?!?!’
The space is now completely quiet, except for maybe the residual thunder of Palau’s roar. Palau’s and all other eyes on me. And I say, after skipping no less than four beats: ‘That’s, uh… my parti.’”
Jarvis snaps his fingers. “Like this, the whole place went into hysterics.” He snaps his fingers again. “Just like… in a split second EVERY SINGLE PERSON PRESENT was hysterically laughing like they had never before in their lives laughed, so hard; I’m looking arounf, Jesus H. Christ, the riotous laughing uproar is everywhere; every single person present, the whole crowd, even Palau -- who’s now for some reason up and hysterically high-fiving the two other crits – and Bimwell, whom I’ve never ever seen doubling up quite like that, and I mean and Kurz literally had to be helped off the floor and back on to his seat and he’s still laughing; grad chicks who’d never even given me the light of day now with their eyes fixed on mine and holding total eye contact with me as they laughed, upperclassmen I don’t even know the names of all laughing too and looking at me in a sort of incomprehensible, kind of, admiration is the best way I can describe it, shaking their heads, good naturedly, as if grateful that I’ve made their day, and the hall is still roaring as I continue, and conclude, saying: “And, uh… the rest, as they say, is… history.’”
The crowd about the keg is lightly amused. Says Spisiak, who was there, “I was there.” Spisiak is a Rem freak. “Motherfucking funny as fuck, for real, man, for some reason. You know and then as the laughter begins to subside they start grilling at him again for his shitty presentation. Palau’s like, ‘At least O’Idu-Mas back there shows you a fucking piece of shit but he at least took forever proposing a moderately interesting theory, explaining his lack of an adequate presentation,’ and Teak Bimwell’s all like smiling nervously, saying, ‘Hey, Peter, Peter, come on, don’t call it that,’ and Palau’s like, ‘Call it what?’ and Bimwell’s like, ‘A piece of shit,’ and Palau’s like, ‘But even if it’s not a piece of shit, it is a piece of shit, since that tracing paper roll is just one long shit he cut a small piece from, isn’t it?’ and Bimwell’s like, ‘Then you mean a piece of sheet, Peter,’ and Peter’s like, ‘Yes! That’s what I’m saying! Exactly! A piece of shit! A fucking piece of shit!’ and Bimwell’s again like, ‘Sheet, Peter, come on, sheet…’ So that went on for a while.”
Genevieve Palmer, the bespectacled, shabby, very young-looking Eric Owen Moss freak with the braces, is chuckling. “Fucking dunces.” Jarvis keeps filling and emptying his cup as he also diligently keeps filling the entire party’s, which the entire party then diligently, in gratitude, also keeps emptying. A beautiful, existential virtuous circle, to be sure. The Palm would be passably hot, Jarvis mused, were she to ditch those baggy sweats for real clothes and maybe put on some makeup and maybe some contacts, for Christ’s freaking sake, and some mousse on that saggy, lifeless clump of hair or something, for the love of almighty God.
“I had a run-in with him the other day,” starts Mingan, the behemothic Cree transfer with the ponytail from Saskatchewan Polytechnic. “So I’m doing the graveyard shift at the C-store, in he comes with three – three, ok? Ultra-certified dime pieces. I’m talking ul-traaaaaaaahh…, and I’m talking three-thirty a.m. or something. No one else is around. So long story short one of the ‘phos – I see her do this – stuffs a big bag of fucking Bugles in her purse, okay? Family size, the bitch. So. Now. I let them pay. Four hot dogs, three packs of Kools, two large Poland Springs and a box of blueberry Tic-Tacs. Yo, out of the corner of my eye, okay, I’m even seeing a corner of the damn bag of chips sticking out this bitch’s purse, like, stuck on the zipper? So he pays for everything else with his credit card, I let them get to the door, and as soon as one of the trolls starts pushing the door open, I’m like, ‘Ah, excuse me, sir? You got to pay for those chips, too.’ He turns around and shoots me this glance, all squinting and frowning like it was all of a sudden high noon, and we’re facing off in the middle of the goddamn desert, and he’s looking as if he’s truly gonna fucking kill me, and is like, ‘What chips?’ I’m like, ‘The chips your ladyfriend’s got in her purse, sir.’ He’s just glaring back at me, confused, mouth partly open, his three bitches around him. I’m like, ‘I mean, uh, mind telling me where’s the sign that says ‘FOURTH HOT DOG TAKES A FREE BAG OF FAMILY-SIZE BUGLES’?’ He’s like, ‘What the fuck?’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, you don’t know where that sign is? Do you know why you don’t know where that sign is?’ And he says, ‘Save it, you stupid fucking Tarantino wannabe Navajo fucking nitwit,’ as he tosses four twenties on the floor. Draws them out from his wallet and tosses them on the floor in front of the counter one by one, as he slowly walks forward, and never taking his eyes off mine. Puts the wallet back in his pocket. And he says, ‘There. Go get a fucking haircut.’ And they’re off. And I swear those fucking bitches were laughing.” Though not that skilled a craftsman, one would assess, Mingan’s into Calatrava. Whom he tries to emulate, with mixed results. And that’s putting it kindly.
“What kind of credit card did he have?” The Palm.
Mingan: “Platinum Amex.”
“He’s definitely not someone I’d be too keen to… start a conversation with at a dinner party,” Markus, the fast-talking, Meier-admiring, also bespectacled, long-sleeve-cotton-shirt-tucked-in ultra-proper hick from Virginia.
Rina basses out, “I’d start whatever with him. I’d totally bang his ass. I’d totally tell him to come on on my face. Hot bastard.”
Says Travis, “Yo Mingan, mind covering me for, ah… till the soirée’s over?”
“I got your back, bro.”
“Thanks, my man.” He and the Cree slap hands. Then to Spisiak, “Up for a Red, dude?”
“Always, my brutha,” Spisiak’s eyes light up.
And as Inspectah Deck keeps dropping priceless knowledge on them all, the heavy bass beat rattling the walls, the two squeeze their way across the mingling living room crowd to the ‘Smoker’s Lounge’ -- to the crisp, thirty-degree-Fahrenheit night air in the college-district four-bedroom American foursquare’s side-to-side front porch, where there’s also a mingling crowd -- this one within the mingling cloud of dense, grey wafts of dozens of frozen, tobacco smoke-laden exhalations and conversations.
***
This is way beyond four corners, escape this mental prison before we're all goners, now embrace the world!
The WTC’s ‘The City’ is still blaring throughout the house. Slouched on a heavily-can-scented couch that’s almost fully collapsed now, Jarvis slowly opens his eyes, halfway at most. He scans the room through apparently profusely-smudged corneas. God, is that Turco making out with that bag lady? What’s going on? He starts to get up, no dice. Damn, I must have passed out. But the night is still young.
The outcome do or die son, it's bound to come, mentally aware I see truth within the square
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
He literally pries his eyelids open using his thumb and forefinger. A group of black guys all wearing the same type of cushiony XXL-sized coats and droopy jeans and caps and oversize Nikes and Adidas raucously pass by en route to the door. He sits up. And the couch now regally completes its collapse. On the floor now; he’s slow to get up. He starts staggering around the house, looking for Spisiak. He walks into the kitchen, where across from him, maybe eight feet away, stands this tall, slender woman with her back to him, lightly swaying her body along to the heavy rap beat as she pages through a large-format book she’s got open on the counter by the microwave. The book’s titled RE:WORKING EISENMAN. He notices that she’s smoking a cigarette. He says, “Hey, no smoking in here,” and, unstartled, she slowly turns around, laying her eyes on him, and then, slightly smirking, says, ‘Oh, really?’ and then, of course, she brings the half-smoked cigarette to her lips and without breaking eye contact, takes in a long, deep drag. But when she exhales the smoke back out, Jarvis notices that she, while still fully maintaining unblinking eye contact, very slightly turns her head to her right, her chin up, and still half smirking blows the smoke up and to her right, instead of, you know, for example, in his face. And Jarvis, struggling to keep his balance, drawls out the following:
“Wanna fuck?”
She then leans back against the counter and loosely rests her palms on the edge, long fingers curled around it. She’s wearing high heel knee-high brown leather boots, a brown corduroy miniskirt, grey cotton leggings, and a black blouse beneath a brown sheep suede leather jacket. Her hair’s a muted blonde, naturally straight, untreated, to shoulder level, like a little girl’s, bangs and all. Her face is devoid of makeup except for the black mascara and eyeliner she’s wearing. She’s got a long, kind, yet slightly mischievous face, and a great pair of grey eyes. Jarvis notices what looks like a small, half inch scar on her forehead and another, ovalish one on her left cheek. At least almost as old as she is, prolly, those scars, thought Jarvis, and also, sluggishly, this chick’s got to be nearing thirty. So that… would make those scars… around my age, or…
“You a freshman?” asks the woman, never breaking eye contact.
“Er… no ma’am. Sophomore,” responds Jarvis, dimly offended.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty…” -- he burps -- “…five?”
She pulls in another drag. “Taking your time, huh?”
“I guess…”
She exhales an inverted isosceles of a plume triangle up and to her right as she examines him closely, her smirk intact but now also slightly squinting. She stops squinting now and takes a deep breath as she shifts her weight to her right leg. She says, “Did you know that according to Eisenman, with what he calls ‘the end of the end’, what was formerly the process of composition or transformation ceases to be a casual strategy, a process of addition or subtraction from an origin, and, instead, the process becomes one of modification?”
“…”
“That is, the actual invention of a non-dialectical, non-directional, non-goal-oriented process, since remember that modification is one aspect of extension which is actually defined by Kipnis as a component of decomposition – and - while extension is any movement from an origin, modification is a specific form of extension, concerned with preserving the evidence of initial conditions... on the other hand, synthesis is of course an example of extension which does not attempt to maintain evidence of initial conditions, but instead attempts to create an entirely new whole.”
It takes about five beats for Jarvis to babble out, “I guess… I had never quite looked at it… ah, quite that way be…” – he burps again, louder this time -- “…fore,” he finishes.
She glances back toward her purse – which Jarvis only now notices is there – and she, lightly smiling, produces from it an ashtray which is actually just a small black matte box. She opens it, extinguishes her cigarette in it, closes it, glances back toward her purse as she puts the box away in it, looks back at him again, sealed-lip smiling, arms crossed under her breasts, and she just keeps looking at him, arms crossed, weight still on her right leg, sealed-lip smiling.
The outcome do or die son, it's bound to come, mentally aware I see truth within the square
Jarvis is still struggling just to maintain his balance there.
She stands up straight now, leaning away from the counter, turns around, and closes the book. She grabs her purse and walks past him, and through the soirée-ravaged body-sprawn living room, to the front door. Only now has he noticed that she’s actually taller than him. Dude… this chick’s like… taller than me...
This is way beyond four corners, escape this mental prison before we're all goners, now embrace the world!
He follows her. She’s already out the door. The loud rap now abruptly stops. At the curb besides the mounds of snow by the sidewalk is a nondescript, beat-up, off-white hatchback that she incredibly enough, considering her length, deftly gets into. Jarvis opens up the door, which makes a loud creak as he does, and gets in beside her. His knees all up on the dashboard. Her left foot on the clutch and her right one on the break, she turns the ignition, left hand on the wheel. She leaned forward as she did this. Ratting and rumbling now blast from the cheap engine as static is hissing through the surely cheap speakers. She tells him, gesturing at the radio, with her head, “Go ahead, find something cool.” Jarvis starts turning the dial as she puts down the hand break, places the car in first gear and slowly releases the clutch as she aptly compensates for that with her right foot on the accelerator. And they’re off. The next few minutes are a blur to Jarvis. He looks up then to notice that she’s smoking again, and the song ‘Rapture’ by Blondie from their 1980 LP, Autoamerican, is playing very low over a tortuous field of static and of sibilance, twittering, clicking and hissing, not to mention the resigned humming of the car on fourth. He regards as a child once again the streetlights dancing on the windshield and dashboard and gleaming up and back along her legs and face... Jesus… she’s really good looking, homes… wait. Am I beergoggling?? But Jarvis was not beergoggling.
“So,” the woman says. “What do you think about the man from Mars?”
Jarvis turns to look at her. He says, “The man from Mars?”
She looks back at him, right corner of her mouth slightly upturned, seemingly amused.
They ride down a Venturiworld cityscape of the quintessential suburban commercial main street except that this time around it was eerily deserted. As a matter of fact, Jarvis now notices, no other cars are on the street. Neither coming nor going nor turning nor parking, nor parked nor stalled nor waiting -- for their turn to advance or whatever -- at the light or the drive-thru or the left turn. No red taillights nor white headlights light the landscape, of any kind. ‘Faces’, also from Autoamerican, is now playing very softly… through the speakers’ hissing, and the speakers’ cracking.
Jarvis dozes off.
***
He wakes up to see he’s face up on a bed in a room in what looks like a family home somewhere, in a teenage girl’s bedroom, actually. Rock and pop and grunge and goth posters line the walls, as do dolls and figurines and stuffed animals. The room is warmly lit by maybe a dozen assorted candles. By the dresser at arm’s length from the bed, there are, incidentally, pictures of a teenage girl. This teenage girl in the pictures doesn’t look at all like the woman he’s with. A magenta-lighted portable stereo is playing a cassette tape. He passes out again.
The music that’s playing is Bob Marley and the Wailer’s ‘Get Up Stand Up’ from their 1973 LP Burnin’. And completely naked, laying chest down in the space between his legs on the queen-size bed, facing him, is the woman from the party, the woman from the kitchen, looking back at him, her face above his exposed crotch, singing along to the song, smiling.
Get up, stand up…
She's clutching his limp dick firmly in her fist like a microphone, and singing into it, along with Bob, mostly anyway, saying: "Get up, stand up… stand up for your right… to fuck-some-brains-out! Get up, stand up… stand up for your right… to jizz-some-face-out!” Her obvious post-line lyrics additions she sings in Run-D.M.C., old school rap mode. Now she’s on her knees, crawling up to Jarvis’ unconscious face; now she’s got her crotch over his face and now she’s roughly rubbing her bushy blonde wet pussy all over Jarvis’ hilariously clueless, go-along-with-anything dormant face, his features being pushed and pulled up and down and right and left at her vulva’s will and now she’s leaning down and pressing her own face against his and – few renegade wandering leftover pubes notwithstanding -- starts furiously licking, sucking, kissing it -- his face, his neck; she rubs her oily face against his passed-out one, giving now his neck and chest more of the same licking and sucking treatment, and now she’s back down to his crotch where she services then his slumbering balls the same exact treatment… furiously licking, sucking, kissing, nipping; well, pretty soon, passed out Jarvis is now the unknowing owner of some pretty reliable wood. Surprising, really, that that much blood can autonomically be ordered into the corpora in such a state. As, you know, the one Jarvis is in. Her own vulva and vagina by now literally dripping wet, she now climbs on top of him and puts his dick inside her, and fucks him, hard, till she’s gushing out a shaking, single-moan orgasm, in just under a couple of minutes. Then now, with Jarvis’ unfazed stomach and dick and balls and -- matter of fact -- entire crotch area thoroughly doused, she now turns around and with her back to him reaches back and grabs his wet dick and slides it inside her also-slick-with-cunt-juice ass, and proceeds to fuck it again, hard once again, till she’s again single-moaning a shaking, gushing orgasm all over oblivious Jarvis. She raises her hips way up high then which causes Jarvis’ still-fully-erect wet cock to slide out from inside her ass and loudly splat down back on his stomach. She then falls by his side, face up, eyes closed.
Get up, stand up
Stand up for your right
Get up, stand up
Don't give up the fight
***
Jarvis opens his eyes. It’s daytime. He’s sitting on the shotgun seat of a parked car by the side of a solitary two-lane rural road, inside a dense forest. A dense coniferous forest. Really? Through his window he can see that on the right side the trees are slightly sparse. Sparse enough for him to see that there’s what looks like a vast clearing just behind those first few lines of trees. The car’s running, but the heater’1s off, and though he’s got his jeans on, his snow boots and his heavy coat, he’s still freezing. His window’s rolled down slightly, with an inch or so gap at the top. He looks through the glass. Snow is everywhere around, but it’s sunny. He notices the smell of freshly-brewed coffee. Not Edsast, definitely. But rich, true, pure coffee. He turns and sees the thermos bottle with the lid off that’s placed on the car’s cup holder, steaming out the aroma of the coffee his way. What the fuck was going on, where the fuck was he, and what the fuck was he doing here? Then he remembers that old chick from last night. Did they just drive all night? Was he in fucking Canada or something? Then he hears the faraway giggling and laughter that’s seemingly coming from the forest clearing, the snow field. It’s clearly the sound of a grown woman laughing. But this woman, whoever she is, is laughing like a little girl. Is it the bitch from that party last night? He opens the door and manages to exit the car. The laughter is still there. Stumbling slightly, he starts towards the pine-flanked field. It turns out that the clearing’s about the size of two football fields placed side by side. He keeps walking, up a slight steep now, following the laughter, until he makes out what appears to be a person lying down on the snowy field, on their back. This person’s wearing a violet and grey beanie, black scarf, black thighs, brown snow boots, padded silverish mittens and a padded, heavy, pink winter sports coat. It’s the woman from last night all right. She’s lying face up on the snow, slowly batting her extended arms and legs in unison, as if doing jumping jacks on the ground at half-speed, looking up at the sky, laughing; now looking at him, and laughing harder, with an ecstatic smile on her face, and now looking back up at the sky, still laughing.
“Hey, ah… what… happened? Where are we? What are we doing here?” he asks her.
“Hey, Mr. Sleepyface!” she responds, gleefully.
“Hey, no joke, what’s going on, where are we? What time is it?” insists Jarvis.
“Just chillin’” she responds, her laughing subduing now, smile reduced by half. He can clearly see the thin yellow lines on her now pink skin that ran from the outside of her nostrils down to around the corners of her mouth from where said corners had forayed deep into her cheeks with her laughing. “Like my snow angel? What do you think? It looks cool?” Now she laughs briefly: literally, a ‘haha’, then looks back at him.
“Dude… what the fuck happened last night?” he asks, tone edging on pissed-off.
“I take it to heart you don’t remember,” the woman, coyly, turning back her head again toward the clear sky.
“Dude, seriously. Please. Where did we go last night? What happened?” he presses.
“I fucked the living shit out of you, that’s what happened. Boy. Heck. I were a feller, I’d remember that shit, man. You may not know. Your fat fucking dick know,” she laughs again, still staring at the sky above. “Ask it.”
Jarvis instinctively grabs his crotch, a look of relief faintly appearing on his face; slowly lets go of it, slowly puts his hand back in his jeans pocket again.
She looks at him. “Wanna lie here by me? Wanna make snow angels with me?”
“Ah…” he starts.
“Please??” she pleads, making a sad face. Like a little girl.
Jarvis sighs. “Look, I do that, lie there by you, do your stupid snow angel, you take me back to campus?”
“Sure,” she responds.
Jarvis, shaking his head, just looks back at her.
“Cross my heart and hope to die!” she responds.
“Jesus christ,” he says, and gets on his back roughly two armspans away from her and starts waving his outstretched arms and legs on the snow, creating four troughs through the snow, a pair of these third-circles, each centered at the joint where each of his humeri meets each of his scapulas; the other pair sixth-circles, each centered at the joint where each of his femurs meet his pelvic girdle. He stops and turns to look at her. “You happy now? Can we fucking go now?”
“No, no. You keep riding those hands and those feet along those shallow arcs,” she says, then giggles.
Jarvis slowly sits up and turns to her. “What did you say?”
“I said keep riding those hands and those feet along those shallow arcs,” she repeats, giggling.
Jarvis sits still for about five seconds, just staring at her. Then he snaps out of it. He says to her, “Yo, fuck this,” and starts to get up. “That coffee back there, is it roofie-free, by any chance?”
She stops her snow angel-making for a second, chortles, then resumes, laughing harder.
“Crazy bee,” he says, and starts walking towards the car, and the woman’s laughter progressively subsides as he nears it. He opens the car door and fetches the thermos, which is no longer steaming, and takes a sip. Good brew. He sips in some more. Perfect. He sighs. Maybe he could now start calling this a day. Not in the idiomatic sense that the day is, like, over. But, literally, this caffeine did really officially mean the start of his waking day. And this is no Edsast shit, either, indeed. This shit’s… good. Really good. A large, metallic blue pickup approaches, then eventually passes by, heading in the direction opposite to the one the woman’s car is pointing. The pickup is loaded with a big, shiny machine. He follows the distancing pickup’s load with his gaze. As he sips, he concentrates on the receding sound of the distancing pickup. Almost inaudible now, it eventually disappears behind the forest about the faraway curve. A hunter, perhaps? Out for deer? Squirrels? Crazy bitches? Where the fuck was he? What the hell happened last night? Who was this bitch? This pretty hot bitch, he might add. And did she really like fuck the living… he turns and starts back toward her, the way he came, thermos in hand. He follows his own footsteps back to the snow-angel-fest. And he walks all the way back until the footsteps stop. And but there’s no fest of any kind where the footsteps stop. There’s no girl, by the way, either. He looks around, confused. He calls out, “Hey!” No response. He calls out again, “Hey!” Nothing. A pang of fear hits him square in the solar plexus then. It washes over him as his legs start to feel like they were made of rubber. He gulps in some air, holds it, slowly exhales out as he starts hitting his thighs with the sides of his fist, then his arms, then his chest. He looks at the snow on the ground again as he takes a deep breath; there is, actually, no trace of any activity whatsoever. The ground’s just snowed on, evenly, maybe two feet of undisturbed snow on the ground; the feeling, the strange combination of scared, dumbfounded, disoriented, abandoned. He looks around again for any trace of anything. And for the first time now notices the existence of a large wooden shed that appears to be near the edge of the forest, on the far side. How he hadn’t noticed it before, he does not understand. Okay, she’s probably in there, she’s playing with me. Acting on impulse, he starts toward it, and plows across the field. After traversing it for about a minute he reaches it; comes up to the shed’s door, which is already slightly ajar, and he guardedly pushes it open some, just wide enough that he can squeeze by. The architecture is obviously a farming shed, and it’s stacked with hay, farming tools, equipment. Hanging on the back he sees an old, dirty, portrait-sized mirror, and makes his way toward it. He gets to it and stands in front of it, and he looks at his reflection in the mirror. He breathes in sharply. There are skin lesions -- dark bruises, to be precise -- all over his face, especially neck. He unzips his coat and lifts his t-shirt up and there are all of these same kind of bruises all across his torso, especially concentrated across his chest, even more especially concentrated on and around his nipples. What the… are these fucking hickeys!? Fucking crazy bitch?? Jarvis pulls his shirt back down and zips up his coat. He walks back toward the entrance and leaves the shed, and plows across the snow back to the road, where -- surprise -- no car is to be found, no tracks are to be seen. He walks for what seems like dozens of miles along the side of the road, refusing to accept either of the couple of rides he was offered by passing drivers, until he gets to what looks like the edge of a small town. Here he enters a nostalgia shop of sorts, and asks the old man inside to borrow the phone. After also asking the name of the town they’re in, he calls up his friend Spisiak, then heads outside and sits by a bench by the store’s entrance, to wait for him to pick him up. This is not the kind of favor he’d usually ask of Spisiak. After sitting there for maybe a half an hour, he again sees the metallic blue pickup with the big machine on it, but this time heading the opposite way, into town. He never saw that woman again or heard about her ever again. No one he ever spoke to after that even knew who she was, or who she might have been.