fiction by max eichelberger
Sophia
In 2008, I worked nighttime security for a small stage in downtown Los Angeles. The pay was awful, and so were the plays, but I was young and young goes quickly. One night (not a beautiful night, not that sort of night where you realize how pretty the sky can still be) these scenes took place on stage: Strom Thurmond arrived in East Texas to discuss options for restoring the natural and traditional supremacy of the German language; he delivered a monologue about the etymology of the words “shit” and “excrement” and “effluence” that culminates in a defense of adult diapers; he provided an extemporaneous and inscrutable reading of Jorge Luis Borges’ Funes the Memorious, interpolated by long discussions of the Kabbalah; and in the finale scene the director stormed the stage to scream absurdities at the audience.
None of it meant anything to me, but—as the audience shuffled out—I saw Sophia. She pushed a handbill toward me, my hand wrapped around hers, and it was all I could do to stammer out in reply, “Of course, I’ll come,” as I stared into her eyes. “Of course, yes.”
She had the bluest eyes I had ever seen. Oh, she had an ass that ate swimsuits and fine breasts, but it was her eyes. They were blue like two shards of ice and my heart slid over them for miles. Seeing them was ecstasy and, simultaneously, with a vague sense of unreality, corresponded to nothing at all.
The next night, Syagrius was brought before Alaric II who ordered him sent to Clovis I, or perhaps it was Clovis I who was brought before Alaric II who ordered him sent to Syagrius. Either way, Clovis I and Alaric II, or perhaps their ghosts, compared the sizes of their dicks and planned a worldwide revolution of the working class that traced the route of the Visigoths over Gibraltar and into Jerusalem. At the end, Fidel Castro appeared.
Then Sophia performed casting herself in a pillar of light eating and drinking until she leaned over, still chewing, and opened a thrown briefcase to pull out fistfuls of dime bags that she rubbed against her belly and her breasts and under her armpits and between her legs and behind her knees with tears rolling down her cheeks as she shook with silent rage or terror or, perhaps, even sadness while she chewed.
After her performance one of the audio techs took me and the other guys out behind the theater to split a fifth of mezcal and warm our hands around a steel drum of burning trash. After an hour, Sophia and the other actors joined. In the silence that followed Sophia asked if I had ever seen a spark page. It’s the first page you see with your inner eye, she said, it’s the first words that awaken who you really are. She wasn’t sure what hers were, but she thought it could be the first time she read Sylvia Plath, which is embarrassing to say, I thought, but it was what it was. Suddenly, she grabbed me by the arm and asked why it looked burnt. I told her I had had a small green splotch on my forearm, which was almost certainly dried pesto, but I had spent all morning scrubbing my body red imagining the splotch growing like mold across the skin of an apple. She laughed at me, brought me to her home, rubbed aloe all over my arm and took me in her mouth.
Later she called and told me she was a hunter. Men’s voices were always so easily heard and women’s weren’t and she slept around and she wasn’t shy about it. I told her I didn’t care, people being born that way was natural, and then she cried.
Those first months were delirious and if I had to explain it now I don’t think I could. We read stories by the pool and talked about Cortozar’s islands. When I walked in the heat, I heard her laughter from closed windows. I asked her why I never saw her writing. She told me she performed on impulse, that she didn’t block her plays because she never wrote (but neither did I, I just filled notebooks with the plans for books and poems that I would never write). If I felt anything it was envy, though that’s not how I’d describe it now, toward my past self for living the same life and feeling happy. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I’d turn on a podcast, switch it off, open a window and light a cigarette and think about how cheap it’d be to live in a van.
One afternoon she said she was in love. Not with me, which made sense, but with a man who lived in Big Bear. She said his name was Jonathan and she was psychic for how else could she sense, even before he knew, that he’d need to call off his engagement? She said I could keep her chewed on pencils, her legal pads of doodles, and the giant pink flamingo pool floaty. She asked me if I put away all the things she wanted me to remember her by, would I keep remembering? But, of course, I didn’t have an answer, nothing of the sort. I could hardly imagine my hallway without her shoes lining it.
Later, but not much later, I met Jonathan in Palm Springs. He was all in black sitting in a shaded chair, left hand resting in his lap, right hand hanging limply, almost lifelessly. He was staring straight out, turned away, toward the palm trees and there seemed to be on his face, and in his deep-set eyes, an expression of sadness. I’m not sure what it was, and I don’t know everything about what happened, but after a long cordial conversation about Jurgen Moltmann he suddenly sank to his knees like a marionette cut free of its strings. When his eyes finally turned to look at me, bloodshot, almost scarlet, even the iris seemed purpled—and the misery, the almost shameful look of self-hate and misery on the disfigured face, was shocking. I was amazed and, more importantly, it was fairly new.
I told him she was staying with her actors. I don’t know why I helped him drive over there or why I told him I’d knock on the door. What has stayed with me is the way he shook all over like a fever and the way he wrote furiously on a partially torn paper a list of archaic Greek poleis at random intervals along the edge of the page. She answered the door in an advanced state of cokeation and behind her were two exhausted looking nude men. Jonathan at first looked all right and apart from the smell of cum it was normal enough inside, but then he stepped to her, yelling, and she kicked him in the balls and told him he was boring and short and small. He sank to the floor and screamed like a coyote or muezzin, and that’s how I left them.
How they made up I don’t know, but I didn’t expect anything else when he reappeared in my life or, perhaps, I should say me in his (we were both minor characters in Sophia’s life, so it hardly makes any difference). At the end of a particularly boring play, stagehands strategically placed in the audience began to shove each other. Suddenly, Roy Lichenstein, Jasper Johns, and Keith Haring or, more precisely their actors, joined the pandemonium. As the audience watched Liechtenstein seduce Johns, Johns seduce Haring—culminating with Liechtenstein ejaculating into Johns ejaculation into Haring ejaculating, inexplicably, onto a providential bust of Max Ernst—I saw her in the audience.
After the show, I talked to Jonathan. He said she was on edge, pulling psychological diagnoses one by one from an old DSM-IV. Why did Sophia have that, I asked, and he responded calmly enough that she had tried to kill herself. She had terrible dreams. A reoccurring dream was of a deserted coliseum and on the floor were photographs of faces. Faces of Russians, Bolivians, faces of Sooners, faces of Vendee peasants during the First Republic, faces of the Peloponnesian League’s first citizens, faces of the dead from the Battle of Mezokeresztes and from the rise and fall of the Heavenly Kingdom of Taiping, the face of George Perec on a typical day, and Simon Bolivar as a child. They covered the ground so completely it was impossible to tell if there was any floor at all. And, as she walked, she fell into them step by step until they swallowed her whole.
I decided to call her every so often and stay in touch, which I knew wasn’t for her. I learned things that turned up unannounced, hammering on my mind’s door at 4 a.m. She told me about her stay in a community that did nothing except take peyote, construct small wicker crafts, and fluid bond in imitation of what an Adamist theosophilogist had prefigured in his purely descriptive account of an angelic community. She told me about working in a chicken processing plant where teenagers cut their beards to fit pressurized masks and their corpses were dragged out from the immense nitrogen tanks. She told me about visiting her cousin in an asbestos sided trailer and drinking pitchers of margaritas with lime concentrate. She said she had gotten piss drunk and screamed at her cousin and passed out underneath her car.
Eventually Sophia died. I don’t know who told me that, perhaps it was one of the kids behind AM/PM, the one in front of the tamarisks. Perhaps it was Jonathan, the helicopter hum of anticipation rising in his throat. It was a brain bleed, or they cut down a tree she happened to be underneath, or she drove over a cliff.
In her last call to me she told me a small town sheriff was throwing away millions of photo arrays. She asked if I could drive her up.
“Of course,” I said, not stammering at all, “Of course I can.”
Since a deputy couldn’t find a reason to say no, we took binders of people to my house in Sky Valley where guided by psilocybin we drafted an immense series of sketches for a play based on a battered VHS film that I don’t remember, but that percolated through my mind as a disquieting sequel to Myra Breckenridge. My role was to prepare the mezcal, which requires no preparation at all after the third shot and around midnight she began forming the pictures into a massive collage. In the small hours of the third day, she began taking pictures of herself bracketing the hundreds of pictures that we had grabbed with thousands of herself.
In the morning, we drove back to Palm Canyon. I have tried to reconstruct the drive, but by now I’m no longer sure of anything, with the exception, perhaps, of her eyes—the color of firmament that appears in the morning and only some mornings after a winter storm renders the desert silent—and the junk that rolled around underneath our feet.
Max Eichelberger was born in Palm Springs, CA and lives in Seattle, WA. His interests include his family's College Football Pick'em League, basketball and Seattle's new hockey team. During the day he works at a midlevel factotum in a vast impersonal bureaucracy. At night he likes to write, and one day he'd like to have enough money to operate a small independent bookstore at a modest loss. His work has been published in Nightingale & Sparrow, The Vista, and Asteroid Lit.