Victor's Stain

Victor’s Stain

By Cooper Baltis

Published January 4th 2012 in the Wednesday edition of the UB Post

“Oh it’s just a small stain,” Victor said, glimpsing down at the tiny red blotch opposite the cufflink on his left wrist.

He glanced at himself one last time in the mirror, smoothed his hands through his hair, adjusted the collar on his shirt, and made sure his tie was just a little loose to appear as if he didn’t care. He fixed the bottom of his shirt, tucked into his dark blue Simon Spurr jeans and held tightly by a thick Brioni belt. He grabbed his glass of wine and carefully opened the restroom door.

            His home, a recently built condominium overlooking Central Park, was filled with lively guests and coworkers. The company he worked for, CDO Limitless, had just posted an unheard of quarterly profit gain and it was Victor’s turn to host the party. It was September 2008 in New York and the streets below were finally starting to cool down. Inside his apartment, people hovered around an elaborate cheese and wine set up fluttering their socialite wings.

            “Here’s to us!” Jeff said, running past him and sloppily toasting his wine glass against Victor’s. The wine from Jeff’s glass sloshed onto Victor’s shiny lacewood floor. “Sorry about that buddy,” he said, wiping a bit of cracker off his fat lip. “At least it won’t stain!”

            Victor gave Jeff a small, curt smile as Jeff pushed past him into the bathroom. Jeff, a North Carolina native, had yet to figure out how to hold his alcohol. Victor secretly despised him. He looked down at the stain on his cufflink and noticed it had spread a little.

            “How is this possible?” he said, setting his wineglass down on a small nightstand he had ordered from Asambienti. As he examined the stain, Sarah, one of the fiercest analysts he had ever met, scooted next to him and whispered something into his ear. “What?” he asked.

            “Do you want me to fill your glass?” she asked louder this time, steadying her gaze on Victor.

            “Do you see this stain?” Victor asked, still shocked at his own clumsiness.

            “Oh it’s so small Victor, don’t worry. Here, let me fill up your glass,” Sarah, wild eyed and with a slight snarl on her face, bent forward to fill Victor’s glass. “Forget the stain. Just have fun.”

            “It just appeared…” Victor said, scratching the stain with his fingernails.

            “How did it happen?” Sarah asked, checking her Blackberry and smiling at a text message she had received. She chuckled and stuffed the phone back in her cerulean blue Herme’s purse with off-white stitching.

            “One minute I was standing in the restroom, the next minute I noticed the stain,” Victor thrust his wrist forward to show her. “I’m quite sure I didn’t cause it. I think it’s spreading.”

            Indeed the stain was spreading. It had made its way from the tip of the cuff past his wrist now. Sarah examined the stain curiously as she sipped from her glass of wine. She took Victor’s wrist in her hand like a mother examining an injured child. She turned the wrist over as she took another sip from her glass.

            “It is spreading. Strange,” she said, dropping his wrist.

            “Have you ever seen a stain do this?” he asked, watching as the red stain quickly spread to his forearm.

            “I’m sure it’s happened before, stains have a way of trickling down.”

            “Maybe I should change shirts,” Victor said as Jeff exited the bathroom behind him.

            “Looks like you got yourself a spill there, buddy,” Jeff said, patting Victor hard on the back.

            “Please don’t call me buddy,” Victor said, disgusted at the stain and at Jeff.

            “No worries ol’ Vic,” Jeff laughed and slapped Victor on the back again. “Say, is your stain spreadin’?”

            “I don’t know,” Victor said, crossing his arms in front of his chest.

            “Looks like it to me,” Sarah said as she pulled her Blackberry out of her purse.

            “No use cryin’ over spilt milk. Just go and change your shirt,” Jeff said, burping.

            “I think I’ll do that,” Victor said, frowning and turning towards his bedroom. After shutting the door, Victor looked disgustedly at the red stain in the mirror. He hated the stain. It had spread to his chest and tie. The shirt must be cursed, he thought, taking off his cufflinks and flinging his shirt into a bamboo clothes hamper.

            He pulled out another shirt from his closet and removed the plastic dry cleaning sheet that had been carefully draped over it. Staring at his reflection in the mirror, he began to button the shirt. It was light green Borrelli shirt with tangerine stitching. He went back to his closet and found a thin checkered tie to go with it. He affixed the tie, making sure that its tip hung to his belt, and tucked in his shirt.

            “Better,” he said aloud. Just to reassure himself, he looked back at the cuff where the stain had been on the original shirt.

            Sure enough, the stain had spread to his new shirt.

            “Impossible!” He yelled, rushing to his closet and grabbing a random shirt. It too had stains on the cuff.

            “What’s happening?” Sarah asked, opening the door slightly and jiggling the wine glass in her hand. As she closed the door, the din from the party in his living room diminished.

            “I can’t…it’s not possible. Someone is playing a prank on me,” Victor said, unbuttoning the green shirt.

            “The stain…it is on all my shirts. Look!” he led Sarah around to his closet and began pulling out the shirts. “This one, this one, this one, this one…”

            “Oh wow,” Sarah set her wineglass down on his mahogany armoire. “They are all spreading too…”

            “What do you think it is?”

            “I don’t know, but it’s spreading to the floor now,” Sarah stepped back as the red stain spread from the cuffs of Victor’s shirts to a puddle on the floor. The look on her face changed from one of mild amusement to shock.

Victor and Sarah watched as the stain spread from the closet, past their shoes and under the door. They heard someone slip on the stain outside the door. More bodies started to fall in the living room as the stain breached those hallowed grounds, each thud vibrating the floor. Victor watched in horror as the stain crawled up his shiny Bellò shoes to the legs of his pants. He touched his jeans and watched as the stain spread to the tips of his finger. Sarah screamed as the stain spread from her heels to her Hermes purse.

The stain quickly metastasized from Victor’s posh apartment overlooking Central Park. Through the coffee shops, high end clothing boutiques, pubs, the carts of street side food venders, spreading left and right, through the Wall Street financial district, to the Jersey shore, spreading north and south, into the water nearby, across the Atlantic, through the aged stones of the Tower of London, to the European mainland, climbing the Eiffel Tower, into the cerulean waters of the Rhine, over the Alps, past the Coliseum and the cobble stoned streets of Greece, into the Dead Sea, spinning around the Dome of the Rock, up to the elaborate cathedrals of St. Petersburg, through the crumbled buildings of Baghdad, to the tip of the Pyramids, across the Horn of South Africa, through the Indian Ocean, to the peaks of the Himalayas, north to the Great Wall, across the steppe, back down over the Potala, down the Ganges River as holy men bathed, through the wheels of rickshaws on their way to the Taj Mahal, spreading east into the Mekong, passing a fisherman on a long boat wearing a thatched hat and smoking a yellow cigarette, across the crisp green rice paddies of Thailand, through the dazzling streets of Tokyo, over the Sydney Opera House, across the Pacific and its myriad islands, through the vast Canadian countryside, south through the plains and farms of North America, west through the hills of Hollywood, past the Pyramid of the Sun and Moon in Mexico, down the crests of the Andes, swimming with piranhas through Amazon, under the widespread concrete arms of the Jesus statue in Rio de Janeiro, back into the Atlantic on the tailfin of a killer whale.

Victor’s stain spread far and wide. Victor’s stain spread far and wide.

life in a pencil bag

The following was published in the UB Post on Friday December 16.

Life in a Pencil Bag

By Cooper Baltis

It’s dark in here. Very dark. Well sometimes it’s light, sometimes I am allowed up there but most of the time, I sit inside this cramped little pencil bag waiting for the zipper to peel back. The crisp sound that sends a shiver of excitement down my lead. Even after sitting in here for six months, I can still smell the fresh tinge of the Mongolian leather each time the zipper is pulled.

Usually, I sit on top of the other pencils, or nuzzle in next to an eraser named Bob. Aside from the occasional grumbling or shiny newcomer, we all seem to get along pretty well. My least favorite tenet inside the bag is George, the fat white-out marker with a disdain for writing utensils. He loves to erase things and always insists on taking up too much space. Me and Chuka on the other hand, we love to write, we love to stain our ideas across the big paper surface with its faded blue lines. We’re dreamers and Bob and George are erasers. But Bob is cool, so I consider him a dreamer as well.

When we are out there, Chuka and I, we are truly happy. Chuka, a blue Korean pen with a white rabbit head on its tip, has been inside the pencil bag the longest. He was the first one to make friends with me, to show me the ropes of “living on the inside” as he called it. I count the conversation we had six months ago as one of the turning points of my life:

“When the zipper peels back, it’s like this sky is opening up,” he said, the first night after I was placed in the bag. If I could see his eyes in the dark I’m sure they would have been wide and wise. “When we are up there, we learn things: things about their world, about their language, about other languages, about their gossip. The gossip is my favorite part. Did you know Zoljargal failed her Anthropology test?”

“No…” I replied on that fateful first day. “Who’s Zoljargal?”

“That’s not important. The important part is she did, she failed miserably and was quite upset. My best advice? When you are up there, you gotta listen. You can’t just write. You also have to pay attention. Did you know that Solongo met a boy named Jamsram at a camp? Did you?”

“No, I’ve only been up one time,” I reminded him.

“Well, next time the zipper opens, you gotta pay attention. If the lesson is boring, try and see what the people around the hand are doing. If you can escape, do it. Nothing like a new pencil bag. Most importantly—constant vigilance. It’s the way of our world.”

So for the last six months, Chuka and I have been heavily following the lives of the people “up there” whenever we are summoned from our pencil bag. For starters, the person who owns our pencil bag is named Davka. She is a nice girl who hums loudly when no one is around. She changes the color and design of her nails once a week and sometimes wears a ring that stains the skin on her pointer finger green. When the teacher isn’t looking, she likes to draw small flowers on the desk. Both Chuka and I hate it when she does this, as it is very painful to have our tips ground into the tiny wooden grooves of the tabletop.

Davka’s friend’s name is Saran, a heavier girl who always picks her nose during class. Saran is trying to go abroad to Germany and is always studying. She is assiduous and mouthy, correcting the teacher at every chance she gets. Usually, a girl named Solongo sits on the other side of Davka. Solongo always falls asleep during the longer lectures, using her puffy rolled up jacket as a pillow. She usually has a single headphone in her left ear and sometimes, Davka listens to the spare earpiece, the chord like a dangling wishbone between the two girls.

“What do they listen to?” I asked Chuka one day, as he nudged himself between Bob the eraser and George the white-out marker.

“This is my territory,” George the white-out marker growled, as Chuka scooted on top of him.

“We all have to live in this cramped space,” Chuka said patiently, trying his best to cover the agitation rising in his voice. George had been at Chuka’s throat for weeks now, commenting on everything he said and threatening sanctions and violence.

“My territory…”

“Anyways,” Chuka said, turning towards me. “I don’t know exactly what it is they listen to, but once, Davka set the ear bud down next to me and I heard a little bit of it.”

“What did it sound like?” I asked.

“It was a very fast paced song with this, how should I describe this? Electronic tinge?”

“Tinge?” Bob the eraser asked, hopping in the conversation.

“Party rocker…something about party rocking and houses.”

“This is our house,” I said, looking up wistfully at the top of the pencil bag. Davka had left it cracked just a little. An arc of light had filtered into the normally subfusc space like a flashlight in the dark.

“Yes, but what is a party rocker?” Bob asked.

“Someone who rocks parties,” George the white-out marker said in a sharp voice. “You guys are idiots.”

“If you’re so smart, how does one rock a party?” Chuka asked.

“By invading,” the George quipped.

“I don’t understand,” I said, turning towards Chuka.

We all watched as the zipper was pulled from above by Davka’s hand. The light instantly reflected off her freshly glittered fingernails. She reached into the pencil bag and stirred us all around. She grabbed Bob the eraser and me.

“See you!” I yelled to Chuka as I was hailed to the world above.

Davka set Bob and me in front of her thin notebook. The teacher was talking about the Mongolian economy. She picked me up and started writing. The economy seemed to be doing pretty good these days and could grow up to 20 percent next year, he said, but inflation is rising, and if the government doesn’t hone in their spending habits, the price of goods and services could skyrocket. This is what is known as hyperinflation. Luckily, the budget for 2012…

At the word “rocket” Davka used me to draw a small cylinder adorned with two tiny wings. She used Bob to erase the head of the cylinder and replaced it with a pointed tip. She outlined the cylinder again and began to stipple in the top portion of it, tapping my head violently against the paper.

“Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch!” I wailed, as Davka jabbed my head repeatedly against the paper. She shaded in some smoke coming off the bottom of the pointed cylinder and wrote the word Пуужин above the cylinder. She showed it to Solongo who tried to suppress a laugh.

The teacher walked by and Davka threw her hands over the picture, sending me flying against the chair in front of her. I slammed against the back of chair and fell like an anvil onto the fake wood floor. I bounced once and rolled forward a few inches. I lay there for a moment, winded, when suddenly a boot covered in deerskin shot forward and tried to step on me. It missed the first time, stepping a crumbled piece of paper instead. I panicked.

I thought of what Chuka said, about finding a new pencil bag if I could. But I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving Bob and Chuka. No one had ever been on the floor before. No one. That I knew was sure, the closest Chuka had ever been was Solongo’s lap. I was frightened, unsure, and above all—the most alone I have ever been. I thought of all the times I wanted out of the bag, all the times I wanted just a minute to myself. They all seemed so trivial now. I wanted the safety of my pencil bag, the security of my home. Zipped up and kept tight. Clean and organized.

The malicious boot waited for the teacher to pass before finally catching me. I let out a tiny yelp as the boot slammed down on top of me. I felt my stomach being pressed against the floor. I was swiftly dragged by the boot to the leg of the chair. Delirious and in excruciating pain, I noticed Davka’s glittery fingers like a crane slowly reaching down towards me. I would soon be safe.