story in the werks

“What a warped whale,” he said and something in him spat. He was drunk because of his unconscious. It had been meandering and slurring his notions. He had just missed the last train home, probably because of this. In fact he had not been drinking and was in general prevented from doing so by what he termed “the depression”. I can also tell you he liked to speak, and to hear himself think, with a Slavic accent. He liked to say ‘vodka’ with a soft ‘wu’ and a hard ‘d’. Wud-ka. And he was afraid of being homeless. You may not know – it is a common fear. What is less common is the way he coped, the way he treated security, and dealt repeated blows to it.
He came from a happy family. Is it true they are all the same? I don't know, I have encountered too few. But why was he afraid if his family was happy? Indeed his father had died young. You can see right away how Tolstoy's remark loses some weight just on this account. Can death ruin the happiness of a family? Absolutely not. Death is too much like life. Things are often so close to what we thought were their opposites. Things that seem to have an axis: love and hate, beauty and ugliness, truth and falsehood... To invert their orientation is simple, like turning an hour glass, because both come from the same sand. For awhile it will just run down until its collects at the bottom and starts to look the same as before. Happiness in a family however, probably comes from health. It has too many axes to be flipped. And this is what Tolstoy meant. He meant that health is a remarkably particular thing. It is also hoofed.
Remember that Pan had shrines of healing and could grant health. This is because he and health were such bedfellows. Neurotically questing for coincidence of opposites together, the two sided coin both liked to flip and rub between their fingers feeling its slenderness. On this account both were trouble makers, unruly hosts, worse guests, disreputable and celebrated, no matter the circumstance. Think of such nuts, lousing and slacking unchecked, hard, smarmy, autocratic! Always prepared to be slid into or out of. Renders me beside myself. Maroons me there, objection between us like a sea. A knuckle sandwich, a wish sandwich, a trinity of spaced purple teeth, rotting a grin through the first lines of War and Peace. A prevailing plaque routing, a sea-slimed knot slipping, a perverted snot spitting, in the belly of a whale. I admit it! I am in this belly, I am spitting in this whale man's belly. A whale who is afraid to go home!
Thinks he's too heavy, too much body. Needs made of blubber, empathy all stretched and blurred on account of his unconscious 3D glass, its snipped puzzle pieces, kaleidoscopes of wire and fishing line roaming the sea floor spearing lobsters. The whipped butter all whooping and crackling. Like bits of hair on his neck, gaps in his baleen and two rows of teeth. Many things need to be watered, most human artifacts. But this is what water will do to a body.
Drunk on sea-water. How then does he cope by leaning on the bubbles? If the empathy looks crimped in one way he will bend it to the other extreme. The steam of a whaling boat gets to God, the blubber cooks, and the kettle is soon upside down in the street of scrimshaw and ambergris. Think of empathy fatigued like metal. A drone whizzing around a tired pot. Gutters chanting the message, you’ve come too soon because we're sleepy! Scalded arms on the hips, crossed, then waving, like animations on a card. But his domain will be as absent as he.
Have I died then today in his belly, no. It was the threshold, the throat. The Unknown swallowed its heir and in that way bore him. His throat became rigid the minute I passed through. And the belly is next, that night-soul, that persistent womb. My time is far off, but he is dying. Because every creature must cease to exist before it can move on.
His unconscious, like a sun with volcanic moons spewing stories in the heavy gravity, is dying. It is a death full of faces, stretched again, and faulty accusations, wired to burst in terrible waves of contrast, shadows like blue-black alien blood, light like disorienting goat's milk, full of new reproach or revelry. He realized he had missed the train on purpose. The light. Like everything that bubbled up from it, it was a heavy dose meant to counteract the last. Faces sprung open like mouse traps and sputtered into the air without a meaning to stopper them, balloons, blotched with wrinkled irrigation ditches that had fed satellites. There was moisture, sweat, evaporating. This was drunkenness, a lilting, ephemeral snake. Withering while its footprint heaved.

He paused outside the subway station to remember how he had laughed the time he had missed the train before. When his step-sister had leant him $50 for a cab rather than put him up. How he had lost this on the way back to a bar. The police escort from the convenience store where he realized this to his door. He turned to walk toward the square. He could play another game of chess before the café closed. Nick was there, a man with a red, scabbed nose whose father was Hungarian and had been a diplomat. He fished a vinyl board and pieces in a zippered bag out of a graying white duffle and they played until one o’clock.