fiction by max eichelberger

Kaufmann House

It was 2008. The Kaufmann House was for sale, and the boredom of hot streets and white wisps scudded over the blue sky, settling on me like dust. Cars the color of egg yolk sizzled along the gutter, old alcoholics lounged in Tommy Bahama, the palm trees had all the reality of papier-mâché—but no matter how fast Monty drove, not one tree toppled forward and not one man broke character, their affected daze and postures of apathy un-phased by his jeep screaming up and down Palm Canyon. The only movement was the junk that rolled beneath our feet and the tenor of Monty’s parodic Mr. Rogers chant at every red—“would you be mine? Could you be mine!” 

When a cop pulled us over, the tinny sound of pebbles against the metal of the jeep’s heat-shields punctuated Monty’s explanation that he “wasn’t doing more than thirty.” The cop showed us the laser, and Monty quoted Reagan, “My heart and my best intentions tell me that it was true, even if the facts and evidence tell me it is not true.”

The cop didn’t say anything. He just wrote his ticket and reflected, behind his aviators, on this caricature of Palm Springs: an infinite pastel hacienda cut by mirage that, simultaneously, apart from that vague sense of unreality, corresponded to nothing at all.

Monty didn’t speak again until we were sunk deep in Jalisco’s vinyl booths. “Like water off a duck,” he said with a twist to his face. I looked away with the exact same expression, and I felt rather than heard him puke in the bathroom. When he came back, it was as if he hadn’t left at all.

“It’s Cardio Jesus,” he said, chewing furiously on a lime, his face’s features sharpened by the fluorescent light that rested heavily against his skin. “Cardio Jesus. I see him once and when I close my eyes all I can see are his hands against his body, that’s all I can think, that cardio body stuck on the outside of some building. I can feel it in my hands,” he said, sculpting a sensuous outline in the air. “I don’t need anyone and the last person I need is Cardio Christ.” 

“Have I ever told you about the Kaufmann House?” he asked suddenly. He liked the conversation this way, scattered and meaningless, but somehow engaging. It was even in the words he tried on. When he cracked these little jokes, he was missing something, but then I could never escape the feeling that it was I who was missing something. 

“The owner’s problems,” he continued, “The beautiful couple’s problems, I mean, are like our problems. Future-us and future-them are in trouble, but we aren’t because it is 2008, the sun is out and Riverside is out of fire season.” He repeated again, like a koan, that we had to go to the Kaufmann House. “It is a beautiful, beautiful house,” he said—and then he was off into Eva Hesse, Walter Benjamin’s “The Arcades,” and how Hamburger Mary’s had changed into an Amazon store, a second-rate pizza place and was now awaiting its final transfiguration into a Dollar General (which he pronounced as if he was trying to extract the very last drop from the words).

Then he ordered a beer. “It’ll wash out the tequila.”  

Two years ago, Monty had failed his field sobriety tests and a uniformed officer had thrown him into the back of her cruiser. Then we listened—me, him, his public defender—later, much later, to the cruiser’s dash-cam mic pick up his 2 AM struggle. We heard his phone aged by misuse, sand, and time cruelly destroy my voice into a high and essentially bitchy falsetto. 

“Bail you out? You’ve been drunk driving again.” 

“Yeah, I’m pretty lit,” he responded.

I remember his public defender wasn’t happy. The poor girl existed without any apparent joy—not so much following through with life as much as she was coexisting with it, dissecting the anatomy of its idiocy, its ribs and hollows, impotent and important parts, and identifying with neither surprise nor hope the day’s tragedies like a blind woman identifying the body of a dead pet.

Of course, I didn’t have to explain it to him the way I’m explaining it to you now. I told him I’d drive and he tossed me the keys with the hand that held his crushed Tecate. 

I don’t know why I remember his teal jeep sandwiched between white hot sky and ashen pavement, but I do. Outside Jalisco’s there wasn’t a living soul to be seen—not even far-off—and the horizon had all the color and vegetation of a seabed. The only movement was the Santa Ana’s, which carried sun-blasted gum-wrappers and plastic coffee mugs from one side of the parking lot to the other.

The jeep started with a throaty rumble and, through the haze of benzene flavored smoke, I told Monty that Monet lost the ability to see blue, had surgery on one eye and it overcorrected so it only saw blue. Monty said nothing, which made sense—and, when I closed my left eye, the black dots behind my lid arranged themselves in different shapes. Once into the shape of a face, but only so much that it brought to my mind the idea of a face, like the stump of a felled tree. Then they fell into the shape of a body. I told myself that this was concerning, but I obviously wasn’t. 

After a few minutes of driving, Monty turned to me with a serious look on his face and even more seriously asked, “Where are we going?” 

“My hands,” I said pointing to the steering wheel, “My moves.” 

“We can just hike up into the desert a bit,” Monty said. “Swing back down and climb over the privacy fence. It hardly keeps the rattlesnakes out.”

I made a noncommittal noise, perhaps even then subconsciously anticipating my own surrender. Monty had a way of circling back to an idea, reducing it to a pattern of unbudging words that were astonishingly small and filtered through the corners of your mouth so when you coughed, silt would come up. You wouldn’t even know it was happening. And, much later, you’d tell a story to someone else and you’d talk using words he used and passing his sentences off as your own. This was something you would only realize much later, on Sundays, and never during the week. 

I turned into a bar that had been someone’s house—a cool, deep house where quail had chortled at each other and children crunched ice between their teeth next to an empty orange cooler of horchata. I tried to sidetrack Monty with pints of ranch water as we impressed ourselves with claimed sexual conquests that, if committed to paper, our competitors would hardly be able to diagram them. He told me about an immense glacier that tore itself down through Alaska, taking with it Earth to the bone. Then he was silent and, when I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye, I saw he was looking at a polychrome figure of Jesus Christ in a niche on the patio wall. 

The figure was immense and, though the modest pier it sat on was sound, the lack of proportion gave it a haphazard and temporary impression. The face looked fit for a baroque monstrosity, looking down at a considerable height, the eyes widened in what, at such closeness, amounted to a leer.  The skin was taut, the sinews exposed and the abs pronounced.

“Quite the cum gutter,” Monty said gesturing up and down the center of the figure. The right arm was broken off, a halted benediction reduced to a splint of exposed wooden marrow. 

But I’m probably mixing this up with another day. We might have never even seen Christ. Perhaps we sat there staring at the glass behind the bar, silently counting up the bottles of liquor, guessing how much it would cost if the shelves suddenly collapsed on each other, one after another like Eisenhower’s dominos. Perhaps we clinked bottles of light beer together and talked at length about hops. Perhaps we didn’t drink at all and tried to explain with unconvincing casualness that we were perfectly able to talk to each other sober. What I know is that eventually the conversation returned to the Kaufmann House. 

“I hate the Kaufmann House,” I said. “I hate Jalisco’s. I hate the sun when it reflects off the white tile walls. I hate the way it presses itself into the back of my skull and how it seems to push my spinal fluid through my scalp. I hate the fake clay tile that suctions to the bottom of our shoes and I hate the way the owner laughs at our jokes, and nothing will stop me from imagining your face slammed against this table, your forehead making a spongy sound against the formica as it peels to the floor.” Monty didn’t say a thing. He just laughed louder and louder and slouched deeper and deeper into the booth.

The next day started like any other, but then I turned to him and, as if viewing myself from a long way off, said, “Fine, fine, we’ll go to the house. But, first, a beer.” 

The Kaufmann House sat atop a low hill and, at its bottom, was Cafe Blanca. I called it “the Club,” but that didn’t mean anything, not really. It only meant it wasn’t Blanca Cafe, which was miles up the road and an absolute shit-hole. No one else called it the Club, at least not that I know, but then I didn’t talk to anyone about it, not even Monty, who called both places Cafe Blanco. The Club was dominated by a single long piece of peeling flotsam that extended from inside the bar to the outside patio. In fact every surface of the bar was peeling: paint, finish, wax—and, yet, its decrepitude only enhanced the smell of carne asada and sweat. As we sipped our beers, we watched the bartender feed crickets to his pet scorpions that, connected by a small tunnel, chittered away in their couplings wrapped up in violent or possibly erotic bliss. 

Off the Club’s back porch, there wasn’t a single blade of grass that wasn’t interrupted by upthrusting weeds. Dutiful landscapers blew cut vegetation from little piles to bigger piles and from big piles to smaller piles. Plump ants ran up and down in a near perfect line against the patio’s edge and were caught straight up into the vortex where they came down into our drinks no matter how we turned our glasses.

For its part, the Kaufmann House resembled nothing at all. After the fifth or sixth ant, I paid the bill and, as I walked back to the jeep, I heard Monty behind me singing underneath his breath.

“Would you be mine? Could you be mine?” 

On our way up, scrags of rock reached out like the fingers of a golem, or a half-buried skeleton of an immense beast.

When we got there (and there is no other way to put this) I don’t remember what happened. I assume nothing at all. I remember on our way down, a roadrunner tumble-weeded underneath our tires with a human shriek and Monty smashed his foot to the floor. We both leaned out the side of his jeep simultaneously to look back—but the dumb little bird only quivered in the middle of the road with a crick in its neck, before dashing up onto a low irrigation-stained cinderblock wall. Its eyes looked neither toward the glint of Monty’s glasses nor toward the direction from where we had come. And we continued on.

Max Eichelberger is a fiction writer based in Seattle. During the day he is a midlevel factotum in a vast impersonal bureaucracy, and at night he reads Kafka. His previous short fiction has been published in Nightingale & Sparrow, Asteroids Lit, and Fables Mag.