Lukies (pt. I)

 

     The street was awash with lukies: plush little copulations of semitransparent cilia which had erupted from long, segmented pods attached to trees overhanging the sidewalks. “Lukies” was the name given them by Gregory Deinde, who presently dragged his shoes through entire drifts of them. His face took on the shapes and configurations of a novel mental difficulty, which it is to be doubted was ever experienced before. He had just disembarked from the train down the street and was plowing his way toward the ruddy brick carapace of his apartment building. The stifling breeze of that year’s penultimate dog-day slung its obese and drooping arm around his sweating neck.

     In two mere minutes, he was standing before the dingy, glass-encased vestibule, wrangling a ring of keys out of his jacket pocket. Just inside, tossed recklessly into a disintegrating cobweb, which had by now accumulated a veritable plumage of lukies, he espied an envelope bearing his name in large, hand-crafted letters. Shoving the key home into the bronze lock and leaning into the door with his shoulder, Gregory lolled into the dim enclosure and bent over to fetch the letter. He held it close to his face. From this distance, his eyes could resolve a finer print, jotted below his name:

 

“Somewhat urgent, but not extremely”

 

Gregory’s eyes jittered: from dyslexia? a kind of peripheral neuralgia? or due to a basic corporeal illiteracy? It’s not my place to conjecture. But then he stuffed the envelope into the breast pocket of his jacket and stomped up the stairs to the second floor, where he let himself into his apartment.

     Passing with hesitation through the hallway which met him on the other side of the door, stacked with mold-choked cardboard boxes and obsolete radio equipment, Gregory made his way to the kitchen. This culinary chamber was situated in the extreme eastern boundary of his oblong apartment. Once arrived, he approached the sink and filled a copper pot with water. This he set down over a trembling lotus of blue gas-fed flames and dropped in an egg to boil. Then he lowered himself into a nearby chair, his knobbed spine screeching against the cheap faux leather upholstery, and rested his elbows on the circular breakfast table.

     The envelope, which bore his name in the monumental font of a practiced and eccentric hand, once more hovered a span of inches from his face. He flipped it over and set about shredding its flap with his honed thumbnail; he had specially cultivated this utilitarian growth to serve as an all-purpose blade or spatula whenever the need arose. Inside of the envelope was a plain leaf of college-ruled notebook paper, folded into thirds.

     One result of its unfolding was the animated dispersal of a load of lukies. These were not the regal spheroid manes of milked fluff which were being hourly multiplied in the street below, but rather detached anemic sprays of three and four cilia apiece. They did not float down to the floor as gravity might have dictated, but cycled mutely through the air, carried on the invisible convection of the stove heat.

     Gregory spent a solid minute sputtering and motorboating his swollen lips in an ineffectual bid to rid his mouth of lukies; but the ones that had evaded the palisade of his dun teeth had already clung to the walls and roof of his mouth and had absorbed his saliva to the greatest extent conceivable, transforming the enzyme-infused liquid into an insuperable cement. After a further moment, Gregory’s eyes fell upon his spade of a thumbnail. He would need to carry out an aggressive intervention with this multifarious tool in order to alleviate his oral cavity of the invasive matter, but apparently decided to leave off with the business until he had tended to the contents of the letter.

     Drawing his eyes back onto the creased sheet before him, Gregory scanned, perhaps not fully comprehending, the following lines:

 

“Hey Greg,

     My power’s out and my phone’s cut off (ran out of minutes), so I’m left with good old pen & paper. Not that it bothers me to write this in longhand. I used to keep a diary, and the act of putting words on paper with ink was often more enjoyable than the very meaning the words were meant to convey. But this is all a bit of chatter and dross. Pardon the self-indulgence.

     I’m writing because I haven’t seen you lately at the hi-fi shop. Blaze even mentioned your absence toward the end of the last clinic. So we’re all wondering what’s become of you. No one has heard you on the usual bandwidth, either. We were hoping to have you come in and show us that modified encryption system you mentioned the last time you showed up.

     Anyway, you’re probably wondering how this letter found its way into your mail slot. None of us have ever come to visit your place, of course. But I got your address off of Charlie Reagent, the parts guy who runs that shop down on Lincoln. I figured he must have been mailing stuff to you in this interim of quietude (he sells better kit for cheaper, anyway, so good on you). Hope you don’t mind. Write back! You know where to leave the letter.

 

Over ‘n’ out,

D7KFY (Jameson)

 

     P.S. Apologies for the fuzz. There’s one of those pod trees right outside my parlor window and, over the past few weeks, it’s filled every cubic inch of air in my house with these whisps. Any minute now, I swear I'll see Donald Sutherland standing in my front yard, pointing and gawping at me."

 

    Having read this missive’s final line, Gregory folded the letter once more into thirds and restored it to the ragged envelope in which it had arrived.

     Just then, a globular missile of seething water leapt from the now boiling pot and landed on the crown of his head, searing not only his scalp (denuded as a result of male-pattern balding), but also very likely violating the seat of his highest chakra and momentarily destroying his chances of rejoining the pleroma of the Godhead, should his body happen to expire within the next five minutes. His shoulders gave a violent shudder as he clamped his knees to his chest. This sudden shift in Gregory’s gravitational center set his chair into a slow orbital spin. In all of this action, little to no sound was produced. Such was Gregory’s habit in his longsuffering. Silence is golden.

     But judging by the singularity of his facial topography, one could easily infer the words: “The Egg! Not My Head!”

     Truth to tell, Gregory’s phrenological profile was not entirely dissimilar from the contours of a healthy tan egg, plucked from the hay-strewn roost of a natural-raised heirloom hen, who is regarded by her human protectors, just about, as a member of the family.

     Naturally, in such a comparison, we make all necessary concessions for the presence on Gregory’s capital egg of a vestigial and piebald remainder of human hair.

     Yet, even taking this detail into account, as Gregory ladled the egg appointed as his lunch out of the tumbling, vaporous waters of the copper pot, the lukies latent in the atmosphere of the kitchen began to adhere to the smoking eggshell. Here, now, the resemblance was entire, such that, were Gregory to stand beside himself, comparing the two boiled eggs present in the room, he might just as well crack his own skull open on the cheap, savaged linoleum of the countertop and sprinkle salt upon the now exposed semi-liquid yolk inside.

     But Gregory, very much inside himself, cracked the initial egg instead. Standing over the trash can in the shadowed corner by a battered microwave and a pile of withered garlic cloves, he relieved the ovoid cargo of its fractured hull. It was this hull which, in the act of separation, came away with large chunks of white flesh and gummed membrane. This ejecta pattered onto a wreck of discarded cellophane which sat atop the mound of refuse within.

     By the time the egg was cleaned, it bore the countenance of an asteroid-ravaged moon, unveiling deposits of a pale yellow ore, already greying as it oxidized and gaped out from the soft, sweating crags; here was a supple Mount Olympus; and there, a shallow Sea of Tranquility.

     Gregory began to lift this quarry to his sparkling mouth when the lukies fell upon it.

     Once fastened and fully saturated, these tufts desiccated the egg’s surface and hardened into a brittle crust. Gregory turned the gnarled, ovoid sphere over in his hands a few times, inspecting the prohibitive new layer. Then he let it fall into the trash, where it crashed through to the bottom of the bag and lay stewing in a juicy abyss.