Jackson Culpepper O’ Malley It is 10:23 and fifteen, sixteen, seventeen seconds when I walk down the hall, that Stephen King’s The Shining hall that goes on forever and has the empty elevator shaft at the end, boarded up like zombies were on the other side. Room 919 and now it is 10:23 and fifty-three seconds, almost 10:24. I still arrived too early, should’ve sat in the car listening to the talk radio for another four minutes, they were talking about Marilynne Robinson. Inside it smells like expensive coffee, like a big chain bookstore with the bistro up front. O’ Malley grinds it every morning and puts it in his press. His real name is Chris but he tells everyone to call him O’ Malley. His last name is Musselwite which may or be Irish but I think it isn’t. O’ Malley, Chris, sits in front of and two to the right of me in English 441, Intro to Southern Literature. O’ Malley wears frayed tweed pants and jackets, a vest almost every day with a watch chain snaking into its pockets. His hair is curly, an eagle’s nest over his head. I say eagle’s nest because if I say robin’s nest or blue jay’s nest you will think of something small, so I will instead say eagle’s nest, which can sway its tree back and forth in the wind. O’ Malley’s beard comes and goes between thick sideburns. (This kind of description is more or less futile. If I were good, I could sum O’ Malley up in a passing phrase, tell you he likes q-tips or something, and have a scene of him cleaning his ears ritualistically in the mirror. I’ve already ruined the one-shot description deal, but I’ll make a second attempt at it with this:) He smokes a churchwarden pipe between classes at the Humanities building. O’ Malley’s roommate, Brian, sits on the couch staring at the TV. Every few seconds it flips to a different channel, one of the four they get on rabbit-ears. Doesn’t that bother you, Brian? You get used to it. Alright. Dialogue: “Like this?” or like this? Not even capitalized, just indented. Cormac pulls it off but he makes it look easier than it is. I could confuse you, right Brian? You could confuse, said Brian. “What are you talking about?” He stares at me. I retreat to the kitchen. Connected to the kitchen (the very small kitchen) is another bedroom where O’ Malley’s other roommate, also named Chris (although the second Chris was content to be called simply Chris)
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lives. Chris, the second one, has his door open and is doing tai chi movements in an army green kilt with no shirt. During the day he tends to disappear. Try as we might, none of us ever noticed a man in a kilt the rest of the day, as noticeable as a man in a kilt might be. You may have the impression, after these blocky and uncreative descriptions, that I am good friends with these people. I am somewhat. I know them, at least enough to know that Brian majors in mechanical engineering but seems always unconcerned with the coursework for mechanical engineering, and that Chris the second, if you can get him to sit down, will talk for hours about almost anything you bring up and may or may not keep marijuana somewhere in that bedroom, and that O’ Malley’s real name is Chris (the first) Musselwite. They are the characters, the setting is some college apartment building for which you are substituting the creepiest example of the kind you personally remember. Or, if you’re in a hurry and reading this at a bus stop then you might mistakenly think we’re all in the hotel from the The Shining and you’re waiting for one of us to go at the others with an axe. The plot, so far, has been the initial exposition, which I have unfortunately gone about in a boring, mechanical way. Now that you know who and where, there has to be a what, why and how. The how, to get back to the actual story (or experience, or story of experience, or experience of story) is that O’ Malley sits one ahead and two to the right of me in English 441 and I had a conversation with him about writing and he said that he had been writing since high school because his high school, evidently a rich one, offered creative writing classes, and that he’d been published a few places and that he would look at my story (not this one, this story is about the experience of getting my other story to O’ Malley) and tell me what he thought of it and help me revise it. The egg timer next to O’ Malley’s coffee press is close to ending its rotation and chiming. I assume that when it chimes he will come out from the back bedroom, in his vest with the pocket watch chain, and I can hand him my story, talk to him a moment and be on my way. The egg timer clicks its ratcheting clicks. Chris the second came into the kitchen, now with a shirt on and still with his kilt. How’s it going, man?
Fine, you? Hey, I’m doing good man, doing good, gonna go by the climbing wall some today. You been by there yet? You should come one day, just show them your ID and they’ll let you in. Wear some good tennis shoes though, you can’t do that shit in flip-flops, you’ll bust your ass. I mean, they got padding and all that under you and you never get too high unless you do the really crucial stuff but it still busts your ass. He sees my story. Hey man, you a writer too? O’ Malley writes, did he tell you? His stuff is crazy, I read one of his about this guy that goes to the library, only it’s this crazy library where he takes this book and when he keeps it overdue these guys in suits come and beat the shit out of him. I don’t remember the whole thing but it was cool stuff. Hey Chris, you sent the check yet? asked Brian. No, when they need it, Friday? Wednesday, you better go ahead and get it. Alright, they might have to wait a few days before they cash it. If Cindy’s down there she’ll be cool with it. Chris the second, kilt swaying, exits. He’s the kind of man you would expect to have dreadlocks. Brian watches the ever-flipping TV as it cycles through local news, Regis and Kelly, a preacher in a particle-board pulpit, an ad for an ab-sculpting machine. News, Regis, preacher, ad. Two dead in a local wreck, What is going on with Obama, Sometimes the Lord gets angry, Six weeks to your best shape in years. Heartland’s coming on in a little bit, says Brian. The egg-timer chimes, its ratcheting ceased. I turn to watch the back bedroom door open, expecting frayed tweed, a chain jumping with his steps; his flashing eyes, his floating hair. Weave a circle round him thrice, says Brian, and close your eyes with holy dread. I look at the label of his coffee, Honey-Dew brand, and the milk in the fridge, unopened, is Paradise Co. Thus enters O’ Malley. He goes first to pour his coffee. He smiles his crooked smile and says good morning, Andrew. (Except that knowing my
name, the name of the first-person speaker, psychically distances me from you, the reader, which I have done enough already with these asides, drawing your attention always away from the story and into my own premature critiques of it, it (the story) not even halfway written. So forget my name, forget the face you may have thought of for me. I’m just a poor wayfaring stranger. I am no one at all but your perception of this story.) I tell him good morning. Is this your story? He asks, seeing it on the table. Yes, would you look at it for me? Sure, sure. O’ Malley sits and reads, flipping the pages over their staple gently. I look over at the TV where Brian is watching Heartland between the channel flips. Once every six seconds or so he hears a measure of mountain dulcimer music, a respite from the grating Regis and Kelly voices, the fuzzy audio of the preacher, the bright synthesized music of the ad. On Heartland, the mountain dulcimer plays, strummed under the brown, crooked fingers of a woman who must have grown up from the Appalachian soil below her cabin. Between flips, I think about her long pattern dress hiding not legs (they might once have been) but gray taproots, digging down, millimeter by millimeter each day through the boards of her porch into the black, wet soil until they strike the bones of the mountains, the black and huge tectonics covered over by a million years of loamy dust and photosynthetic activity. She draws the soul of those bones, their age and veneration, up through her deep deep roots and with each gathered nutrient, with each hydrogen-bonded drop of clear mountain water she presses her fingers down on the strings, on the boards, and strums a chord not heard since God or fate or Grandfather Buzzard of the Cherokees pulled the mountains up from the ground. I like it, said O’ Malley. I ask him if he liked the part where the woman with the gold tooth told her daughter-in-law that her abusive, alcoholic husband had died. I liked it. That was an interesting idea, he says. He sits cross-legged, his decorum never interrupted, his posture matching his vest, chain, pipe, literariness. What about the part where she drives off furious and almost goes over the bridge, did that all make sense? Yes, I knew what was going on. I liked the description, your descriptions were very good.
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