Truth Front

Up and down the dark flights echoed their labored breaths of ascension. The walls were black and the wooden stairs creaked with their lamplit upward march and with each flight the man and woman drowned further in the clank and crash of the giant working gears.

In the belfry they stood silent about wavering shadow and watched the innards of the great clock, their bodies quaking with the sheer mass of sound, the measured scream of grinding metal and time. The man walked over to the control unit and with his entire body weight pulled down on the kill switch and the room trembled around them and the immense machine slowed to a halt.

The silence was complete and stunning, a sudden presence of swirling spirits, insidious and arresting in their scrutiny. The man and woman looked at one another for several seconds and then set down their pails of water and degreaser and other like solvents and began to scrub.

“Are you married,” the man asked.

“Yes, three years,” said the woman. “You?”

“No, no marriage.”

“A girlfriend, then.”

“I have a neighbor.”

“You have a neighbor.”

“Sometimes I feel like she’s my girlfriend. I imagine we inhabit the same intimate spaces, we breathe the same air. We have long dramatic and inane conversations in my head.”

“Forgive me, but isn’t that a little strange?”

“For years I’ve been asking people do they think I’m strange. Because I’m not convinced either way. They always say no. Then they add something very profound or insightful about me and I’m glad I asked the initial question.”

“Maybe you’re not entirely strange but it sounds like you do some pretty strange things.”

“I was dating this girl a couple years ago, actually dating her, not just imagining dating her, and I asked her do you think I’m strange or peculiar or weird or odd and she said no, she didn’t think so. ‘But I think you live completely inside yourself,’ she said, ‘And that must be exhausting.’”

“You always look very tired,” the woman said, scrubbing with a brush between the teeth of the giant main gear, cleaning away black gunk and rust and dirt and all the attitudes of time and wear. “Like you’ve been traveling varied expanses, or something.”

“I am tired,” said the man. “When I’m at home in my apartment I have the feeling that she’s with me in the room, she’s observing me. The girl from upstairs. Not just sometimes, but always. She’s always there, watching, and so I talk to myself, or I talk to her, but there’s really no one there. I say things out loud to explain why I do certain things or what I’m thinking. I speak to her to justify my behavior. I’m cooking a meal and I tell her, ‘You can never have too many tomatoes. And beans. Beans are necessary, good for the heart and colon.’ Or maybe I’m giving her a recommendation: ‘You should seriously consider supplementing your nutritive plan with a probiotic.’ I imagine how she would respond to my words, which of course means I then must speak back to her, keep the dialogue going. I speak more words and then more words and before I realize what’s happening I’m carrying on an entire conversation with an imagined person. Even though she really exists. I’m talking to myself, thinking she’s there with me, critiquing my behavior and actions. Telling me to do something or not do something. Asking me questions about how I live my life, commenting on the state of cleanliness of my apartment. Making small demands. Without even noticing, I’ve already tagged her with a knack for subtle harassment. She’s a nag. She nags me. The poor girl never even had a chance. In my mind she’s nagging, and every time I see her for real out there in the world and I talk to her face to face and not just in my head, I’m always wondering when I’m going to have to duck and juke and put up my hands, go defensive. But she never nags me and then we part ways and she goes into her apartment and I into mine and the strangely unforced conversations with myself continue. I tell her about the books I’ve recently read. I talk to her about jazz, that immense presence in my life, as if it was important to her. I pretend she likes me or maybe she doesn’t like me, she’s just getting to know me. I tell her what it’s like to be a creative person, the loneliness, exalted breath of life, the ridiculous self-demand. The loneliness. Perhaps I frighten her, the real her. I’ve considered this repeatedly. Maybe she can hear me talking to myself through the ceiling or the walls and she finds it strange, but certainly not as strange as she would if she knew I was talking to her. Or her projection. Her imaginary nagging presence. Then when I step back and observe myself, what I’m really doing here, it saddens me terribly. I feel the sadness in my bones. The solitude is crystalline in its purity, its edges sharpened to a razored danger.”

They scrubbed in silence. The only sounds their back and forth scouring motion, the slosh of dirty liquid in the pails. The woman thought about the dream she’d had the night before. She was a child again and back on the farm in Montana, gray sky and pallid sloping landscape of green and flaming brown, and it began to rain, the drops large and heavy and cold. She started to run up to the house with the clouds tumbling low and fast and stark directly above her and she stormed smiling with eyes wild into that familiar sanctuary of family and nurture but the inside of the house was nothing like she remembered it. Everything had changed. New furniture arranged in different places, different wallpaper adorned with alien photos and embroidered scripture. Unusually ornate statues of women in various elegant poses, all of them nude, haunting and surreal. Even her family members had been substituted. A bearded man who acted like her father and a fat dark-skinned woman who was not her mother, the mother she knew and loved and with whom all was sacred and plain. A thickness grew in her throat and she began to cry, tugging on the frayed ends of her long brown hair as she always did, and then a furious rolling sonic clap of thunder shook the house and she woke startled and alone, sweaty palms tugging curiously on the ends of her hair, now much shorter and much more pale in the fleeting morning dark.

“Do you believe in time travel,” he said.

“I don’t believe in anything.”

“I was thinking about taking up a religion. Something morally precise, deeply ascetic in nature. I want to strip my world down to its bones. I want to believe in something just for the sake of believing. Take the blind leap, rescue myself from myself. Because that’s what religion is, when you dismantle its myths. It’s a rescue mechanism. Have you ever heard of the term eschaton?”

“I’m working here,” she said.

“It’s the philosophical study of the end times. Each religion or theological system of beliefs adopts or creates its own, they weave it into the body of their respective myth to give people the option of being rescued. This works most effectively on a micro level, interpretations taken from the myth, entrenched and transformed in the individual believer’s mind.”

“You’re making this up as you go along.”

“I told you I’ve been looking into it,” he said.

“We’re living in peculiar times.”

“I’m almost finished with this gear,” he said.

He polished the cog he’d been working on and moved over to the next as she continued to scrub the giant main gear, her face frozen in concentration, the lamp tossing waves of yellow light about the small dark room.

“If you could go back in time,” she said, “where would you go and what would you do?”

“I would definitely want to witness the crucifixion of Christ. Imagine the energy in the air, thick and electric with so much historical force. The birth of myth, ground zero of prophecy. This is all contingent on Jesus being the son of god, of course. Or even a real, breathing person in history.”

“I would want to witness my own birth, she said. “Stricken by the shockwaves of irony. Then I’d hang around in the shadows and watch my life unfurl. Try to confirm some things, warn myself of grave dangers. Either that or the beginning of the universe. I’d like to be there at the commencement of time. Listen to those words: commencement of time. I’d like to see those massive electrical storms of energy, feel the enormous wrath of mathematics. A witness to the jumpstarting of the currents of history.”

“How much longer?” he said. He stretched his back, his shoulders and abdomen. He cracked his knuckles and bent over to pick the brush back up and then he walked over to where the woman was working and helped her scrub away the grime on the main gear.

“When I was a girl,” she said, “I used to imagine what I’d be doing when I was the age I am now. I always imagined I’d be traveling the world, city to plain, living in bungalows or cloistered shacks and eating fresh vegetables. Snapping photos, speaking to the locals and listening to their stories, matching fable with scar. And now that I’m older I imagine what I’ll be doing twenty years from now. If I’m still alive. I can see myself running a small unconventional business. Maybe a hot air balloon park in Flagstaff, Arizona. A themed coffee shop in Norman, Oklahoma. You can never have enough themed coffee shops. In twenty years I’ll be mid-forties, the ideal age for a woman to begin grandmotherhood. I’ll be the cutest grandmother ever, little beaded necklaces, my hair graying and always pulled back in a pony tail, sandals every day of the year.”

“I picture myself as an article of history,” he said. Twenty years from now I’ll exist only as a newspaper clipping. Headlines like: Religious Fundamentalist Assassinates Pope. I see myself as a casualty in some grand personal war, a war I’ll attribute to my newfound religion. Anyone can commit a crime, violent or otherwise. But when you apply religion to it, an impassioned set of beliefs upon which you’ve vowed to die for, you assign novelty to the act, you thrust the crime past the news briefs in the daily paper and into the leather-bound volumes of history.”

“Man Stabs Librarian, Says She Was Satan,” said the woman.

“Exactly.”

“Bank Robber Vows Money ‘Belongs to God.’”

“That’s the stuff,” he said.

“How about: Strange Man Impregnates Imaginary Girlfriend.”

“Good one.”

“How’re we doing on time?”

“No, really,” he said. “I’m impressed.”

“I think we’re done here.”

“I’m laughing on the inside.”

“Let’s get this baby cranking.”

And so bejeweled by flickering light the man pushed up on the heavy switch and the room tremulous and sallow jolted he and the woman from discourse back into the confines of their own minds. They contemplated the majesty of engineering before them, sensorially merciless, and it humbled them into something like mirth, an inner shadowed room of awe and pleasure. The gears picked up speed and charged into a maddening frenzy of energy to compensate for the time lost to maintenance, a whirling and howling fury, a sudden massive force of heat and light and wind born of sprawling dendrites and tentacles snapping and licking electric white, crippling in its power. The man and woman with their eyes shut and faces turned upward surrendered complete to that relentless god of time with silent supplication, the lines of worship and the body of humanity’s sacred mantras painted in water upon them.

The gears slowed into their steady circadian truth and the man and woman picked up the lamp and pails and brushes and began the long journey back down the rickety stairs to the pool of faint light at the base of the tower.

I don’t remember what you look like, he whispered, nor do I remember the color of your eyes or the narcotic scent of your scalp but I do remember you speaking to me and your voice like carved from some small talisman made of glass and pearl and time. He thought of her while in the cell surrounded by darkness and the frenzied breaths of the other men and he thought of many other things and then things that weren’t things at all. His thoughts helped him endure the rhythmic crash of dripping water in those vast stone chambers and he dreamed of her in the runaway void of his mind and sometimes when he woke her breath was on his tongue and her eyes, not the shape nor the color but the essence, were somehow burned cold and alive into his retinae. He would whisper her name and his voice was life incarnate and the guards would shout at him with the other detainees shifting in their rags upon the dried pools of their own filth before retreating back into their own stone dreams, and he could see pairs of eyes flashing at him from the dark corners across the cell and he could hear the beating hearts of the starved, of the lonely and mad, mad with loneliness. The darkness was nearly total, is if he were approaching blindness. Every now and then the sound of men screaming agonies through the chambers and down the hall or around the corner, he knew not which, for direction was time and both were lost, and the prisoners in the shared cell closed their eyes to those terrible sounds or otherwise peered through the darkness to meet and hold another’s gaze in a tacit bond of principle or shame. Men thinking about their wives or lovers or their children either juvenile and still novel or fully grown and autonomous, or men thinking about their former lives as journalists and the destined chain of events that brought them to these catacombs. Men with a fire in their eyes smothered more with each minute but men married to principle and stubborn and unwilling to cede to the intimidation around them. And sometimes the man thought he heard the songs of birds beyond those cell walls, peculiar in pitch and nothing like he’d ever heard before, as if the prison or bunker or dungeon or whatever it was had been visited by a strange or foreign migration of flying creatures from faraway lands, possibly even other continents or worlds, or maybe he’d never heard the calls of birds before, he thought, the language utterly beautifully but oddly coarse and incomprehensible and perfect in some unintelligible way, a microscopic view into the fragments of his dreams, and every now and then one of the prisoners would mutter in his sleep or try to speak to another prisoner and the guards would thunder upon the cell walls with their rifles or their hammers or their books of lies and shout at the captives to be quiet, shut up or we’ll kill you all with your tongues ripped from your mouths, they said, journalist scum, and sometimes a guard or guards would walk into the cell the man shared with the others, the number of prisoners perhaps five or six but as many as twelve or even twenty, and the man would awaken to the footsteps of the guards inches from his face and the guards were there with their rifles slung about their shoulder or their sidearms clutched at the ready and they were tall and looked something like him but they were more like shadows of guards or the ghosts of guards there in the darkness rather than real armed men. They would not speak but abruptly drag one of the prisoners away seemingly at random and the prisoner would weep quietly as they carried him off, the scent of his shit and piss suffocating the man lying there pretending to sleep, and sometimes the prisoners came back to the cell quiet and subdued but sometimes the prisoners never came back. The man would awaken sharply and bitterly from some pained dream he could not remember and he could hardly breathe for the intensity of his hunger. He still believed in love after all this time without food and he held steadfast to the claim that men were moral agents before they were social creatures and he knew his decisions were just despite the onset of madness and disease and the temptations therein curtailing him. He occupied himself by stretching his bony finger out to the stone ground and making shapes of words in the dirt and grime. He wrote messages in the dust, letters to his dead mother, reassuring lists to himself, his future self. Both the free self and the still-imprisoned self, the starved self and well-fed self, the clothed self and the naked self, and the messages were different in tone and shape depending on which self he addressed, but with each note or letter or message or transmission he saw himself there on the ground scribbled in his own shit. He described his dreams in symbol and picture and he knew at that moment that the power of language was beyond reproach, even from god. Then he wondered what it would be like to be blind for good, his eyes shorn or plucked from his head by the guards just as they set him free to wander the world a lost and helpless soul. He imagined he would learn Braille and read continuously, and he wondered how it would feel to be blind, reading in the darkness. What it must be like to feel the words as you read them, he thought. Touch your way through a story. Reading would become a physical experience, even more intimate than reading with eyes. Imagine what it would be like to have a favorite word to touch. The guards fed them each a biscuit and a paper cup full of water each day. The man always woke to the smell of his biscuit somewhere near his face, and he’d sit up and eat the biscuit in two large bites. Sometimes after he ate he knelt with his eyes closed and his hands outstretched to the fetid air and on his face his tears were dried and renewed again to his cause. For what does it mean to cry in this place, and is there ever any deliverance for our tears when we cry them in solitude? He thought about his life previous, the newsrooms, the road, the chain of days like questions upon his lips, colleagues and subjects, loves and lives passed, and his heart was fortified by his memories, strengthened by his woe. He dropped his hands to his sides and stretched out again there upon the muck in the room with no dimension and he slept. He dreamed of long meandering rivers flowing up mountains, frothing white and replete with life and in each river he saw his reflection pure and shimmering and distorted only by the sparkling ruse of the sun. To be blind and reading in the darkness, he thought, embracing the words, feeling his way through a story. Imagine how abrasive some words must feel. Imagine what it would feel like to reach out and touch my favorite characters, those select souls I’ve seen so much of myself in. It would be like feeling my own reflection. To be blind and reading in the darkness, repeating words and phrases, feeling over them again and again, the rote tactile experience of living through great things. Living through great things. To be blind and reading in the darkness, rain pounding the attic roof, smell of wise earth creeping through the open window, breath of crickets and worms out in the fire shower of their universe, flashes of lighting opening up the broad mysterious horizon. You scan the pages rapidly, your hands trained and possessed upon the text open and virginal before you, and there is no wind for the wind’s nature is to unsettle and there is no light save for the flashing sky. This would be something like happiness, he thought. Or to be blind and huddled beneath the ground in the city sewers and reading with the sounds of running water and the odd rumblings of humanity above and the tremors of the very earth shaking you to your core and the scent of rot and plague and the lick of death upon your cheek. To hear the echo of your heart beating there in the tunnels, tunnels just like these, the dream vocabulary of the miniature, and there is storm and malevolence above but down below you’re impenetrable, deciphering treasures. Nothing matters but the story and you emerge upward back into the world once the story is finished. Hatched back into the center of madness like some ripened fetus, more alert and shrewd than before your submersion. And somehow the air tastes different than you remember it. The people all talk and sound the same as before but you learn to see them differently in your mind. You imagine they’re more aware of you in their own movements, their furtive glances. They wonder how a blind person could see so much. A guard enters the cell, Where is the Yankee, he says. There is an American here, where is he. There are two Americans here, says one of the prisoners. No, says the guard, there were two but one of them is dead. The man sits up and studies the dark silhouette of the guard. Right here, he says, and stands. His body shudders with exhaustion. Come with me, says the guard, You’re going home. I’m not going anywhere, the man says, Unless we all go. You’re coming with me or everyone in here dies, says the guard. The man looks into the dark corners of the cell to the eyes peering back at him and he nods slowly to each of them and all of them and then he follows the guard out of the cell into a long stone corridor lit by sunlight at the far end. Hold it, says the guard, and another soldier appears and ties a blindfold about the man’s filthy head and they all three walk toward the light and into the chaotic embrace of Earth’s resplendent lithosphere.