Hollow's End/ Houston We Have/the mail

I've asked you very specifically and with insistence, time and time again, that you bury me in a body bag and still you won't. I am a dying man, it's true.
Very quiet now. Listen. Off to the right a hum like a rapid flutter of wing and heavy air. This in the city of Long Beach. At the end of the Metro tracks where the cars turnaround and head back up to LA.
Hollow sits. In a chair he has made, if you can believe it. Sits and smokes figuring his end is about near. Could be far, but he's not restrictive. All in all a learning day. A day to cast wishes.
It's a long day. He now imagines himself near Equador. A knock...
"Mr. Hollow? .... Mr. Hollow... Hollow!"
All he hears is 'Howl...' Yes, He is indeed a dying king betrayed by history and circumstance to find himself turned away by his own daughters and having forsaken the true daughter. Hollow had 3 daughters. By the third he had grown weary of trying for a boy.
"Hollow...You there?...Guess not....I hate your guts Hollow...You always pay your rent on time. That's what gets me. You're so damn efficienct I can't stand you. It's about time I told you what I think...."
Hollow opens the door. The apratment manager, red-faced, "I only meant...".
Hollow, though filled with glee, shows his digusted face and waves the manager in.
"I only meant..."
"Collingsworth, I suppose you wonder why the promptness of my monthly payments. I mean every month. Maybe I missed a couple of months but..."
" Mr. Hollow, you are always on time..."
"And yet you still complain. Why is that, Collingsworth"?
"Mr. Hollow..."
"It's because you're an idiot, Collingsworth.You have to complain about something, so why not? Why not complain about something that's well enough let alone. But no. You have to complain just to complain. You have to push things, be the center of your world. Make some kind of statement. Some kind of statement to yourself, I suppose"
"Mr. Hollow..."
Hollow holds up his hand. "From now on I'll pay when I feel like it but it won't be monthly. And if you want to throw me out, you'll have hell to pay." With that Hollow tore his check up under Collingsworth's nose.
Hollow sad? Of course not. Happy? Of course not. In between? Perhaps. But the fact is Hollow watches (of course behind Collinsworth's back), watches very carefully almost lovingly the descent of Collingsworth down the stairs of the apartment building.
Hollow concedes, "He's got no right to be happy. I just made him knowledgeable of that fact".
Hollow goes back to tracing his pen on a map.

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Houston, We Have

Jean was my sister's name. She was younger than I. Even when she was six and I was nine, I would read stories chosen by her under a cave of bedding that was propped up with wire and wood coat hangers. I would read with a green plastic flashlight that shone through to the outside. Should a cosmic traveler, bypassing empty stars on her lonely sojourn from the outer planets, happen by our high window, she would've been entranced enough to pause and take note.
Jean liked being read to. But this should be a father's prerogative. Instead, he would be found sleeping after his late meeting at NASA. Sometimes, he wouldn't even come home until morning.
But it's evening now and our apartment in Houston is dark but for one room faintly lit. TV shadows roam the walls. The volume's so low it could lull you to sleep. There's a re-cast of pale light off my father's spectacles, the metallic parts of his wheelchair, off the ring that stands poised on its rim at the edge of the nightstand. I won't let him take the cure of forgetting.
"Stevie," he says,"Stevie, bring something to take the edge off, ne?" Not on your life, I say to myself.
I bring him a tray of Swanson's turkey dinner, hungry man portion. It has a steamy cranberry muffin in its upper-right side compartment. When I slide the dinner onto the tray-thingy that's attached to the side arm of his wheelchair, he stares straight down at it. I can predict: galactic storm brewing.
He takes a pen from his white pocket protector and edges the hot plate over the boundary of the seat tray. It drops with a light plop and momentary echo as cheap foil dinnerware meets thread-bare carpet. Muffin still steamy.
"Doshite? Why?", I ask.
"I need refreshment. Not food."
"You have to eat, Dad."
"Bourbon"
"No bourbon".
"Sake then."
We don't look eye to eye; we stare off to the side of each other like someone's actually there and we're mad at them. But now, the television news beckons. There's been an accident on the 59 somewhere out in Needville. Two victims. Car totaled. Man in Mercy General. Daughter dead. When I turn to him, he's absorbed in the drama
"It's not like I meant it", he blurts out to the news. He recovers.
Maybe I won't take the bait this time and not say what I always say. But, too late; it rolls from my mouth, "I know."
I bend down to pick up the floored meal. Would've been better had the peas mixed with the fake mashed potatoes. Then I could get at the mess with one swipe. As it is, they flee from me and I have to seek.
"Sorry, but we need an understanding between us", he says over the bent me as I try to retrieve.
"Yes, we do." Gummy mess.
"You do as I say and we'll be OK. The sake, ne?" He's tapping the pen in rhthym at the far end of the wheelchair tray.
"No. How about, as I say and we'll be OK''. I'm startled to hear my mother's voice behind my words as if she were present and not in Seattle. He's irritably surprised.
"Houston, we have a problem." he fires back, massaging the grizzle on his chin. If he were a smoker in abstinence, his craving would be for a room filling with haze; instead, alcohol's the preferred addiction and he craves an atmosphere of combustible fumes.
But, just in time, the phone rings. It's Mrs. Maize, the building owner, from upstairs.
"I'm hearing voices from outer space", she says, " You guys planning something big aren't you? I should have guessed the minute you come back, Steven Ohara. Something huge in the works. Don't deny it. I've told you before what I believe. You're aliens. But I won't tell a soul. I'm coming down to keep an eye on both of you. And you can do with me what you will. Go ahead. I dare you. Abduct me..."
She goes on but I put my hand over the phone's mouthpiece and whisper to my dad, "It's obaasan at 12 o'clock. She's on her way down for a landing." Dad has given his neighbors in the apartment complex positional coordinates. Like old aircraft dog-fights there's still radio contact between him and me during an engagement.The last vestige of propriety and connection left to us is this made up diversion of air combat.
"We have to let her land," he says. "She's the owner of this hangar. She's a bomber compared to us flies. Stay out of her league, Stevie."
I go back to obaasan,
"Mrs. Maize, it's late. We need rest. I've got classes to teach in the morning. Can't you wait til tommorow to be abducted?"
"No. And don't you believe I didn't hear everything you'all said, all of it." The phone slams down.
The mess remains. Can't even get to a place where frustration ends and house chores begin. The mash potatoes and peas remain. I don't care.
When she arrives she walks in with a huge ring of keys. She looks official although dressed in an apron and a short sleeve blouse, her greying hair in a tight bun at the back. She is short and spritely. She peruses the perimeter of the whole apartment like the inspector general she is. "Gotta clean that up." She points a rheumatic finger to the mess on the rug. Put off, I fail to move. And I won't. This is our apartment anyways, even if she does own the building.
"Why is it so damn dark in here?", she says, and switches on all the lights from the entrance to our back room television set where we'd been at odds.
"Welcome Mrs. Maize, nice to see you.", my father says rollling out with his wheelchair.
"Yeah, right, " she says. "God, now two of you! George, ever since moving in here 5 years ago, been nothing but excitement. And now, both of you. That's something. Time has come has it? You're leaving planet Earth. I can just feel it, here. " She motions with a crossing of arms and a hug to her body. And with that, she rubs her uncovered upper arms, making it seem as if she were outside with the cooling desert moon.
Thinking to escape my hearing, Dad motions Mrs. Maize closer with his pen and in a whisper, "Maisy-san, there's a bottle of sake, upper right shelf in the kitchen. It's meant for us. That'll heat you up good. Now, go."
She makes a slow turn around towards the kitchen and casually meanders, inspecting our furniture as she goes.
Before she can get to the kitchen threshold, I step in her way and shake my head. But she feints left and spins right and gains the kitchen. The cabinet's an easy reach. She brings forth the prize, Ozeki, in her arthritic hand.
"Now," my father says, "share the wealth". And reaches up to her with both his hands like a child,
But she spurns the move. "Frankly, I don't see how you can stand the stuff . It smells like sweat and worse when you heat it. Let me take a swig."
She drinks straight from the bottle with both hands. Then in delayed reaction her upper torso shivers and quakes like a dog slinging water after a dip. "God, like fire going down." She takes another, ending with an appreciative toothy intake and release of air that would've signalled 'beyond perfection' to any Japanese listener. My father eyes me. I look back, straight faced, blinking, trying to figure where'd she pick up the move and where'd she learn the affectation. All she needs now is an "oishi" to cap it and she'd be honorary buddha head.
"So what about it? Do I sit here teased to death?" my father implores, trying to shift my focus away from Mrs. Maize. "Share the wealth, c'mon. Share the wealth. Time for 'kampai'." He rolls towards her, then begins wheeling in circles pursuing the Ozeki, the object of his affection, as Mrs.Maize circles with the bottle just out of his range.
"So happens I might have to remove this bottle from the premises due to endangerment to our building. Health and Safety Code ", she says keeping him in a whirl, at bay.
"Bakatare, ne." he stops, out of breath. I see the smallest of tremor moving his arm. He clutches at it in a cover up. He catches me looking.
"Here comes the alien talk", she says.
"Have to use the benjo," he says. She steps aside as the glitter of spokes go by. Perhaps Dad wants to get away from the interaction. If so, it's a clever enough ruse. He's left me with her, this 12 o'clock. I pray she won't stay that amount of time. She can have the Ozeki.
I can feel an energy drain without him in the room. He had once told me of alcohol and the substantive claim it had on his life, and how I was to be next. He made it seem as if the alcohol were inheriting me more than I inheriting it.
"You and I come from a long line of addiction. Don't fool yourself. Think you can stop, just like that?
"Dad, I'm not the one with a problem. I don't drink like you."
"I said don't fool yourself", he repeated, "One thing I know. In this life there will always be the need to get bullet-proof. It's your heritage at work, calling you. All you need do is give in, ne?"
We're waiting for his return. Mrs. Maize studies her hands in the faint moonlight from the window. As she stands there I'm guessing she must be in pain with those hands, the bones at odds with themselves pulling this way and that, bones caught in a net of muscle and sinew and joints. She looks up.
"Ok, Mrs. Maize?" I ask. For a second her gaze is past me to a place of no pain, somewhere past all of us. She puts the Ozeki aside and returns to earth, yet unbound by it.
"Steven Ohara, if that's your real name, explain something to me. As we stand here we're not really talking are we? We're in telepathy with each other. But if I didn't know better I would swear your lips moved just now."
She leaves the Texas moonlight and comes closer, and closer still, to examine me. She touches my lips with four fingers, the unexpected soft pads of skin against my mouth, almost to the teeth; she touches my cheek, then cradles my chin with the four twisted fingers. I flush. I close my eyes. Her hand, from a tender life lost long ago, from a time I could not remember, warms my cold face from the bottom of my chin up.
"There, now, mercy's begun," she whispers and sweeps her free thumb across a wet path that's down my face, "Tell me about your father."
"Why?" I ask, congested.
"It's what you need to speak and to hear it spoken."
"I can't."
She glances to the bathroom to make sure he's still cloistered.
"Your father proved himself to me to be more than alien."
"How's that , Mrs. Maize."
"Why, the way he took care of Darien."
"Who?" I blow my nose.
"Darien. Darien what's her name. You know the astronaut's Darien. Do you remember her?."
It was pretty neat to have a father at NASA even though he wasn't officially in space. He worked in a room filled with long desks and a bank of screens above their heads.
No, he was ground crew, but he was closer to space than most of my classmates' fathers. He provided technical guidance to the space program, that occupation of mystery and secret that he could not discuss among the living. His lips were sealed. But, still, he did open them to drink. There was a connection between us; it might have been wished for or unwanted. It seems we had both.
Dad had once given me a mission patch that had those letters-- white on a blue background. And it had the path of an orbit around the cipher, A, and the letter, S. It was machine embroidered and became a touchstone I kept in my school lunch box. I lay in wait for lost extra-terrestials so I might show them this badge as a sign of courage and recognition that I might rescue my solar travellers home to Dad.
One day at school, after the cafeteria had emptied and only a few remained, the girl with the black arm-band named Darien came to me and said, "My dad was an astronaut. Your dad isn't. Your dad just sits at a desk. I know what's in your lunch box, Steven Ohara. Gimme it. It's theirs, for true astronauts, not yours."
The cafeteria seemed hollowed out and cold like the pit of my stomach. She was right of course. Everyone had seen her father in the papers and on the TV because of the failed shuttle . No one knew my dad. But still, who would see my travellers home?
"Your Daddy's dead. Mine's alive." I said.
It was quiet for awhile. No voices. Nothing moved. Then, into all the empty spaces, she began. At first you could hardly tell where it came from, that keening. Though I had never seen him in person I thought of her father. And I thought of her without him. I thought of my words and how I would remember them for the longest time. From my knapsack I removed Bowie's "Life on Mars" CD out of its case and put the patch within. I took the case with its patch and placed it next to her elbow as she sobbed. I whispered; she kept crying. I wanted to be removed, to be tele-transported out.
So, I left the scene of my crime as if I were returning to earth and she were the moon. I ran from the empty cafeteria, ran and ran trying to catch up to the sun, until I arrived home, out of breath, slobbering, and told no one except Jean.
Mrs. Maize stands near the sliding door that leads to our small balcony.
"Your father's a drunk. Maybe he'll manage to escape gravity some day. Maybe there's too much weight and baggage and he'll be dragged back down. He was ground crew and you and I don't understand the half of it, the unspeakable things they felt when they watched the shuttle go up that day. It was the first of the year, Steven. The very start of a new year. And it went to shambles in front of the world." She goes and opens the sliding door. We gaze into the dark landscape filled with stars, Orion's belt, all the deep invisible sky objects. "After that happened, almost daily he would go to Darien's home and comfort the whole family. He told me that sometimes he would stay the entire night. That says something. But he got worse. I know he was the cause of your sister being taken from you, but in a sense, you have another. And she's still on earth and she's somewhere out in California."
We hear a flush and the door to our bathroom squeaks open. My dad wheels out.
"Hey, Maisy-san, We need the hinges on this thing adjusted," he rapidly taps on the door's edge with his pen." As if to make sure that he would not be expected to respond to all that he had heard from behind the bathroom door, he turns to me, "And Stevie, see if you can find my ring. I've lost it. Must be lying around here somewhere. Take a look at the mess back there near the TV. Now, where were we?"
I leave them and go to the bedroom. The door closes and all I hear are voices behind me. I face the room. Off in a corner is the twin bed he sleeps in; beside it, a pair of crutches. Along this side of the white wall, at a uniform height, are markings, scratches and faint smudges, like petroglyphs meant for me to read. I close my eyes and breathe. It's as if efforts to stand erect had been attempted and failed. I had not noticed these before, but in the darkened room and with the light from the bulb it's more apparent. Perhaps something or someone had convinced him to try. There are pictures on the opposite wall, of shuttle space craft, of planets viewed from orbiting satellites, of the sidereal us among the millions of star systems. He might have been looking at these as he struggled to rise.
And in smaller frames, on desk, TV cabinet, ledge and nook are photographs of our family: Unce Yosh, Roy, Auntie Irene and the distanced relative who acts out and picks fights with everyone. Perhaps Dad was looking at these, too.
The talk in the other room has ceased. My eyes flick back and forth from a family photo on the window sill to the world beyond the glass pane. It's still dark outside. There's a circle of light from a street lamp immediately in front of our apartment building. Jean sits on Dad's lap; it's a sunny day. A cat crosses under the lamp light. In her small hand is a bottle of Lone Star. There's a street a distance beyond here that's sodium lit and runs parallel to ours. Jean would hold, and he would sip and sip again; he would laugh; then unexpectedly, she'd try a sip too. There are few cars at this time of night on that parallel street. There is nothing Jean would request that Dad would deny, even to the point of recklessness. She always wished the driver's seat too early. In the parallel street there are drivers, two per car, who breathe air and alcohol. Mom faces the camera; she's bent towards dad, her concerned face angled in to Jean. I'm the one snapping the picture and convince myself that I am, because I'm not in the photo. There's a range of dark Texas mountains or do I imagine them in the distance, deep in the heart? It has to be, because the stars seem to stop their display at an irregular but definite edge like a curtain torn at the border. The room becomes too small to breathe.
Turkey wing and breast , cranberry and artificial potato,I sift and clean on hands and knees searching for my father's ring. But in the end I'm at a lost where to begin. I'd like to scrub every inch of rug, to wash everything down, to start all over again from the very beginning, to catch the ring in mid-flight as it falls through space from the night stand. But it's not possible. A million places to hide in a fourteen square foot room. To an object the size of a ring, a room's infinity.
In a corner, hidden behind a leg tip the shine from the ring catches my eye. I pick it up. I propose to myself. I slide the gold band onto my ring finger and go back into the living room.
Dad is speaking. I remove the ring off my finger, take his hand and put it on his ring finger. At first his hand jerks away from me, then settles. He looks up. " Hey, Stevie, you found it," he says with a wide grin and grips my hand more than I expect in compensation for the jerk away. "And now. Since we're all here what can we do?" He shuffles his palms together and holds court. He winks at me. "Maisy-san. Full disclosure time. We are aliens just as you said we were and now we are about to leave. Let's have a going away celebration.. Everything's perfect. I've found my communicator ring, thanks to my son, and now we can return."
Is it red eyes that Mrs. Maize has? Could it be a silent 'take me with you'?
"This calls for a toast, ne? Maisy-san, please, kudasai."
Mrs. Maize hesitates, shakes her head, no ,looks my way for an answer. I drop my gaze which she takes for assent.
She brings me the hidden ozeki from under the couch pillow. I take the bottle to the kitchen, uncap it, take down three senchawan from the cabinet, pour and bring out the handle-less teacups.to the living room. He lifts his ochawan to the both of us and nods. In compliance and necessity we do too. Then he proclaims,
"Alcohol's organic, dissolving everything it touches, guts, brain cells, memory, all the organic stuff that makes us human. Like dissolves like. It's a flood taking everything in its path, all the unlovely and unforgiveable."
"What the hell you talking about, George? , she asks him with her red eyes. Then, she turns to me, "What's he talking about? Religion?" She wipes her eyes, sniffles.
He leans back into his wheelchair, pauses as if on the brink, then announces, "Houston, we have lift off." With a hail to us once again, he brings the cup to his lips.
Maize and I are his ground crew brought to standing attention with cups that will go untasted. Instead, we dream of the rocket's red glare of ignition, those seven faces illumined and destroyed at once in 73 seconds as the fabric of them turns to cinder and climbs as one billow, drifting askew.

END

The Mail
For most of my adult life I have been a postman. I say that because once I was raised and educated as a pharmacist. My father and my father's father have been just that. Went to school for it. But came the day of graduation I drove to our post office in Yucaipa and took the test to become a mail carrier. The thought of stacks and stacks of mail waiting to be delivered took on an urgency in me. It was an obligation. Someone's news of birth or death or even ordinary life might be contained in one of these letters. There is something phenomenal about it which escapes description. I wished to be the unknown bearer of such tidings great or small. I would be connecting people. Communication to one another. It's all we have left. All at once it seemed more important than drugs. Much of my route takes me to the rural parts of the area, sometimes the highlands. One part of my route takes me to a stretch of mail boxes that goes on and on seeming to no end. The mail boxes are like fledglings with their beaks about to open asking to be filled. This I like. Sometimes I stop here, sit in my right handed jeep, unwrap the chicken sandwich that Denise has packed for me along with a thermos of coffee and just stare down that long road and think about the job ahead. Especially in the spring. One morning I'm sitting there and the automatic sprinklers come on on a few of the lawns. That and the too early sun with the drops of water sprayed upon the grass and the waiting mail boxes were there to feed. Well, it made me stop mid-way in my cup of Folgers and just settle in.