The Contingency of the Changeable

Half-biographical, half-fantasy, this is technically a first chapter of a project I've been working on for a while. This is the story of a struggling young artist and his conversation with his muses.

Chapter 1

The Contingency of the Changeable

Summer sucks in Wisconsin. Even the evenings. After the sun goes down, you’d think it would be less miserable, but the humidity stays, coating everything in a slick sheen. I’m from the Northwest, back in Idaho, where summer is dry, shady, and eighty degrees till the end of September, so I never got used to the heat in Madison; I stay inside as much as I can, unless I’m working, and my life begins at night, when the orange glare of streetlights replaces the inhumane sunshine.

All I really do at night is walk around town, listening to music and smoking. Vasily joins me sometimes; I never see him during the day, but once it’s dark out, I’ll hear a clatter of elderly wings and a rough croak as he hops off a telephone wire or tree branch to perch on my shoulder. He’s a filthy bird, always ridden with something, always asking for a drag of my cigarette, always looking for something dead to eat or valuable to steal. Since I’m nominally alive and poor as s**t, I’m safe from his scavenging, which makes us friends, I suppose.

He’s awfully unbalanced tonight, lurching from side to side and digging into my shoulder with his blunted talons. “Jesus, Vasily, enough. You’ll draw blood.”

He chuckles, then coughs, then swears. “This heat, Osip,” he grates. “It’s too much.”

“You shouldn’t smoke so much,” I offer, tossing him my cigarette. He leans to catch it, tearing my shirt a little in the process.

“Why not?” he asks, tendrils of smoke wafting from the slits of the top of his beak.

“Well, you’re a bird, for one thing. And you’re getting old.”

Vasily harrumphs. “The first one is no good reason. And I’ll be dead soon anyway. So I think I keep smoking.”

I shrug, and he nearly falls. “You old f**k,” I gasp. “You’re killing me up there.”

“You sound like child, mysh.”

I spark my lighter, and after a few tries, it lights a fresh cigarette. “You’re probably not even real. Who ever heard of a talking crow?”

“I am more real than stupid lisa you live with. Stop with talk of real and fake, it makes my poor head hurt.”

“Mephistopheles is a roommate, and he is real. You leave him alone.”

He chuckles at that. “He pay you rent?”

“He gets food, fixes the television, and keeps pests out. More that you ever do.”

Vasily makes an odd choking noise, the one he makes when he’s pretentiously outraged. “I give advice! I tell you how to deal with those girlish boys who never stay. I keep you company while he drinks and sleeps in gutters with cheap shluykhami. I have wisdom, mysh, and I give that free.”

I wince at the thought of Mephistopheles’ nocturnal habits. He’s a genius composer and writer, but sleazy as they come. “Wisdom? You’ve destroyed the majority of my relationships.”

“They weren’t good enough for you. You should thank me.”

I roll my eyes and keep walking, the smoke from our cigarettes mingling and pouring in slim trails behind us. It’s mid-July, and colder weather seems so far away; I can’t even imagine what the sharp winter wind from the lake feels like anymore. Ahead, cars streak a freeway overpass with smudges of light, businessmen heading to suburbs from the Capitol, parents, teenagers, lovers, all of them going somewhere while I wait, life paused, beneath a concrete arch. I stand there for a moment, hair too long, shirt secondhand, wondering when I stopped being a part of everything, or if I ever was. Will I ever be?

“I’m lonely, Vasily.”

“Nonsense,” the old crow sneers, dragging the word through his rotted avian lungs. “You have me, you have your… room-mate, you have the utyatas. Why do you feel alone?”

“Maybe it’s not about being alone. Maybe it’s about wanting to be with the right people.” Suddenly aware of how dramatic I sound, I toss my fuming cigarette butt and add, in a grumbling tone, “And you’re all animals. Probably imaginary ones.”

Vasily drops his butt down the back of my shirt and I yelp when the burning filter scorches my back. “Again, with the reality. Be happy we put up with you, mysh. Not many others would listen to your complaining all night long.”

“I’m not complaining.”

“You cry like infant. Never happy unless we give you attention. You always look for other things, and never appreciate what you have.” He coughs again, a sort of rattling whistle. “The utyatas are growing, and soon they will need you more. You will have to listen to them complain and struggle with this life we have. There are others in the world besides you, and all of us have to take care of someone.”

“I suppose you’re right,” I say with a sigh. “I’m being selfish.”

“Yes,” Vasily agrees. “Now give me cigarette.”

I light up another one and hand it to him. My shirt is soaked with sweat, and my earphones clatter as they swing from side to side in time with my steps. We pass construction areas girded with chain-link, great darkened cranes, and broken bottles that I kick aside with the toe of my worn-out Converse high-tops; Vasily flutters occasionally, or wheezes as he inhales the spicy tobacco smoke. These sights, smells, sensations, are my life. This is everything that’s familiar and right anymore.

“Why haven’t you been writing? I miss your stories,” Vasily says, after a while.

“Nothing to write, I guess.”

“That is s**t, and you know it. Your head is full of stories, all these worlds that no one else has seen. It is your job, mysh. You have to.”

I sigh in frustration, running my fingers through my sweaty hair. “The stories are there, but that doesn’t mean I can write them. Most of the time they’re stuck in my mind and I can’t get them out.”

“Ask that dog you live with. He knows things about writing, even if he is filth.”

“I don’t know how he does it. He writes sonatas, and treatises. He drinks all day and f***s all night, but still manages to make so many things. We’re different, and it’s hard to talk to him about it. I don’t think he even knows how it happens.”

Vasily settles a bit with a half-flap. “I have heard his music from the window. He has great pain, and the best art comes from pain. I know you have been hurt before, and there is much pain in your past. Use it.”

“Use it how?”

“You are the artist, that is up to you. But wandering around this s**t city at night with me won’t make your stories on paper. Put the things that hurt you in words.”

I have no idea how to respond. His advice is good, but it does nothing to alleviate the block of frustration that’s settled in my forehead. So I grunt in reply, light a cigarette, and start walking toward home.

“Were you ever in love, Vasily?” I ask, crossing a one-way side street.

“Who hasn’t been?” he asks in return.

I shrug. “I don’t know if I ever have. No one ever stays around long enough for me to love them.”

“How many, mysh?”

“What?”

“How many of those boys have you been with?”

“Five. If you count the last one,” I say, snorting a little at the memory. First date, and he asked if I’d like to join him and his wife in a threesome.

“Five. That is nothing. The world is full of billions, and more come along every day. You have bad luck, yes, but you need to wait. These men are children on the inside, walking around with empty souls, looking for things that will never matter. You have songs in your heart and stars in your eyes, and none of them can love you, because they know they aren’t the same.”

I shrug and he almost falls off my shoulder. “So I’m supposed to just wait?">“No. Make your art. Sing your songs. It will bring them. The right ones, the ones you can love, they will hear it. Maybe you never find somebody who stays, but you will love.” He sighs. “Everyone loves, myshka.”

We’re on my street now, a narrow, crooked thing with potholes haphazardly patched with asphalt blobs. Cheap apartment buildings lean against elderly sagging duplexes, and a mesh spiderweb of telephone wires cross each other in the sky above at impossible angles. It’s not a bad neighborhood, really. Not much crime, just tired people trying to get by. My neighbors and I have a silent pact: we leave each other the f**k alone. It works pretty well, I’d say.

Vasily is somehow asleep on my shoulder. His steady, wheezing snore has become the cadence to which I walk, slowly, down the shattered sidewalk to my front door. “Wake up, Vasily,” I say, jolting my shoulder upwards.

He snorts and grumbles something in Russian, then leaps down onto the fence in front of the house.

“Goodnight,” I say, opening the gate.

“Get some sleep,” he grumbles. “Or better, write something.”

“I will when I’m ready. Leave me alone.” I walk up the short path to my front door, a peeling-paint portal to my tiny world. “Thanks for listening, Vasily. See you tomorrow.”

He doesn’t respond. I walk into the house, closing the door behind me just as the sun begins to creep above the corroded skyline.

My house is tiny. There’s a kitchen, two bedrooms, a living room, and a cellar the size of a closet. I keep it pretty clean, but it still always manages to look dingy. The carpeting is stained in a million places, a constellation of blackout booze-spill mementos; most of them are from Mephistopheles’ parties, but I know I’ve contributed more than my fair share. The coffee table is littered with a few rolled dollar bills, and a few fresh lines of snow scream for attention against the dark, scuffed wood.

I roll my eyes and check under the table. Sure enough, there’s a faded orange pile of fur wrapped around a bottle of Tanqueray, gently rising and falling in the pulse of fitful sleep. “Hey,” I whisper, reaching out and shaking him gently. “Mephistopheles. Wake up.”

He grumbles and chokes a little, then wraps himself tightly around the bottle, white-tipped tail flicking at the carpeting.

“Hey,” I say again, shaking him harder. “Come on. Get your a*s in bed.”

Mephistopheles lunges forward, snapping at my hand. I pull back quickly. He’s on all fours, crouching, tensed, growling. His yellow vulpine eyes are bloodshot, cracked with streaks of red, radiating a single emotion.

“Come on. You’ll feel better tomorrow if you’re sleep in your bed.”

“Joe,” he says, slowly, each syllable stretching. “I’m. Working. F**k. Off.”

“You’re drunk, d****t. And you left coke all over the coffee table. Oh, and most of my gin is gone.”

He sits back, swaying, and laughs. “Creativity. I’m writing. This is how it’s done.”

I raise an eyebrow skeptically.

“You, you don’t understand, you just write down feelings and call it art. Real creativity, you gotta shock it, beat it out, kick it in the gut until it crawls out of its hole. This is writing. This is art, and if it scares you, you’ll never going to get- you’re never… I don’t know. What time is it?” he squints, then shakes, coughs, and sniffs hard, making a face.

“Almost 6 AM.”

“Let me sleep.” He slumps against the bottle again, and it falls over, cheap liquor sloshing against the glass.

I sigh and stand up, stretching my back. There’s an old Starbucks gift card on the table, and I use it to scrape the cocaine back into its plastic bag. I stuff it into my pocket, then look back down at the old fox, drooling and kicking in his sleep under the coffee table. “Goodnight,” I whisper, wishing I could talk to him tonight.

I close the blinds against the stark morning sunlight, fix the scattered couch cushions, and walk to my room. I undress, tossing my clothes into the hamper. My sheets are already sticky with humidity, and my back is still soaked in sweat. I wish I could shower, but the water won’t be on until tomorrow. Forgot to pay the bill on Monday.

I light my last cigarette of the night, then lay back against the headboard, counting the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling. Still sixty-two of them. Smoke wafts around me, and I finally close my eyes.

Sleep comes eventually.