A.C. Koch: THESE ARE MY ILLUSIONS • Cleaver Magazine

Fiction by A.C. Koch
THESE ARE MY ILLUSIONS

You find what you’re looking for

I bent down to pluck a hot bullet casing from the asphalt, and there it was—the dried head of a flower lying in broken glass and cigarette butts. A yellow rose, abandoned in a stretch of parking lot behind a strip mall in Albuquerque. I pocketed the brass casing, then picked up the rose. Carefully, so as not to crush it. It weighed next to nothing.

In each of the last two cities I’d been in—Las Vegas and then Gallup—I’d also found roses randomly on the ground. A long-stemmed red one in Vegas, and a solitary silver earring shaped like the flower, with its hook backing, right there on the pavement next to the bullet casing. It felt like a sign: three roses. Each time, I picked them up, stowed them in my pocket, moved on.

A little ways across the pavement, I spied a tiny piece of quartz, and I pocketed that too, because that’s how I manage my compulsions—by giving in to them.

Later, in the shower, I thought of an insight that an old girlfriend had shared. I’d remarked how it always seemed like as soon as I learned some obscure new word—kakistocracy, hegemony, pareidolia—I started seeing and hearing it randomly out in the world. “You find what you’re looking for,” she’d said as she pulled on her skirt, zipped it at the small of her back. “You just weren’t looking for it before.”

Which was one of those things that sounded obvious but felt profound. The same way I kept noticing, in the months and years that followed, that no one seemed to have her startling shade of green eyes. In fact, I don’t believe I’ve met anyone with green eyes since her. Plenty of hazels, but no true green. I keep looking, because looking leads to finding, and I’d love to see her again.

Also—and you might not even believe this part—her name was Rose.

Everything is fine

I rolled into Santa Fe in time to check my P.O. box before the post office closed. Grabbed the package I was expecting. On the way to my usual motel, I stopped at a Kum & Go. I put a coconut water, a bag of Fritos, and a Big Hunk on the counter, and I was scanning the liquor bottles behind the clerk when the guy said, out of nowhere, “Death is your true love’s kiss.”

“What?” My hand went to the utility knife I keep in a sheath on my belt. “What did you just say?”

The guy was scrawny with long, greasy hair, wire-rimmed child-molester glasses, and an Amy Grant concert tee. He tapped my manila envelope where I’d laid it on the counter next to my items. The words were visible there in black Sharpie—DEATH IS YOUR TRUE LOVE’S KISS—but I’d been in such a hurry at the post office that I hadn’t noticed. This was unusual; the envelopes never carried any markings besides the address, not even my name. Apparently, there’d been some shifts in protocols at the central level. The clerk and I looked at the phrase together, then I covered it up when I slapped down a pair of twenties. I pointed over his shoulder at the liquor. “And give me a pint of Four Roses bourbon while you’re at it.” That made me smirk, and I couldn’t resist.

Statistically speaking, and despite all the mystery saturating our lives, most things work out in the end. Aside from our individual deaths, the universe keeps on existing and evolving no matter what happens. I guess it’s a matter of perspective. The bigger the picture, the finer everything is going to be.

Everything is an individual

I have the kind of job that I can’t tell people about, so I have to make up plausible cover stories. Most of my friends think I drive around the Southwest on a circuit of thrift stores, collecting vintage clothes to bring back to Denver and sell for a profit online. Having a rotating batch of satin, pearl-button cowboy shirts and ’80s concert tees on a garment rack in my dining room is apparently all the evidence my friends need to believe that story.

The truth is, I don’t have that many friends, and they don’t come around very often, so it’s not a stretch.

Today’s job took me onto the eastern plains of Colorado, a dusty-ass, podunk town that smelled of cowshit and b.o. At a diner called C.C.’s, I had a cheeseburger and fries and black coffee, sitting in a duct-taped booth. A table in the middle of the joint was occupied by six old men, potbellied in their overalls and flannels and windbreakers, each of them wearing a greasy cap, and each of them with some unattractive variation of facial hair. Mutton chops, Van Dykes, Father Times, whatever that Abe Lincoln shit is. Their conversation amounted to the braying of Fawkes News factoids and meme-speak.

I concentrated on chewing each of my fries. Kakistocracy (noun): rule by the worst. At least some of us are doing something about it. About those fries: It’s important to not leave any food on my plate, especially when the food is comprised of individual units. A puddle of refried beans I have no trouble walking away from, but I feel a personal responsibility to each French fry on my plate. Every one of those fries made a long journey to the cusp of my delectation, and it would be tragic (for the fry) to be turned away at the last moment, shunned, only to be dumped cruelly into the trash to decompose as waste instead of undergoing the final, miraculous transformation into life-sustaining energy within my body.

But this line of thinking gets complicated fast. Because is each fry an individual, or is the originating potato the individual? Each fry has its particular, unique aspects of color, texture, shape, length, attitude—they practically have personalities, when you really pay attention. So different from one another! And any two fries might come from the same potato, or different potatoes. So what is the difference in the experience of a fry versus its originating potato? And me: am I a solitary fry, or am I some component part of a much larger thing, along with random others of my fellow man? Here the argument circles back on itself: just because a lone fry is wasted doesn’t mean that the elemental potato has failed to traverse the fullest arc of its existence.

The braying conversation had died down a while ago, I realized, and now the room was quiet as my voice trailed off. A radio blared from the kitchen, and a clock ticked nearby in the dining room. Everyone at the communal table was staring at me.

The dude nearest me peered over the tops of his readers. “Son, are you okay?”

I’d been talking out loud again. Maybe it was a nervous thing? It never used to happen, but this was the third time recently. At least, no one ever managed to walk away with that information.

“Sorry,” I said. “Just working on my list of illusions.”

A pleasant side effect of the commotion I’d just caused was a diminishment in the volume of the dumb conversation going on at the communal table. Now not a soul would meet my eye. That suited me fine. As soon as my fries were all accounted for, I took out my things and got to work. Collected all the bullet casings afterward. As I walked out, trailing lighter fluid behind me, I couldn’t help noticing that the song blaring from the kitchen was “Welcome to the Jungle.”

I’d been developing my theory about the elemental individuality of all things since I was in a high chair and swallowing every Cheerio my mother put in front of me. I couldn’t bear the thought of denying any Cheerio the fun of riding the slide down my throat. Later, I saw a Peanuts cartoon, Linus chastising Charlie Brown for throwing stones into the ocean when each stone had ridden tidal forces for millions of years in order to achieve their place in the sun on dry land, only to be tossed back into the depths by some dimwit kid. Yeah, I thought. If we all paid more attention to the little things—every little thing—this would be a better world.

Driving away from C.C.’s diner, I shifted the rearview mirror once I saw black smoke billowing. No need to gaze at it once the job was done.

I always get away with covering my tracks

My mom never found out that I was stealing half of every bottle of vodka she brought home. As soon as she passed out, I’d pour exactly half of her Smirnoff into one of dozens of bike bottles I kept in my closet, then I topped her bottle back up with water. She always drank that stuff by adding it to a Big Gulp or a giant orange juice, so she never knew it was watered down. Took her longer to get drunk, was all. And me, I collected a bunch of squeeze bottles of straight vodka, which worked to numb everything during the back half of the Reagan hegemony while high school happened to a tiny sliver of my stupefied consciousness. Everyone won, and my mom never found out.

The next packet I received turned out to represent a promotion of sorts. My guy looked like a one-percenter, much higher up the food chain than I usually operated. That would surely add some layers of complication, but it sounded appealing. I’d been working in and around bus stations and dive bars and shitty diners like C.C.’s for way too long. I flipped the packet over to find a new Sharpie message: IT’S A QUEER WORLD THAT UNDOES US.

I’d never met anyone in the central office, so I couldn’t say what might be going on with this change in protocol, but I had a hunch that these messages provided key information for the job. Maybe someone was looking out for me?

Following that hunch, I set up an account on a gay hookup app and tagged myself as “available now.” Meanwhile, I had a white wine on the patio of a cocktail bar just down the street from the mark’s gated community. Into my second Chablis, one of the various pings I received caught my attention. The tag marked the user’s distance from my location as “950 feet.” The profile pic showed a guy’s shoulder and pecs, scattered with freckles. He was flexing to show off his biceps, and there was a chunky Patek Philippe on his left wrist. My mark was a ginger, and a finance bro. I hearted the ping and made a date.

It would be tempting to get it done as soon as he opened the door, but I had to be sure there was no one else there. I also wanted to avoid having to talk, so I dropped to my knees and opened his pants right there in the grand foyer of his McMansion.

When you think about it, there was a lot going on with that blowjob. Mostly, it was deception. I’m not gay, never have been, but I had a job to do, and playing jazz with my sexuality was a low-risk way to do it. But it was also a kindness. Who wouldn’t want to end it all on the receiving end of a spectacular blowjob? And I don’t know if “spectacular” was the word for it, but I will say that I put all of my effort into it, as a matter of integrity. (Thankfully, his business was in my mouth and I wasn’t saying any of this out loud except in mumbles and hums.) I can say for sure that the dude never doubted, right up until his final, explosive end, that his cock was being sucked by anything less than the gayest gay who ever gayed a gay. I keep getting away with it, you see?

When it was done, I gathered up the bullet casings from the tile floor. A crystal vase brimming with fat pink roses stood right there in the foyer. Because of course it did. I plucked one that was free of blood spatter, inspected it for thorns—none—and slid it behind my ear as I went out the door.

Messages come when you pay attention

When I was twelve, I was reading a comic book on the couch when our dog, Shasta, walked into the room and stared at me. Several times. I finally looked up. Shasta met my eyes, looked away, looked back. She was saying Look over there, almost as clearly as if she’d spoken the words. I went and looked, and her water bowl was bone dry. I filled it, set it down for her. She lapped up some water, then cast a look back at me that said, quite clearly, Thank you. Shasta was my first teacher, and the lesson was this: Pay attention.

The last rose was the real Rose. I should have seen that coming. I opened the packet on the steps of the Boulder post office. This envelope bore a Sharpie’d message that said, USE YOUR ILLUSIONS. I found myself looking right into those green eyes. A glossy photograph, her headshot. Exactly the shocking green I remembered, practically Technicolor in intensity. Part of me leapt with joy at the sight of her, but the bigger part of me recoiled, both for what this meant and what was to come.

She wasn’t a billionaire and she wasn’t a Nazi, but she was on the board of a tech company that was popular with white supremacists. My poor, sweet, wayward Rose.

I brainstormed half a dozen elaborate schemes to reconnect, but in the end, I took the most direct approach. On a leafy street in Boulder’s old Victorian neighborhood, I stood before her house. The upper windows and shadowed porch gave it the aspect of a surprised face: pareidolia. I hoped that it would be her, and also that it wouldn’t. Knocked on the door. A raven standing on the lawn cawed, “Murder! Murder!”

I shooed it but it didn’t move.

“Murder!”

“Fuck off,” I muttered. (“Murder” might be the only word ravens know.)

She opened the door and there she was: green-eyed Rose. Slimmer than I remembered, with a severe blonde bob that didn’t really suit, but those eyes were the giveaway. Scintillating green.

“Roses everywhere!” I said. “Dried roses on the ground! An earring! Four Roses bourbon! Guns & Roses on the freaking stereo! And even this robust pink wonder.” I produced the flower from behind my back, the same one from—well, you know.

She stared at me, at the rose, back at me. Her face seemed to be short-circuiting, working its way toward an expression that made sense.

I jutted a thumb over my shoulder. “That crow should be saying ‘rose’ instead of ‘murder,’ you know? But crows are nuts, right?”

She settled on a slanted smile, pupils jittery with nerves. “Um—can I help you?”

I tilted my head, thoughtful. “Do the crows in this neighborhood know your name? Or maybe they have their own name for you? Wouldn’t it be interesting to know what the crows call us?”

My whole shtick was a defense mechanism. I can see that. This was the last thing I wanted to do today. I walked inside the house even as she backed down the hall. Her smile went away, and I knew that no matter how this played out, I would never see it again.

“Please don’t,” she said.

“No,” I said, avoiding her eyes. “I’m not the Please Guy. I come after that guy.” Her cat, a fluffy Persian, looked at me from the couch and said Fuck you, bitch.

“Fuck you, bitch,” I said.

“Listen, I can give you cash…”

I need to develop some kind of illusion about the way emotions are drained away at key moments. Or maybe that should be active: I drain away emotions at key moments. “I only show up,” I said, “when someone has done something really, really bad, and they can’t be allowed to do anything else.”

Terror and confusion warped her face. “Is this about the TerreX upgrade patch? Because we can talk about that.”

I shrugged. “I truly don’t want to be here, Rose. It’s so unlike you to get tangled up in something unsavory like this. Honestly, I would do almost anything to not be at work right now.”

She backed into a book-filled study, edging toward a desk that was tidily stacked with papers, a single laptop open and aglow. “I don’t know who you are,” she said, “but if you’re one of Felix’s guys, I can make a call right now…”

I waved that idea away. Was it possible she didn’t recognize me? It had been, what, fifteen years, but I’d taken decent care of myself. I use moisturizer on my face every night without fail. Surely it was the nerves of the moment. She couldn’t possibly have forgotten that weekend in Atlantic City, how we’d gotten kicked out of that sports bar on the boardwalk for changing all the TVs to PBS. Man, do sports bros hate Charlie Rose. Then the job we pulled at the Tropicana where we almost got nabbed if not for the cocktail waitress that slipped us her key fob because she had a thing for Rose, because everyone had a thing for Rose. How could you not, with those eyes?

Now she watched me with pupils that were practically vibrating with alertness. “The Tropicana?” she said. “The-the Tropicana in Atlantic City?”

“I know you haven’t forgotten that,” I said. It had been later that night, after a greasy threesome with that waitress, that I decided that I loved Rose beyond all others and would do anything for her. But in the middle of the night when I was covered in sex crust and pickled in bourbon, she’d taken the bags with the cash and slipped away. Gone forever—until now. I knew I didn’t say that part out loud because I was clenching my jaw and pressing my lips together. And then, because I believe in the power of honest messages, I said out loud, “I really thought I loved you, Rose. Beyond all others.”

“I know,” she said. Hope sparked in her eyes. “Remember that picture we took? By the fountain?”

I didn’t. There hadn’t been any pictures, we were on a job.

“It’s right there,” she said. “I had it framed. You said my dress made my eyes pop.”

Which was a shrewd thing to say, because that did tease a memory. I could almost see it, a strappy dress, vibrant against her golden skin, her eyes like sparks. Hadn’t that happened?

She glanced at the bookshelf behind me, back at me, back at the bookshelf. This was too unlikely, and yet the possibility of its truth outweighed the probability of its falsehood. I turned and scanned the bookshelf. The only framed photograph was a shot of that droopy-eyed cat. Fuck you, bitch.

Any woman with striking green eyes is likely to have a dress that makes her eyes pop.

I turned back; she stood behind the desk. She had one drawer open and held something in my direction, which flashed. But that didn’t seem important, because everything was going to be fine. None of this should have happened, not just coming to this woman’s house, but none of it. Nothing after Atlantic City, at least, when I’d been offered a moment of clarity but had let it slip away. That was what the envelopes had been telling me.

And then, even though the woman was still behind the desk, Rose’s face appeared in front of me, filling the world. My Rose, the true one. “Ariel,” she exhaled, my real name, the warmest breeze, and then her mouth fell on mine and pressed all that warmth into me, dissolving. I was never sure, but I had always hoped, that if I had one true love in this life, it was Rose.

A.C. Koch is a teacher, writer, and musician whose work has been published in Analog, Gulf Coast, Catamaran, Split/Lip, The Pinch, and forthcoming in Fantasy & Science Fiction. After some years living and working overseas (France, South Korea, Mexico), he resides in Denver, Colorado, working with language learners and writing film reviews for Spectrum Culture. As a moonlight gig, he sings and plays guitar in the power-pop bands CHEF ANDRÉ and FIRSTIMERS. The story appearing here was written during the Arts Retreat residency program at New York Mills, MN.