The Box  

1 

A hush swept over the lilac-covered meadow. Tiny insects spun in the confusion of summer haze. A motorcycle careened around a distant curve in the highway, and elsewhere, where minds and habits seldom allow themselves to roam, a young, muscle-taut torso spun idly, impaled on a bloody iron pole, slabs of gorgeous meat beginning to soften and stink. 

"Yes," she yawned half-heartedly. "This is the place. Pull over."  Her rickshaw driver--an old, panting, crooked widow with enormous blackened palms--willfully obeyed, slowing from her tired trot, listing onto the uneven gravel on the shoulder of the interstate. She released the splintered poles and felt the cramps in her bony fingers intensify. She wiped sweat from her eyes with the grey collar of her cotton shirt and breathed in labored wheezes.

Prissy daintily helped herself out of the rickshaw seat and bounced on her heels. She looked at what lay between herself and the horizon, first in one direction, then another, turning her head then to look in yet another, and so on until she had surveryed the entire scene, pivoting in a circle. 

"It's absolutely perfect. This is the spot that my forefathers dreamed of and whittled unusual figurines in wistful honor of. This is the place," and at this point she giggled a bit, "where seed will be spilled into the elements…The spilling of the seed, the spilling of the seed…The speeding of the sill." 

She reached for something from beneath the folds of the blanket she'd been sitting on in the rickshaw seat. She dramatically whipped her arms out in front of her and over her head, causing the object to shoot blinding reflections from the sun onto her and the old woman's countenances. Finally she held it still: a brightly-blazing, oddly contorted-looking blade of polished steel, its edges dulled by ages and the elements. It almost looked like an abstract sculpture, vaguely flame-like in its rising, tapering shape. Yet it was a weapon. 

"Ja-zorlich!" she suddenly screamed, and the rickshaw slave-woman fell to her knees, hiding her pathetically burned and wrinkled face in her enormous, snake-skin palms, wailing in terror. 

Prissy joined the old woman's scream, but for her it was a scream of exaltation, of victory, of conquest. She suddenly bent her body into a bizarre, frozen and painful pose, and a moment later hurled the steel artifact into the sky. The arc of its ascent and descent was remarkable. It was a formidable projectile.

"Now, then," she said after a moment of respectful, and almost embarrassed, silence. "Let's take a look at that picnic lunch the ambassador packed us." 

2 

Dr. Nicholaus Brady was picking his teeth thoughtfully, dabbing the grease from his just-finished pork chop with a corner of his linen hanky.  "I remember Mama's pork chops," he silently mused. "I remember how she'd scorch them on one side, and how fatty they were, bitter and soggy from being overcooked and then left sitting in a pool of grease. I remember how often I wanted to scramble from my chair and play beneath the table like a cat." 

"Doctor." 

The voice startled him, interrupting his sentimental daydreams. His face paled and he coughed, and quickly the color returned to his puffy cheeks. He looked up. 

Standing in a stiff, discreet posture, with hands demurely held behind his back, was the maitre d'. "Pardon me, please. But a message has arrived for you."

The famed optometrist nodded vigorously in receptive approval, and the dignified figure of the maitre d' bowed, turned sharply to the side, and signaled with snapping fingers to a monkey fur-covered, fiery-eyed, frothing-at-the-mouth, meter-tall, rubbery-legged urchin. 

"My god!" Brady exclaimed when the creature scampered towards his table with a belligerent gait. "Who in the hell has sent you?" 

The beast bared corn-yellow, razor-sharp teeth in an evil sneer, and in a heartbeat had pounced upon the doctor's table, sending food remnants and dirty dishes crashing all about, digging into the overweight diner's bosom with mole-like claws, burrowing, blood spurting everywhere, the restaurant in a panic, busgirls and customers fleeing and shrieking hysterically in every direction. Dr. Nicholas Brady soon sat propped feebly in a corner of his dining booth, his blood and several vital organs exposed outrageously to the fine, elegant surroundings. The mysterious beast slipped away unnoticed in the madness of the moment.

The good doctor's final act of creation was a silent, but soundly felt, belch. 

3

Wilma Freed's plumpness lay inert on the bare wood floor. It hadn't yet begun to stink, but a few lucky flies were already crawling in and out of her nostrils, ears, and barely-opened eyelids. In the upstairs bedroom canned laughter from a syndicated situation comedy blared from the Zenith tv. The cat slept under the bed, delighted whiskers feverishly a-twitch. 

Three small boys with flashlights mumbled excitedly behind the red brick house. "I'm sure we can do it. The septic tank should be big enough around right about over here, Jay." 

"Shit!" 

"What."

A squeak, barely audible, was the involuntary response.

"Nothin'." 

"Nobody's going to see us. Nobody's going to hear us. We're just too goddamned smart." They chanted their credo in unison, almost singing it in coarse, adolescent whispers.

"OK, start digging."

They didn’t' realize that their caper was going to make them famous, nor did they imagine that it would lead them to their destinies as pop culture figures. They would be given a peculiar nickname. They would be immortalized in warped, exaggerated heavy metal lyrics. They would be chastised in an afterthought at the end of a national press conference held jointly by the Vice President of the United States of America and a newly appointed Admiral of the Navy. 

Twenty minutes later, the first of them smashed through the bottom of Wilma Freed's Asian-style toilet, flush with the floor for squatting. Young Tony, the smallest of the imaginative hoodlums, tossed his small, heavy-headed sledge hammer up through the shattered basin from below. It thunked dully onto a small area rug beside the bathtub. An instant later, up popped his head. He ressembled a bizarre species of prehistoric bird bursting from its egg. His face was covered with septic slime. He twisted his naked upper torso into a workable angle, hunching his skinny shoulders high, tight against his neck, while his mates pushed up against the soles of his feet, until he wriggled his way up out of the toilet up to his waist, enough to free his arms and push himself up the rest of the way against the floor.

He automatically reached for the hammer, turned, and swung it with might swings, enlarging the hole that he had just twisted through so his cohorts could more easily enter the same way. One by one they appeared. It was a whimsical sight, to be sure, as one by one the three boys emerged from the toilet bowl.

They had become quite adept at this routine. Seven houses in the past fortnight they had entered and exited in this manner, showering in their victims' bathrooms before they left. They had taken with them a virtual fortune in stolen artificial hearing devices.

This night was to be just like the others.

Or so they thought.

"Young fools!" howled Police Sgt. Edwin Mopps. "We've GOT the bastards!" He had been watching the entire procedure from the back of a van hidden in a nearby alley. It was a Sting! A setup!

Mopps looked from side to side at his team, all of them grinning in self-satisfaction at the video monitor. "OK, ladies," he chortled. "Let's move."

The boys were laughing together in the shower when their world caved in. Badges flashed. Gun muzzles waved. The cold steel of handcuffs clicked into place around their startled wrists. Handfuls of hearing aids were carefully slipped into transparent plastic bags, labeled, dated, and sealed as evidence. Thus, too, was the fate of the infamous hammer and trusty flashlights sealed.

Headlines screamed the next morning after the Mayberry Police Department spokesperson, a tall blonde woman with peach-flavored lip gloss, held a press conference. She answered a few questions, then showed publicly for the first time the seven minutes of video footage that would be played again countless times in every living room of America, and via satellite, the world, for months to come.

The urban village of Mayberry had had enough. Six victims of an unthinkable crime, all following the same pattern, had been terrorized in this usually sleepy burg. The police had pored over the crime reports. A special Task Force was assembled. Federal authorities were notified. Finally, a strategy was developed, implemented, and WHAM, it was over.

The pattern was striking. In each case, the victim had died of natural causes within half a day of the break-in. Each had a long history of complicated hearing problems, requiring regular refitting of specially designed equipment for the unusually hearing impaired. Each was a lonely, sentimental soul, with a tendency to save a mementos rather than discard their various, previously prescribed and now useless earlier versions of their hearing aids. Perhaps most significant of all, the victims all shared a fondness for Asian-style squat toilets, to the point of having them specially imported and installed in their own ground-floor bathrooms, even at the expense of tightly-regulated, custom-fitted septic tanks that would both conform to local health standards and as authentically as possible duplicate the "septic contexts" (as so touted in promotional literature) of the original, Asian toilet systems.

These boys, regardless of Sgt. Mopps' enthusiastic war cry, were no young fools. They had known what they were doing. They had been able to research the engineering of squat toilets, to determine the strengths and weaknesses that would help them plot their clever, albeit dastardly, schemes. And somehow, they were able to compile and rapidly update a profile of the most susceptible victims--recently dead, lonely hearts, hearing impaired, Asian toilet owners--find them and prey on them in their most vulnerable moments as undiscovered corpses.

Many questions were raised in the public uproar. Who had put these sheepish looking lads up to it? The young felons claimed, through their court-appointed representatives, that there was no Big Boss, that they themselves were the masterminds. Many doubted it was possible. How could these boys, underachievers in school, be so keen on artificial hearing technology, and be aware of the virtual fortune to be made through its resale on an obscure black market of artificial intelligence? Who was their fence? What syndicate had exploited them, twisted their youthful minds?

Mopps knew all the answers. Mopps said nary a word.

4

                 Daisy wheel, Ah, torturous butterfly!

                 With whole-hearted papal admonishments

                 Do you persist in teasing, toying,

                 Coyfully enjoying

                 This dance of ill-fated fortunes.

                 Daisy wheel, Ah, fortuitous dragonfly!

                 In musk-coated, urine-stained battlements

                 The innocents stray pleasing, buoying,

                 Joyfully destroying

                 Your lurching and twisted beatitudes.

--anon. stone inscription, ca. 914 B.E. (Ceylon), trans. W. Blake of London University (Correspondence Studies), 1997  

5

Herd Spivey was working at his autobiography. He didn't notice the box when it appeared. A number of times he looked at it blankly, preoccupied with his mental goings on; he even pulled it closer to his desk so he could set his coffee cup on it as he worked at the computer.  But its presence never really registered with him on a conscious, wondering level. He didn't at any point stop what he was doing and think to himself, "What's this box?" It was simply there, as the stains on his ceiling were there. Had the stains been there when he moved in, or had they appeared sometime since? He didn't know or care or remotely consider it, even in passing. So, too, with the box.

He was constantly working late into the night. Fortunately, his research grant freed him from the burden of worldly responsibilities. A modest gift from a philanthropic foundation supported him well enough, never mind that he had abandoned his thesis months ago as fruitless and irrelevant. Days he would sleep and sporadically feed himself. Nights he would rink absurd amounts of instant coffee and slavishly work at his own project until dawn.

His work was silent, and often pensive between arduous bursts of productivity. He would type furiously for hours without pause, then stop abruptly, glancing ahead at empty space to collect his thoughts and to ponder: "Am I truly here, sitting?" Soon he would bow his head once again to supervise his finger's tapping the computer keys. Often they seemed to work independently of his brain, mysterious mechanisms more closely akin to the keyboard than his mind.

At times he would find himself light-headed with fatigue, barely conscious of his thoughts and movements. Yet, with the aid of caffeine and adrenaline, he persisted. He knew that his project was futile, impossible even. But at the same time, he also knew that it was the only undertaking that he had engaged in with which he felt truly at home and himself. Since conceptualizing his autobiography, the sheer folly of it and his complete lack of purpose in any other arena of life spurned him on. He was attempting the ridiculous, yet he felt an oddly strong commitment, unlike any previous obligation he'd sensed before.

His goal was to recreate every emotional memory of his life from several points of view, writing the same episode over and over again in various voices. For instance, he had spent several weeks describing a moment of his childhood when he was sitting in the back seat of his father's Buick, watching a large black service station attendant clean the car windows with a soapy rag. He was perhaps four years old at the time, and his memory of the incident was completely unconnected to any larger context. Who else was in the car? Where were they going or coming from? What season, what time of day, what state or city? He had no idea. He just remembered watching the black man's faded red rag flatten against the glass of the windows on all four sides of him, and his own silent, curious watching.

Yet this snippet of a memory filled his consciousness and eventually, a lengthy chapter of his project, tens of pages long. He invented the mood of his father, and his father's clothes, his impatient jangling of change in his pockets as he aggressively smoked his menthol cigarette while waiting for the car to be filled with gas. He invented the service station attendant's emotions, family life, childhood, ambitions, and even a projection of his end some dozen years later, dying of a cardiac arrest while buying canned soup at a discount market. He wrote of a passerby that didn't actually exist in his memory, a teenaged boy who was furious at his girlfriend for not having sex with him, and who was wondering whether and when his draft notice to Vietnam would come. And more and more and more details, perspectives, descriptions of this fleeting moment in childhood until it was a sort of narrative symphony broadcasting that simple event.

He treated other incidents in his childhood similarly as he wrote and wrote and wrote. This autobiography, which had been his quiet passion for half a year, had proceeded to the year 1968, when he was in the second grade. He was fully determined to keep working in this manner until he was writing, in the same multi-dimensional perspective, of the present moment. This was his conceptualization: to catch up, finally, with his own creation, to be writing about his own writing as he was writing it, still somehow managing to treat even the present moment as a narrative symphony. In lucid moments he realized he could never reach that point. At the same time, he became determined to embrace this project as if he certainly would, indeed, reach his final goal.

He envisioned himself writing one of several versions of the present moment--of whatever he would at that time be writing--until the autobiography would eventually merge into the final brilliant moment of overwhelming reality: his death itself.

Working, working, working, he typed feverishly, capturing and enlarging and texturing and re-texturing the memories of his past experience as they came to him.

The box was a perfect cube, approximately a foot tall, deep, and wide. It was a dull brownish-grey, a non-reflective metallic material that looked somehow rustic. It was ancient and meaningless, and fairly heavy.

END

--Kevin Acers, Phanat Nikom, Thailand (1995)