When Old Julie knocked her bony, arthritic wrist on the hotel room door, Portobello was having trouble with his new xylophone. For some odd reason, the bars simply wouldn't resonate the way he wanted them to; when he struck them, they seemed only to sap the energy away from his motion. This aggravated Portobello more than he would really let on. Xylophones, he thought, were supposed to ring out to people seated in the farthest seats of the largest auditoriums, yet his would never seem to be able to do that. He'd flail at the thing, and nothing would happen. He'd bat at it with the hotel-provided Super Nintendo controller, and lo, nothing would happen. The xylophone merely sat there in silence, sucking in the energy from any movement he made.

That day, his disposition was only further upset by the fact that he was on the dregs of his last can of olives--the principal source of his nourishment over the past biennial. Nonetheless, he forced a cheerful visage as he set his crudely fashioned mallets down on the carpet and walked to the door. After all, Portobello hadn't seen Old Julie in seventeen years, and he'd be damned to act an ingracious, curmudgeonly fool while she was around.

He unlocked the door and let it open on its own. The hinges were surprisingly well-oiled, which distracted Portobello--he hadn't been expecting that kind of attentive maintenance at a Best Western. However, his gaze soon drifted away from the hinge, landing on the elderly woman before him.

Her face hadn't changed all that much. "It's lovely to see you again, Ports." He said nothing, but gestured to the room to welcome her into it.

At first she noticed the empty olive cans, but then her eyes floated down to the xylophone, which sat conspicuously in the middle of the room amongst a large pile of blinking Christmas lights. "What's this?" she asked, pointing to it. Her finger was no thicker than a chopstick, which was quite unfortunate.

"It is a fantastic musical instrument called a Xylophone, and I will play songs on it when I am prepared to do so."

Old Julie sighed. "I'd assume you aren't quite ready yet, then."

"You would be correct. You are a good person, Julie."

She picked up an olive can and ran her finger along the ribbed interior. "Come back home, Ports. We don't want you here anymore. Nobody wants you here anymore--not us, not your family, not the school. The bellhop certainly doesn't want you here anymore, regardless of what you think the nature of the relationship between the two of you is. We had a lengthy discussion about it in the elevator. This isn't good for you."

Portobello took a minute to process what she'd said. He sipped olive juice from the can he held in his hand and nodded. "I know. I know this is no good."

For a moment, the room was silent. Outside, beyond the tagboard taped haphazardly to the window, semi-trucks carried loads of pencils or something to distribution centers.

Old Julie took a deep breath. "I wanted to take you home, Ports. I want you to know that. I'm only here because I raised my voice about it, and the office had to oblige with some sort of response. They stopped short of what I wanted, but dammit, Portobello; I tried. I tried very hard." A tear began to form in her eye. She started to wipe it away, but stopped short when she realized her chopstick fingers were far too dangerous to go anywhere near the face.

Portobello nodded once again. "I think you need a hug more than anything else, Old Julie. I think you need a hug." For a moment, he forgot about the xylophone and the olives. He embraced the woman before him.

"Oh, Ports. Look at what we've become,' she cried. "I hate all of this nonsense! I hate it so! Oh, Ports; oh, Ports, Ports, Ports." She sighed. "I've brought you a pear and a nectarine, because you need some vitamins in you."

The man smiled. "That's very kind of you. You see, I have been eating mostly olives for the past two years, and am presently running out of them. The supply has lasted this long because I've been wise and economical. These fruits are welcome, tasty and wholesome compliments to this tragically meager and upsetting diet of mine, and I will gladly eat them. I am so hungry. Thanks."

With her sharp, lengthy finger, Julie abruptly stabbed a nectarine in her purse and withdrew it. As Portobello removed it from Julie and took a juicy bite, the bellhop kicked down the door.

"Carl, I loathe you! And I loathe Cindy only slightly less!" he yelled. He then realized that he had misread the room numbers mounted next to the doors and was quickly fired by the administration as any comparably underqualified and poor bellhop would be.

Portobello guffawed at the bellhop's misfortune. "Looks like he won't be inside of the elevator anymore! Except of course to exit the building! UNLESS HE TAKES THE STAIRS!" He found the situation hilarious.

Old Julie was quite upset by Port's insensitivity. "He was a young, naive bellhop! He let his emotions get the best of him, and he made a bad decision--let it go!"

But Julie's attempts to scold Portobello merely drove him farther into hysterics. "Oh ho ho! Ha ha ha! Hum hum hum! Now I am finding your feeble attempts to guilt me into feeling bad about myself for finding the situation so humorous quite funny in and of themselves! Ho ho ho!" He lurched about the room, grabbing his stomach and laughing. His face turned crimson.

"Portobello! You are disgusting. I do not appreciate this one bit, and I'm beginning to think that there is simply no level of things which you will take seriously! In fact, you laugh at anything anybody takes seriously, even the very concept that laughing at everything is serious and important! I hate this pretension of yours; I hate it so! I fear you secretly laugh at me, but dare not mention it lest you mock me for thinking such things! You render our dialogue so stilted and absurd, yet this is not reality--this is nothing even comparable. Though you live in your own mind, your voice carries too far into ours, Portobello!" Julie broke down sobbing, and in a lapse of inhibitions, tried to dry her eyes. Her fingers stabbed into her sockets, and Portobello laughed even more.

"HEEHEEHEE! HAHAHAA! I just find this all too funny, Julie! I'm sorry! Perhaps it has been the steady diet of olives--perhaps it has been my extensive estrangement from the world at large, but your emotional turmoil is so amusing, as is your newfound physical incapacitation! Perhaps this hotel room has numbed me to the human experience! Perhaps I am all too cognizant of my biology these days! Who knows; I am merely watching you on television, foreigner! I am watching myself in the past! I have nothing here; I have olives and a malfunctioning musical instrument and impending age! You--you have stabby fingers and no more eyes! Hilarious days! Hilarious life!" Portobello banged rapturously on the beds. "I am named after a mushroom; that's not particularly funny in and of itself, but I laugh anyways! It seems tritely absurd, but it also mocks the tritely absurd! HAAA!! It also mocks the concept that it's funny to mock things in such an infinately recursive and self-aware way, because that concept itself is so trite! It's been done! HEEHEE!"

His voice now terrified Old Julie, who couldn't see anything. She slowly descended to the floor. "Portobello, I need to sit. You're frightening me now. I want to help you; you're dangerous."

Suddenly, a bat flew into the room. "Oh, no! HAHAHA, a BAT! I don't even understand why a bat has flown into this room, but I find it all too funny. I find everything funny--your earnest consideration of my welfare, my abilities to send you into intolerably cruel webs of confusion, that bat! Hoo!"

It was all far too much for Portobello to bear. His lurching had grown and grown, and now, his legs started to give out. "Oh, Julie," he said, holding back the hysterics momentarily. "I am a body. I am a machine!"

As he flopped about on the carpet, the floor collapsed. And gravity tore his xylophone apart in freefall, like it should--just like it should.

The car burned down.


It's a strange experience. I was painting; Dad was in the computer room and started smelling something like melted plastic. Thinking that the TV in the garage was somehow burning (how he jumped directly to that conclusion, I don't know), he ran downstairs to the basement to check things out.

He opens the garage door to find that the Horizon, my beloved car, previously loved by my brother and before him my aunt, was smoking under the hood. A lot. So Dad lifted the thing, and a huge flame shoots out, which is (needless to say) rather peculiar and distressing. He tries to deal with this by using the dinky, ancient fire extinguishers we keep around, but those are exhausted pretty fast to no avail, and he tells me to call 911, saying something unsettling about how the Horizon's on fire and "liable to explode." In retrospect, I don't know exactly how likely that was, but since I'm not a fan of being around exploding cars and such, this statement kinda freaks me out. I call.

Two fire engines, a police car, and a fire rescue truck come in about five minutes, and in the meantime, I run around the house trying to grab useful things--Dad's in a t-shirt, so I get him a jacket and gloves, etc.; I grab my camera. The house is filling up with smoke because the smoke from the Horizon is drifting steadily into the garage and outside of the master bedroom. I get the dogs outside and watch the firemen as they deal with my burning car. A mass of neighbors stands around.


After a very long time, the fire itself's out. The driveway is slippery with fire retarding foam, and Dad, who's notably shaken by this whole ordeal, looks like he's having a tricky time with his precarious balance, so I follow him around for a while to make sure he doesn't slip or anything. The fire department gets ownership information, etc. They haul a couple gasoline-powered fans up to the deck to flush the smoke out of the house--a fascinating process, although it made me really really really cold whenever I'd enter or exit the house (those things push air around pretty damn well.) The dogs don't like the fans; the fans are loud. I don't really like the fans either.



The firemen trudge around the house checking on things, diverting airflows by opening windows, etc. The fans have strewn most of the papers that had been sitting on tables or weakly attached to the refrigerator all around on the floor. Our house isn't a house; it's a movie set with strange people walking around very quickly, curtly speaking to each other. Dirt gets everywhere, and the place smells like this horrible, mechanical smoke.

In about thirty minutes, the smoke gets under control, and everyone leaves very anticlimactically. We look inside the car, and it's covered in this horrifying, sulfur-yellow ash, and both of us are tremendously upsetted by this; that car--that cute, stupid car--deserved no such fate.