C4 antho - Chamber Four

~184~ The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology
fire and is happy about life in general. The other dream I
have is about Wesley. He is outside my cabin door and asking
me why I left him to die. I wake up feeling unsure about
my decisions in life. I want to feel like the beaver. I want to
tell the President how I feel, but the President is probably
out on one of his midnight rounds of golf. I try to go back to
sleep, but I can’t. I think about Wesley. One minute, eating
lunch, the next, blood gushing from his bomb-eaten arm. I’ve
eaten a thousand turkey sandwiches and I never got my arm
blown off and died in the desert. If you think about your arm
possibly getting blown off every time you eat a turkey sandwich
you would get summarily fired, or divorced because no
one would understand you and you would live under your
bed fearfully eating turkey sandwiches, or under an old tree
with some talking moles drinking sherry, or move to Islay or
somewhere where turkey sandwiches haven’t been invented
yet.
* * * *
One night when I was younger, the full moon was out
and it made me feel sad and happy at the same time. It was
big and white, but also sort of blue like a corpse. The moon is
probably more powerful than we know, I thought. I probably
thought this because I felt empty inside and was smoking cocaine.
I wanted to make love under the volcanoes to German
au pairs who would say things like, “Anflug das gemuts unt
legen dein schneidel!”
* * * *
Every Christmas, I used to go to Wesley’s Christmas
party at his parents apartment on Central Park West, and