by Jason File
Editor’s note: the following is an excerpt from Jason File’s debut novel, The Axis of Praxis, available now for purchase in .PDF or paperback at lulu.com.
The directions Dan gave me were simple: get off the freeway at Trona, there’s only one exit, make a right at the gas station, hang a left at the next street, and his house would be down at the end of the block. I expected to find him living in a modest English Tudor. Instead, I was greeted with the reason for some real estate developer’s bankruptcy: an entire small community of near-deserted track homes. Dan’s house was an emotionless rectangle among them. I could only pick out two or three other houses on the block that were occupied. The rest were boarded up, or had signs staked in the lawn, pleading with no one to call and make an offer. There was one Yucca plant in the center of Dan’s dirt lawn, growing at a sharp right angle, as if it too had given up and was trying to leave this place. I put my clothes back on in the empty street, collected a few personal belongings, and stretched before heading up to the house. Dan opened the door as I approached. The first thing I noticed was the handlebar mustache.
“Ah, how now Michael?” He was wearing a dirty-white, thrift shop t-shirt. It was sweat stained from too many rotations under the harsh desert sun. It said something on the breast but various letters were worn out and gone, now wandering somewhere in the Mojave.
“I’m good,” I told Dan, smiling.
“Aye, truthfully I am most glad to see you.” He seemed almost overly relaxed, the way he moved, and the slow delivery of his words. Even his sandy blond hair seemed to fall to his shoulders in a sort of collective sigh. We went inside the sparse house and he sat down. I watched his body as it conformed perfectly to an old, tired recliner.
“Looks like a nice place you have here.” My eyes went first to the bookshelf in the corner of the room, where I noticed a lonely Complete Works of William Shakespeare sitting on its side, tattered and well thumbed. There was not much else. A wooden desk, doubling as a dining table, was off in the shadows of another room. I was sitting on Dan’s mattress, where an architect had intended a couch.
“I tell you,” he said glancing around. “’Tis a fair and good house. ‘Twas a matter of convenience that I came to posses such a handsome home.”
“Then you like it out here?”
“Yes,” he affirmed after a second, thinking. “I find it a most natural setting, one that lofts the mind and soul higher than possible in other places where they’re hindered by the folly of incalculable distractions.” He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. I remembered how Dan and I used to drive to San Francisco for the weekend whenever we could get the chance. We would go to parties and clubs and try to dance with pretty girls and he would always do most of the talking for us. He was very charismatic then.
“So why the decision to start talking like Bill Shakespeare? Not that I don’t like it. I just sort of thought you’d been fucking with me in all those letters.”
“My voice, like so many things under the heavens, hath simply exhausted its own well. I grew tired of the ceremony and fashion of exercising it.” He managed to say this with a completely straight face.
“Uh huh,” I gulped.
“So I, being much prepared to forfeit my audience, did transfer my address to less crowded lands, where the implorators could not distract me so.”
“I had no idea you were so fed up with everything.”
He laughed and it threw me off. With his words spoken in such a theatrical way I didn’t expect such an innocent and normal laugh. Then I yawned and Dan did in reflex and both of us smiled. We talked for a while longer. I updated him about all of his old friends and the girls he used to date. He giggled and nodded through it all, before telling me about the desert and how he didn’t mind being a local weirdo and also how Shakespeare made more sense to him in the middle of nowhere, how it was in effect its own world.
“My eyes do inform me that you grow tired,” he then observed. He was right. I did feel tired. I realized I hadn’t slept much in the last two days. “We shall speak more upon the morn.’”
“That sounds good,” I said. I got off his bed and pulled out my sleeping bag, but I didn’t get in. Still hot from absorbing a day’s worth of sun, I stayed on top. “’Night Dan.”
“Parting is such sweet sorrow,” he said, his voice then adapting a perfect English accent. He still had his fucking humor.
I slept in on the carpet that was begging to be replaced, its thousands of tiny frays having been worn stiff, stubborn, and stained by old owners. It was no longer white, more a dirty beige, having taken the color of its desert surroundings. It felt like a hardwood floor and though it was uncomfortable. I kept forcing myself to sleep.
I woke up late in the morning, glancing around, and noted the empty mattress with a note lying on top, written on the back of an old utility bill. Pulling myself up from my sleeping bag, which had become in this weather an unnecessary invention, I walked over and grabbed the note, sweating and groggy. Light pushed the window to its limits, gushing and illuminating the house. The note informed me in iambic pentameter that Dan would be at the gas station working a twelve-hour shift and that I could meet him there whenever I wanted or just do my own thing.
I spent the first half of the day in my underwear, in the backyard. I sat under the roof overhang of the house, draped in shade. According to the old thermometer that was nailed to the exterior of the house, it was still over 100 degrees where I sought refuge,. I had stocked a small Styrofoam cooler from inside the house with beers that Dan had in his fridge. I drank these beers until I was drunk and then sat in the backyard and watched the lizards sprint across the sandy lawn. There was a whole aerobic regiment going on in my presence, consisting of both short and long distance running, along with a rigorous series of push-ups that the lizards performed in the direct sunlight. They had to be in good shape. They probably had some of the better lizard stamina in the world. No human sounds disrupted this lizard world. The street was as quiet as it was when I arrived last night. If Dan actually had any neighbors they wouldn’t be coming outside unless their house caught on fire; that was the only way I could imagine things getting any hotter.
It was strange but the longer I watched the backyard, the more I saw Sophia sleeping in my bed. I saw the coast and my house with Steve dog-earing a page in some book, whistling out loud at some profound passage he had just decoded. But somehow the longer I stared into the backyard, the more I felt removed from the last few years. Time magnified while sitting in that blank yard. The people, the environment, everything I saw in my head seemed so dated, almost inconsequential now. It would be possible and easy to sit here forever, I thought, watching these memories parade by in this vacuous heat. For a second I became sure I was disappearing. Out here there were no references to my normal life. I could hear the faint gusts of wind perfectly, the sand scraping across the patio. The million distractions that would have overwhelmed this back home had all been stripped away. I soon fell asleep.
I awoke to find that the shadow of the roof had retreated and that my feet had become exposed to the sun. I wasn’t sure how long I had been baking there but my feet had turned a painful shade of red. The burn reached up to my ankles, where the skin faded back to white, and then red again on my thighs, from the drive yesterday. Shit, I thought, observing my increasing resemblance to a candy cane. I twisted this development around in my mind and decided to take it as a sign; it was time to go inside, get dressed, and head down to Dan’s work. I contemplated staying in my underwear, wondering if I would actually see another person in town.
I was no longer drunk but could still feel the alcohol in my blood, driving down to the gas station. Big surprise, I became the only car in the lot upon pulling up. Dan must have taken a bike, I thought.
I walked into the dusty Snack Center of the gas station and observed him sitting behind a clear plastic wall, hunched over a notebook. Candy, cigarettes, and cheap trinkets of the desert surrounded him. He had the stereo turned up fairly loud, over the humming air conditioner, and he was writing with his head bobbing up and down, keeping time to an obscure song from a punk album I knew I had heard but could no longer name.
“Am I your first potential customer today?” I asked.
He looked up calmly and smiled, closing his notebook and scratching the back of his head with a pencil.
“The third, my friend. Already, your visit makes thrice.”
“Slow day?”
“For the summer, this day is expected. Few travelers possess such strange will as to deposit their soul in this unrelenting location.”
“Makes sense,” I said, thinking about myself. “So is there any tour I need to take of the town or what about sights to see?”
“The heart of the town, when observed from the corner of this business, can be appreciated properly.” He pointed outside to the far corner of the station, near the posted prices of gasoline.
“Be back in a second,” I said. The doors slid open and the heat rushed in, before it was banned. I was left with it outside. After releasing a beer-flavored yawn, I walked to the corner of the gas station and looked downtown.
Two identical stucco strip-malls mirrored each other, flowing along the road, until they abruptly ended and gave the desert back. There were tall steel poles with business signs attached to the tops, various logos, and a single two-story building with faux-colonial Spanish architecture that anchored the town. A minimum amount of dusty cars lined the boulevard. You had to have a hobby out here, I thought. The opportunity for social stimulation looked challenging. I stood at the top of the town in some frayed shorts and one of my dad’s old t-shirts. I felt my mind emptying, reflecting the expansive scene in front of me. I spotted my second tumbleweed, shook myself out of my momentary stupor, and turned to head back inside.
Back in the Snack Center I found a chair by the booth to fill out lottery tickets.
“Michael, if you desire anything which lies in these four walls, make haste and prey upon it.”
“Is that all right?”
“Aye, the lord of this business is a foppish man whose liver runs sour from too much drink. A rascal who takes no notice of goods which are stolen and unaccounted for. ‘Tis never any theft, so I bear the duty of assuring the disappearance of a minimum of goods.”
I told Dan “Thanks” and grabbed a bean and cheese burrito, then placed it in the microwave. I took a cherry Coke from the large wall-sized refrigerator. After preparing my meal I sat with a dirty magazine near the Lotto booth. Dan returned to writing in his notebook and we listened to the stereo. After eating I looked over every periodical in the place. If I got bored I would go around the store eating candy bars that had the texture of a long life lived on the shelf.
A customer came in two hours after I had arrived at the gas station. He walked up to the counter, put a twenty down, and told Dan he wanted the gas on Number Three. Dan nodded and the man left. One more car came through the station right before Dan closed and together we secured the building, turning off some lights and setting the alarm. We got out into the evening and enjoyed the falling temperature. I followed Dan back to the house, he on his bike and me in my car.
?
Jason File is an MFA student at San Francisco State University. He invites you to visit his website, www.nomorebummers.net, to learn more about The Axis of Praxis, available for purchase now on lulu.com in .PDF or paperback.
photo by Cosmic Spanner
