The furnishings were off in the place and that should have been a sign for me to get up and leave. It was like a crab fishing boat had vomited sea shanties, netting, and strands of seaweed all over the walls. The sofa was modern vintage, the ones where the company steals the form directly from a 1920s fashion magazine and then smacks you across the face with a price tag worthy of a kidney reduction.
The smell was something also. Somewhere, an intelligent group of PhDs, having lost the instruction manuals to their moral compass, built nanobots the size of snowflakes – millions of them – charged with the single task of exchanging bad air molecules for good ones. Colouring the air with smells of lavender, buttercup, vanilla, and a spatter of cinnamon clover.
If such a technology existed, this man’s house was ground zero for the first atomic test of its powers. It smelt like someone had gifted you a new air freshener for your car and then rammed it up your nostrils when you asked what it was for.
He liked pasta, women, pizza oven’s, and the sound of jazz shot from five speakers planted on the walls. The pizza oven was rusting with crumbs from a season long forgotten. There it sat in military formation with two other pizza ovens, each one evolving in size and polish like a set of Russian dolls.
“The floors,” he told me, “are polished wood slats. I had them rip out the carpet and place these babies down so I can tango from the front door to the back.”
And at that he shuffled him and his metal knees back and forth down the corridor and the carpet tried to trip him up and kill him on the way.
“I get them polished once a week,” he also told me. “Women like to slip and I like to catch’em.”
So this man thought he was a Pokemon trainer when it came to the opposite sex. Eighty years of keratin shooting from his head had made it white as a ghost and it hung, clinging, to his scalp like a perpetual waterfall off the edge of a wrinkled world.
I thought about how disgusting it would be to be that old. Then I felt bad about judging this man based on his age and looks. Age is something we can’t escape.
I saw the heavy pockets of gravity swelling under his eyes. Then I felt disgusted again.
After the first twenty minutes we were talking like gravy. Each of us would pour words over the other person until they sent something that felt like an acceptable response. He didn’t have hearing aids.
This was why we smothered each other in gravy.
The first thing I said to him was to ask how was the new microbrewery down the road. The first thing he replied to me was, “The floors are polished wood slats. I had them rip out the carpet and..” yada yada, you know the rest.
We got to talking about women and suddenly twenty years dropped off him like the pope had shrugged off his cassock to go frolicking naked in a field of daisies.
Maybe he only ever talked about women with his doctor.
Maybe this was why he didn’t have hearing aids.
“Dancing,” he said, “was the language of love. I’ve danced with women all the way from twenty to twenty-twenty.”
I interpreted “twenty-twenty” as someone aged two-hundred and twenty, which I found to be impossible. He humped his hips like a robot trying to mimic the sexual motor control of human but is unaware that its hips lacked the appropriate degrees of freedom.
“Forty-seven,” was the number he told me when I asked about his escapades.
“Where are all these women?” I coaxed.
He smiled at me and just turned looked down at his phone and proceeded to barrage it with verbal abuse because the five speakers on the wall had started playing a random radio station. The radio show host asked, “Who’s ready for a night of tu-u-u-unes… baby?”
We sat across from each other in two armchairs, mine was a fake vintage, his was a vintage fake. Trying to get comfortable, I brought the glass of sherry to my mouth that he’d poured me from a crystal goblet. I let the glass touch my lips. It tasted like cinnamon clover.
The sherry tasted like the inside of a pizza oven.
Four drinks in required me to investigate further into the house to find a receptacle I could alleviate myself into, colloquially referred to as a wash room. I had no plans on washing in this one though.
The old man had already knocked himself out from just the fumes of the sherry bottle sitting next to him, while I quietly got up to empty myself. The conversation was preferable when one of us was asleep, so I wanted to keep it that way.
The first wash room I found had a carpet and the volume to fit three porpoises snugly. Being porpoiseless as I entered, I had ample room to spread out. The space had an air that demanded investigation (who kept a butcher block in the wash room? It was collaged in magazines, a few leaning towards the tame pornographic).
The toilet and I had a brief discussion via the language of splooshes and splashes, I then took the time at the sink to survey the place using the mirror in front of me.
Tiny dolphins swam where the ceiling met the walls, they seemed to be guarding the skirting from non-existent cold breezes. I followed the leaping dolphin pattern down to a metal rod that jutted from the wall, then to the curtain that hung from the rod, then to the bowl that held the water that the curtain draped over, then to the…
I froze my eyes. Unable to look, unable to look away. A hand was draped out of the bathtub, casually as if requesting a drink from a waiter. My heart did a few wallops as if to ground the situation, alert my body to the adrenaline that was wiring the endpoints of my nerves.
As a boy, I’d only seen the Milky Way once. I was on a white water river rafting trip down the Salmon River with my father and we’d stopped one night to camp on the beach. It was cold, but civilization was too far away to project it’s light blanket.
Here, on this hand’s fingers, I was seeing the Milky Way for the second time.
After two minutes of chest wallops, I’d garnered the courage to investigate, calming my nerves with logical mumblings. Up close, the hand was now apparently a strong green, like the skin of a lime. Very human, and very alien. The fingernails are what drew me, flinging me into a moment of childhood recollection. At first I thought they were an astounding demonstration of the modern art form of finger nail salons, but I noticed quickly that the painting on the nails shifted as I changed perspective. What was a painting was instead a portal, a portal showing a wide shot of the Milky Way, like there was a CCTV camera planted one-hundred million light years out from the galaxy and providing a general stream of the churning spirals.
I was so transfixed by the fingernail portal that my brain had chosen to ignore the undulating motion the hand was making. Subtle, but it came in waves, like someone involved in a deep dream.
---
The number of green, fingernail portal hands I have seen in my life is equal in value to the number of octopuses I have seen walking on two legs on dry land.
That is, none.
I felt held by a robe of calmness, snuggled tight in an embrace of confidence – something I wouldn’t have predicted as my natural response to this situation.
I pulled back the shower curtain.
“Here, Tom, where you got off to?” I hear the call from back in the living room. Then some mumbling about his head. With the liquor he’s pumped into his veins, his metal knees won’t be enough to lift him off the chair. I return to my detective work at hand.
Some sights are distressing, perhaps a mother holding her baby too lightly as she flits around the balcony. Some sights are disturbing, perhaps a mother consuming her baby to save it from the life of a runt. In the arms of the bathtub there held a sight that was distrerbing.
I experimented with different orientations of my head, trying to jostle my mind into classifying what it saw before it. Certainly there were limbs, at least twenty of them. Whether it was a leg or an arm or a tentacle or a multi-pronged claw, each one found another to wrap over and a few others to bury under. It was a multidimensional ouroboros of appendages. I held myself, twisting my head this way and that, awaiting the wave of fear spiked with a healthy shot of paranoid horror.
Not a finger flinched.
Perhaps the colouring of the pool of body parts before me shrouded the experience in a comical undertone. One arm was a brilliant vermilion striped green up to the wrist, another foot nestled a few layers down brandished nodules, like little spikes, purposefully around the skin. It was a rainbow lake of flesh. And the whole entanglement was convulsing.
The old man’s hair loss and saggy cheeks had distressed me greatly, but the movement of these disembodied limbs in a bathtub alleviated me from that concern.
“Dance partners.”
Most of the nerves in my body shot an electric cold that froze me to the spot like a stone gargoyle. My neck seemed immune to the internal attack and allowed me the freedom to turn my head. I told myself that it was the old man, standing in the doorway, but my eyes demanded confirmation of the belief.
There he was, the old man, standing in the door way, using the frame to prop up his collapsing architecture.
“She was quite the tango partner. How her feet moved across the floor. Like she was on ice.” He pointed towards the bathtub hazily, of which hand or foot he was referring to was unclear. My throat still felt like my tongue had been jammed into it like a rag. I expected this man to proceed to add me to the pile before me.
“Son, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.” He staggered towards me and then past me, and then dropped his two hands against the bathtub. His hand took a deep dive into the bathtub like he was fishing for a ball that a child had dropped in a pool. Resurfacing, his hand came back with its catch: another hand. The two shook like they were courtly friends about to partner up for a ceilidh.
“Margaret. Well, that’s what I called her. She went by To Hyvvoup to her friends. I just couldn’t get into the whole alien name thing.” He waved it around and it moved like the weight of the rest of its body was still there.
“Alien?” I squeaked. Some override in my head had decided that was the noise my mouth hole would make. I was still a handcuffed copilot up there.
“Yep, every one of them.” He put on a cheeky grin and again I saw the flush in his face that shed twenty years off him. “As beautiful as the stock we have here.” And he winked at me. “I like to keep these,” he scooped up a pair of arms and legs, “as mementos. I’m old, you see, and the day-to-day has lost its bedazzle, it shine of youth for me. They’re a deciduous species and I ask if I can keep them.”
Another squeak: “Deciduous?”
“Mhm. Took me a few women to get comfortable with the whole exercise. These things,” he held up the first blue hand he’d dug out. Margaret, I believe. “These things, they just drop them like leaves every few weeks. Don’t need them when you’ve got hundreds sprouting out a year.”
“And I’ll tell ya,” he chuckled and leaned in like he was confiding in me the secret of all manhood, divulging the password to eternal ecstasy, “you’ll never want one of these drab two-limbed women we have growing round here once you get your hands on one of these.”