Self-Portrait as My Stepbrother
Derek White
I was hanging out and drinking mescal with my stepbrother Eric before he became paralyzed. He became paralyzed by smoking pot on an aircraft carrier and falling forty feet from a communications tower onto the flight deck.
But this was before all that. Now we were coming home from a Radiohead concert. I was so thrilled to see them live that I couldn’t control my momentum and lifted off the ground up into the sky. Not only that, but I had eagle-eye vision. I was hundreds of feet off the ground and could see Eric trudging along below without me. His mind was so preoccupied with the worm he had swallowed that he had not even noticed I was gone. I wanted to yell out, “Eric, look how high I am,” but feared this would induce me fall.
Flying just for the sake of myself wasn’t satisfying enough—I wanted somebody to verify it. So in the end I yelled out to him. And of course this made me fall. I didn’t blame Eric so much as my own self-consciousness. I fell at an alarming rate, even faster than everyday gravity. I was passing ordinary objects such as matchsticks and eggbeaters and anvils. I was propelled downward with such great force that I created a crater in the ground that was the exact shape of my body profile—just like in the cartoons Eric and I watched as kids, counting how many times the coyote died and arguing over whether it would constitute a death in real life.
I climbed out of the hole and told Eric that he had to try it. He was never one to cave in to peer pressure so I pushed him into the hole of my body profile. He wasn’t quite immortal like me and didn’t fit my shape. Not that he died or anything, but he didn’t get up right away and he was not happy with me for pushing him in my hole. He didn’t have crutches or a wheelchair yet but was acting like he needed them.
Then I remembered the objects that I had passed on the way down, and once I remembered and looked up, they came whistling through the air. The anvil hit Eric on the head and knocked him back in the hole. He shook it off and started to crawl out when the eggbeater hit him smack on the nose. That really pissed him off and he stopped talking to me, even though I argued that it had nothing to do with me. Then the friction from the raining matchsticks caused lightning with no thunder that rained like brimstone down on both of us.
When the dust settled, Eric was nowhere to be found. My mind had pretty much hit a limit as to how much it could hold, so I had to regroup and write down everything that had happened in my field notebook, up until the part about creating a crater in the shape of my body profile. Once the events were documented sequentially, on paper, it all made perfect sense. But it wasn’t hard to track him down anyway as he was dragging his full body weight around.
I followed his tracks back to our house. Eric wasn’t in his studio, but there was a self-portrait of him on the wall entitled Self-assured or Self-referential: Take Your Pick. He did this piece back when he took an art class in junior college. I thought it looked more like me than him, but as Eric would point out, this was a sign of immature human nature.
He was still nowhere to be found. Thumbing through a stack of unopened mail on his drafting table, I remembered that he was off fighting a war in the gulf and that he would subsequently become paralyzed. One thing was for sure—before he left, he had really organized and classified everything. I started thumbing through a rack of life-size paintings. I was in the “iconic” section, which were all self-portraits arranged according to date. But this was the only section. Under the typewritten label, Eric had handwritten that “self-portraits are the only things we are justified in painting.”
I felt self-conscious being in his room even though technically we weren’t blood related or vested in each other. Looking back on it, this was right about the time of his fall and subsequent rise. This in turn made me fall.
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Hitting From the Wheelhouse
Derek White
A stout man in a navy blue uniform wades through water to board a skiff that will take him to an anchored ship. He climbs aboard, soaking wet from the waist down. Where he is wet, his navy blue uniform is essentially black. He marches over to another man he presumes is captain and salutes him. His mind is wandering during this ritual, still thinking of the shore he just left behind. I should know because this man in the navy blue uniform is I.
As I’m saluting the captain I am thinking back to better times when I was a little boy in Panama, when I was running through shanty streets and I came across a gang of street urchins who my mother forewarned would beat me up. They were urchins from various ethnic backgrounds. Upon closer inspection I could see they were grabbing arms and forming what at first I thought was a rugby scrum, but ended up being a uniform circle. They would slingshot in towards the center and smash their heads together—then they would recoil and do it all over again. Eventually their arms fused together into one continuous circle.
I continued running through the streets, lost. I found a litter of stray puppies and kept the runt for myself. My feet kept running but I wasn’t going anywhere. When I caught a glimpse of myself from the ship I was now standing on, I realized I was albino. The man I was saluting was calling out my name but I couldn’t hear him. I scanned the insignia on his uniform and realized he was not captain. He informed me I was on the wrong ship and that I had to get back in the water and wade to another. When I got to the other ship (which happened instantaneously this time, after clicking my heels together), the crew was on deck waiting for me. The real captain of that ship had the crew remove my clothes to dry them. They also took my puppy away, saying they could unzip his fur, machine launder it and then zip it back on. All of our human uniforms were the same and interchangeable—one size fits all. Underneath my uniform, my skin was as pink as a doll.
As I stood there naked and dripping, the captain didn’t make eye contact with me, but instead looked at a distant snow-capped peak. I let my teeth noticeably chatter together to emphasize that I was shivering cold. My penis had all but shriveled up into my scrotum. What patches of pubic hair I did have to cover my privates were pointless as my hair was so blonde it was opaque.
“What are we looking at, captain?”
“We are waiting,” he said. “For the enemy.”
“What sea are we on?”
“Enemy Sea.”
“What about the mountain?”
“Mt. Enemy.”
“These are just names you are giving to them on the spot—surely the indigenous must have named them something?”
“We don’t use names around here. Names only spell d-a-n-g-e-r.” The captain brought his binoculars to his eyes and scanned the horizon.
I excused myself and went over to a map to try to find the names for myself, but the map table was littered with girlie magazines—especially the type of glossy publications that juxtaposed girls and motorcycles. I thumbed through the stacks of magazines to try to get to what was underneath and found myself getting aroused. It was a fine line—I wanted to get a little bit excited to unshrivel some and regain my confidence, but at the same time I didn’t want to get so excited that I would pitch a flagpole with no flag to hang.
“The water in the lake is snowmelt from those peaks,” the captain said out of the blue. He turned around and looked at my naked form and it was then that I realized this man was my father. Tears started to well up in my eyes, but he wouldn’t acknowledge who I was. He pricked my finger to take a blood sample that he smeared between two glass slides, then told me to get into the wheelhouse where it was warmer.
“You mean this isn’t the wheelhouse?”
“This is a decoy of the wheelhouse. The real wheelhouse is beneath us.” He kicked a latch with his shiny boot and pulled open a trapdoor he had been standing on this whole time, just waiting for me to ask.
There were three privates in the wheelhouse playing foosball—they asked me if I would complete the foursome. They didn’t seem to mind that I wasn’t dressed. I told them I had never played foosball before, but the little guy I was paired up with kept encouraging me, “keep spinning, you’re bound to hit something.”
I grabbed a handle that controlled four stiff plastic men with red uniforms and blue shorts. All their faces, arms and legs were the same doll-pink as me—on both teams. Each one also had yellow hair. A sticker in the middle of the green plastic field stated, “Hecho en Alemánia.”
I set all four players spinning in unison then grabbed another rod with three players strapped to it. The white ball slipped between all of their feet. I didn’t even see it it moved so fast. The movement of the ball was wobbly on account of the waves.
“That’s not fair,” I objected.
“Just because the ball is larger than a proton doesn’t mean it doesn’t obey the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle,” said player one.
“The more you know about its motion, the less you know about its position on the table,” said player two.
“Hit it right there on the sweet spot,” said player three, my partner. He pointed to the fused feet of the plastic goalie that I was now in control of.
“This man is defective,” I objected.
“Impossible,” said player one.
“All the men on both teams are identical,” said player two.
“They were made from the same mold,” said player three. “This is a team sport after all.”
I looked at the insignia on their uniforms—they were bar-coded and all three read, “PRVT WHITE.” These were my brothers. Right when I realized this I unconsciously spun my men and a cannonball pierced the hull—a real one that rolled to a stop at our feet. We all looked at it for a second, waiting for something to happen. From the cartoons we grew up with, we had an association of a cannonball being an explosive weapon, but nothing of the sort was happening. There was no fuse, but water did start leaking through the hole in the hull.
When the water reached our ankles, the eldest of us brothers asked, “should we bail?”
We all stood standing until the water reached our knees. That’s when the second eldest of us brothers yelled, “women and children first!”
No one moved. When the water reached our waists, the third eldest of us brothers yelled, “man the lifeboats!” But as he said this, we all realized this is what we were already in.
I reached underwater and picked up the cannonball, and realized it wasn’t spherical, but cylindrical. From there it wasn’t hard to extrapolate that it was a can, not a cannonball. The label on the can said, “FATHER = RED HERRING”. But this didn’t stop the water from coming through the hole in the hull it had created in the first place.
Derek White lives in NYC, but hopes to live somewhere else. Before this he lived somewhere else. The pieces herein are from a collection called Poste Restante, which can be ordered from Calamari Press.
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