Category: Fiction

—I wonder where he was when the first tremors shook him from his reverie or his sleep, the troubled dreams of an unknown man, where was he when that first tremor jarred him with a violent reality unlike anything he’d experienced before, where was he and how was he occupied when his city or rural plain began to crumble or flood, did he think the end was nigh, was he alone or with someone or by chance could he have been thinking of my mother, was he worried for her in that first instant of impending conclusion, did he miss her, did he think of her when the skies turned to black? Or was he like her, was he dead, was he lucky enough to have died before the quake, before my birth, sparing him the terrible days and weeks that followed, the months of repeat concussions deep in the planet, the famine and disease and absolute chaos, the radiation and unspeakable horror, was he already buried beneath the rubble of his past life and that was the reason my mother had been alone in that room of reflection when I was born into this world? And where are you, Jennifer, now that we’re old and haven’t affected the world in the slightest, this I believe, though everything I’ve experienced has shown me that belief is a logical loose end at best, and most likely a dead end, or at least the end of the believer. And where does the time go? It slips into the wrinkles of our skin, it consumes our cells and swallows our odor, it becomes the stories to remember us by. We become one word, Jennifer. We all become just one word or three words or five words to those we leave behind, five words to describe our lives to others or perhaps only to themselves, he was a writer or he was a sad man, she was wonderful or she was assiduous in her religion, she was sick, he will be mourned, that is all, this is all that’s left of us because time is cruel but history is even crueler, the passage of time is inevitable and soulless but with history at least there’s a chance our story will be told and our life will thereby be validated. But it never is. We’re reduced to memory in the hearts of a very select few people who, like the words fated to illustrate those memories, become fewer and fewer until there is nothing but what is occupied by other people and other lives soon to join the void themselves. If you’re reading this, Jennifer, be not mad or indignant when I tell you that life is nothing but a concentric farce, or at the very least it certainly appears that way—

I opened the door halfway and peered into the shadowed hallway, rows of closed doors disappearing into the darkness, rain splattering the roof above. I came to investigate the mysterious scratching noise but it was gone, nothing but silence and dust in the hall and so I closed the door, my back pressed against it. Solid shafts of white moonlight shot through the alley window into my kitchen. My feet were cold on the linoleum.

Those were the days and nights I pretended at life. I wasn’t actually living. I heard noises that weren’t really there and saw things that were hundreds of miles away or thousands of years in the past. I was a Roman guard in the time of Augustus or I was a truck mechanic in Barstow in the mid-eighties, drinking cheap whiskey and threatening my wife with a butcher knife. I was an apprentice Panther in Chicago the night the cops stormed in and killed Fred Hampton in his sleep. I had all these dreams, I lived vicariously in my sleep, breathing through unfamiliar faces with a stranger’s lungs, seeing things as though I had adopted their histories and experiences and somehow suspended my own. I believed I had control over this.

I walked to the bathroom and swallowed another pill, water from a glass on the sink. A brief glance in the mirror was all I needed to know that I’d rather not see the real man, the real face.

I went back to the bedroom and slipped in the icy sheets, wincing at the contraction in my back and legs. I settled in and lay on my stomach, the spare pillow tucked tightly in the crook of my arm, rhythm of breath, mouth twisted into a beautiful crescent-shaped lie. I wondered what I was going to be next, where I was going to live, under what circumstances I was going to die. I wondered if I would experience love and what type of woman it would be and what time would feel like on my skin and I didn’t think about my real life, laden with responsibility. I ignored the bills that had been collecting for weeks in my real life mailbox and I didn’t care when I had last eaten real food. My ultimate concern was descending back into some parallel existence I could occupy without the needless truths and trivialities of the life I really had but never wanted.

I had this idea, I told this friend of mine that mental waves are just like radio waves, man, only they travel on a different plane in a separate dimension, all around us. They’re out there. Just like radio and light waves, our thoughts can be intercepted if there is something to receive them. Something that recognizes the data and catches it in flight. I was sure of this. It was my personal scientific experiment. I was the receptor, the gifted one, my life completely fulfilled in subordination to the lives of others. I was the ultimate spiritual medium. I wanted to unstitch time and experience history first hand, catalog the memories, document the universe as the stories were told to me by the people who actually lived them. It would be an endeavor unrivaled in the history of the universe. I told my friend that ever since people had unlocked the mystery of the solar system and defined the hazy machinery of time, they’d been trying to subvert it.

This was the premise. All those other lives were so much better than mine. I was enthralled by the magnificent uncertainty of it all. Each time I swallowed another pill and laid to rest I was frightened by the possibility of not knowing what to expect, where I would end up.

I was just happy because I didn’t have to be me.

*

There’s a cock crowing somewhere nearby, darkness, the smell of animals, dirt. Lying on my back, thick hay needles stabbing my bare ass and legs. The sound of running water, chill of morning, eyes adjusting to thin beams of light fighting through cracks in the wall. I’m in a barn. I look around, stand up, acknowledge my nakedness, the wide door opens, giant rectangle of sunshine exploding inward, blinding me.

“Well, well,” a man’s voice says. My hands in front of my face, eyes scrunched to fight off the excruciating light. Large silhouetted figures of people. “If it ain’t the great pre-ten-dor.”

There is women’s laughter and I feel suddenly vulnerable, exposed. I drop a concealing hand to my genitalia but it all feels too large, it’s humongous, grotesque. Violence and death are present in the room, living beings, tangible shadows lurking.

“Do you think this man went and got a horse’s dick, or this horse went and got a man’s body?” the man asks the women. He’s moving toward me, holding something long, thin. A rifle or shotgun. The women laugh again and there’s an aura of diamond fire about the man’s silhouette. He wields considerable power and I know without seeing him complete that he’s a traveler, he’s a receptor like me, a dreamer but a killer, perhaps something even more grand. Wanton and unscrupulous.

“Horse-man,” the killer says softly, moving toward me, the gun in his hands. I can’t see his face. “You should be fuckin’ the horses. Not women in this county.”

He keeps moving toward me and the women loiter in the background, squealing with girl’s delight. The man approaches nearer, nearer, and I’m still standing naked and bare with one hand shielding my eyes and the other hand hovering around my giant snaking sex and I have a sudden lucid understanding of the man’s nature and his influence on history, the spirit of the murder-at-large, transient violence for all occasions and without discrimination, the embodiment of darkness masquerading as brilliantine light.

“Go on, now,” he says over his shoulder. The women take a final lasting peek at the freak standing naked in the barn. They leave in quiet reluctance, two dark figures shuffling out of the light, out of sight.

“What are you?” I ask the man, and my voice is something like a man’s but not really. There’s an animal resonance in it, a throaty tin shriek boiling up from my chest, the words hardly discernible as they leave my mouth. I realize the sound of running water has stopped.

The man walks in close and his head eclipses the bright light and I can finally see his face and I drop my hand from my eyes. It’s the same face from all dreams, eternal in its youth, a study in perfection, a million arcane and familiar likenesses of everyone that I’ve ever known, the face of those select scenes from all the books ever written in time, the man from the light, the same face that paints every decimated body hanging on every crucifix in every building and revelation, the same eyes of the glittering mad as they pay reverence to it.

“Forget it,” I say, and I close my eyes and the man’s light swallows me entire, the life of the transient dream traveler, my real life as it was lived without moderation or truth of spirit.

[This story originally posted on January 5, 2008.]

—you can imagine a world where churches and libraries are sanctuaries rather than targets, where bombs are made and stockpiled only to be categorically destroyed in controlled environments, where perpetual violence is a fantasy rather than the reality. But you do not live in an imagined world, no, you are forced along with your contemporaries into a particular type of reality, unless, of course, reality as your contemporaries know it differs dramatically from your singular experience, unless you’ve been lucky enough to live apathetically rather than with feeling and concern. I digress—you do not live in an imagined world but instead in an unimagined world wherein occur the most agonizing circumstances and events imaginable. You live in a world where a better world is continually hinted at and/or promised, both prior to and following this current world, and so this unimagined world seems as if it were the worst of all possible worlds, or at least one of the worst possible worlds imaginable. It is a world where imagined horrors are realized while imagined joys and elations and tranquilities are but imaginary—imagined but not realized, conceptions that you were born too late to experience and enjoy, conceptions equally as prohibited and impossible as that salvation long ago promised to you. It is no secret among the living that you are sick with envy, nauseous when you imagine the generations that preceded you, before the quake, and you envy them not only for the world they were privileged to inhabit but also because, quite simply, they are dead. If what you have heard and read is true, people in the pre-quake world were lucky and different from you but then perhaps it is likely they were much the same: they were ungrateful creatures that harbored inherent antagonists—creation and destruction, with destruction, for whatever reason, appearing to have the advantage, to lead by example.

—I read Descartes’ Meditations last night, I read it twice, I hardly slept, having dreamed of my paternal grandmother and how she used to tell me, after my mother died and my father abandoned me at the old woman’s doorstep, she used to tell me that I was a special child to her but that the world was complicated and the quake had changed everything and I probably wouldn’t ever seem too special to anyone else but her.

But don’t be upset, she said. It happens to us all. This is what it means to be human.

Then she would hug me and look at me with her milky irises and she’d say, My child, I am blind, and even I can see how special you are, and that is all you need to know.

I woke up and looked over at the desk and I knew at that moment that I both hated and loved Descartes, and I didn’t know why.

I wake early in the morning with the lamp on between Lilly and me. I know it’s late because I don’t remember falling asleep. I hardly ever remember where I left off in the story. I usually close the book and turn off the lamp and leave Lilly alone with her breathing and walk across the hall to my room, the room that feels so empty without Lilly’s mother. I lie in bed staring at the ceiling or the walls until the sun crawls up and I fall asleep for an hour or two until the nurse knocks on the door and wakes me.

The nurse changes Lilly’s clothing and refills the liquid packs of vitamins and checks all the life sustaining elements. She leaves and I make a few calls for work, just to be doing something. I’m useless. I make myself something to eat and get down maybe two or three bites before I can’t eat anymore. I feel sick. At the bathroom mirror I don’t look like the same person. I lean into the image and see the stubble, the dirt in the cracks of my skin, the clogged pores. Each individual hair protrudes outward to the world I inhabit. I stare into my eyes, I try to numb myself. After a while I start the shower and get in, the water steaming hot.

Everything is different when you’re grieving. A newfound microscopic significance inhabits the mundane. All actions and all thoughts are weighed down and replete with meaning. Values are assigned to inanimate objects. Light is no longer just light, a bar of soap isn’t just a bar of soap. Grief is a process, a deeply emotional response, an imbalanced characterization. I read the ingredients on the shampoo bottle six times in a row, silently annunciating each chemical. There is an odd comfort in grief because the grieving person feels so close to the recently departed, holding onto their memory with everything, as if it were the waning force of life or as if even the memories would also soon be gone. What’s difficult is maintaining a firm grasp on one’s identity; do not confuse the life force of the dead or dying for your own, for no matter how intimately entwined you might have been, no matter the volume and significance of what you shared with them, one’s will to live will always be one’s own.

The towel is my friend, the shower helps clear my head. I decide that everything’s going to be okay. I walk into Lilly’s room and sit next to the lamp and open the book. I start reading aloud again.

At times the post-quake man must forcibly defend his life and property and is thus compelled to dictate the fate of others. For the principles we must follow we need not look any further than Aquinas. We live in a world where libraries have burned to the ground and many of the old texts are gone forever. Here I will spare the reader of this treatise that tragedy and sum up Aquinas’ principle of double effect. Aquinas wrote that in defense of one’s self and property, one is justified in the killing of one’s assailant if and only if the killing of the assailant is necessary to the survival of one’s self. The killing of the assailant can only occur if the intention is to save one’s own life (or the life of his or her immediate community or property), and the amount of violence used against the assailant was the necessary amount and nothing more.

Based upon Aquinas’ principle, killing another as a means of self-defense isn’t necessarily prohibited. But the killing of another for reasons other than stated above is unlawful and unethical. The health of the social apparatus depends on this. Certainly it is obvious that warfare contains its own rules and codes that fall outside of the principle of double effect, though the principle of double effect does still, and always must, apply.

And the child’s first year in its new home continued primarily in this regard, with celebration and solidarity among the people of the village and the child began to walk of its own power, its plump and shaky legs moving deftly from the rearing mother and her arms outstretched to other women in the candlelight of the hut, for the child hardly left its abode, it was brought to it all essentials including food and drinking water as well as gifts from the people in the village, gifts piled up in its hut as signs of respect and offerings not only to the child but whom the people of the village trusted as the child’s true father, the everlasting, and so the child hadn’t too much room to maneuver upon its quivering legs, but maneuver it did, smiling at the odd sensation of muscle and bone and other tissue at work in its small body. As was customary in the village the rearing mother would cradle the child in her arms and feed the child milk from her breast until the child’s constitution was mature enough to eat solid foods and the rearing mother did this well into the child’s second year, and also customary among these people was to settle the child during lamplight by softly rubbing the child’s genitals, a gentle massage that the rearing mother found arduous, for not only was their holy child dually equipped but as it continued to grow its genitalia grew and matured along with it, the penis in particular which seemed at times to the rearing mother to be obscenely large and dangerous, especially as it reacted to the mother’s soft stroking and stimulation of it, for the penis secretly frightened her in many ways, not only for its sheer size and virile nature, its unspeakable power, but also because she knew it would continue to grow as the child grew in years and it would doubtlessly become a product of gossip among the young women in the village and ultimately the focus of their licentious weakness, just as she was afraid the same might happen to herself, for she could not admit in all honesty that she massaged the child’s erection simply out of motherly love alone.