The Ballad of Coffee Ghee and Honey Jekyll

By Zenas H. Upputuru

Coffee didn’t take the pandemic-regulated twenty seconds to wash his hands; in an exhausted, child-like burst of deviousness he took sixty seconds instead. Coffee soaped coarsely between his long fingers, foam-glazed all the hair on the back of his hands blue, stung dark pink under his thick pale cuticles and trapped tiny bubbles in the pocket between his nail and his curling skin. It was all a singular, impractical attempt to freeze time and stop history. Once he resigned, Coffee forced himself to march with some professional’s dignity from the single gender-neutral, steel high-school staff bathroom. This was the first of his mistakes, as planting the Tree of Knowledge was the beginning of God’s and as invading Russia was the first of Napoleon's.

Shuffling for pride led to him vaguely swinging his Samsonite briefcase in a dance-hall, wild movement, which led to him dislocating Professor Aubery’s left shoulder. It wasn’t even an impressive swing- some kind of amateurish polar opposite of the neat, awesome pendulum-ic briefcase movements you can observe of dark-dressed commuters. The flow from shoulder down alone would have made any respectable banker twitch like palsy.

“ Dear god, I’m so sorry!” Coffee wondered fast if saying ‘Are You Okay?’  would be stupid, but what if the lack of the three words might get him thrown out of the school. It was the English, after all. He decided to be safe, act weak when you’re weak, and all that. “ Are You Okay? Is There Anything I Can Do? Here, Splash Some Water On It.” Coffee rattled off the script nearly before Aubrey finished dropping his mostly-red-marked sheaves of assignments. Coffee needed this gig, and he couldn’t afford to let a tenured uncoordinated Owl with a name like a soppy female novelist to mess it up.

Aubrey’s left eye seemed to bestow benevolent forgiveness, while the watery tics of the other eyeball seemed to promise violent death. His face collapsed and flowed in a chaos of wrinkles the colour of weak tea. He had by now clicked his other bones too, and drooped inevitably like a tulip on to the sweating corridor floor. His hip seemed dragged down by some deathly force {Gravity, perhaps} as he splayed like a garden spider to try and offset the dead weight of his neatly twisted left arm. Aubrey gasped, strangely bird-like, from the pain.

A SCIenCE class-room door opened, a murmured prayer answered with anomalous accuracy. The teacher, a burnished figure in blue sweaters and with strong shoulders, nearly managed to distract Coffee in a familiar way. Alert- they just happened to look like a Statue Of David tailored specifically to some bisexual, edgy, intellectual, pathetic guy’s specifications. He might even know the guy whose type the teacher was. Yeah, he probably did. Anyway, they were in a cardigan. Which was fine.

Coffee proudly hummed a springy tune under his breath- Coffee was very nearly almost mostly married, and no easy-eyed tall sharp-chin androgynous figure in dark blues could sway him away from his Honey. He suddenly felt the pride of the happily ensnared, he never ever could be stood up again, or inappropriately dressed at a singles event again. A cardigan? I bet they knit it themself. Ha. A science teacher with no grammar skills. They both broke eye contact, and remembered the writhing corpse at their feet. Coffee took his victims and victories wherever, whenever he could. Because, you know, he killed centenarian physics professors and spilt coffee over himself way more often.

“ Oh dear!” Coffee had wondered for years who actually said ‘Oh Dear!’  in novels, and learnt this 23^rd of December it was androgynous high-school science teachers in dark blues and with strong shoulders. C’mon. Maybe it was just a bad day. “ What happened to Aubrey?”

Me, Coffee didn’t say, and didn’t cackle. He still needed the gig. He glanced at the HMP watch Honey had bought for his birthday- and the talk was going to happen in less than half an hour. Oh Dear..

”We had a little accident when I walked out of the bathroom, I wasn’t looking where I was going.” The science teacher’s eyes flitted to the rusting sign.  I can use any washroom I want, you little twerp. I’m hygienic, you know how disgusting men’s urinals and women’s toilets are? Just cause you look good in blue and I can’t figure out your gender doesn’t mean I can’t tune you up. Michelangelo got his measurements wrong, Galatea. Yeah, I’ve got a wife.

”Oh dear, John, come on, I’ve got the class doing worksheets.” Aubrey- John Aubrey- reached up with his working arm like a reclining zombie. His head lolled on the freezing hallway sweating floors. Coffee leaped backward. The science teacher hooked an arm around the Owl and dragged him to his feet as he whimpered. John waved a hand to stop the cat-eyed science teacher for a moment. He whispered, “ Mister. Don’t mind, hey? Need a couple more right hooks like yours in today’s wishwashy trannie world..” He let out a chuckle which bubbled. Coffee nodded at him hard, as one might respectfully nod at a 75 year old serial killer and watched both of Johnnie Boy’s wrinkled ‘hooks’ like one might stare hard at sleeping snakes. The science teacher gave him a look full of points. The Cardigan puffed icily, the elegant Birkenstock shuffled sharply on the stop. I’m judging you. Coffee replied fast  with a similar, brain-fluffy chuckle, “ Oh, I’m ever so sorry-“ Who the hell says ‘ever so sorry’ when they have less than half a half hour to go before their talk??? “But I can’t take you to the nurses. I have a talk in 15, less than 15 minutes now. At the auditorium.” No, Ghee, I thought you might give a slideshow in the school kitchen. Who are you, Beezelbub?

Coffee patted someone’s shoulder, ran down the expanding, oblivious corridor without knowing or caring where the auditorium was. Or even the school kitchen.

 Coffee stared blankly at the stage’s wood patterned floor, an Robotman with the brain temporarily mediating in a faraway jar. He’d woken up at 4 in the morning from anxiety, taken two connecting tubes to get here, dislocated a 80 year old man’s shoulder and wandered into a high-school basement to reach here. There were socks. The ghosts of socks. The ghosts of ghosts of socks, because some of the little un-uniformed punks were boarders and the huge, Rikers appropriate washing-machines were here like underground gods, huge guardian eyes murdering all the colour from old Nirvana hoodies.

Coffee defied all of his lightning, zombie-apocalypse stage-fright public-speaking-scare dreams by having a plan. His beautiful notes were neat, an outline sketch of endless date palm fields. Lines go up down, up down, up down. Bird. Think about your topic, stop fooling around. The principal came in. He tried to respectfully greet her.

Dark sepia ink and neat, tiny-loopy handwriting were two of his fondest habits, Oscar Wilde affectations like Victorian lacey gloves and gummy-bear spotted rainbow boxers.. Coffee shook out his shoulders, smoothened his brown suit. It’s alright. The stage isn’t going to crack like a chocolate dome, the dissatisfied kids aren’t going to leap at me with whale-bone cutlasses, green war-spiders won’t escape from Area 55 to slaughter me for a joke I made about ‘Nam four years ago, each monster with eight circles of blue eyeliner which enables them to have x-ray vision.

He knew plenty about tackling usually sane men to try and fund research for getting bacteria to shit energy and to save the planet with black-spotted banana peels. You had to watch their auctioning patterns for years before. Coffee decided to trust in whatever god Honey believed in, ke sera sera, and just mentally complain about funding or think about her for the next ten minutes. No more rabid cacti.

-and Microbial Fuel Cells sounded itself like one of Bowie’s wilder song titles, some Asimov sci-fi theory. He ran his muttering, complaining train of thought almost until the students started filing into the fake-leather seats. Coffee took an uncomfortable deep breath with his head bent like a particularly lanky pelican. Here comes QT-1, the Thin White Duke and the Robots from Mercury- we’re replacing all your expensive Windmills! All your pesky Fossil Fuels! The unpredictable Solar Power! Wiiiithhh my brand new collection of bacteria corpses. Collected from the compost of yours truly.

The hand-soap was maddening, its scent had been engineered in the white rooms of Russia in the Stalinist Era to psychologically torture political prisoners and make them grateful for it. Coffee didn’t know how the hell it had crossed seas, or how it had been elegantly tweaked to provide some kind of sickly sweet anodyne to the Western Rat Race like some aromatic Kellogs , but he did know he could no longer think about pronouncing the word ‘Electrobioreacter’. The smell was funeral lilies and condensed milk and cough syrup creeping into his eyes. Childhood memories of his cheap tiny suit at some aunts funeral reactivated. This didn’t help, as another cousin had had a heart attack at the funeral and the family had decided to make a cheap job of it by combining the-

“ Good Afternoon.”, Coffee began. The principal caught his eye and made a cut-your-throat movement with both her hands. He froze and stared at her. She tucked the edges of her blazer into her navy skirt and mouthed Shut Up. Coffee’s hands followed the movement, but he was luckily not wearing the cut of blazer whose tails could be tucked into skirts, or indeed unpatterned chinos. It just confusedly rode up and fell down again, too short and deep novelty oak-brown as always. He heard Honey laughing her ass off at him, exactly right now, and that blunted any sting of stress the miscommunication spiked in him. He was lucky, and he took a deep breath, thanking her invisible forever presence outlining his heart. Finally made a decision to nod at the principal. Wow, you’re just brilliant. Sarcasm? Coffee decided he wouldn’t care about his talking wasp-buzzing head for the next two hours, until he reached home and could recite his Odyssey to Honey in thick Shakespearean old English with as many mistakes and puns as possible, or his approximation of a fake dirty American accent. Or maybe the Pirates of the Caribbean. Fine, anything that he had the energy for and that could make her grin, big. And he’d cook lamb today, just to thank her positive mental conditioning. The money for the fine meat would come, somehow.

Coffee decided to wait. After all, students could still be filling in 15 minutes after the time when the talk was supposed to begin. We wouldn’t want that.

He paced vaguely around the stage. The only times Coffee had ever been onstage before, held up like a tasty eye-morsel on this tall a pedestal, were years ago. Roman 1, when he’d been in a shitty high-school band and far more attracted to the supposedly meaningful shared human frenzy of meaningless deathmetal noise, the claps and the low-quality amps and the fights and the boos and hisses and the sheer idiotic true clear humanity of it all in the crowd where there was no such thing as identity, the philosophical romance of it and the sheer respite from godforsaken thought- than any actual talent. They were all absolutely horrible musicians, especially this one Jug-Jet Sing, and mostly people showed up because no one could believe how absolutely stinking rotten they were. Coffee finally managed to have his faith in the sheer clumsiness of everyone secured one Sunday afternoon and left because he got a headache. Roman 2, another time when he’d been getting a Pulitzer for his Micro-Fuel: AN ALTERNATE ENDING and Coffee had smiled before becoming easily desperately lost and med-foggy in the single flash of a camera and spent the night walking dumb around a city he had no flavour or knowhow or shortcuts in for hours till morning. He’d been too scared to call any of his friends in the city for the possibility that they would have turned into jealous vipers overnight, or, even worse, be genuinely happy for him. Coffee was too cowardly to admit this to himself and to then book a hotel room, so he just got mugged under a bridge. Roman 3 was around when Coffee had been in his first actual relationship built on something more than shared disdain for something, and he was desperate to impress Madison, the relationship-ee. He’d leaped on the Riot Fest stage during one of the Foo Fighters’s early concerts and murdered something shaky in himself when Madison surged to the front to catch him down again with something like admiration and David Grohl nodded at him and his first lover.

Where had anyone gone? Where was everyone before this decade of brand-new Alexas and easy online shopping? Where were the crazy bored audience who’d showed up to the Loop Lounge’s gigs? Where were all the scientist colleague friends he’d been so scared of? The photographer, the funders that the publicity was supposed to get him, the mugger who had bemusedly stolen the award and his belt, where were the Foo Fighters? And Madison?

Ha, he thought, well at least I know where the last one is married and working and in the suburbs far too “bland” for him to paint. And one of the colleagues, David something-Jewish got a Noble. Good for him. I bet when he gets mugged they’ll take his glammy fake rolex too.

Coffee Ghee, since his childhood, could do or be anything with only minimal usage of black holes. His supergod power was to be able to tie-dye his grey matter with such speed that he could have mentally married you, murdered his inlaws, and bought you a pet giraffe in the thirty seconds before you notice him staring unblinkingly at you. He robbed English banks, burnt palaces and set free a million mongoose in the Vatican, had easily been Casanova and Anna Karenina twice over- all in his head. The origin story was being a single anxious child, on Krypton- no, sorry. Just an single anxious child. No, not even a Kryptonite orphan. No, not even a blood relation to a blood relation of a Kryptonite orphan. Sorry, Robotman.

So Coffee pretended he was Bob Dylan, playing live in Berlin. He was going over his gear list and props. Coffee Dylan strutted long-legged around the stage, touching or patting random beakers and projectors he made into monitors and amps. He shifted his weight, warming up his muscles. Coffee gently stroked his guitar and let the familiar curves of the wood leap to his touch. The strings were familiar and light from his practice soundcheck today, his hands loose after the repeated backstage warmups. Honey had wished him good luck, beating him to a hurried Hope you don’t need it, yeah, I know, go do your thing.

Working projector- check. Lucky broken projector- also check. He ran through his files, the colour-coded titles in a perfect, organised rainbow- Coffee thought of it as scales so familiar that he went over them with strings muted. His props- three stuffed frogs he planned to destroy , and a dolphin was the practice of creating clean fuel, check. A conductor's baton he’d picked up from a deserted seat on the subway, check. Bass, drums, three mics, distortion pedals and an extra electric guitar with a shiny red killswitch. Dylan was opening for Metallica, apparently.

The school had scattered some apparently educational paraphernalia around the misshapen ovalish stage floor. It could be taken as a message cleverly encoded into the theatre scenery, to give any passing ground-breaking slightly- impoverished scientist the clear, rocky impression- We don’t have the money for poster paint. We don’t have the good design sense to attract anyone impressive to advertise your work. We don’t have the mentality to collect all those fallen chalks into a box, we’d prefer if you’d break your neck slowly so there’s one more half-hour we don’t have to be in a room of Teenagers. Good luck.

Dylan Ghee looked up, got another satanic, pin-pupiled glare from the principal, and on that jerk of fear he scurried to the other end of stage. Some pretty advanced science kits were spread over that end, the contents linking a constellation of some broken bird all over the floor, all the lines random and broken like a giant childish catastrophe. It reminded him of the Pleiades cloud, tiny dwarfs clustered together in a graceful shiny blob near Taurus, marking it as a demigod. Near a firework of broken beakers and incisors was an intact human skeleton model held together by shiny snakes of wire. Watch carefully, kids, this is were it starts bubbling and smoking and fucking up and releasing some hydrogen bubbles and K2o2H. Probably a Hiroshima. Have you messaged your parents?

He dropped his imaginary guitar, dissipating all the hard work of method acting The Freewheelin’ Coffee Dylan. Curiosity ran naturally as gravity in his veins. Pathogens battled with the inherited inquisitive-ness, hey, who gets to kill the cat first? The Coffee? He bent closer to the plastic demonstration of the difference between body- and soul. A person- and bones.

The metal wires were frozen thin maggots feeding on the skeleton’s remnants of an aura, paperclip scraps scavenging on invisible flesh. The iron clustered around the joints, and shone against the dullish ivor-ish bone. Coffee rubbed his elbows, dark skin paling, unusually vulnerable. He imagined himself unravelling like the Science Teacher’s cardigan, all the blue separating into puzzle pieces of person.

There was something wrong, terribly wrong like shadows without bodies moving towards you and bodies without shadows moving away. The plastic, too-white shoddy model was yellowing, its hips softening and curving like a woman’s. The ribs were delicate and one had a slight hairline fracture, the collarbones hinged neatly like a thick necklace, though she’d always complained that the bones jutting out so prominently made her look like an anorexic with buffalo-bones. Coffee disagreed, it gave her some of the well-built, big-boned elegance of the Egyptian Queens he used to greet daily at his earlier museum janitor gig. The arms were lanky and were slung behind her back in the nervous, adorable habit she still had from her choir girl days. The knobbly elbows were like long knives, another feature she bemoaned and Coffee deeply appreciated, ever since the day she had ”accidentally” jabbed his cousin “brother” in the gut twice and the brother got off at the wrong stop as fast as could. She was his favourite exorcist of any demon relative who made Coffee bite his nails, and he was her favourite Tall person who could always find a cab and a payphone and some more patience for her ferocious street antics, for all of her sudden surges of anger and happiness and sadness at everything, sound and hurt. The principal was yelling something at a kid who’d smuggled in a joint, but Coffee couldn’t hear her.

The elbows were, indeed, imperfectly pointy enough that the yellow-white, swan-tinted bone cast shadows on itself and the wood-panelled floor. The shadows were blue, and no pirate animation could have prepared Coffee for the stark shine of his fiancee’s skull. They’d gloried often at the stereotypical couple height difference between them both- it made for lovely postcards, anyway. Whatever grudges Honey’s feminist principles and butch fashion had against her height and petiteness, Coffee secretly loved tucking her head under his chin, and holding her close as he could. Fitting neatly together, despite times when she’d get exasperated at his inability to talk to a cabdriver or put an phone on speaker or sustain a fight or get happy drunk and he’d get pissed off at her emotional response to anything she saw online or the way she was liable pick a fight with any random guy on the street if he glanced at her, or when she’d yelled at a random cop and Coffee had to always bail her out again. But her bird head, as Honey called it irritably when her view was blocked at a line or at a MSI crowd, was probably Coffee’s favourite physical quality of hers. She probably mentally analysed the posture favouritism as his masculine need to feel in power, to be the alpha protecter, but whatever, fuck it, they were the most mentally stable and screensaver pretty couple they knew. Anyway, the skull was pretty and familiar to the hollow of his chest when Coffee knelt down on the stage floor and hugged the biology model skeleton of his lover , slow like those lethargic sepia dreams you have when you’ve forgotten to switch on the heater or off the AC or close the windows and the cold is creeping into your bed, a serial elemental rapist as your bedfellow. What happenedwhat happened whathowhappened what what what The shock burnt like a glacial killing of a thousand centuries of an impaling exhale, the lungs screaming as they rattled with imaginary bullets and Coffee cradled the perfectly cured bones of Honey, his wife to-never-be.

By Zenas H. Upputuru