truthfront

Category: Fiction

  • Phony writers

    Processed with VSCOcam with b5 preset

    He sat next to me at the bar and ordered a beer, introducing himself as the writer who does not write. I thought it odd that someone should say such a thing to a stranger, but then no one is a stranger in this city, in this world. I told him that I’m a banker, retired, which was a lie, because while I am retired I have never in my life been a banker. I detest bankers and banks and I despise most attorneys and writers though this is the first time I’ve met a writer who actually told the truth about anything, namely about how he did not write. Most people who claim to be writers talk a lot about writing and don’t write anything, instead twisting and distorting words toward some false point of light. This is something they’d never admit to. Liars, all of them, save one. I shook the man’s hand and said I’m pleased to meet you, I appreciate your candor.

    It’s not candor, sir, it’s the truth, he said, and drank his entire glass of beer down in two or three gulps. I’m not proud of it, he continued. Not proud at all. I’d much rather be working, writing with the immediacy of youth.

    I drank the rest of my scotch and sat in silence. The writer who does not write ordered another beer, a saison. A ballgame played silently on the TV behind the bar, the Braves were up on the Dodgers in the fourth.

    It’s a peculiar profession, I said to the writer who does not write. I imagine it has its ups and downs like everything else.

    I was never any good at baseball, he said, but before I could clarify what I’d meant, that I’d meant his profession was peculiar, not the profession of baseball, he lifted his beer and drained it again in two or three seconds.

    I haven’t seen anyone drink a beer like that in a long time, I told him.

    I’m a thirsty man, he said. A thirsty man who does not write. He put a bill on the bar and stood to leave.

    It was nice meeting you, he said, and shook my hand. Have a pleasant day.

    Same here. Good luck to you.

    Thank you. Maybe I’ll walk out of here and get hit by a bus.

    Then he was gone.

    I ordered another scotch and watched the rest of the game.

     

  • Another memory in algorithm

    Hopscotch

    Suburban life can be maddening for a man under pressure. On certain days he feels violated  by all the comparison. The people and things he sees spread up and down his street are like the people and things of his own life, only different, nuanced in ways he can’t quite explain. Fulfillment is replaced with longing. Time elapses in duty and rote obligation rather than days, weeks, sunsets, breakfasts.

    There is something subtle and devious about the way people communicate in the suburbs. Neighbors symbolize their lives through what they possess, the activity of their social lives. In the suburban community, a man’s value is measured by what he keeps and how he keeps it. Everywhere he looks is a form of qualitative comparison, a measuring stick of social value, a mirror under fleeting light.

    I sometimes wonder what my father saw when he looked at our neighbors. He was a man married to the pursuit of his own meaning, deeply and spiritually unhappy with his life. He hated everything about his life, most of all the man who was living it.

    I used to construct my calendar based on my parents’ work schedules. Thursday nights were a practice in tension. My mother worked late into the evening, my two sisters and I forced to endure the strain of a night alone with my father, his body teeming with living currents of pressure. His endeavors on those Thursday nights were struggles in simplicity, mere withdrawals of anything that might upset his self control. He listened to baseball games on the radio because this soothed him, it comforted him in the aging skin of his failures. He always cooked eggs and toast for his kids because that was what he knew. To try something else or experiment with his delicate routine would teeter the entire experience close to danger. He smoked cigarettes while he ate, one after the other.

    We would be at the table, the four of us deliberate in our silence, shoveling mouthfuls of runny eggs to thwart the hush. A baseball game droned in the other room, the innocuous soundtrack of our fragile safety. My father studied me as I ate, not just this night or other Thursday nights but always, judging me with every meal, each small bite, waiting for me to give him a reason. There was always a cosmic inevitability in those situations. I think back and wonder what my sisters thought while we ate, if they averted their gaze out of some mixture of compassion for me and respect for him, or maybe they measured him furtively, puzzled by the enormous weight of his thoughts. I wonder if they looked at me and couldn’t help but share my discomfort, a truth so deep that it became a part of who I was and still am. I don’t think they knew how close I always felt to death and how confusing it was to continually share that distinction with being a child.

    He would say something about my eating, I was doing it wrong, slow down, eat faster, chew with your mouth closed, open your mouth, look at me, don’t look at me. The words were meaningless, they could have been any words, any language or dialect. His words were the evasive filler of space and time, metaphysical snapshots of the moment before the moment. I always knew what to expect long before I cowered deep into myself in preparation, before the blow sent me sailing into the other room, his giant electric frame pouncing on me, eyes glittering mad, smoky breath comforting and familiar on my cheeks.

    I remember the red ember of cigarette fire in his fingers inching toward my eyes and I closed them, shutting out the animal light in his face, his eyes like mine in the years to come, and I felt the close burn just before he pulled the cigarette away, unable to whimper in entreaty or resist his rage by uttering the only name I knew to call him.

  • Cornucopia

    Processed with VSCOcam with se3 preset

    He spoke but I wasn’t listening, instead writing in the notebook in my mind but forgetting words, too many of them, a cornucopia of words pooling at my feet, flooding the office floor, words upon words piling to the desktop, I’m sinking in them, everything sinks.

    You must particularly peer into the recesses in your life, he said.

    I nodded.

    Recess, recess, he repeated, hissing, and walked out of my office.

    I wondered if he’d meant a fissure or some type of indentation, or if he’d thought I was slacking on the job, much like a child would take recess from class. I couldn’t help feeling defensive.

    I’m a leader, I shouted, but he was already down the hall in his own office. I said, I’ve always done what’s been asked of me, is this about the books? This must be about the books.

    In my mind, my boss walked back into my office and said, What books?

    The books I’ve been taking from the library, I said. I put them back, it’s not like I’ve been stealing them. I’m not a thief! I shouted. I’m not a thief!

    A voice from the hall, perhaps Sarah from accounting, asked if I was feeling okay. TJ? the voice said.

    Here I am now preparing for my death, I whispered.

  • Bulbous but strong

    Processed with VSCOcam with b5 preset

    My mother died when I was young, she drowned herself. I’ve written about this incident countless times, I know, but I’m writing again for myself. My mother died when I was young, she drowned herself. This is what they say. My father told me that she drowned herself because she was crazy but also because of me, she simply loved me too much or she was afraid of me, she couldn’t control the maternal bond with her son, she didn’t trust her body near mine, my father never really knew what, he only told me that she was crazy and it was because of me. She was crazy when he met her, he said. He told me once that she used to have nightmares, premonitions, she repeatedly endured the phenomena until she couldn’t live any longer, she just couldn’t take it, neither in this world nor the next. This is what my father told me. My father the hypocrite. My father told me this when I was seven, he hardly speaks to me at all but he told me this back when I was seven, he said my mother never mentioned to him what the dreams were about but only that they were terrible, our son is cursed, she told him, he’s awaiting some dark fate, some terrible future. I wake thinking of my mother and try to imagine that midnight pool she waded into, I try to find it in my mind. A moonlit expanse, a solitary woman exposed to the night, serene, a woman dwarfed by trees, awash in the light of the moon. This notepad is small in proportion to the desk and I’m hungry, I need to eat and I’m also thirsty, I remember the rotted bulbous tree root from my dream and my appetite is abated, at least for now, how is it possible to be alive and feel dead at the same time, I think of her, my mother, and I write in the notepad now fully aware of the scab on my hand, for it sets directly beneath the pen, a blister, each diagonal thrust of the pen reminds me of my mortality. Leaking and bulbous. I wake with my mother floating about the pool of my conscience and a bulbous tree root rotting, strong but rotting, a bulbous scab on my hand and a dark pool whereby my mother sent her last breath upward in a spring of slow bubbles up to her moon, itself just a bubble. I was seven. She was twenty-eight, and now I’m already half-past her final age. In some respects, a grown man. At this rate the scab will never become a scar, it will never heal, opened and reopened and reopened and reopened and the motherless child will never become a man despite his intellect but instead perhaps whittle himself away scab by scab, the image of my mother more like the dramatization of an image rather than the actual image, her body floats, I can’t remember what she looks like and I try to imagine what she wore that night, if she wore anything at all, bulbous tree root rotting but strong, what she wore floating dead in that lake, that secret pond in my mind. I see soft pink fluttering at the edges of the water’s surface, or perhaps the air’s surface, her hair too dark to see by moonlight, her hair shimmering equally with the water, the soft pink of her thin gown two shades paler than her skin, my mother, face down, forever, my mind’s eye directly above her, looking down, the eye of the moon. My father blames me, he’s always blamed me and I cannot hate him for it, I cannot blame anyone for blaming me for causing the quake, a bulbous tree root a scab a bulbous tree root seven a blame, a moon eye—

  • In this room (he writes)

    woods_town

    In this room he sits facing the word machine with papers and notebooks scattered about the desk and the rest of the room is bare save a small window draped in pages of his various manuscripts to shroud the room in shadow. A pastel glow from the desk lamp splashes his own shadow on the bare wall at his back and outside of this room explosions wrack the terrain and crowds move in the subtle majesty of sheer mass, pestilence devours entire races of people like waves of famine, and messages of hope and peace infiltrate the violent leanings of men, but contained within the walls of this room are the most profound things, for this is where the spectacle of the outside world is extracted and concentrated and enumerated for posterity.

    There is news in his village of a great earthquake across the globe and lovers stroll easily through the city square but in this room the streets of Mexico City burn with the energy of rebellion and New York’s midnight veins purge the police presence from the subways and the children of Port au Prince dance upon the recycled ashes of tradition just as floods and windstorms reshape the surface and appearance of the earth. He sees himself in the crowds, the swaying hunger marches and chaotic zigzag sprints from terror. He sees his face looking back up at him in the words he writes. He stares into his eyes and smiles at the likeness, torturer of innocents, playing both victim and tyrant, ultimately a patriot for freedom of thought and individuality.

    For he only recognizes himself when he’s writing. The world continues to revolve and shudder deeply and burn in places and he’s huddled in some dark corner of the planet somewhere, in this room, thinking, staring into the mirror of his thoughts. He sees himself and looks away, focusing deeper, because he knows he is only relevant as a medium of the message, and at the root of his ability lays the most fundamental purpose, a vehicle in the continuous search for truth.

    In this room the walls are tremulous and time is heartless. He taps at the word machine and scans the papers, jots notes down in a pad. He can’t remember his voice. He only knows that no one shares it.

     [revisited]

  • House fire

    Ecrasezburn

    (For Patrick)

    The house was on fire, I believe it was the house on East Iowa Drive where my mother and sisters and I moved after mom remarried. I was twelve. I believe it was that house, but I’m almost certain that it wasn’t. My stepfather was there, as were my stepbrothers, as the ground floor began to smolder, casually, innocuously. My stepfather ordered us boys to retrieve whatever was important to us from inside and place it on the lawn in front of and well away from the burning house. Quickly. There’s little time. The fire department will be here soon to douse the flames, he said, and then we can move on to somewhere else, another house, perhaps another city. Naturally I took the computer notebook, the one upon which I now construct these words, a device I naturally didn’t possess when I was twelve, and that moment of self-regard was the first indication, the first lucid injection into my subconscious that I was in fact dreaming, that there was no house and there was no fire, at least not right then, not in my immediate experience. So I grabbed the computer notebook as I have told myself countless times to grab first in case of a fire — If there’s ever a fire, grab the computer, if nothing else, yes, of course, save the people, but don’t forget to also grab the notebook, it is essential, for what is a painter’s worth if he or she has no canvas upon which to paint, what value does an auto mechanic have if there is no car to operate on — and retreated to the front lawn. A lovely sunny day, spring, perhaps. My brothers had likewise begun grabbing what was valuable to them and placing it out on the lawn and my three brothers, all of them in various stages of their lives and appearance of age, moved quickly, almost recklessly, piling clothes and video game consoles and assorted items of personal significance onto the grass, and it was then that I felt the heat of the fire for the first time, the flames had spread out and slightly upward, as flames tend to do when sated, but then no flame is ever fully sated. I looked up at the house and I thought it was only a matter of seconds until the wood and stone would begin to crackle and fall, to disintegrate into charred fragments of the place we formerly used to live, and I did not feel sadness nor nostalgia but a crazed rush of adrenaline and I plunged back into the house just to feel its power and energy on my body. My stepfather yelled for me not to go back into the house but I ran in anyway, passing my youngest brother on his way out, his arms full of clothing or blankets or whatever. I stopped in the living area and looked upward at the staircase and saw each individual stair coated in blue and red and orange liquid fire like nothing else on the planet save the waves in a sea and I knew nobody would ever walk or run up or down those stairs again, not the way the stairs used to allow it, anyway, and the flames swelled to the ceiling, melting away the material there, the flames in complete control now, the fire’s insatiable thirst swallowing holes in the world and transforming the holes to black. Back outside the fire department had still not arrived but awed neighbors collected about the fringes of safety, looking up at the flames and the wonder therein, then down to our meager collection of valuables piled on the lawn, all of them peering into the intimate secrets of what we four boys decided we couldn’t live without. Crack and burn, hiss and moan. The acrid smell of smoke and us boys looking up in wonder at how the things of our lives smelled when they burned. Impulsively I ran back into the house despite the pleas from my brothers, my stepfather, the people standing near them but not too near, and immediately upon reentering the jungle of flames sections of the house collapsed around me, essentially pinning me inside, blocking out the power of the sun and sky that I knew I’d always taken for granted and might never again behold. Impossibly large beams of wood and steel fell around me as the house burst and multiplied in size, thirty, fifty times the size of the regular house so that it was no longer a house at all but a giant warehouse, or larger yet, a construction site on the scale of an airport terminal or a small city and we were trapped inside, my brothers and stepfather and I, as the building crashed around us, enclosing each new possible escape route, forcing us to run toward the light and air only to be suddenly rerouted upon its closure by a sheet of corrugated metal, my stepfather yelling as he ran, Where’s the fucking fire truck? Running through the careening frame of the building while it threatened collapse and our steps pounded faster, my incredibly small twelve-year-old body jumping over steel and iron obstacles and looking up to see whole portions of the building falling before me, crashing behind, dropping to the side of me. I was soon alone, separated from everyone else, desperate, my hope enclosed in my heart like I inside the warehouse, and just as I thought I would never make it out alive to breathe and to drink water and to laugh I found daylight at a hole in the side of the building and without looking I jumped out, floating silently in the freshest air hundreds of feet above a lush horizon of endless green lawn where I knew I would land, whether I survived the fall or not, to find my computer notebook and begin writing about it.

  • The architect, a fragment

    wpid-IMAG0164-1-1.jpg

    The architect remembered back to the first time someone tried to explain how his work made them feel. It was a young woman in drafting class in undergraduate school. She sat next to him and one afternoon he was immersed in his work and didn’t notice her staring over at what he was drafting. A lifeboat, she said, pulling him out of his creative trance. I’m sorry, he said to her. A lifeboat, she repeated. Looking at that drawing makes me feel like I’m on a lifeboat. The architect looked down at his drawing and then back to the woman’s face. She smiled. But I’m not sure if I’m saving someone or the one being saved, she said.

  • The fifth year

    ratner

     

    In the child’s fifth year it fully memorized all five of the sacred texts and decided to destroy them. While the rearing mother was outside the hut tending to the matters of the village the child tore the pages from the sacred texts and left the books spineless, ripping the lifeless pages even further so that the floor of the hut was littered with small bits of paper like shaved ice. The rearing mother arrived to find the child seated on the carpeted floor with a mound of paper scraps before itself, a sullen look on the child’s face, and the rearing mother didn’t understand what had happened until her eyes fell upon the disconnected spines of the texts, whereupon her eyes metamorphosed into a darkness deeper than night and she rushed over to the child, beating it with her open fists, screaming that the child was a devil, nothing but a devil, a devil all along, the child unconscious after the first ten or twelve blows to the head, and it wasn’t until an adolescent male villager outside the hut overheard the violence within and opened the hut door to find the holy child’s rearing mother astride the bloodied and motionless body of the pale king. The young man separated the rearing mother from the child and set her outside to face the fate of the profane while inside he tended to the child and ensured it was still alive, it was still breathing and could move. As the child’s broken bones healed and its wounds became scars the people in the village orchestrated a ceremony whereby the rearing mother was beheaded with a machete and her head displayed upon a stick for the people to parade about the woods with their torches of fire guiding them in the night. The people of the village sang and howled at their joy, they celebrated the holy death of the heretic, they returned to the village to find the child of god huddled by candlelight over its papers, its ever-present words and ideas that the papers couldn’t contain, for with age the human intellect activates, and the child, for reasons unknown to this omniscient narrator, had finally become convinced that the words he or she had been writing so feverishly were words or the pictures of words delivered directly from god, messages for the people, for the future, for all time and all people from the heavenly king. Everyone had been right, all the people of the village were correct, the rearing mother had indeed been the caretaker of a holy person, a medium between the common man and the god they worshipped, the child thought. The electric current of power slid though the child, intoxicating and rapturous.