The city, the historic city: its wrought-iron face, its cobblestone heart. Daniel is thirteen when he leaves it.

Daniel is taken in by his Aunt Effie and Uncle Ray Pietrzak. With their adopted son Chok, Aunt Effie and Uncle Ray live in Michigan. They live in a stale quad-level house in the shadow of a burgeoning resort-style community in the City-of-Tomorrow-Never-Comes. The city is also called the Hexurb, the Surlyburb, the Plant-Living, the Community-of-Us-Here-Now, the Simul-Athens-of- Historillusion, the Sixteen-Lane-Intersection, the Tran-Sylvan-Ity, the Mallmerica, the Déjà-View, the Moated-Values, the Ex-Isle, the Pine-Valley-of-Tall-Test-Scores, the Much-Disparaged, the Easily-Targeted, the Unstopped-Thing, the Land-in-Demand, and the New-New-Knoll.

Chok has dried-wheat hair, unharvested. He wears a hodgepodge of clothes: greenescent zip-shirt, plaidtooth cardigan vest, white pants with pheasants flying thighways and northcrotch. He sets himself apart from the rural bumpkins and exurban yuppies. Among the books packed in a trunk in Chok's bedroom are:

Greene's Neglected Societies
Wiccan Pottery
How to Tie A Better Knot
Studies in Metallurgical Ballistics
The Hoburn Village Nuisance
The Improved Genome
The Recalcitrant Witness

The spines are of vetical blue, orinate burgundy, gelbane taupe, with gilt lettering. They smell of swamp and coriander.

Chok has always planned to leave but sees Daniel as the perfect excuse. Chok is packing up his personal items and stowing them in duffel bags and cardboard wine boxes.

Daniel stands in his doorway. "You're not my brother. Not even my cousin."

"You're right. I'm not." Chok leaps away and hangs from chin-up bar on the ceiling. "I got here like you did. Sort of. Pawned off."

Kneeling, Daniel pretends to idly examine the books in Chok's opened trunk. He selects one and then suddenly frisbees A Diary of Solids at Chok's head. He dashes to his bedroom, locks the door.

Chok's fingers root up from the cracks in Daniel's floorboards.

Daniel's knees ache from crouching on the dresser. The window is warm at his back. He curls his toes over the edge of the dresser. The past is a hot sore on the skin of his mind. The Fire consumed his parents and torched the totems of his childhood and licked the gables and brickwork of the old neighborhood. From the street, Daniel watched The Fire as if it were a cartoon, a gaudy unreal event happening on the other side of a screen, against the backdrop of night. The Fire burned in Daniel's mind as if it were a snippet of movie reel, a lashing of film emulsion, a shimmering coil of rage under glass. Barefoot, ash-faced, held at the shoulders by a neighbor, Daniel was afraid of what grief would do to him and so refused to believe The Fire was real. Staggering under a wet firehouse blanket, Daniel was guided through the smoke toward the ambulance. Hugging his knees, adrift in the thin green foam of the suburban sea, Daniel sleeps to the sound of Chok's tremuliltavo voice in the walls.

Aunt Effie prepares dinners in casserole pots, saucepans, Dutch ovens, Pryflex trays, and recycleable microwaveable plastic bins. Her dining table is kitschy-crafty-cottage-country, as is the kitchen. Because it is the back yard that opens onto a six-lane boulevard, Uncle Ray grills nightly on the front porch, screened in against the deer flies, green flies, black flies, horse flies, wolf flies, bat flies, silver flies, caribou flies, and rat flies that sortie out of the coniferous swamplands, which are federally protected.

Among the identifiable meals steaming on the table are Chicken-Berry-Cheddar, Pretzel-Jelly-Puff, and Mayo-Kidney-Okra.

Uncle Ray eats and drinks in the smoky asylum of the front porch. Aunt Effie prefers the islands and peninsulas of her kitchen and, like a martyr, refuses to emigrate.

After dinner, Aunt Effie and Uncle Ray Pietrzak watch cable television in separate rooms.

The mossy couch patterned like a Scottish kilt lunks deflated in the basement. Chok spreads open Carmilla, a goth-smut zine, on a glass table whose dangerous edges are chinked like flint arrowheads.

"Look at her ass," he says. "She's gonna take it pretty good. She's a good girl, eh?"

Carmilla is aiming her strap-on dildo at Laura's tan-lined buttocks. There is American leather and high Victorian collars, Parisian stilletto heels and German restraining devices.

"I'd like to give it to her." Chok turns the page and slides the magazine toward Daniel. "Who's your girl?" he asks. "This one here. Is she ready for it? Or this one. She's definitely ready for it."

Chok grabs at Daniel's crotch. "I like to relax after dinner." He leans back, coasters his black-socked heels on the glass table, and pulls out his penis.

With control beyond his years and volume beyond his size, Chok ejaculates into an Urn, a Garden-Glove, a Tumbler, an Ice-Tray, an Aquarium, a Yarn-Nest, a Crockpot, an Erlenmeyer-Flask, a Ludwig-Snare-Drum, a Baby-Bootie, a Macintosh-IIC, a Marshall-Amplifier, a Snorkel, a First-Edition-Thalaba, a Dustpan, a Bed-Pan, a Mannikin-Wrist, a Gym-Bag, an Album-Sleeve, a Microphone, a Manila-Folder, a Syringe, a Conch, a VCR, a Brownie-8, a Die-Sack, a Foam-Mat, a Fondue-Bowl, a Toolbox, a Dollhouse, and a Wallet.

"You have a lot to learn," says Chok.

"I'm not like you."

"You don't know you are."

"Are you going to clean up?"

"You don't know what you can be."

"I'm not tired," Daniel says.

"Go to sleep."

In the morning, it is Saturday.

"Watch this." Chok has somehow got in Daniel's room. Chok levitates. Or, no, Chok has installed one of those chin-up bars on Daniel's ceiling, and he has hooked himself up to it. Like a dressed duck, Chok dangles in the straps of a bright orange safety harness. "You have a lot to learn."

"What?"

"You have a lot to learn."

"I have to get out of here."

Chok unbuckles and drops, straddles Daniel, and, with obsidian nail, flicks the cartilage of his ear.

"I have a lot to learn," Daniel mumbles.

They squat on the roof of the house.

Harnessed, Chok faces the boulevard and spits seventy feet, leading the cars like a football quarterback.

Daniel faces the woods and pretends to discern shadows among the tents of tentworms. The grains of the shingles impress into his palms. He prays the pepper away.

"Everyone has a learning curve," Chok says.

" 'Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance,' " quotes Daniel. "Will Durant."

" 'Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper,' " Chok answers. "Robert Frost."

Below them, snarl-swishes emanate from within the screened-in front porch. They regard its flat roof, supporting an abstract of mucked leaves, a collage of rot. Beneath that roof, unseen, the gas grill submits its dentata to the wire brush. Heat softens the blackened bits of pork ribs, quail, brisket, bratwurst, walleye, veal, tubesteak. In the morning, Uncle Ray scrubbles, spritzes, wolpes and sheenes the facets, planes, nooks, and farings of his belovedly complex and joy-giving stainless-steel gas grill.

"Watch this," says Chok, unzipping his pants, again.

In disgust, Daniel shoves Chok, and Chok slides backwards down the roof. Before Chok falls onto the screened-in porch, a harness strap catches on the gutter, holding him. He is engulfed in the uproiling charbillows of meatsmoke and ash.

Daniel sleds down and takes aim with his heels. Chok's smile stretches between Daniel's feet.

Then Chok disappears. The harness straps are coiled as sad as an empty nest in the gutter. Daniel is sledding toward the flat roof of the porch.

Chok has grown fleshy flaps under his arms and beats them like wings. He kites into the clouds.

As Daniel bucks over the gutter and arcs toward the porch roof, he elects to grow wings himself. Cartilaginous webbing opens like umbrellas out of his armpits. He banks into a severe turn. He inhales and coughs and grows teary-eyed in the smoke. He beats the air. Daniel ascends.

He engages Chok in battle.

They battle in woods, swamps, meads, creeks, boroughs, fields, pits, tanks, hollows, hills, shipyards, graveyards, peepshows, prisons, armories, alleys, lakefronts, restaurants, racetracks, playgrounds, fairgrounds, beaches, churches, turnpikes, sewers, railroads, bridges, tunnels, galleries, factories, condos, casinos, state parks, trailer parks, office parks, airports, freeways, fairways, drive-thrus, malls, dumps, funhouses, courthouses, and historic downtowns.

Daniel is exhausted.

Chok carries Daniel to the house, over the threshold, and into the bedroom.

Daniel sleeps for three days while Chok packs up the last of his stuff into produce crates, appliance boxes, complimentary tote bags. Chok also packs up Daniel's stuff and transfers all of it (including Daniel, still somnolent) into their new place in the new city, a real city, a living city of no myth, only promise and possibility and the paradox of invigorated self-regard achieved in the rattling vertiginous cage of a million hungry mortal animals, away from the mild windless beach of the suburbs, the thin green foam that laves only existential ache on the bone. The precise location of their city apartment is yet unknown to Daniel. Also unknown to Daniel: his new status as Chok's lover and roommate.

On the fourth night, Chok drills his dirty finger into Daniel's ear and then unplugs it.

Daniel pretends not to notice.

Chok pokes his fingertip, cerated with cerumen, under Daniel's nose. "Can you hear me?" cries Chok. "We're on the thirty-sixth floor. Can you believe it? Listen. The city is a busted siren. It's a gaping iron lung. It needs you."

"I don't love you," says Daniel.

"You don't know you do."

"Where are we?"

"At the beginning." Chok lifts Daniel's arm out and back, up and down, flapping it through its range of motion. "An ergograph," Chok says, "measures the work capacity of a group of muscles. Ergo is from the Greek: work." He drops Daniel's limp arm and sighs. "I am a gynandromorph," announces Chok, unzipping his pants. "Look. I got both sets." He cups his balls, parts his labia. He zips back up. "You can be unique. If you work hard at it, Daniel, you will be unique."

Daniel, crying, struggles to his feet, fisting the silk of Chok's magnolia shirt, the phosphorescent pattern shimmering in his eyes. Daniel plows into Chok until the windowsill chops their legs out from under them. They tip into air, falling, unfurled, wind-ripped and earthbound.

Laughing, Chok opens his wings into the broad black flames of an embrace.

They are two boys, soaring, shouting, a frenzy of limbs grappling skyward.

The young city barks at their heels.

 

©2002 David Barringer - Contributor's Bio