FICTION: “Dispatch from the Chaos,” by Jesse Darnay

Illustration by Maura Walsh / Black Nail Studio.

FICTION
Dispatch from the Chaos
By Jesse Darnay

I’d passed out on a frail settee, legs dangling over an arm, the leopard print button-down I’d bought at Brown Elephant torn along a flank. On the top unit of a weathered three-flat. Piles of videocassettes lined the walls. Potted ivies decayed on a windowsill. A stuffed, one-eyed macaw sat perched in a birdcage on a bulging U-Haul box. The stench of fungal tomatoes wafted from a ripped Hefty bag dumped by the front door.

“You need to go,” the woman said.

“Easy,” I told her. “Where am I?”

She broke apart cookie dough on her kitchenette counter. “Logan. Get out.”

This pre-dawn birdie I remembered had been a suave master of gargantuan sexuality. Complete lack of hesitation to caress Evan Junior, in public, at her whim, but at the same time not touching it gratuitously, only at those pitch-perfect moments when our eyes locked and the liquor lightening was flashing. Talking the way that erotic goddess still strutting through the jazzy ghettos of my memory would move her petite, jeans-bound ass in slow-motion samba and at the same time keep her head still as an Ancient Greek bust.

The morning woman waxing Martha Stewart had nothing to do with the one from the night before (even though in some remote backland of my mind where neurons were still firing away at their normal rate, I knew the two images I had, the one by day, the one by witching hour, belonged to that same person). No, this daylight woman sported an oversized, wrinkled sweatsuit advertising for some high school football team called the Crusaders. Eczema pocked her neck.

Burgundy lipstick smudged her chin. Her barrette couldn’t contain spikes still stiffened by hairspray.

I stood, hugging myself. “Did I have a coat?”

“I don’t care. Leave.” She turned a knob on her oven.

“Why are you so angry?”

She grabbed a pack of American Spirits on top of a rusty coffeemaker, crushing it when she felt it was empty, throwing it into the “living” room. Her missile landed on a folding table covered with a vinyl cloth, between depleted trails of blow and a Target gift card.

I coughed phlegm. Caught a flashing memory of ruling the woman from behind, condomless, in the pallid post-party darkness that had surrounded this room two hours ago, three maybe: the scorch and spill, the way she’d shrilled like a chimp manic for male seed.

“We had sex?” I said.

“That’s it. I’m calling the cops.”

This woman is insane.

I nicked a crocheted shawl I saw bunched on the floor, fallen from a half-open closet, and took off. Heard her deadbolt the door behind me as I swaddled myself like a chilly babushka on the landing.

Bulbs flickered as I pounded down the stairwell. Frantic, white flashes. Saw a capsized BMX bike in front of someone’s door and thought about jacking it.

Why did I keep waking in these dens of the fallen? Why did power-fucking troubled strangers at 3 a.m. seem beatific?

My discomfort compounded when I stepped onto a residential street god knows where, the sunlight setting fire to my eyes, biting gusts tearing my skin. Not a single industriously striding weekday person in sight. The parked Jeeps and Fords disregarded me. Stark patches of snow reminded me I’d now have to contend with the natural world.

I shuffled down this small street and that one gripping the shawl. Had to stop every minute or two to let my blustering thoughts subside. Apocalyptic thoughts. Not Jim-Morrisonorgasmic-poetic “this is the end” visions. Exquisite fears that my breath would cease and I’d be whisked away to another plane of existence: Elysium or Hades or re-birth. Whatever you believe.

Finally! Milwaukee Avenue.

The neighborhood appeared like an organized collection of dregs from all the other parts of the city that had long since been gentrified. As if a contractor had taken a giant snowplow and dumped off the city’s architectural shit for a pack of poor émigrés to put into order under the command of an alderman on the take. Someone had traced “Burn corporate scum!” in dust on the window of a second-hand furniture shop. An izakaya’s Kirin sign gave a sudden flicker, then blinked out. Congealed puke spattered the sidewalk outside Flash Taco. Cobblestones burst with veinal street trees that would never bloom.

This was the sub-dirt neighborhood I’d known so well in the shadows, amid the Black Death. Known by the crowds of smoking, laughing bambis--when my neurotransmitterscrambled consciousness made the entire city seem like an outdoor nightclub in Dubai.

I shivered, tightening the shawl. The frayed wool gave a whiff of must. Started hiking north toward the Blue Line and glimpsed an ATM through the window of SWIG, beneath a fluorescent poster of Medusa. Stopped, touching my pockets. “Fuck!” I said, prompting a homeless twenty-something sitting against a streetlamp with her German Shepherd to strum an acoustic guitar in response and sing, “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

I’d left my wallet back at Hannibal Lecter’s place, which, even if I could remember how to get back, I wouldn’t go anywhere near if it meant ending malaria in Africa. Why had I left my iPhone in my towel basket the night before? To smell the maples on my way to O’Mahony’s, I’d thought, juiced with Nespresso, fresh from a shower. Let grass tickle my hand. Follow messages on street signs—Stop, One Way, Detour. Calculate my coordinates by Polaris. God!

This was 2010, not the Oregon Trail! Apple Maps gave me an omniscient vision of America. The stone buildings, whisking cars, whizzing wind, and relentless daylight signaled another planet without my 3GS. I couldn’t protect myself from what I didn’t understand.

The homeless woman stopped playing. “Can I have your shawl?”

“No!”

Her Shepherd lifted his head and growled.

I turned around, heading for Division Street.

Maybe a midday Mass. Walgreens. Somewhere I can get warm.

I needed to teleport myself back to Lakeview! My neighborhood. Back among pastywhite couples with their frenetic Shih Tzus and the bustling Whole Foods and Weisman Playground. Where women swaggered out of Fitness Formula Club in Georgetown sweaters slurping acai smoothies at 6:30 p.m. and obsidian Mercedes SUVs took too long to move again when the stoplights turned green.

Proximity to the privileged made me part of them.

I needed to think about this little Lucifer the alcohol had incanted again. Deranged motherfucker who cared so little about me when he or she or it was done--when the high had faded to nothing--that he or she or it would just leave me here, in a place like this, at whatever the hour: befuddled, befouled with couch grime, distended with irrational fears and rational regret, neglected of all my ambitious enterprises for the day (I didn’t have enterprises, but if I did), frozen, overwhelmed by a childlike terror about how to take care of myself, unfriended, disenfranchised.

I passed a park sculpture--a settler in a stovepipe hat gripping a broom--and recalled Dad slouched in his armchair after work, whispering verses from the Book of Proverbs to himself.

“You need to guard against yourself, son,” he’d told me once.

We were sitting with Sbarro slices at a table in the Woodfield Mall food court. Mom and Olivia had stayed at Marshall Field arguing over a midi- or knee-length dress for her Confirmation. He’d seen me eyeing a trio of Hoffman Estates sophomores clad in Brando jackets and ripped fishnets by the A&W. I’d laughed, Dr. Pepper dribbling out of my nose.

Not so funny now, is it? I imagined his ghost saying as I glimpsed a 7-Eleven across Damen Avenue, as though his voice had been ventriloquized through the pursed mouth of that statue commemorating working-class values behind me.

My shawl caught on a branch, tearing almost in half. Goddamn you!

Let it go.

I stood at the 7-Eleven doorway now, under a matrix of lights white as boiling glue, trying to hold my severed dress shirt together, seeking someone to tap for three dollars. Just to get on the “L.”

Truckers waited in line with Red Bulls and chocolate donuts, scowling. An old man scanned items behind the checkout counter, producing that beep-beep transmission of futile morning commerce. A hipster chick swaddled in a camo jacket, with an oversized beanie, gawked at a bag of Flamin’ Hot Ruffles in the chip aisle.

“Breakfast?” I said, creeping beside her.

She grinned at me. “Look like you had a hell of a night, guy. Why didn’t you invite me?”

“I left you a voicemail.”

She laughed.

“Listen, this is embarrassing,” I said. “I don’t have my wallet. I lost it last night, and--”

“You need scratch.”

Her eyes glinted. Her high cheekbones and full face conjured the image of a Viking queen. Pins dotted her jacket sleeve: “You Just Gotta Poke Around”, “MTV.”

“I feel like a jackass,” I said.

“Don’t. We gotta help each other out, man. What is the world coming to?” She plucked the Ruffles bag, holding it like an infant on her arm. “Wait here. I’ll get cash back.”

Stunned, unable to form a “thank you,” I watched her shuffle to the register, clamping my billowing shirt so as not to strip-tease incoming children. I contemplated nutrition facts on a Ho Ho package, trying not to look like the local meth-head employees take a moment to pity—I hope he gets help—before they boot him out again.

Molly was a distant recollection now. She’d met a coworker with goals for whiskey sodas at F. O’Mahony’s the night before. Not me. Not this. Molly was my Beatrice, far from me as Andromeda the underworld. Grime clung to my skin. O how fallen! She wouldn’t even recognize me if we passed each other in the SAC building at DePaul.

I longed to pick my nose--dried to a booger quarry from all the coke. Thoughts zigzagged. I recalled being fifteen, racing Marcus Gutman across Wise Road to Omega Restaurant, desperate to prove I was the most enviable athlete. I’d get two grand from my tax return this year--buy those sick Bose headphones. Be elite with the best tech.

“I’m Rayne.” She’d returned, offering me a five she’d rolled into a spliff shape and wedged between her fingers.

“Can’t thank you enough, friend,” I said, snatching it.

I’d made it to the front when she asked me to hold up.

Why?

I had nothing and therefore was nothing. She, this giver of my only resource, was now not only my impromptu benefactor but my master. She, hipster money lady, had the power to seize back all my worth or draw attention to my true desperate worthlessness.

I turned around.

“I have a hoodie in my car,” she said. “You’ll freeze.”

We stepped out onto the sidewalk. Somewhere beyond the whine of a garbage truck backing up, indignant traffic honks, and nineties hip hop booming from third-floor windows, a sparrow gave a single chirp.

“Want it?” she said.

“You recognize I’m a stranger, right?”

“Introduce yourself.”

“Evan.”

“Strangers no more.” She laughed.

She was like a surreal and valorous little Virgil out in the pallid, wet frigidness as I walked behind her, south, watching her suede boots move swift and straight from underneath that camo jacket, her capped head as it bobbed like a docked boat. As though I could hear her exalted god-whisper cutting through the mist: “You are but a mortal, Evan. Stick to your scientific understanding of the world. These Wicker Park gluttons are doomed to be what they are for all eternity.”

We approached a maroon, dust-pocked Prius parked askew.

“Meet Cherry Carcia,” she said.

“That’s clever.”

She ambled to the driver’s side door and lobbed her chips onto a landfill of Styrofoam coffee cups, Lonely Planets, unopened mail, burned CDs with Sharpied labels announcing mix moods, flower-patched bellbottoms, screwdrivers, toilet paper, playing cards, matchbooks, and bongs across the back seats. Dug through the ruins and unearthed a hoodie with a Route 66 logo that read, “America’s Highway,” tossing it to me.

“Keep it,” she said. “This tripping girl gifted it to me at a Phil & Friends show in North Carolina. She kept saying it would rain, but it was as clear as a Clorox commercial.”

I put it on, recalling warmth, remembering Grandma Marianne’s condo in Delray Beach, Florida. Her wooly couch. Tomato bisque. “Munchkin” this and “angel face” that. Her humming—The Sound of Music. Insert the next Proustian sense memory: __________________.

“Want a ride?” she said. “Where do you live?”

“You sure?”

“People used to spend their entire lives on the road in the sixties, man, following the Dead.” She waved me toward the passenger door, fiddling with the ignition as I ducked in. The engine whinnied. Grumbled to life. “Sugar Magnolia” came on, mid-song. “They’d share VWs,” she continued, “Thai Sticks, grilled cheeses. Children were born into this family connected by the music. They had the right idea.”

“Didn’t most of them become stockbrokers in the eighties?” I clicked on a seatbelt spangled with My Little Pony stickers.

We cruised toward North Avenue, past a mural touting the MacBook Air’s thinness. A Blue Line bulleted south above us, shaking the graffitied columns of an overpass. People in puffy coats stalked across intersections, heads down and hoods up like Sith apprentices. Some paced at a bus stop cursing the CTA’s dysfunctionality. Thrill chasers in balaclavas zipped along the street curbs on vintage Schwinns. A store manager splashed water from a pail bucket onto that vomit outside Flash Taco.

“You a musician or something?” I said when she didn’t answer.

“Played the trumpet in fourth grade. Ditched it for theater, though.” She cut right, fishtailing.

“Easy, Knievel,” I said. “It’s winter.”

“Think the groundhog will see his shadow today?”

“What?”

“I don’t know where I’m going.”

My temples throbbed. The city blurred into dissecting lines.

“Grace and Broadway,” I said. “Know where that is?”

“Could you direct me?” She picked a roach out of the ashtray, contemplating the smokability, cooing along to “Touch of Grey.” The car veered. I gripped the wheel, guiding us back into our lane.

“Watch it!” I told her.

“Stay on North Avenue, boss?” She flicked her nub into the back.

Her breasts filled a knit pullover. Her moonstone necklace dangled over its black fabric. I imagined her naked, riding me--the way her sweat smelled.

“Here,” I said, “LaSalle. Turn.”

We swooped like songbirds in migration. She pressed the brake. I pitched forward.

Red light.

A statue in the park catty-corner to us, an explorer in a doublet with one laced boot propped on a stone, assessed our threat to Western progress.

She turned up the stereo; I turned it back down.

“That’s cool,” she said, drumming a bongo riff on the wheel. “How ’bout crow calls?

Caw-caw! Caw-caw! You try.”

“No.”

“Don’t be a pill. C’mon, like there’s trouble at the roost. Caw!”

I glanced at the Subaru beside us. A child with a bowl cut in the back stared at me and

smooshed his face against the window. “Caw,” I whispered.

“What?”

“Caw!”

“Freeing, isn’t it?”

I pointed us onto Lake Shore; we merged.

Morning sun touched the lake like a butter ball on a pancake drowned in syrup. Floes

drifted à la end-of-the-Ice-Age. A water crib dotted the horizon, alien and beckoning. Joggers in

puffer vests slogged along the lakefront trail blowing tufts of steam.

“What brought you to 7-Eleven at this godless hour?” I said

“Crashing with a friend in Wicker.”

“Damn--sorry to put you out.”

“All good. Gotta hit my apartment. Change. Satan will be gone by now.”

I chortled.

She wheeled around a Hyundai. Sped up.

“Slow down,” I said.

“Thought she was so much better than me,” she muttered.

“It’s a speed trap.”

“Trust no one,” she said, grinning, teeth white as Vail. “Where am I going?”

“Irving Park--there. You can just drop me on the corner.”

“Don’t be a doof.” She cut across lanes and wound the exit, halting at a stop sign.

“Having serious roommate drama, my guy,” she said. Her hat slipped back revealing more chestnut hair. “Kept telling Margot to back off. We all have our shit--I get it. Life’s a beast. Don’t take that out on me, man. I’m just trying to live. Bitch wouldn’t listen, so I decked her. She called the cops. Cops. Believe that? Now I’m facing assault. Anyways… Left? Right?”

“Here’s fine.” I wrestled off her hoodie.

“No--wait till we get home, cub,” she said, touching my shoulder, laughing. “Kidding. Here? Wait, you gotta listen to my friend Gabbie’s EP. Shakira meets Velvet Underground meets New Order, but, like, at a picnic in Tennessee. She’ll blow up. Trust me.” She rustled through crushed Mountain Dew cans and CDs on her floor mat.

“Watch out!”

We smashed into a Lexus.

Shit you not.

My body jolted. Car made a tectonic rattle. Thought the doors and roof would just rip off, sucked away into the sky’s whirling void. That cataclysmic echo of cracked metal. The drifty and hushed travel motion beyond the windows paralyzed in such a cruel and unnatural and unwelcome way.

I tugged my door handle. “Open it.”

“That never happens,” she said.

The pearl sedan in front of us with its bumper knocked halfway off clicked on hazards. A retiree in the driver’s seat whose head just crested the steering wheel dialed on his cell phone.

“Holy fuck my life, man,” Rayne said. “We gotta flee.”

“What?”

She flipped a U.

Condos blended with elm trees. Tires squealed. A Wintergreen Tic Tac box flew off the dashboard and hit my stomach like a blow dart. I pressed the glove compartment for balance. Turned to see my hood shrinking in the rear window as she gunned it--back onto Lake Shore. South again.

“My boy Bear in Logan has a garage,” she said, weaving through traffic. “We can hide.”

“Let me out!”

“Chill. I can’t get busted.”

Thought about smacking her. Just had to reach over and press that child lock.

My words sank. Exhaustion. Shock.

LaSalle again. The mariner statue.

Treetops tremored on Lincoln Park’s hillocks. A nine-to-fiver waited for his Pug to piss on a holly. Squirrels chased each other over toppled garbage cans.

She tried to sail across Clark Street on the yellow, but a station wagon ahead stopped, hedging us. “Come on, bro!” Her horn brayed.

I lurched across the car and jabbed the safety lock. Shouldered open my door. Tried to cannonball out, but the seatbelt checked me. “Goddamn you!” Unclicked, I dove. I rolled like a Jesse White Tumbler over sidewalk and grass, into a bramble.

Just lay there, looking up at the brightening sky, laughing.

“What’s next?” I shouted.

Jesse Darnay works as a reading interventionist and English tutor in Chicago. His poems have appeared in the Decadent Review, Neologism Poetry Journal, and Neon Garden. He's currently working on his first novel. You can find more of his writing on his website.

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