Buildings Without Murders

By Dan Gutstein

Our future is increasingly blurry and Dan Gutstein and his work may well be part of it.
--Cathy Wagner, author of Of Course

Dan Gutstein lives in the future and has returned from then to give you this book, now.
--Matthew Salesses, author of The Hundred Year Flood

A bookshelf without Dan Gutstein is like a b

• Language: English
• Publisher: Atmosphere Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781647647001

Dan Gutstein

Dan Gutstein is author of eight books and chapbooks, including Metacarpalism. He is also codirector of a forthcoming documentary film devoted to “Li’l Liza Jane” as well as vocalist for NPR-featured punk band Joy on Fire. More information can be found at www.dangutstein.com.

Book preview

Copyright © 2020 Dan Gutstein

Published by Atmosphere Press

Cover design by Nick Courtright

No part of this book may be reproduced

except in brief quotations and in reviews

without permission from the publisher.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Buildings Without Murders

2020, Dan Gutstein

atmospherepress.com

CONTENTS

Chapter 1: Do I look like an assorted damsel?

…………………………………………………………………………………..3

Chapter 2: Divided, awkwardly, into the pessimistic

kingdoms of yearning and obligation

…………………………………………………………………………………..7

Chapter 3: coming home w/ bf want u 2 meet him

…………………………………………………………………………………41

Chapter 4: HE TOOK UMBRAGE, OKAY?

……………………………………………………………………………….113

Chapter 5: When the women laughed a bit youthfully

and a bit fiercely

……………………………………………………………………………….177

This book was inspired by the writing

of Clarice Lispector and Paul Celan

CHAPTER 1

Do I look like an assorted damsel?

LaRousse might’ve neared the industrious urban lot with the arm and leg chaos suited for any commotion, generic or otherwise, but she didn’t demonstrate reverence for the traditions of enterprise and assembly; great cranes loitered at the site of the lot, smaller cranes that had constructed larger ones, peripheral cranes and wheeled units, and as for the lot itself, it occupied a considerable mass—four square blocks?—of a breezy downtown district serviced by screen, projection, lamp, ticker, voice-over. The redhead, LaRousse, hadn’t fully blundered into the newly emplaced chain-link fencing, anchored every so often by heavy concrete boots. There, before the fencing, she situated both hands atop her flat abdomen, such that her fingertips overlapped, perhaps a concession to gentleness, perhaps a declaration of consonance. She’d have hovered at that barrier, bent in wordlessness, but for a voice arriving.

Ma’am? said a young soldier. His camouflage uniform seemed to anticipate a bluish-green theatre.

I’m not no ma’am! LaRousse replied.

We’re asking the onlookers to congregate over to the side. He pointed toward a minor ruckus of gawkers and tosspots.

I’m not an onlooker, either. She cruised the spacious enclosure from left to right. What’s going on here, anyhow? Why the muscle and why the fortress?

Don’t you know? said the soldier. He swiveled and swept, his arms mimicking the limbs of a ringmaster who’d betray the magical significance of an unforeseen wonder, when the directives from a loudspeaker—Mwah mwah treble or Mwah mwah triple—summoned him, without further delineation, his boots hustling toward an oppressive encounter.

The cranes read GmbH on their hindquarters. They lowered hooks and belts which workers fastened to nondescript booths that loitered aboard flatbed trailers. They lowered hooks and belts which workers fastened to streetlamp apparatuses and utility poles that slumbered aboard flatbed trailers. Once secured, these booths and streetlamps and poles swung toward their destinations, the rapidly populating lot, where other workers received them, unhooked and unbuckled them. In the midst of this mechanized bustle, prominent rectangular signage descended as from the afterworld itself.

Civil Illumination Authority—God Booth Project, it proclaimed. A few workers, as well as a few soldiers, who’d attempted to capture the signage by its upper corners, suffered a flinging-forth, their handholds lost, when the crane rocketed around unexpectedly. Some of them tumbled like the bodies of unfortunate, panicky victims in ancient, snowy newsreels. They picked themselves up, relatively unhurt, and slapped the dust out of their trousers with their caps. Mwah mwah portion or Mwah mwah torsion hooted a bullhorn.

Ma’am, said the soldier, who reappeared at the fencing.

No! said LaRousse. "Why do you keep calling me ma’am?"

Out of respect!

Ma’am is for dames, maybe an assorted damsel. Do I look like a dame? Do I look like an assorted damsel?

My mother has always emphasized respect, said the soldier, as a sheepish expression perished, initially, among his eyebrows.

Someone like me shouldn’t be respected. I mean, I should be respected, but differently. Ah! How old are you?

Me? I lied about my age.

To the army? The young man didn’t have to wince. He’d begun to wring his delicate hands together. LaRousse whispered: It’s okay. I lied about my age, also.

To the army?

No, silly! I lied to a guy.

Me, too. I lied to a Major.

So, it was a major lie. LaRousse smiled in a way that would likely resist any tactics employed to break it, to cancel. She had triumphed. 

Look here, started the soldier, but his attempt at impatience couldn’t exceed the dominion of the jocular.

I know, I know, said LaRousse. Over to the side. Over to the side. She interrupted herself as several youthful women and their children materialized. Where it looks like the Outing of the Young Mothers & Young Moppets Society. It’s okay. I have to—inventory—all the charming counterfeiters who are, apparently, surrounding me.

Would you go to the God Booths? the soldier bellowed, after LaRousse had drifted halfway toward an uncertain destination. Once they’re open?

But LaRousse countered, after fashioning a bullhorn out of one hand: You’re lucky to have a mother who emphasizes respect, even if you misapply the respect she emphasizes. I bet she held your hand a lot in public, like if the two of you were approaching a wishing well with a surplus nickel. You’ll probably make a better human being than a soldier. Plus, those uniforms are appalling.

The soldier began to check his arms, his armpits, and his chest, as if he suspected smoke, when LaRousse’s smartphone buzzed. It registered the presence of several GPS pins orbiting her own signal, a collection of competent kissers, street kids, philanthropists, and rough-house run-rioters demonstrating recalcitrant intentions. Half her body shivered in a downdraft. She traced the origins of this chilly whirlybird by sizing up the architecture of the tallest crane, from anchor to tower head, until she espied the very phenomenon that the News Update had reported for the past several broadcasts, up high, adrift above everyday birds and skyscrapers. A single, available cloud bank blundered between the forces of opposing currents, the defiant and the stoic, its magenta-white lightning bolt fizzling in a brisk state of perpetual discharge. The cloud hauled a stroke of incomplete, ornamental lightning.

CHAPTER 2

Divided, awkwardly,

into the pessimistic kingdoms

of yearning and obligation

2.1

Burn Victim gazed across the street at the silver gelatin light blooming from a living room window uneven with his, a half-story higher. His wife, Evans, affixed her second earring in the woodprint weather of the hallway’s vanishing point, her gesture one of impatience—both hands hovering about the earlobe—before she joined her husband, the hollows of her husband, his heavy arm trunk-like around her shoulders. Each offered the other a tempo, but the pause filled with chimerical kindliness projecting upward from the street. Evans wriggled toward a beverage in the kitchen.

Who them earrings for?

Ha, said Evans.

Huh?

Nobody.

Not me, said Burn Victim.

Nope.

"What is that nasty stuff?"

Kombucha, said Evans. It reverses gray hairs.

"The hell’s a reversed gray hair?"

A reversed gray hair, is a hair.

Nothing but riddles, said Burn Victim, shaking his eyes around. Riddles and tricky-speak. Sounds like the portion of my day I spend with confidence men.

Lobbyists?

Them, too.

Listen up, said Evans, slinging an overstuffed bag around her left shoulder, a second overstuffed bag around the same buckled shoulder. Hey, now.

I’m all right, said Burn Victim, swatting away a bit of everything: the future, the Evans cooing, the shortcomings of his rebuttals. Thanks.

Evans balanced a third bag in the crook of her free elbow. She voiced an approximate time of return: Not too late, before she admitted herself, via unlatching, to the institutional swatches of the common corridor. Burn Victim attended to the direction of departed Evans, her key scratching around the lock, her key torqueing the deadbolt despite the contraption’s cantankerous age applying a modest snag of resistance. He might’ve resented his wife locking the door from the outside—"Snappier if I do it here, on the inside," he might’ve thought—but either way, he repaired to the master bedroom where he could choose a shirt, pair of socks, suit, pair of shoes, tie. He assembled the outfit on his person, but for the supreme elements, tie and suit-jacket, which he tended to in the bathroom mirror.

There, he scrutinized a view of himself, the relatively new himself, the two countries of his nouveau race, how ‘healing’ hadn’t corrected the installation of a second person in considerable islands with leaf-like contours, a second person vying for full emergence, pop-through, or relative domination from the standpoint of total summary surface. The pattern, an elusive printing of differences, began above the neck; thus Burn Victim’s cinched tie and the collar of his suit-jacket could not prevent the dear friend or the confidence man or his wife, Evans, or the street-chap from an optical stuttering. As if the glass on a filament bulb, he recited aloud, would color painfully, rather than blacken sooty, rather than darken gracefully over the periods of its usefulness.

Burn Victim’s secretary had seated a gentleman and a lady in the conference room that could’ve borne forty hopeful souls. Its one-piece table, the color of Italian-roasted coffee beans, might’ve doubled as the surfboard for a certified giant. She’d seated them, in that she’d bade them sit, watched them wiggle into swivel chairs, and exchanged with them a small-town smile in advance of a second, unrehearsed scene. But the two visitors, clad in the crisp, conservative demeanor of those who specialize in encouraging sizable-but-private outcomes, hadn’t loitered very long in their seats before deciding to roam the space, pausing in front of platted-out portraits—they, the guests, akin to museumgoers at an incidental exhibition.

Sintered tungsten, the lady remarked. She, the lieutenant, affected a statuesque skepticism in dark skirt, dark shirt.

The halogen E27, offered the gentleman, a career operative who’d developed a reputation for his bright, twisted nose.

Both guests rotated toward other framed images, before joining one another at opposite edges of a darkened window, floor to ceiling. They shrugged before the lady raised the heavy blinds, an act that admitted the bulging cubism of mid-morning avenues and superstructures. Before long, their gaze perched upon the partially obscured offerings of a massive, electronic billboard, exhibiting a dauntless man clad in business attire brightened by light bulbs.

If I’m not mistaken, said the gentleman, and I’m not, that would be our benefactor, well, a portion of him, at the very least, staring at the two of us from his aerie: the billboard.

Yes, it is he.

He or him?

It is Wolfgang, the lady clarified. Perhaps we should close the blinds. It might be a violation.

Pah! said the gentleman. "No violation. ‘GmbH suits me.’ Nice touch."

Thank you. It was murder affixing those bulbs to his jacket!

"Yessirree, he sure is wearing the sharp apparel. ‘Trusting in human brightness for the past 100 years.’ Next up, we pry the fellow away, mit potency und chicanery, from the water cooler! Maybe the imagery of that, too, can hover ten or twenty floors toward the skies."

Burn Victim came to occupy the conference room’s doorway, observing the messengers, warily, for some untethered beats. Good morning, he said, striding toward the head of the table. Sorry I’m a few minutes delayed. Please, have a seat.

The double contact bayonet cap, said the gentleman, pointing toward a glass frame with his middle finger. I used to manufacture that sterling sucker, personally. Factory hours. Supporting myself as a young buck while I obtained higher education. He and his lieutenant floated toward Burn Victim, who unfisted his hand to greet the first person, Princess O’Darkness, to reach his station. They shook. They exchanged titles and good mornings. In a betrayal of her repose, she allowed her eyesight to travel the slight border, the demarcation on Burn Victim’s wrist, until it disappeared into his sleeve. Her boss, Orange N. Gnarly, clapped their host on the shoulder.

We’ve met before, he said. He and Burn Victim shook, a minor tug-of-war without any flimsy energy. Good to see you again. Burn Victim squinted, maybe a sudden effort to disqualify the earnest expression that Orange N. Gnarly had generated, but it characterized his face as skeptical and rash.

Please. Burn Victim gestured to his guests that they should center themselves in chairs, before he seated himself, his relatively new himself, at the head of the giant surfboard, Orange N. Gnarly to his left, Princess O’Darkness to his right. The tabletop reflected the trio’s upper body attire and faces in a compendium of hazy, digital geometries, the mask of their eye sockets the lightest codes in this representational anatomy. How can I help you both today?

Our client, Orange N. Gnarly began, would like to express its substantial interest in the style of other great, if scanty, philanthropic entities, toward the prospect of—well, given the recent public notices from your noble hillocks, mind you—toward the prospect of brushing aside the rather poorly equipped and, frankly, ill-prepared alternatives, and by that, I mean, of course, those who vie to deprive our client of market share, whose bravery may outweigh their, shall we say, capacities for achievement, if not synthesis.

You represent GmbH.

Yes.

By ‘public notices,’ you refer to our recent Request for Proposal?

Princess O’Darkness cleared her throat. We look forward to participating in this equitable competition, whatever the rigors. Her thin, attractive fingers inched a large leather portfolio toward Burn Victim. Please consider this electronic dossier, as a sort of leaping-off estimate. An appraisal, quite convincing, of our capabilities. She attempted to recline backward in the swivel chair, but it returned her, forcefully, with a zooming grunt, to her upright position. The spring-action seemed to jar her into correcting a slight mistake. I mean the capabilities of our client.

GmbH, added Orange N. Gnarly. The two emissaries exchanged the kind of citizenship faces folks might reserve for rural policemen, cops with saggy gun-belts and sweaty drawl.

Perhaps Burn Victim kicked the stuffing out of his porous approach, sitting there ambiguously, the administrator of a raw mental flogging. Had he noticed any ‘dossier’ when he entered the room? Yet he’d allowed himself to receive a package in semi-secrecy outside the RFP process. His secretary arrived with coffee service: a thermal carafe, three small spoons, pasteurized and pasture-sourced organic cream, organic cane sugar, and three ceramic mugs that read ‘Civil Illumination Authority.’ The mugs additionally displayed the CIA logo that Burn Victim detested—a shower head casting a spotlight.

His eyes, his tentative gaze had discovered the overzealous fatherly eyes of his guest. You used to represent—

Big Koala, said Orange N. Gnarly.

Big Coal?

Big Koala.

Oh, the Eucalyptus Project.

You bet, said Orange N. Gnarly. You bet your bright, herbivorous planet. He tapped the conference table twice.

Burn Victim had rediscovered his mettle. He attempted to wrest the steering breeze of the meeting. There wouldn’t be any evidence of ‘philanthropy’ in this dossier? he asked.

Of course not, Princess O’Darkness replied, in the tone of a grinning candidate, however foxy, who might run for public office. I don’t have a pistol in my pocket. 

"Really?" said Burn Victim.

Listen to this, said Orange N. Gnarly, his hand bidding adieu to a traveler boarding the final rickety train to cross a painfully obsolete bridge. Here’s a little quip that my younger colleague hasn’t heard yet, I don’t believe. How many corporate lobbyists does it take to change a public sector light bulb? Princess O’Darkness slouched sideways with body language that indicted her supervisor’s redundancy. Two, said Orange N. Gnarly. One to screw the official in charge of the RFP, and the other to watts.

Evans had waited outside the actors’ entrance for half an hour, but East Indies hadn’t arrived. She’d lingered casually by refreshing the email on her smartphone, by stepping out of the sunshine, inch by inch, until the unstoppable mechanism had goosed her beneath the minimal canopy of a crabapple tree, its presence in the world ‘dutiful’ as opposed to ‘spontaneous.’ The parking lot had begun to fill with the automobiles of crew members, like Evans, and she greeted these arrivals with effervescent language and gestures still credible despite the show entering the culminating slate of its stern, obstreperous rehearsals. She’d taken a final panoramic view, adjudging the east entrance, the horrid conical row of dwarf fir trees, the stinky swelling dumpster, the well-faded paint-lines demarcating a generous number of parking spots, the wall against which windiness had heaved papers, paper bags, fat thirsty leaves, and indeed, an unusual grouping of dislodged bird nests, but no East Indies. If Evans chided herself, then she chided herself with her strong, sassy voice, or even her husband’s gale-force sarcasm, as she trudged the crumbling cement-and-rebar staircase to the staff entrance. 

The hallways, the confusing hallways of the arena might have buggered-up roseate and furrowed dispositions alike, the lack of clarity, the one-person squeeze-through of tight corners, the caged turbine up to which staggered a caged ladder, the accumulations of gunk and humidity. Evans stood before her studio space, the small rectangular placard that read Costume Director. None of her staff had