I just saw a spider in the corner of my left eye, but when I turned my head, nothing was there. No spider on my shoulder. No spider on my arm. No spider on my hand. No spider on the carpet. No spider dashing among the infinite mites, dust, fecal matter, and dead skin cells that nobody can see.
No spider on the carpet. Nothing on the carpet besides an old transistor radio, an iced tea, and the stories of Ernest Hemingway. I look at them one at a time. I look at them in that order: radio, tea, Hemingway. I look at them in permutations: tea, Hemingway, radio. I look at them all together. I look at them like three spiders that look like me. I look at them like three spiders crawling on a map of failure.
My Map:
Location 1: The tan carpet. I got it for free from a friend who drove like an asshole. He programmed IT networks, was gay, and made more money than he knew how to spend. He preferred male friends who were broke or on drugs or broke and on drugs. That was me. I remember one time we sat at his computer.
“What are you looking at?” I asked.
“This is a database of the mugshots of every incarcerated guy in the state.”
His brother was messed up on meth after he got out of the army. He had a rough tour in Iraq. It wasn’t long before the two of them were fucking each other. But then the brother started getting violent and my friend changed the locks to his condo and soon sold it. I think it was from that condo that I got the carpet.
He later got fired from his IT job and sued his employer for unlawful termination. He casually settled for 100k over his cell phone while driving 80 mph through the city. I was in the back seat of his Mustang. His half-brother was riding shotgun.
We drifted apart around the time he got tied up in the lawsuit over his next business. He sold dashcams in the early days when dashcams first came out.
“Who in the world buys those?” I asked.
“Republicans. Lots of them,” he said.
This was also around the time his brother ended up in prison.
Location 2: The pocket radio. I got it for two bucks at a junk store run by twins. I first met them when I was still trying to break into the movies. We worked as background extras on a film together, secretly knowing we were never going to make it. The twins had a bit part in a well-known movie years ago when they were kids and still talked about it like it mattered. They told me that when they were young, they ate mayonnaise straight out of the jar with their fingers. That part stuck with me, for some reason. The two of them eating mayonnaise with their fingers. I have a weak stomach.
We all gave up on the Hollywood thing, and they opened up a junk shop with things they purchased from foreclosed storage unit auctions. I bought the pocket radio because they needed the money and I thought I needed a radio. The radio doesn’t work.
Location 3: Iced tea. Don’t worry about it except that it had something to do with my torn meniscus that still shouts at me like a four alarm fire. Also, I ended up with about 50 pounds of tea. I’ve been drinking that tea for the last five years and still have ten big boxes left.
Location 4: The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. A copy I got maybe on the sidewalk, maybe in one of those makeshift libraries around town with free books. “Give a book, take a book.” It’s a 1966 paperback copy with an olive green and yellow striped cover. The cover is loose and will soon fall off like an old scab.
A name is written on the inside of the cover, “KAZAK.” In the table of contents, six stories (including The Snows of Kilimanjaro) are checked off in pencil like a grocery list. I pick it up and try to read a story. I’m too tired. I need glasses. All the words are blurry. I can’t read Hemingway anymore. It requires too much. Too much romance, too much hope. Those days are long gone.
My map leads nowhere.
I sip my iced tea and think about my housemate, Jim. I drove him to work this morning. He works at a hippie anarchist cooperative health food grocery store. He’s 83 years old and spends one hour at the grocery store every Sunday making Xerox copies. He used to be a neurologist but lost his mind and got a job at the hippie anarchist cooperative health food grocery store after McDonald’s wouldn’t hire him.
“You’d be bored here,” the McDonald’s manager told him.
He spends much of the week staring at his computer. There’s a website called “Find a Grave.” He’s always scrolling through it. When he’s not doing that, he’s bugging me.
“Can you help with… Someone is at the… I need help with my __ today, I can’t get it to… I’ve lost my… I need help filling… I need cash for a coffee, do you have any… What are the taxes… I need to mail this letter to __ in Arizona… Did you fix the… Have you found the __ yet… I need a battery for my… I need to contact my old classmate, the one that’s still alive…”
I drive him to work every Sunday and get there before the store opens to the public. He goes inside and I wait in the car, watching the parking lot. It’s all become familiar. There’s a woman in green tights and a tight sweater. She puts on lip gloss at the street edge of the parking lot like a hooker. She doesn’t fit in. This is a hippie anarchist cooperative health food grocery store, not Safeway. Last week, her tights were flesh-colored, and it looked like she was naked from the waist down. That looked normal. That kind of thing happens around here.
There’s the tall, pale, skinny guy with knobby knees sitting on a bench near the front entrance. He always wears shorts and a brimmed hat. There are the two dudes who look like they belong in a diner eating bacon before going fishing. There’s the kid in high-water jeans and Converse, wide awake and jittery, ready to start his shopping. There’s the loud, gray-haired hippie woman in a purple dress. She pulled up in a BMW wagon with Massachusetts plates and talks to everyone like she’s their best friend.
I look across the parking lot and can almost see the replay of an older guy in a Subaru mistaking his accelerator pedal for the brakes. That was about a month ago. He ran down a guy in Nikes who died on the spot. I was nearby. I didn’t see the accident, but I saw the ambulance and fire trucks, the dead body, and people gathered around talking.
“He probably didn’t even have time to realize it…”
“I hope the store has insurance…”
“Does the driver still get to shop?”
I look in my sideview mirror. There’s a homeless guy dancing in the middle of the street like it’s spring break in Miami. I can tell he can really hear the music and that music is loud. He thrusts out his arms, skips and slides. He slaps his chest and shouts, “Huah!”
It hurts my knee to watch him.
There’s a man pushing a shopping cart full of bike tires, scraps of metal, and a mannequin. A minute later there’s a retro homeless guy in torn pants, gray stubble on his face, and busted boots. He has that down-and-out boxcar hobo look and walks up the street like it’s just another day in 1933.
My side-view mirror is covered in spiderwebs. There’s a crack on my front windshield that slithers halfway up the glass. I think about the day I found all that tea so many years ago. My knee hurts.
A security guard emerges from a metal door to the side of the entrance. She’s a short, mean-looking, Latina woman in her 30s with long dark hair. She stomps into the parking lot in her security outfit with her chest thrust forward and watches me for a moment.
Then she turns to the girl in the tights, sweater, and lip gloss and they exchange a look. Just like last week, the security guard lets her in before the general public. My housemate cautioned that the store hired an undercover security guard. People steal from this store like crazy. There are no security cameras and they have a policy of never calling the cops.
I sip my tea.
I sip my tea and remember the dream I had last night. I was in an empty square room. It felt like a hospital room flooded with lights. Steadily, pythons slithered into the room until the floor was covered with them and then they were up to my knees. They spiraled up my legs. I threw them off one at a time. Somehow, I managed to kill one by cutting it along the length of its body. Another one opened its wide snake jaw and hissed, and I knew that I was being punished by a power far greater than all of us.
I thought about the infinite mites, dust, fecal matter, and dead skin cells that nobody can see. I thought about the twins and the girl in the tights. I thought about the guy in the Nikes before the guy in the Subaru ran him down. I thought about the snows of Kilimanjaro. I thought about my old friend and his brother in prison. I could hear a cracking sound like a glacier. It was my windshield cracking in the timeless echo of space. I could hear the static on my broken transistor radio. It sounded awful. It sounded beautiful. I thought about my dream last night. The room filled with snakes, slithering up my legs, into my mouth, and down my throat. I couldn’t breathe. I died.
But that was just a dream. The spiders in my eyes? Well, the spiders… I don’t know. I guess I just can’t really say.