Art Along the Aether, Chapter Four – Xperience Fiction = by Liam Sweeny.
The warehouse was huge, tens of thousands of square feet. It was long ago abandoned by the property owner and would’ve been torn down if not for its sheer size compared to the size of the city budget. But Sarah figured that heaven was no more lost than the stairway to it, and that’s what they looked for.
As they reached one of the stairwells, they nearly knocked over a woman carrying a handful of paper, not unlike the Guru in the holding of them. But she seemed about as far from the Guru in posture as one could be. Some of the papers drifted to the ground. Sarah went to pick them up.
“Please don’t read them,” she said. “You can’t read them, or I’ll have to throw them away.”
Sarah handed them to her, her eyes across the scrawl withholding the urge to penetrate a single word or sentence. The woman gathered them up and produced an earnest smile but no thank you. She turned toward the stairs.
“Hey, we want to go up there,” Sarah said. “We’re looking for someone.”
“Have you given cloth?”
“Um, not yet?”
“You can’t come up until you’ve given cloth. You’ll have to find the Scrounge. She collects the cloth.”
“We saw her,” Ollie said. “She seemed sketchy, so we kind of passed on the cloth.”
“I don’t think you understand this place very well,” she said. “No matter. Sacred mysteries abound. Just go give Scrounge your cloth. Then meet me up there. Third floor.”
“I think she’s on the second floor.”
“Everybody sees God before they get to heaven.” The woman left for the stairs, which upon the fall of her feet sounded out thin taps.
“I’m not cutting up my clothes,” Ollie said. “I wear this shit on stage. Maybe Juli left here.”
“You got your stuff at Goodwill. Don’t be so proud. And she’s here until we know she’s not.”
“I haven’t seen you this driven about anything since you used to scheme to, you know…”
“Cop? You should just say cop. I’m not embarrassed. I was an addict; I schemed and copped. You were an addict, you schemed off your mom and dad and copped. We’re both clean now, and maybe we can get Juli clean too.”
They retraced their steps looking for Scrounge. Sarah held up the bottom edge of her sweatshirt and pulled down the T-shirt underneath.
“If we gotta dance around our past with each other, maybe we need new dance partners.
Sarah’s words gave Ollie the same feeling that seeing spurting blood did. A shock to the solar plexus, the tightening of his gut and the flush wave that traversed his body, He couldn’t lose Sarah. If he did, he’d lose his reason to be sober, and he’d end up in the warehouse again, lined up along the back wall with the other junkies, awaiting a rib-kick from Shitheels to check his mortal condition. And it occurred to him that his sobriety may mean more to him than making Sarah happy.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re right. I can’t let things be a “you know…”
“Look, there’s Scrounge,” Sarah said. Scrounge was accosting a group of post-teens who, judging by their attire and their phones out, were getting their thrill with a little poverty porn.
“You all can afford cloth,” she said, scissors out. “Nobody gets up there without giving cloth.”
“You can’t stop us,” one of them, with a letter jacket, said. “We’ll just go up there is we want.”
Ollie stepped in between them. “You’re right,” he said. “She can’t stop you. I can’t either, probably, but upstairs is where the tweakers are, the methheads, the angel dusters. You ever tangle with those motherfuckers? They don’t feel pain. And they won’t stop; they don’t get tired. Maybe you’re stronger than them, but what does a strong punch mean to ten guys who don’t feel pain? I’d give her the cloth.”
“I’m not giving up this fucking coat, buckaroo.”
“Then don’t go up there and everything will be rootin tootin.”
Scrounge tapped Ollie’s shoulder. “You didn’t give cloth.”
“We’re here to fix that.” Sarah once again pulled at her sweatshirt.
Scrounge waved the tourists off and aimed the tip of her scissors on Sarah, unnerving Ollie more than a little.
“I pick the cloth,” she said. “I know what God needs.”
She bent over, eyes on Sarah’s sweatshirt, which she lifted up to examine her T-shirt. Sarah couldn’t have liked that, as it was her favorite band shirt. Scrounge must’ve picked up on the hesitation in Sarah’s stance, because she pulled the T-Shirt out and snipped a six-inch by six-inch square, tucking it in her satchel. Then she turned to Ollie.
“I want some of your jacket,” she said. “But I don’t do that in the winter. Unzip it; what you got underneath?”
Ollie, relieved, opened his jacket to reveal the least grimy thing he had on the laundry pile at home, a Charlie Brown yellow and black zig-zagged polyester polo shirt.
Scrounge groaned. “Polyester. Cheap stuff. Not suitable for God. What kind of underwear you got? Boxers? Briefs?”
“Boxers; look, lady, I’m not stripping for you. Sarah can go up alone.”
“Oh thanks,” Sarah said. “Great boyfriend. Just show her your boxers. I doubt she’s a pervert. Maybe something else, but not that.”
Ollie took a deep breath, glared at Sarah before dropping his pants to reveal cotton boxers. Scrounge wasted no time in grabbing them by the right leg and snipping a sizeable piece out of them, revealing more than Ollie was wont to reveal. He yanked his pants up and spun around, looking for peepers and finding none.
Scrounge put Ollies snip in the satchel. “I was a buyer for Eammon’s. That’s what I was.”
“Eammon’s? You mean national Eammon’s?”
“Yup. New York, New York. I was an expert on fabrics. An expert on deals fresh off the ships. I was the perfect Scrounge.”
“So what happened?”
“I got too good,” she said. “They value you until you want them to show it, then they bring in some new face. There’s always new faces. There’s always talent. They use you up and spit you out. Went to smaller stores, but it wasn’t the same. Eventually, I tried other stuff; the Scrounge was in me. But what’s a Scrounge without money?”
“You just started coming here so you could scrounge cloth off people?” Ollie said.
“No, I got into drugs and ended up homeless and here. Do you think anybody just comes here except tourists?”
“No, I guess not.”
“This is where talent goes when it’s no longer useful to the world,” she said. “When the gourmet coffee’s all drunk but the dregs are left. The tourists don’t get it. They see people around trash cans and sleeping on the floor and they think they’re looking at set-pieces for their little adventures. Non-player characters, like in the video games.”
“This place isn’t the end of the dreams,” Scrounge added. “It’s the beginning of something more. Something pure.”
Scrounge left via Irish goodbye, not saying a word, a fully clothed tourist with a video camera and Shitheels sneaking up to clamp a hand on his shoulder.
“Think we can find that woman with the papers, or do we just go up?”
Sarah looked over toward the stairs, at the group of hard-looking guys smoking out of glass. “How will they know we gave cloth?”
“The breeze on my balls is a good indication.”
“Must you be gross? What are you, twelve?”
“We have a song called “Miss the rim,” Ollie said. “You start sawing at that branch, it’s a long way down.”
They tried to drift over to the guys by the stairs, checking out a trash can, making just enough small talk to fit in, like they were at a barbeque and had no business checking on the grill but the compulsion to watch the burgers cook. They had nearly made it to the stairs when Deke and Harry bounded into them, disturbing the smoke circle.
“You’ll never guess what we saw,” Deke said. “Guy has two pet rats and a pet possum, and he’s got ‘em dressed up like they’re in the circus, top hats with red-white-and-blue glitter, and the possum runs around in a circle and the rats ride on the possum. Fucking worth coming here, guys, I got shots.”
“You took pictures?”
“No, I got shots. Little bottles. I traded a bag of weed for them. Sarah, I know you’re all good, but you want one, right, Ollie?”
Ollie wanted one. He really wanted one. But he wanted Sarah’s bony elbow out of the ribs that were still a little tender from Shitheels’s bed check.
“I’m good, guys,” he said. “I’m going up to heaven. The second floor. We’re looking for somebody.”
“Oh shit, we found somebody,” Harry said. “You remember Duck Cassidy, how he disappeared? He’s in here. He’s got an acoustic, he says he wanders the fires.”
Duck Cassidy taught Ollie everything he knew about guitar. Then he got good, real good and he was going places. And then he disappeared. Last time Ollie saw Duck, he was smoking a joint backstage at one of Ollie’s shows. Ollie even offered him a chance to get up on stage to jam, but he’d said he couldn’t play 4/4 time anymore, that he was rocking 2/3 and 7/8 time, and even crazier stuff, because those were just jazz times. And that was it, he was gone. Ollie wondered if maybe he just went to the city and got lost playing supper clubs.
“I heard you gave your cloth,” the woman with the papers had once again crossed their path. “I’m Cyra, by the way. But everyone called me the Poet. I’m going up to attend to the third floor, but I can get you to the second floor after all. But you must go see God before you leave. Everybody goes to see God.”
Sarah tugged at Ollie to head for the stairs after the Poet, but when they got back down, he had his own person to find.
They followed the Poet up the stairs, a long flight. She stopped at what looked like a wall torch in an old vampire movie. She crumpled up one of her papers.
“I use these for kindling,” she said. “There’s gasoline in the wall torches, so I soak them in the gasoline; it helps them burn elsewhere.”
“So you collect paper,” Ollie said.
“Not just any paper. They’re poems. Unseen, originals.”
“Why would you burn them?” Sarah said. “Don’t you want people to read them?”
“I want them to light the way,” the Poet said. “I want to give the light meaning, and no better way than to spark it with my own spark?”
Sarah gripped the railing as the stairs had a slight sway to them. “I guess I understand. Like performance art.”
“Oh, miss, that’s all of life and half of death.” They hit the landing, Ollie could see light coming from a crack in the door, not the flicker of flame, but solid and white-bright.
“Welcome to heaven,” the Poet said.
More from Liam Sweeny…
