if you do not have a face because your face is a television then your father is probably mowing a piece of the suburbs

Mark Baumer

First published in Salt Hill 28 (2011).

The next morning I yawned and turned on the television. It spoke at a low volume. The sound did not wake up Leon. The television’s mouth barely touched me. There was nothing important to watch. There had never been anything important. I paused the television on someone’s embarrassed, diplomatic face in the middle of a restrained nod. The mouth said, “All domestic American politics seem to be incomprehensible and childish. I pity the majority of the country that is caught in whatever fashionable idea has gained political momentum. I’m tired of chewing fresh notions of national flavor. I envy people who do not mind being told what to think and who will never realize they are being told what to think.”

The television mouth began to drone. I turned it off. I massaged my political opinions for a little bit. They felt more developed. I got a little sick. I put every political thought I had ever had in a space within my brain where I wouldn’t have to think about it anymore.

Leon was still sleeping so I watched him sleep for a little bit and then touched his cheek gently to see if he wanted to go down the street to the Holiday Inn for breakfast. He woke briefly and said, “My dunes are un-radiated.”

I rode an orange bicycle to the Holiday Inn and ate some waffles and fruit. I asked the front desk clerk if there were any walnuts. The front desk clerk at the Holiday Inn blushed and apologized for the lack of walnuts. I toasted a bagel and rubbed it with cream cheese before wrapping it in a napkin and putting it in my pocket. When I returned to the motel, I left the bagel on the nightstand next to Leon’s bed and waited for him to wake up.

I still felt quite young and was not sure what to do with my life, so I sat on a bed. I waited for someone to look at the bed and tell me to stop being a burden to objects of rest. For the majority of my life, I had been a young person. Another hour of my life existed. The bed was one of billions of ordinary objects that would remain ordinary for its entire existence.

I looked at the clock on the bedside table and thought of Mickey. The clock rested next to a bagel. I imagined Leon accidentally eating the clock instead of the bagel, but when Leon woke up he ate the bagel and then clipped his toenails. He left his clippings on the carpet next to his bed and asked me to throw them out. I gathered some of Leon’s toe particles in the palm of my hand and flushed them down the toilet.

Outside our motel room, I could hear the low whine of the nearby highway. The television was on again. Its mouth told me to hate my father. I looked out the motel window to make sure Earth was still a real place. The only objects in the parking lot were a cooler of beers, a lawn chair, some swim trunks, and a man sitting in two of these objects while sipping the third. The man looked like a cross between a yellow snowflake and a dead astronaut.

An hour later it was almost 10 a.m. I looked out the window again. The man who had been eating beers in the parking lot was no longer eating beers in the parking lot. He had gone back in his motel room to look at a bowl of ice cream and wait for the sun to set. The empty parking lot became slightly less empty. A teal minivan parked in front of our motel room filled with nothing more than the appearance of a fourteen-year-old boy. I watched this boy touch the teal van until he was no longer touching the teal van. A few seconds later he was touching our motel door. The fourteen-year-old boy was wearing the cotton stains of a middle-aged man’s white undershirt. His name was Thomas. He was cloned from a skin fragment of Mickey’s immigration experience.

When I asked Thomas why Mickey didn’t pick us up, he shrugged and then told us a story about the first time he met Mickey. The two of them had been standing in an empty, in-ground swimming pool with dozens of other men who were all related. Someone was cooking processed beef on a hibachi near the drain cover of the empty swimming pool.

Leon and I climbed into a teal object that had multiple seats and before Thomas drove us anywhere he pulled out his wallet and showed us a picture of a woman. He said, “This is my mother. She was Mickey’s sister. The last time I saw her she was dead.” Leon took an idea of Mickey out of his mouth and placed it on the dashboard.Thomas looked at Leon and then said, “Mickey is having some difficulty gathering business clients, so he is lending your services to our pavement operations today.”The word “services” made me a little nauseous.

The teal minivan’s thoughts on motion were cluttered, hyper, and slightly out of control. My existence inside a moving automobile with Thomas grew uncomfortable. I felt my chest straining against the seatbelt. I noticed my body tensing as we sped through yellow lights. Thomas pressed the gas. I watched a stoplight turn red and felt my stomach clench as we continued to move. I waited for the moment when I would realize I had died inside a teal machine. Motion and existence continued. The teal noise began to grow. Thomas was touching the radio.

Thomas stopped the van in a suburban neighborhood full of stale, oversized houses. I could smell the glue used to hold the large wood synthetics together. A crowd of shirtless men stood next to the bones of a driveway that had recently been scalped.

Four stomach pouches hung over some waistlines. Thomas walked over to this group of four fat, shirtless men. Leon and I climbed out of the van and followed. Thomas nodded at the fat, shirtless men. Leon and I stood a little behind Thomas and waited for something to happen. A small bubble of lint clung to the sweat stain of one of the fat, shirtless men. His stain was a few days old. It had begun to mold, and if it were a wound it would have been infected. As the four men continued to talk, I realized their mouths didn’t quite fit in my ear. Their words were a rush of mumbles and body expressions, not a normal bath of words. The few I did recognize were familiar and common, but I couldn’t figure out where in the conversation I had found them.

Eventually the four shirtless men looked at Thomas and then at Leon and I. We breathed a smile at them. Thomas told the group he’d found us in the boils of a motel room. I held out my hand and waited for the fat men to touch it. Their hands were sticky and their names sounded like a wash of slur and drone. One said something that sounded like “Ribeye.” Another said his name was “Gimmy.” A third either grunted or said, “Cork.”

I looked at the fourth fat, shirtless man. His shorts rode low enough to expose his lack of underwear, but his mouth seemed almost stable. He said his name was “Benjamin.” His nipples were larger than the other fat, shirtless men’s nipples. He didn’t touch the hand I extended at him, and instead began to yell instructions to all the shirtless workers who were standing near the uprooted driveway.

A lot of the workers began to grab rakes, so I grabbed a rake. Everyone rubbed his tool on some dirt. A few men bent down to pick up leaves. Some men found shovels and held shovels. I looked at Benjamin. He was continuing to yell instructions at us. His nipples seemed to be growing larger. Leon was sitting near the edge of the driveway plucking weeds. My rake did not feel confident because I wasn’t sure what to do with it. Twenty minutes passed. Leon said he was thirsty. We walked around the back of the house and found some guys drinking from a hose.

One of the men drinking from a hose said, “The last time I was married I got a rash and one of my testicles fell off. This embarrassed me so I called a man who once was a taxidermist. I asked if he could sew something on me that looked like a testicle. He said he couldn’t, so I tried to do it myself and it turned out pretty good, but sometimes it falls off and I have to sew it on again.”

A guy named Bill started to complain that his ear hurt. He asked if I had a Q-tip. I did not have a Q-tip. He began to pick at his ear with his pinky finger. His black mustache dripped sweat onto his upper lip. He was not wearing a shirt. I saw the tip of his pinky finger when he pulled it out of his ear. It was orange.

A truck showed up pulling a trailer. A steamroller rested on its bed. I watched Benjamin’s fat, shirtless body work as he climbed onto the steamroller. His ass crack grew as he sat down. Everyone had stopped and was looking at the perched, fat, shirtless man straddling something large. We waited for the machine breath, but when Benjamin fingered the ignition nothing happened.

Benjamin yelled and when he found there was no battery in the steamroller’s lung, Benjamin yelled at the lack of a battery. He yelled until his lungs sweat and then he looked around for something his lungs could sweat on. He saw Bill’s mustache. Everyone watched Benjamin’s ass crack yell profanities and accuse Bill of stealing the battery so he could pawn it for crack dollars.

Benjamin grabbed his face and slapped Bill on the bare nipple until Bill began to cry a small, waterless teardrop in the shape of a whimper. Bill’s mustache had stopped moving and sunk lower into his face. Up the street, a woman pulled a newspaper out of her mailbox. Benjamin’s ass crack grew larger and larger. He told Bill to either admit to smoking the battery in a crack pipe or to start walking east until he drowned in the Atlantic Ocean. Bill sat on the ground and hugged his knees. Benjamin told Bill to stand up and get back to work.

A large dump truck full of black smells arrived, carrying the hot, boiled taste of three thousand years of slow-burning rubber. Someone told Leon and me to grab wheelbarrows. The dump truck backed up to the edge of the driveway, and a hole opened in the rear of the truck. Black pavement fell from the hole, and Leon and I filled our wheelbarrows on this hole.

Leon’s arms grew weak after a few minutes of pushing the wheelbarrow, and he spilled hot pavement in the middle of the lawn. Someone yelled at Leon and took the wheelbarrow away from him. He was given a rake and told to spread the hot smells evenly across the driveway.

I continued my wheelbarrow chores. As the hot pavement came out of the hole in the back of the dump truck, small, black, hot pebbles tumbled into my shoes and bit at my ankles. The skin blistered from these bites.

Everyone spread pavement for an hour. Leon didn’t do much except push a few pebbles from one side of the driveway to the other. When the driveway was finished, some people got in one van and went somewhere, and the rest of us got in another van and went somewhere else. Leon got in the van that went somewhere. I got in the van that went somewhere else.

We did not leave the suburbs. I wondered where Leon was. We stopped at another old driveway. Someone told us to pick weeds. We picked weeds for an hour. It was almost five. Everyone got back in the van. The van was filled with very loud techno. We stopped next to a driveway where two men were using sledgehammers to beat on the old pavement. The two men stopped working. I realized one of the men was Leon. He got in the van.

Back in the motel room, Leon complained that his hands hurt. He showed me his blisters. I told his blisters to clean up in some hot sink juice. Leon worried his wounds would get infected and his hands would fall off. He said he didn’t want his hands to fall off because then he wouldn’t be able to type emails.

After we cleaned off most of our pavement stains, we walked to a convenience store so Leon could buy some gardening gloves and Vaseline. Before I went to sleep, I looked out the window and saw a woman leaning against a door of one of the other motel rooms. She had long, orange fingernails. Leon rubbed his wounds in Vaseline and wore his new gardening gloves to bed.

Here’s the bio Mark Baumer gave us at the time of Issue 28’s publication:

Mark Baumer is a calm void in the office of a nonprofit corporation whose offices are on the top floor of a building beneath a roof filled with 3G cell structures. Two of his teeth are fake and one of them is no longer glued to his face so it sort of falls out of his mouth sometimes. He just looked at some things on the Internet. One of the things he looked at was about the death of publishing. Mark Baumer did not kill publishing. He only read about it either before it happened, while it happened, or after it happened. Mark Baumer is not sure if he wants to try and make his bio longer than the story he published in the journal he is writing his bio for. He does not want to feel trapped by his bio. Sometimes when he reads other authors’ bios he feels trapped into thinking about an author in a specific way that he knows isn't realistic to the author's normal life. Other times Mark Baumer reads bios and these bios list where an author lives, but the author is usually either dead or doesn't live in that place anymore or in some cases the place stopped existing. Mark Baumer lives in a city called "Oofdon."

You can read more about him here.