Sombrero Fallout. Richard Brautigan

with a penis.

      He probably, if it’s possible, would have cried even more if he had known she was sleeping alone. That would have made him feel even sadder.

      SAILOR

      What was he going to do with the rest of the night? It was 10:15 in November. He didn’t want to watch the eleven o’clock news. He wasn’t hungry. He didn’t want a drink. He knew if he tried to read a book the pages would swim through the tears in his eyes.

      So he thought about her fucking somebody else. He thought about another man, a nameless face with his penis entering her. He thought about her moaning and moving under the weight of another man’s cock. Thoughts like that were no good for him but he clung to them like a drowning sailor to a board in the middle of an ocean without horizons.

      Then he looked down at the pieces of paper at his feet. Why should a sombrero fall out of the sky? The torn pieces of paper would never be able to tell him. He sat down on the floor in the middle of them.

      ERASER

      The Japanese woman slept on.

      Yukiko had gone to bed very tired. It had been a hard day for her. All she wanted to do at work was to go home and go to sleep, and now here she was: she was home sleeping.

      She had a small dream about her childhood. It was a dream that she would not remember when she woke up in the morning nor would she ever remember it.

      It was gone forever.

      It was actually gone as she dreamt it.

      It erased itself as it happened.

      BREATHING

      The first time he met her he was very drunk one night in San Francisco. She had gotten off work and had gone to a bar with some co-workers. She didn’t like to drink because typically Japanese she couldn’t hold her liquor and besides that, she didn’t really like the feeling of alcohol in her body. It made her feel dizzy.

      So she didn’t go to bars very often.

      After she finished work that night she was tired but her two co-workers persuaded her to go with them to a local bar where young people hung out.

      When he turned around on his bar stool, very drunk, which was a condition not unknown to him, and saw her sitting there in her uniform, little did he know that two years later he would be sitting on the floor surrounded by little pieces of paper dealing with a sombrero falling out of the sky, his eyes dashing tears forth like a spring creek in the mountains and he would have nowhere to go forever and his life would be tired of breathing him.

      SUBURB

      Yukiko rolled over.

      That plain, that simple.

      Her body was small in its moving.

      And her hair followed, dreaming her as she moved.

      A cat, her cat, in bed with her was awakened by her moving, and watched her turn slowly over in bed. When she stopped moving, the cat went back to sleep.

      It was a black cat and could have been a suburb of her hair.

      ORIGAMI

      He picked up the many torn pieces of paper about the sombrero and dropped them into an empty waste-paper basket which was dark and totally bottomless, but the pieces of white paper miraculously found a bottom and lay upon it glowing faintly upward like a reverse origami cradled on the abyss.

      He did not know that she slept alone.

      GIRL

      There had to be a way out of this.

      Then he knew what to do. He called a girl on the telephone. She was pleased that it was him when she answered the telephone. ‘I’m glad you called,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you come over and have a nightcap with me? I’d like to see you.’

      She only lived four blocks away.

      There was the sound of romance in her voice.

      For years they had been on and off casual lovers and she was very good in bed. She had read all of his books and was very intelligent because she never talked to him about them. He didn’t like to talk about his books and she had never asked him anything about them, but they were all there on her bookshelf. He liked the idea of her having all of his books but he liked even better the fact that they had been lovers for five years now and she had never asked him about them. He wrote them, she read them, and they did some pretty fair fucking together.

      She wasn’t his physical type but she compensated for it in other ways.

      ‘I’d like to see you,’ she said on the telephone.

      ‘I’ll be over in a few minutes,’ he said.

      ‘I’ll put a log on the fire,’ she said.

      He was feeling better now.

      Maybe it would all work out.

      Perhaps, it wasn’t hopeless.

      He put his coat on and started out the door.

      Actually, he did nothing because he had been only thinking about all of this in his mind. None of it was real. He hadn’t touched the telephone and there was no such girl.

      He was still staring at the torn pieces of paper in the waste-paper basket. He was staring very intently at them as they made friends with the abyss. They seemed to have a life of their own. It was a big decision but they decided to go on without him.

      MAYOR

      ‘Why are hats falling from the sky?’ said the mayor.

      ‘I don’t know,’ said his cousin.

      The man who was without a job wondered if the hat would fit his head.

      ‘This is serious,’ said the mayor. ‘Let me take a look at that sombrero.’ He gestured toward the hat and his cousin immediately reached to pick it up because he wanted to be mayor himself someday and picking up that hat might get him some political help in the future when his name would be on the ballot.

      The mayor might even endorse him and say at a big rally, ‘I’ve been a good mayor and you’ve re-elected me six times but I know my cousin here will be a great mayor and carry on a tradition of honesty and leadership in our community.’

      Yes, it was a very good idea to pick up the sombrero.

      His future as mayor depended on it.

      He would have been an idiot if he’d said, ‘Pick it up yourself. Who do you think you are, anyway? I wasn’t put on this earth to pick up sombreros for you.’

      BERRIES

      Though it was a hot day, the sombrero was ice-cold. When the cousin touched the hat, he withdrew his hand immediately as if he had touched electricity.

      ‘What’s wrong?’ said the mayor.

      ‘This sombrero is cold,’ his cousin said.

      ‘What?’ the mayor said.

      ‘It’s cold.’

      ‘Cold?’

      ‘Ice-cold.’

      The man who did not have a job stared at the sombrero. It didn’t look cold to him. But what did he know? He didn’t have a job. Perhaps if he had a job the sombrero would have looked cold to him. Maybe that’s why he didn’t have a job. He couldn’t see a cold sombrero when he was looking at one.

      His unemployment benefits had run out a month before