A piece of Cardboard
My lawyer, a poor, cheap man who wore little and knew little, knocked on the door of my run-down apartment with a forlorn expression slicked across his plasticine face.
“Are you Mr. Frauk?” He pulled out a card, offered his rubber-gloved hands, but I refused. He offered it again, but I pushed it away and smiled in false respect.
“Mr. Frauk?”, the lawyer repeated in his ancient German accent.
“Frank”, I paused, and beckoned him in, “My name is Frank. What is this about?”
“Mr… Frauk”, his lips curled as he grimaced to pronounce my name,” Frauk, Frank, Frauk… Nonetheless, I’m here because of a recent uncle of your kin. If I remember him properly, his name is Drew Trijark.”
“Trark”, I repeated, but in a different accent, mocking him somewhat.
“Trark, Trijark, Trark… But what I wanted to talk to you about is his inheritance”, my lawyer paused as if in sadness and contemplation, turned away, hiding his motionless expression. He stiffened upwards, showing his pale, facile features, and continued, “Drew is dead. Yesterday his heart stopped. I’m sorry if it seems difficult-”
“You mean…His inheritance?… What is in his inheritanc-…”, I paused in the realization of what I had said, coughed in embarrassment. I smiled again and continued in a different direction, “I’m sorry, I meant his-”
“Not much of something that matters. But his loss must be a significant burden.”, my lawyer said quickly, rubbing his rubbery fingers in fast spurts so that some of the outer coatings of his gloves peeled away.
“No, no, no, I meant something else. Not his inheritance. He was a great uncle, someone that I admired.”, I nodded.
My words were blunt and quick, having their effect, and my lawyer nodded along with me. He didn’t talk for a few seconds, quietly repeating my actions. Then, he continued with his talk.
“Tomorrow is his funeral. And, as you are one of his few relatives. You will be slowly preceding along…”, my lawyer mumbled, continuing in his droning response, as I thought about his inheritance.
An RV, with windows of peeling glass, two flat tires, and two missing tires. Barely anybody around the place except my uncle. He lived in the deeper parts of California. But the inheritance? I remembered a bookshelf, some boxes, and food lying everywhere. Broken glass lying in the dust. Picture frames swinging in the tilting, rusty, smelly, junk-filled place. Fumes of chemical waste pouring into the air. Burnt skeletons of dead cars and dead places filled the place. The carcass of a dead cow drying in the sun, a raisin in the dust.
“His… inheritance?”, I mumbled in thought. My lawyer turned around suddenly.
“What?”
“Hrmmm?”, I straightened.”Oh, nothing, nothing, thinking to myself”
I tapped my forehead, in hopes that he would understand, and also nodded.
He nodded along with me again. Then, he continued with his long monologue.
“It was a shame that he died at the young age of…. I don’t understand whenever, whence, or when, but… “, and my lawyer went on and on about everything my uncle had done and what my uncle had achieved, although there were thousands of men like him. All pale-faced and unoriginal as he was. Eccentric, demeaning, isolated, wiry, and thin. All of them had let the wind softly blow them away.
He looked at his watch, while his lawyer looked through the window into a drowned and polluted city, full of the scarred people, and the smog of the sharp chimney-stacks.
“His inheritance”, I listened to those words. My lawyer paused, silence ensued. I smiled at him and he continued, “His inheritance… It seems that you… “
My lawyer paused, almost shaking his head before jerking it up and down. His forehead filled with sweat, his eyes gone of excitement.
“An RV. Yes, that is it… And something else specific… Something of utmost importance, a chunk of cardboard. I have it here.”
The sound of cars drowned out the slight twitch of my leg and the sudden emptiness in my mind. I coughed, and straightened myself, alertness hiding my limp form.
A box appeared, an old McDonalds container. Red Sharpie marker scribbled across the top, and I opened it.
A chunk of cardboard lay inside, resting neatly in the confinements of the box.
I nearly dropped it. But I managed to balance it between my limp, twitching, fingers as I took out a disappointing piece of cardboard shaped like California. Limp, wet, ragged edges. I observed it for a while. Looking at what made it special. But it was a bulk of soft brown. Nothing else. The image of the disappointing thing burned into my retina until it left a purple trail.
“Mr. Frauk”, my lawyer said, “In a rambling letter, which I cannot discern well enough, he stated that he wished for you to have it for various reasons. The first of which…”
He talked further on about the rules in my uncle’s chaotic chicken-scratch. I listened as attentively as I could, but eventually could not keep my eyes open after the third rule about carefully keeping track of the piece of cardboard and et cetera…and et cetera… I collapsed on the couch, closing my eyes, as my lawyer moved his thin lips, and kept talking. Talking and talking, talking… talking… Droning on and on about my uncle and his eccentricities. His rules, his insanity, his mind, his brain.
After my lawyer left, I sat on my moth-ridden couch and chewed on some gas-station jerky.
My uncle was one of the worst of the worst of eccentrics. The lowliest of the low. The pale, disgusting man of the desert. A hermit. He also had something hidden in his RV. But most likely a gem from the trash heap. The carapace of a beetle. The horns of a deer. A rotting carrot. He collected everything, hoarded them.
He was our uncle. The one who I had stayed with once. He had fed me nothing, locked me in the bedroom, while he went into that hidden and locked room, gone. Where it contained the only thing that he accepted in his world and his reality.
But, I kept the box, the cardboard, inside a cupboard in my home, where it lay filling up the space of my home. Eventually, the dust-covered it up, until it lay covered in a shroud of white.
Two years later, I took the box with me, uncovered the contents, as I lay in the streets of Los Angeles. The blaring buzz of the helicopter blades. The squealing rubber of cars. Around me, the police yelled through sirens that drowned out the gunshots and yells.
I lay in the middle of it all. Drunk, dazed, confused. Mumbling about money, casino chips, and the white foam of the beer.
Again, I had gambled most of my Stash, after recycling thousands of plastic bottles and working for the police. Again and again, I was broke, sobering up, and deeply in trouble.
“Heck… Oh hell…. Oh god….”, I wiped my dry eyes, rubbed my cheeks to clean my dirty face, and drank a sip of the Martini the casino had given me before kicking me out. My cardboard sign requesting bottle caps was gone, stolen by the wind.
“Oh god… Oh god… Oh god…”
Maybe there was something I had left. Something great. Something nice. Something worth selling. Something from my evicted apartment. I looked in my ragged bag, nearly empty, and saw the McDonalds Container and the piece of cardboard. My uncle again. His RV, all in the middle of the desert. Two years later, this was all I had. My lawyer had long abandoned me. The funeral had long passed. A piece of cardboard and a McDonald’s Big Mac container was all that I had in my memory.
The police siren blared louder. A car squealed and burst into the alleyway. Blackjacks unsheathed themselves from fat pockets. Now, they were evicting and kicking out the homeless people from the alleyway.
The chain-like fence crashed down, I heard a dog bark, and a gun cock ready. People were yelling around me. The residents of the apartment ran out of their houses. People cried, others screamed, and then silence, as the dogs ran forward and they all ran for their lives.
I hopped over the fence, landed into the leaves, and ran toward the highway. My heart pounded, I sprinted onto the highway. Gone was my luck, gone was everything.
Then, there was only one place to go. My uncle’s RV in Los Dep. A two-day walk under the fiery sun of California.
I hitchhiked for days, grew stubble, and gave conversation to fat, bald, truckers, while the sun beat upon my back and I looked upon the barren plains of gold. Nobody. Nobody. I could only see the heat streaming into the empty caves, and watched the sun turn animals and plants inside out, shriveling them up, and roasting me alive.
I saw nothing for a moment, as I stood in the emptiness of the shade, observing the silence.
The RV croaked suddenly, its carapace shedding rust into the wind, as I stumbled into the door, and relished the junkyard before me.
A home, mine now, empty of junk, cleaned, vacuumed, bare. No more furniture, only slight stains on the carpet. Quietly, the plumbing echoed through the thin walls, emptying waste forever and ever, even after my uncle’s death.
I walked around, circling the place, noticing the empty kitchen, looking for money in nooks and crannies. But instead, there were only rusted forks, bent straws, ketchup packets, and neatly organized piles of dirt. There were labels on each of the cabinets, each saying something random in my uncle’s chicken scratch. Thousands of cabinets opened along with their half-rotting wheels, as I searched for something: food, money. Thousands of useless things piled up in aging warped shapes, gone to memory, existing in the compartments of my uncle’s RV.
After a while of searching, I opened my bag and searched for that piece of cardboard. For that piece of cardboard that might lead to something, a bag of money, some strange inheritance money, anything, to leave me in peace, and leave me be, so that I could buy more and more sweet wine and those casino chips that had jewel-encrusted edges. Glorious things.
But, there was no clue, nothing that made sense. I bizarrely tried to figure out what it could do, but found nothing, saw nothing, heard nothing, smelled nothing, only a piece of cardboard shaped like California, remained.
Perhaps, I could sell the RV, go back on the road alone, and make a fortune in the casinos. Slot: All Cherries, Everything: Money. That glorious cold, green cash. Money, money, money, money. The thousands spent to make millions, investing it all in the machine that ran out fortune after fortune, and small loss after small loss.
I took out the cabinets, snapping out the small wheels, and slamming them onto the table. One by one, the contents, wheels of a toy car, knives, plates, coins, and more, shook, quivered, and then dropped into a motionless sleep.
I poured them out, the sound like a thousand grains of sand pouring onto the ground as I looked for a solution, looked for money, looked for useful things.
Unfortunately, as I was looking at the cardboard to the sun, something clicked behind a wall. A compartment slid forth, and a weak wooden twig bent a panel sideways to reveal a great orange light. I looked into the darkness and visibly shook at what I saw.
Muffled gunfire burst forth from the thin whorls of a portal. Soldiers ran past and away, factories weighed heavy against the bloody ground, smoke curled around the lungs of humanity, ribs poked through the sagging skin, and money burnt in giant droves, bursting like oil from the ground. The green paper fluttered past in every direction, existing everywhere, floating effortlessly in the wind.
Ropes and pulleys pulled and stretched the panels onto the floor, where forks combined and meshed together like cogwheels. Rust crept slowly around, fringing the wooden panels made of popsicle sticks. Billboards of cork board and cardboard meshed to form a giant wall of rambling words. Theories, ideas, anything, to explain the world itself in another place, another time, another century.
Words fluttered in the smog, banners rippled and struck at the wall, and red spattered the walls in great lettering. Warning. Quiet. Stop. Soldiers. Death. Guns. Money. Future…Gone…The infinite letters warped heavily from the invisible heat of the engines within the portal. But they rambled on forever. Randomly, inconsistently, and forever and ever.
But, the money. God, the money. In piles, in droves, and that is all I saw. The green bills, exact money, piles, and piles. I could jump in there, avoid the gunfire, grab all the money I could. Or, starve to death in the RV, with nothing.
I approached cautiously at first, with my hands ready. Sneaking in, then leaping forward into the portal, the heat searing into my flesh, and I jumped into the wet mud. The sounds of gunfire grew tenfold, screams of people echoed, fires burnt through iron barrels, and signs wept of A Brave New World in Mexico.
The pits of money grew larger by the minute, pouring money forth faster and faster. I grabbed them, the bundles of green cash, saw the people around me, soldiers in gas masks, helicopters shooting thousands of rounds onto them all.
“Die! Die! Die!”, said a man firing a machine gun into a building. I ran away, toward the portal, but it was gone. Invisible. The fire blazed continuously forth, while I looked around, scrambled about in the mud, and finally appeared in the RV again. With hundreds and thousands of dollars, with nothing but a future of money, food, drink, casino chips, and more. Thousands and hundreds of dollars lay, a fortune. All the money in the world, tripled by time, the casino held it all. Soon… Soon…
I lay the bills against the ground and counted them slowly. I stacked the bills against each other, organized them, and counted over a hundred thousand dollars. A hundred thousand dollars.
“Over a hundred thousand dollars have been stolen from the Los Angeles Government Offices. Police are looking for a suspect with black hair…”, and so on and so on. The radio I had bought earlier rambled about the news. The car I had bought earlier rumbled and spun towards the Christmas Casino, where Santa gave free drinks and a blizzard of money flew everywhere. I held the stacks of cash in his hand and walked into the casino.
A waitress greeted me, I gave her a bundle of cash. I was led to the machines.
Cash went into the slot, money flew out. I drank and drank the slimy beer and the slick vodka. Laughed, cheered, and made fortune after fortune, loss after loss. Loss after loss. People crowded around me. I lent them money, threw it up into the air, and was carried by them. Stern faces appeared. The alleyway stood, full of dust, brick, trash. Pain rushed into his spine. People. People. People. Money. Money. Money.
How did I get into the alleyway again?
“Oh, god!.. Oh, God!…. Oh god!…”
Where was my money, where were my drinks, where were the casino chips? The people were laughing, all around me. But where was I? How did I get here? Here? How?
“Oh god!…. God… God….”, I sat in the alleyway, with a glass, a martini, a couple of bucks, and a stinging pain in my head. I wondered where I was, remembering that I had driven a car here.
But, everything had gone, a flash, a wince of pain in my head. All gone! All gone!
But I had a chance. The RV, that was right. Full of money, the portal, back home, with his car. I would go back, teach them a lesson or two. Show them my money. Get a fortune. Buy a mansion! Get rich, die young! Everything!
I sprinted toward the parking lot and discovered it empty. No car. No casino anywhere to be found. Where was I? Where was I? Where had they taken me?
I bumped past people, to the highway, caught a ride, and went back to my RV, my uncle’s place, where money was water, and everything was logical. Even the portal that was hidden behind a piece of cardboard.
I walked into the RV, shut the door, held up the piece of cardboard to the sun.
The panel slid open, quicker than before, as I slowly felt something drop. Bullet holes, multiple, had pierced the cogs, split the ropes. Perhaps, the last time that the panel would hide someone.
I readied myself, spread my legs apart, had my hands ready. Jumped up, ran into the-
A siren hit the air, cars drove up to the RV. People… Talking all around me… Guns cocked… The police… The police… They surrounded the place, everywhere. Where was I to run? Where was I to-
The police! The police! The boots crushing the wooden steps, axes breaking into the iron hull. Death… Death… Death… Prison, the dead prisoners, the dead men, the work, the labor, the death penalty, the money, the judge, the lawyer, the people, the future. God! God! Money, police, death, taxes, the government, guns, war. God! God!
“Hands up! Get down, we have you under citizen’s arrest for robbery! We have evidence from a certain Casino! Open up! Open up!”
“I didn’t do that! The money was from somewhere else! I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it!”, I cried out, hopelessly. Waving my hands, crying out these words over and over again.,
They didn’t listen. Someone kicked at the door, a crowbar tried to wrench it open, but I saw the cogs that contained it there and saw the chance for my escape- into the portal.
Someone fired a potshot at me, it ricocheted off the ceiling. Hurriedly, I scrambled into the cramped space of the secret room. People were yelling my name, some wanted money, most wanted me arrested. Rubberneckers watched on the road. More guns fired, wood splintered. I felt the hot sting of the bullet.
I crawled into the panel, pushed it into its place behind me, and then went into the portal. Crawled into the cramped space, suffocated in the portal’s energy, survived, landed… Landed…
Heat seared my back, pain rushed through my body. The bullet hole rotted in the harsh sunlight. The mud clung to my clothes. Soldiers surrounded me, I saw my face on thousands of others. A light glowed a candle in the dark emptiness. Everywhere, there was nothing. I was dead, I was alive. The pain burnt me up in a terrifying inferno.
I thought about my uncle, I thought about the money, I thought about the people. I wondered if I was stuck. I wondered if I was dead.
The flags around me burnt with a yellow flame, the soldiers themselves had their guns ready, I was dead. I saw myself again, my face, a flag, my uncle, my memories leaking out, dripping in the form of clotted blood.
But wait! Something else! I was not dead yet. But I would not be alive much longer.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
.
