No. 46 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The bidding on this object, with story by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, has ended. Original price: 69 cents. Final price: $30. Proceeds from this auction go to Girls Write Now.]

The dogs waited outside whenever Hilary came. Well, at first, there was just the one dog and then as time passed, it spawned, as if with my desire.

“Trevor?” she called.

I opened the door but there were so many strays jostling, I couldn’t see her at first. Then, she wolf-whistled, and shrilled, “Laikas, sit!” They all lowered, panting, some cocking their heads, some not. Seventeen mongrels, I counted.

I knew they’d give her (maybe) an hour, and then she’d be laughing at me for my fabulous attempts to keep her there.

“I don’t know why you tolerate them,” I said. We were in the sofa, by then, the Greek ashtray nestled into the concave of my belly. “If they turn on you, then what?” Hilary had scars where she’d been bitten and an oozing wound that she wouldn’t let me tend.

The dogs were practically feral.

“I don’t tolerate them,” she said. She leaned over and twisted her cigarette softly on Orpheus’s leg, watched his skin peel off.  “I have no idea about them, at all,” she said. “They like me. They lick and nip. It’s play that goes too far.”

I could hear the dogs whimpering, beckoning.

I flexed my pectoral muscles tight and tried to look naturally hot. I draped the red velvet curtain across myself and pouted elegantly, desperately. I proffered more Cuban cigarettes. I exhaled earthen smoke into her ears, her mouth, whatever opening I felt like.

When I went too far, she giggled and pushed my face away from down there with her bare legs. “In the old stories,” she said, “there is always a door through which the hero must never pass.”

“Death’s door?”

She drew on the Cohiba so deeply it almost disappeared. “It’s a portal to this unimaginable place.”

The dogs were scrabbling, yipping at the porch screen. A howling set up in response to a siren off in the Annex. I grabbed her ankle; I had noticed a long scratch, like on torn nylons, only raw, fresh skin.

“Damn dogs,” I said. “Jesus. They’ll eat you one of these days.”

“It’s something stupid I did,” she said, holding the ashtray in one hand now. I didn’t dare ask what stupid thing she might have done. I just watched her cigarette wantonly remove his face, char his cloak, and burn his private bits. The dogs began jumping onto the windowsill, drooling on, and worrying the glass pane.

“I have to go,” she said.

“Wait!”

I was frantic for her. I placed a small piece of dark chocolate on my penis. “I know this trick!” I flicked my abdominals and caught the arcing chocolate between my teeth.

But she was already dressed. She laughed to placate me. “Nice,” she said. “Brilliant.”

I stood in the threshold when she left. The dogs were whirling outside, anticipating her. They nibbled each other’s ears, moaned, and showed their gums in undeniable grins. And I counted them as they followed her receding sway. Twenty-nine.

Object No. 72 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by William Gibson, has ended. Original price: $2.99. Final price: $101.00]

In 1969 my friend’s dad was a Pentagon technocrat. My friend said that when his dad came home with a new tie-tack, it meant there was a new weapon in the works. Not that there would be a new weapon, but that there was now a coterie of guys in the building who thought the idea was cool enough that they’d wear the tie-tack. It started with the tie-tack. If you couldn’t get the über-geeks to wear your tie-tack, your project wasn’t going to get off the ground. You had to demonstrate that your weapon had fans, and these guys didn’t wear t-shirts. My friend said that Soviet spies should hang out at malls and supermarkets in McLean and take micro-telephoto pictures of tie-tacks. Because it was all there, revealed, this utterly top-secret quadruple-classified shit, on a background of plaid madras. And you could be sure that the weapon of mass destruction depicted there was really the very latest thing, because, he said, it was uncool to wear them once they became a done deal, just as it was uncool to wear them if they definitely weren’t going to happen. What you wanted to demonstrate was that your tie-tack depicted something that was liminal, something still in the Dreamtime.

I imagined that David, my friend’s dad, had one of those ’50s dad boxes on his dresser. Where he kept his doohickies. Cufflinks. Whatnot. And in David’s box was a fistful of tie-tacks, their little anchor-chains hopelessly tangled, a secret history of Pentagon blue-sky imagination.

He was a good guy, David. In 1969 he told me that what was going to happen with the Soviet Union was that it was going to go bankrupt. He said they were cooking the books, fooling themselves that their economy worked, that their system made sense. He wasn’t talking politics. He was an engineer. He was absolutely right, though I confess I didn’t buy it. I couldn’t imagine a world without the Soviet Union. He called it. The only thing he got wrong was the food riots. In the end, they weren’t necessary. In the meantime, he said, we just had to hold them at bay. With tie-tacks.

This ashtray, I imagine, came from somewhere further along the Hawk missile system’s developmental span. Ashtrays aren’t liminal. When you’re passing out ashtrays, you’ve actually got a product. When they passed a little spring-topped jewelry box, closed, to one of the über-geeks, that confidential “check this shit out” moment, it wasn’t a product, it was a glyph, something there but not there, half-juggled from the Dreamtime.

A fossil from a future that you knew might not even happen. Dashing, enigmatic, unworn. Not yet tangled in the darkness of history’s dad box, with the dead boys and the lost stupid war they died in.

[Bidding on this Significant Object, with story by Luc Sante, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $17.79.]

Only now do I feel free to tell my part in the theft of the famed Light of the East diamond from the home of Roscoe and Mindy Furgarden in Beverly Hills in the summer of 1979. The 517-carat colorless gem, one of the world’s largest, had disappeared and reappeared many times in its tangled history. Its latest reemergence, among the effects of the Marquis of Glendale, had occasioned a crowded and contentious Sotheby’s auction that was won, to the dismay of all, by an anonymous telephone bid placed on behalf of the Furgardens.

The identity of the winner was sufficiently well concealed that the Furgardens felt no hurry to stow the diamond in a vault. Mindy needed to spend time staring at it, in her boudoir, where the illuminated five-part dressing mirror enhanced and multiplied its splendors. She couldn’t keep her mouth shut, though, and happened to tell her very best friend, Sheila Showpony, all about it on the terrace of Sheila’s Elizabethan cottage in the Hollywood Hills, right when my friend Craig was crouched nearby, cleaning out the pool filter.

Craig wasted no time organizing a crew of four to heist the rock. Sully was driver and lookout, Rat the lock specialist, and Craig and I were set to penetrate the boudoir. We frankly had no idea how to go about fencing the thing, but it was too rich a score to pass up. We learned that the Furgardens would be attending a charity polo match on the evening of June 18th, leaving the house in the care of their housekeeper, Mildred Swing, who was known to suffer from narcolepsy, and a retired cop named McDrain who acted as majordomo and security guard. McDrain’s weakness was the dog track, so we faked a hot tip on the sixth race to get him out of the house.

As we pulled into the driveway, the night was clear and we felt confident. Rat eased open the rear service entrance and we were in. We tiptoed up the stairs and found Mildred watching The Rockford Files in her room, her eyelids drooping. We easily found the master suite; within, the second door we tried led to Mindy’s boudoir. And there on the vanity lay the biggest diamond any of us had ever seen, lying casually on a chamois cloth like a naked movie star sprawled on a satin sheet.

Then the lights went out. We never found out what happened — had we cut an electric-eye beam? But we went into action mode. I wrapped the stone in its cloth, secreted it in a pocket of my jumpsuit, and we ran, bent low, down the carpeted hall and the carpeted stairs. We jumped into the car and made straight for our safehouse on the outskirts of Burbank, listening for sirens.

We yanked all the shades down and turned on a single light. I pulled the package out of my pocket. With slow, dramatic gestures I unwrapped it, only to discover… a Sanka ashtray. It was about the same size. In the dark I must have — I didn’t want to think about it. The others left me bleeding in an alley with the ashtray jammed into my mouth. I hung on to it for years as a bitter reminder, but eventually I drove to the nearest Goodwill box and shoved it in. And the stone? It disappeared that night and was never seen again.