issue103ontheotherside

                                                     ZYGOTE IN MY COFFEE.COM

***BIO*** Christian Rose lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. His stories have appeared recently in The Modern Drunkard, Denver Syntax, DeComp, Main Street Rag and The L Magazine's Literary Upstart Competition. www.myspace.com/christian__rose or look for Christian Rose on Facebook.

Home

Submit

On the Other Side of Kate Bosworth's Right Eye

by Christian Rose

It was in jail, after devastating a local Blockbuster with my head-mounted boom box and some smoke grenades, when I first danced out into infinity through Kate Bosworth’s right eye.

Like most days spent in jail, this one had deteriorated quite badly, so, after a failed attempt to teleport out of my cell, I found myself beside myself, reaching wildly through the bars, the other inmates laughing, kind of slapping the back of my head as I sobbed. I desperately needed something to distract me from the hopelessness of that cell, its utter lack of Wild Turkey.

I couldn’t think of anything, so I started spinning in circles and swinging my arms. I don’t know if you’ve ever been locked up in a Brooklyn holding tank before, but if you have I don’t need to tell you what a truly bold and ill-advised move this was.

In a matter of seconds a pair of big hands pinned me to the floor.

“No Bruiser!” I shouted. “I already gave you my bologna sandwich!”

“My name’s not Bruiser!” he shouted. “I told you to stop calling me that!”

“Alright,” I managed. “I’ll stop. But only if you’ll admit that this frustration you feel, this sense of isolation and hopelessness, is not just a product of our incarceration behind these bars, but, even more-so, it’s a product of our incarceration within the flesh and bone of our own bodies, the walled-off finitude that comes from living a life of isolation among so many, haunted by our inability to broadcast our souls through the air like songs, so that others may hear, and, in listening, truly know who we are.”

Bruiser choked me harder, but I was on a roll.

“Also,” I said. “There’s the threat that we’ll never learn how to levitate or shoot lighting from our hands. And, as if all this weren’t already enough, there’s the creeping fear that female celebrities will refuse to mother our children, and thus, our offspring will be born mortal, without lightning, doomed to live as we have lived: anonymous, earthbound, with wicked hangovers.

“So,” I said. “Are you prepared to admit it?”

“Admit what?” he said. “I forget the question.”

“That you’re a prisoner of much more than this cell,” I said. “If you can admit the true nature of your confinement, I can share a secret with you.”

“What secret?” he asked.

“The Secret to Transcending The Prison of One’s Self.” I said. “The only way out of…this!”

And as I said this I whacked him sternly on the forehead.

Startled, he loosened his grip on my neck.

“Ok,” he said. “I admit it.”

“Good,” I said. “Wild Turkey.”

“Wild Turkey what?” he asked.

“Is the answer,” I said.

“The Secret to Transcending The Prison of One’s Self is Wild Turkey?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Or Natural Ice, St. Ides 40’s, any kind of tequila, Milwaukee’s Best Ice…”

Suddenly Bruiser was smashing my face, the crowd cheering madly.

“You think this is a joke?” he yelled. “It’s not! Not for me! My whole life I’ve been searching, trying to fill this aching hole in my heart! I went to Yale! I traveled the world, climbed mountains, studied all the great religions! And you…you think it’s a joke?”

“Yale?” I said. “I’m sorry Bruiser…”

Then he punched me in the forehead, a cymbal clash with stars and bells.

“Wait!” I squeaked. “You didn’t let me finish. Alcohol is just part of the equation. You also need loud music, preferably progressive house…the TV is your infinity portal, on it you’ll need female celebrities in the vein of Jessicas Biel, Simpson and Alba, and, not to be forgotten, at least one pack each of Marlboro Lights and generic-brand honey roasted peanuts. Consume all these things together, rapidly, and you’ll find yourself transported…”

Then he started choking me in earnest.

“I’m not listening anymore,” he said. “You die now.”

As I lost air I felt the pain of my existence melting away, the poverty, the isolation and hangovers, they held no sway anymore. Death was coming for me in a wave, a warm Hawaiian wave, the kind Kate Bosworth surfed in Blue Crush.

My head lolled back and everything was upside down, the corridor beyond the bars, a bright light growing there. Then I heard a beat, something I recognized instantly as the Fonzerelli Remix of “My Life” by Chanel. Heaven has good music, I was thinking, I’ll like it here.

Then, without warning, Kate Bosworth emerged from the light in Dior and high heels, moving in my direction, executing an increasingly complicated progression of dance moves.

My heart beat like a subwoofer, pumping nuclear energies out into my arms and legs, giving them strength, my body coming violently back into possession of itself, the urge to dance almost irrepressible.

She got close to the bars so I could see her right eye. It was two colors, brown and blue. This seemed symbolic, a commentary on the duality of man, or maybe my ongoing struggle with a split personality disorder.

Apparently Bruiser and the rest couldn’t see Bosworth, because their focus was still solely on murdering me. Suddenly annoyed by them, I sprung to life, bopping my head vigorously in Bruiser’s face, mocking him.

Bruiser, shrieking, lost his grip on my neck. I leapt/levitated to my feet.

“No,” Bruiser said. “You’re dead! I watched you die!”

He tried to swing at me, still disbelieving, but I was too quick. I sent a centralized surge of energies into my hips as I sidestepped, then I swept in with a perfectly executed pelvic thrust that sent Bruiser flying through the air and into the wall like one of those sticky throw toys you find in a cereal box. He stuck there for a moment, wide-eyed, then peeled off and flopped to the floor.

The other inmates froze. I hoisted an eyebrow, taunting them. A tattooed biker broke ranks and took a shot at me, but I ducked and danced him into the corner.

What followed was a full fledged cage-match dance-off, the first I’d had in weeks. Of course they weren’t dancing so much as trying to stab me with foreign objects, but it didn’t matter.

When I had all of them cowering in the corner it occurred to me that there was a problem. The Bos was still on one side of the bars and I was on the other. Although there was a certain tragic quality to this arrangement, I found it unacceptable.

I leapt forward to bend the bars like Superman. They didn’t budge. I stepped back and put my fingers to my temples, but my eye lasers weren’t firing. I tried dancing at the bars, wiggling my hips desperately, but still no result.

Embarrassed and exhausted, I looked to Bosworth for help. She just smiled, turned sideways, and stepped easily between the bars. I made a mental note to force-feed her a cheeseburger later.

The moment she stepped inside the entire cell changed. The fluorescent bulb dripped down and crystallized into a disco ball, the rancid toilet became a well-stocked bar, and the floor lit up wherever we stepped like in the “Billie Jean” video.

The other inmates still couldn’t see what was happening, their disbelieving eyes wouldn’t let them, instead they glowered at me, too scared or weirded-out by now to attack.

I lifted a bottle of Wild Turkey from the bar, gave Bosworth a gentlemanly nod, then knocked the bottle’s neck off on the wall and started chugging. Bosworth didn’t miss a beat. Opting for a Stoli martini, she spun the shaker expertly on one finger while we bopped our heads in unison, our energies mingling, growing. I looked into her right eye.

“Dance into me,” it seemed to say.

“How?” I asked.

“Just believe,” it answered.

I took another hit of Turkey, finishing the bottle, closed my eyes and danced forward. Suddenly there was no gravity, and without ever exchanging a word Kate Bosworth and I knew each other totally, perfectly…in a way Orlando Bloom never could have imagined.

I opened my eyes and I was floating in the outer space of Kate Bosworth’s right eye, pulling off unprecedented 360-degree-upsidedown dance moves, comets soaring past me, adding a cosmic roar to the loud rendition of O-Zone’s “Dragostea Din Tei” that seemed to be coming from Saturn, its outer ring vibrating with each thump of the bass.

I thought of the jail cell, Bruiser and the other inmates wondering how I’d escaped.

I promised myself I’d go back to free them some day, all of them. It didn’t matter that they’d dismissed my Secret to Transcending the Prison of One’s Self, dared to challenge my dance moves, cheered for my death. They were prisoners, as I had been. All I wanted was for them to feel what I felt now, on the other side of Kate Bosworth’s right eye, this beautiful, spinning weightlessness that comes when you put your arms through the bars and reach.

Mar. 2008

103