truthfront

Month: June 2009

  • Untitled [revisited]

    iglesia

    The young man dismounted his horse in the mad clatter of battle and forgot everything about his life, the unwritten codes and reverence of the land and deep honored traditions. He forgot about his young wife and the lump in her belly and he moved swiftly through the fog of rifle smoke trailed by his own long braids and the mad shrieks of wounded men. He approached the white man with red hair lying supine and staring at him from the mud. There were men upon wild horses weaving incoherently through the smoke with their guns or war clubs raised and there were fleeting visions of other men riding boldly and bareback but long ago killed on the battlefield and a small white sun directly overhead trembled each time the white men in blue coats fired their wagon-gun.

    The young man stepped over the men strewn across the sodden prairie field and unsheathed his bowie and crouched down next to the white man. He took a handful of the man’s red hair and looked into his eyes. A bullet whistled over the young man’s head and another screamed by his left ear and he sliced the white man’s forehead from temple to temple and said to him quietly in Lakota, “The wind does not cry for you.”

    Then he stood and tore the scalp from the white man’s skull and held it up to the sky and screamed while the white man in his final moments of life watched his own blood drip down the young man’s arm, his torso, lean and brown and heaving muscle in the gray light.

    That night the young man sat alone in his tipi and thought about the mystery of battle, the subtle violent leanings of men and the power to forget one’s self amid the jolts of heightened awareness. Outside, the red fire glowed bestial and the hypnotic throb of victory drums brought to life the dancing ghosts of many dead men both white and red and the young man agreed with the ageless wisdom of his ancestors that warfare was indeed more spiritual than physical, that courage was an extension of the self but that acting upon that courage according to honor and principle was integrally selfless.

    The young man reclined onto his blankets and listened to the chanting of his people and breathed deeply to remove the walls of his mind. He remembered what he had said to the white man with red hair and he reminded himself that the wind cried for no man, especially not the man who honored and defended it with his own life.

  • Premonition

    LinesofBlood

    Beyond the windows the city suffocates and inside the airport an improvised social order has emerged, people placing themselves in like company within the first few hours, migrating either toward others or slinking from them, watching suspiciously. The snow continues its relentless entombment, mountains of snow, so much snow that it seems like a joke, a cataclysm and a joke. Families cluster and gravitate together, a kindred alliance in the struggle to raise children in such an unpredictable world. The erudite, greatly outnumbered, concede space to the philistines, retreating to their darkened corners where they can read or sleep in peace. Lonely travelers linger about the fringes of the terminal and three concourses, sitting in bars desperate to spread the microbe of random discussion. Outside the world is gray and cold and buried in fifty, perhaps sixty inches of snow and ice but inside travelers of exotic speech and color band together and sit against the walls with their luggage next to them, the contents unfolded and unused.

    Situated throughout the entire airport there are precisely 891 people, 28 of which are reading books,  41 reading magazines. Only one of those books would be considered by bibliophiles and some librarians, not to mention teachers and many linguists and of course writers and readers of particularly rigid standards, to be a great work, and it sits open faced to pages 384 and 385 on the lap of its sleeping lord. Five hundred and twelve people attend non-literary electronic devices such as television or portable phones and music players and video games. Among the sources of such rapt attention are popular films and pre-recorded sporting events downloaded onto small digital screens. Fifty-four people throughout the airport at this late hour are engaged in dialogue with other people or with themselves, speaking at this very moment, 30 of which are connected to their partner via cellular satellite. Forty-nine adults are staring into the screen of their mobile computers, reading, studying, communicating, formulating their private mathematical balances, chatting on their preferred discussion boards, all of them drunk with fatigue and boredom after two days of near complete immobility. Four children run in circles of Gate 3C, chasing one another and yelping gleefully. A dog sleeps snoring in its plastic cage, another metaphor for the ennui that defines this frozen city in miniature. Two women kiss very passionately in a secluded corner of gate 21A and a young man smokes a cigarette in the bathroom stall in concourse B, fanning unsuccessfully at the smoke with his hands. Of the 412 people fast asleep, 408 of them are dreaming about death.

    In the terminal of the airport an impressionable young man has filled his head with ideas of revolution and armed struggle and other romanticized concepts he doesn’t fully understand and yet he’s certain he’s carrying with him all sorts of mental weaponry and knowledge, he’s enlightened, he is the guns of his generation locked and loaded and primed for destruction, and he gets into a bickering match with a much older and equally obstinate man about the difference between Republicans and Democrats, or maybe it was Catholics and Protestants or perhaps warm water and tepid water, and the confrontation of words quickly escalates into shoving and pulling and then rolling about the carpet and two armed guards intervene and haul the fighting men into the underground lair in the belly of the terminal, and government men in suits interrogate them one by one for hours, nearly torturing them, and the revolutionary, or the self-proclaimed revolutionary, rather, begins sobbing under the pressure and he tells the suited government men that he needs to speak with his mother, please, just leave me alone, I just wanna go home.

    There is a doctor in the terminal, actually there are two doctors. One of them waits patiently and attentive in wait until his services are needed, the other sleeps with avowed designs of concealing from everyone the fact that he is indeed a trained doctor. He will not deliver any babies tonight, no sir, and no matter what, he will not put his mouth upon another’s and breathe, breathe, unless it’s the soft sugary mouth of an attractive woman, perhaps even a teenage girl with glossed lips and the tiniest of blonde hairs rimming her mouth. He smiles and his hips shift and then thrust slightly as he sleeps.

    To read the story in its entirety, you’re gonna have to buy the book when it comes out.

  • A memory in algorithm

    smokespirit

    Sometimes I recall those memories of my father and me in his garage and view them cinematically. Jutting images of deep emotional warmth, close-up frames of his pallid head, his face folding in wrinkled gaiety. The stories we shared were the background music of our film. Quaint abstract close-up of my fingers holding a cigarette, smoke rising in creeping braids, the lens focusing past the smoke to my father’s face, his head bent forward in meditation, listening. In the garage we were safe. The world had its troubles, its violence and fakery, its small-mindedness. Our world was in the garage beneath the bright fluorescent glow, it was the two of us learning, reaching into parts of ourselves and pulling out the truths, extending them out for the other to take and digest. The garage was retreat, lectern, prayer room. I view those deep moments in montage, powerful imagery flashing about the screen of my mind, the moments before the credits roll up from the disconnected abyss.

    Then in the garage one Saturday afternoon he collapsed to the ground and couldn’t move. His legs wouldn’t support him. He was conscious but his brain wasn’t communicating with his limbs. The overhead door was opened wide to the sunshine. I’ll never forget his face, that expression of shock, understanding, submission, helpless analysis. My father knew in that instant that he had been beaten by his own mortality. It had stepped in front of him and choked him down. How sudden and jarring death claims our attention. How strange to be alive and commanding one moment, a sycophant the next. He saw the rest of his life spread out thinly before him, the decay, the mindlessness, the vibrato and stink of his organs shutting down. He realized in that flashing madness that he wouldn’t live another month.

    I helped him to his feet while my stepmother called the hospital. He was still stunned in silent thought. I could see the fear and awe on his face. He knew he was looking straight into the heart of that wide visceral truth. He thought he had envisioned it, he told himself repeatedly that he was ready. As I set him in his folding chair and lit him a cigarette, he realized he hadn’t even known what ready meant.

    Just before my stepmother drove the two of them out of the garage and down the driveway to my father’s sun-soaked reckoning, I took off my necklace and placed it in his hand. He was almost too weak to hang on to it. I said I would meet them at the hospital and watched them drive away, the car shrinking away from me into the luminous maw, my hand where my chain had been and that naked, vulnerable feeling there.