Category: Fiction

Revisiting themes

I read the words of thinkers and sometimes I read Shakespeare’s tragedies, namely Hamlet. I read Hamlet during respite from the words of thinkers and the ideas in my own mind. I don’t read fiction or the histories, which are largely the same. I’d rather read the words of pure thinkers, for thought is a condition of itself and only itself whereas fiction and history are conditions of the surrounding narrative that outlives them. Stories live forever in one form or another but pure thought is fleeting and demands to be captured. Descartes, for example, laid in his bed staring at the ceiling and its junction of two walls, stricken at once by candlelight with an idea he simply had to write down, an idea that had nothing to do with narrative, nothing whatever to do with the world he lived in, the political and religious turmoil, civil strife, disease and natural cataclysms, his own agonizing chronic pain, no, his walls and his ceiling spoke to him in coded heresy and mathematical jargon and he rose, wraithlike, hobbling to the desk by candlelight in his robe to compose an unprecedented system of geometric coordinates, timeless and practical, the system rich in—what seemed to him—a veiled utility.

This is of course not to say there’s no merit in narrative or fiction or history, especially the great works, no, but I prefer to cultivate the garden in my mind with the purest of the pure, the foundations of all thought, a trail that of course leads to culture, innovation, social hierarchy, paradigm, transcendence, what have you. Ideas that form the building blocks of all culture and sociography. But Shakespeare is different. I am haunted by Hamlet, for reasons I know not. I’m connected to the text without having seen the great tragedy performed, without having a friend like Horatio, without a father living or dead to honor.

April 7, 2015
From the notebooks of [name redacted]

And so, legend says, one cold night the boy sat down at his bedroom desk to write his way through that labyrinth of mystery. There was an empty composition notebook and he opened it before him to begin writing the state of his perusals, composing into language the likeness of his whirling mental tapestries. He soon discovered how natural it was for him, the act of writing. He wrote about his fears, the crippling panic whenever he was around strangers, whenever he thought of something particularly troublesome, perhaps a situation that forced his heart into a sprint. He wrote about the effects of that anxiety, it’s force not only upon his mind but also his body, which he hoped would lead him invariably to the source, what he considered to be the progenitor of his sickness, and he wrote about time and refracted light and he scribbled mathematical equations into the notebook and then his mind delicately eased him onto the path of the state of the world, the collective fear amid the global socioeconomic hardship, the widespread warfare, disease, the suffering in the wake of poor leadership and representation. Ever-present spiritual decay and fragmentation. He wrote about the governing policies and the political world as entropy or as a crutch for the modern, post-quake people of the world. He wrote about prolonged and sustained damage and he wrote about the social norms that would need to change in order for the world to be a more peaceful, more practical place for everyone to live cooperatively, contributively, equally, and before he knew it he had composed a very detailed (and very long) treatise on radical social theory unlike anything since the quake.

The translator and I watched the woman. She seemed more confident than before, as if opening this doorway into her history or our history she’d found the courage she’d needed. She tossed the butt on the ground and watched a string of smoke rise into the air, a flame of smoke braided and torn, twisted and folded back upon itself.

So who is this person, this prodigy child? I asked her.

These are stories, she said, waving at the air with a gesture of dismissal. They are just stories. Nobody knows if they are true.

Where are these writings? I asked her.

The woman looked at me and smiled.

March 5, 2015
Fate of the profane

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 beyond the hut tending to matters of the village the child tore the pages from the sacred texts and left the books spineless, then 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 floor amid heaps of paper scraps, a sullen look on the child’s face. 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 to ensure it was alive, it was still breathing and moving.

As the child’s broken bones healed and its wounds became scars the people in the village removed the rearing mother’s head with a machete and impaled it on a stick to parade about the woods with torches of fire guiding the horde in the night. The people of the village sang and howled, they celebrated the holy death of the heretic, and they returned to the village to find the child of god huddled by candlelight over its papers. With age the human intellect activates, and the child, for reasons unknown to this omniscient narrator, had finally become convinced that the words it had been writing so feverishly were indeed words or the pictures of words delivered directly from god, messages for the people, for the future and for all time from the heavenly king himself. Everyone had been right, the child thought. I am god incarnate.

An electric current slid though the child, intoxicating and rapturous.

March 2, 2015
Straight outta Boise

From his front porch near the crest overlooking town he watched the parade of vehicles leave at first light. Off in the west the sky was dark and nebulous, veined with snatches of pink and white. Coffee steamed from the mug in his hand and he knew he’d leave with them, trucks and vans and cars of all types with campers tugging boats and trailers behind them. He’d leave Boise for the first time since his wife died and he was surprised how easy it was for him. Sunlight shattered the sky in the east, and it was not a broken sun but vibrant and full of life and he turned from the endless stream of vehicles crawling from south Boise to check his rig once more. And then, moments later, as he pulled away from his house on Mackinaw Road for the final time he did not even look back nor did he feel sadness or guilt but rather romance and faint excitement despite his age at the novelty of uprooting and diving headlong into the unpredictable and enchanting world.

Hitchers lined both shoulders of I-84 outside of Boise with packs stacked on their backs like mules. His wife would have told him to stop for one of them and so he picked out the most vulnerable looking one and slowed down. The girl found an empty place in the backseat of the rig to set her pack and then hopped up front, smiling, her cheeks the color of blood, talking in rapid bursts and thanking him for stopping.

I’ve been walkin all night, she said. Thank god. I can’t believe you stopped.

Where you headed? he said.

Denver, I think.

I can take you into Utah, if that’s okay, he said.

That’s fine, she said. I’m Corine, and she talked fast while he drove down through the valley. The sun rose up into the world, intense and warm. She talked so much that he almost regretted picking her up. By the time they rode down through Mountain Home he noticed she’d stopped talking, slumped against the window with her mouth shut quiet despite the sun on her face.

She was young. He didn’t know how young because long ago he’d stopped paying attention to young people. He guessed she was in her early twenties or thereabouts. It was her hair, dirty blond and bunched up playfully in the back of her head, or maybe it was her skin, ruddy and smooth, her cheeks with that soft unused look. Piercings in her ears and nose and a black loop in one eyebrow. She was short and thin, perhaps too slight to carry the size of pack she had with her. He turned down the radio and let the news reports die so the girl could rest.

He drove I-84 alongside the Snake River toward Heyburn with nothing to see but sun-washed grassland and trees breathing in the distant morning glow. Neglected farm equipment hunched in the haze with farmers milling about like skeletons, quiet and remote. There were hitchers on both sides of the freeway and every mile or so there’d be a van or truck slung onto the shoulder with a tent fastened to the ground near the vehicle. The man looked over at the sleeping girl and wondered what she was doing out here alone, a drop in the world’s bucket of caprice. He figured he would protect her if he had to, and he didn’t know why. He could feel the road beneath the SUV skipping past and he thought of his wife, he conversed with her in his head as he was wont to do in solitary moments, just a man alone in a house or upon the asphalt that happens to connect us all with the past, with each other. For our experience in life is not relegated solely to the physical, though it is the physical that we have before us, it is the physical that we have to draw from or compare to, and though his wife was there with him in spirit she was obviously not there in the physical form, which is to say that he could neither verbally address her nor reach out and touch her. At times he forgot this caveat just as he often forgot the small details, the minutiae that escaped him and then returned to memory when he least expected, randomly. He’d forget about her scars and moles and imperfections unknown to everyone save the two of them, and then those details would return to him arbitrarily, often at night, he with a book in his easy chair by lamplight, suddenly present and engaged with the contours of her neck, the bones in her back just beneath the skin, her scent lingering on his tongue.

February 19, 2015
Daily affirmation

Hush blankets the world after the storm, it conceals the chaos and the strain, the turmoil and the truth of the world. Everything sets in the silence to renew again. What few leaves remain on branches bob in the breeze. The sun shines slanting downward in the late afternoon and colors explode everywhere, softly, in delighted whisper. There is only calm and reflection, controlled anticipation as white and lucid as the environment itself. Even the insects take respite. Without moments like this, life on Earth might be unbearable, oppressive. We heal after digging free of the storm, we move forward, ready for anything.

I wear a light jacket and walk through the morning glow gathering wood as if I belonged here. Nothing belongs. We’re all itinerants. Man can make no claim here. The only moral obligation is survival. Voices up the hill weave through days intermittently and I spy them over the rifle barrel. In spring I collect roses and wildflowers and put them in glass jars of water because it makes me feel normal.

There are no hobbies. Every moment of the day is spent doing what must be done. If there’s any time to spare beyond that, I’m doing something wrong. Laundry, hunting, water from the well. Cleaning, cooking. I find peace in the daily routine of necessary tasks. Every now and then a quiet cup of coffee at the window. Clean the guns and grease them up. Walk the grounds, check the traps. Sweep the floor. I trick myself into thinking I hear voices and I investigate. The air is cold, it sharpens the mind.

The baby cries in the night and the woman rouses me. She’s tired of seeing to the child. I can’t blame her. I put on my robe and the woman’s red hair spreads over her pillow like tapestry. In the sitting room the baby shouts for something, for someone. I pick the baby girl up out of her crib and hold her, telling her everything’s okay, hush, everything’s going to be okay.

January 29, 2015
Letter to a (non) reader

Dear Jennifer, I know you won’t read this, wherever you are, stuck in the muddy waters of your consciousness, if you’re alive at all. I dream of you often, I dream that you have wrinkles in your face and that you’re still in the village. I imagine you’re married, maybe for the second time. You’ve got three grown children and four grandchildren and you’re happy or at peace despite the frailty in the world around you. I imagine we converse, we’re seated in your sitting room across from one another after all these years, each of us hardly recognizable to the other. The floor is bare wood and the walls of the room are decorated with framed photos, and I say, You’ve changed.

As have you.

You haven’t strayed from the village.

No, I haven’t.

Have you thought of me?

Every now and then.

Do you remember our times together?

I have a hard time.

It was a long time ago.

Yes it was.

—and it would continue like that for hours, tentatively at first and then even slower, for we who no longer recognize whom we have loved quickly run out of things to say. But I know you’re not reading this, Jennifer, your eyes will not ever scan these lines. No one will read these words and that is as it should be. Perhaps Jorge will stumble upon them by accident one day or night and the idea of that is torture enough for me. Much of what’s in these notebooks is nonsense, meaninglessness, without value, word games and random emotion, detailed illustrations of the curse upon the infinitude of the private man. The more frivolous the words and ideas, the closer they originate in the most interior part of the self, the most private, intimate, secret room in the mind. Every writer has these notebooks or heaps of scraps that expose his many weaknesses as an artist but also as a man. The notebooks become a worthless catalog of futility that upon completion he avoids and wishes to destroy. He regards his notebooks with embarrassment. All of his pages and papers are full of affirmations and doubts and worthless blood oaths of nothing and everything that enter (exit) the mind of a person who writes to validate his life.

It is a privilege to converse with you in your sitting room near your fireplace with photos of your family framed on the wall. It’s cozy here. Everyone in your family has your eyes, except your husband, of course, and maybe there’s a photo of you as a girl, the Jennifer I remember, freckles and dresses, dirty feet, the youth stripped away bare by consequences we inherited, and you’ll look at all the scars on my body and know exactly how I got them. The scar beneath the left eye now browned and hardened with age, you’d know it was a fight I had with a landlord in the Appalachians. You’d know it because I wrote it in a notebook and sent it to you. You’d know about the scar up the inside of my right forearm and the whore in Denver who cut me when I grabbed her. You’d know because I wrote and confessed. I wrote it just as it happened. But what you wouldn’t know, Jennifer, is that I cried as I wrote you—

It’s okay.

No, it was wrong of me. I am a bad person. I have done terrible things. I have killed and harmed and still I write with you in mind if only from a smoky vantage. Though you’ll never read the words. Of course you have a husband, your second, and he constructs things, he’s a carpenter or an architect, a practical man who knows the world needs more builders. You try to help your community through its unbearable winters and flawless crepuscular moments and you worship in some crystallized place of quietude. It seems so foreign and forgotten to me. You and I sit across from one another in your sitting room with coffee cooling in mugs in our hands and we talk about the affairs of the world or maybe we don’t. We realize almost immediately how far apart we have grown, how different we are. It seems we never knew each other. I am suddenly incredulous, stupefied. My memory is fractured and incomplete and I might not have known you at all but invented you through the years as a way to protect myself, to dissociate from the danger and chaos around me. I invented the village in the Tetons, I invented my adoptive parents, I fabricated those discussions with you on the hill at sunset. All of it, a dream, a lie to myself. I cannot distinguish real memories from those I’ve invented, so elusive my past and identity are. Maybe Jorge is the true Jennifer, he’s the real intended recipient of these notebooks, and even he just a complex invention or delusion.

I won’t offend your sense of decorum, Jennifer, I won’t mention the brutality I’ve witnessed, the catalogue of failed moral judgments, because I am not a perfect man. You’d know this because I wrote to you, I wrote it all down for you with blood and dirt in the cracks of my hands. I told you everything; I held nothing back. In this sense you know me better than I know myself, you know my secrets and delusions and I know nothing about you. I am wide open beneath the cold blade of your scrutiny, sentenced to a panopticon of my own design.

Maybe you should leave.

Of course.

Please.

Is it because I stopped writing to you? Because I stopped sending the notebooks?

I’ll scream.

—and I deserve your screams, Jennifer. Howl and scream and remind me that you’re alive, that I’m not inventing this. I should not have stopped sending my notebooks. I should have always kept you close, always just a pen stroke away. I can reach out across the light and touch you. You’re so cold. What happens when we go, Jennifer? What happens when the eyes cease to glitter and our minds race dreamless into oblivion? What happens when there are none of us left to roam this place and drain its resources? What happens when our languages hush with us? Thunder echoes in fragmented mosaic and the human cadence is weak in response. Could our direct forebears have known they were living in the penultimate age?

Some of us are so convinced of our fate. What happens when our wells dry up, when the world is finally free of the human stain? We can’t all of us be certain of the fate of the human species, Jennifer. Or better — we can’t all of us live to see the truth (or untruth) of our respective beliefs. What happens to the planet then? There will be wind and seasons and there will be the Earth’s only true enlightened creature, the sea, for the sea is not ever surprised despite its eternal metamorphosis. The sea, though it always changes, remains forever unchanged—

December 26, 2014
Letter to a reader

Today I received a letter from a reader in Canada, asking if I’d ever read The Book of God. My news stories were lopsided, the reader wrote, and it seemed as if I’d never actually read the sacred text. I was a traditionalist sympathizer, or worse, a secret secularist, working for the other side.

My intent has always been to make it clear that I work for no side. Yes, I am employed by the New Collective, which maintains unique autonomy in the global environment of information control. They offer meager pay but protection and the freedom to write as I wish. The words that readers see in the New Collective have been reviewed and reshaped (and often heavily chopped) by gatekeepers and editors who fashion the original message into something new, approved for readers, aligned with the New Collective’s editorial mission.

I usually ignore the few letters I receive from readers and discard them without a thought. But when I do occasionally read one I’m not pleased with what I’ve read and it’s ultimately a waste of time because most readers have no energy or passion in their thoughts, there is no love or power or presence. I’m not upset when readers are critical of my work; I will always defend healthy criticism and discussion. The problem is that the letters are sabotaged by poor organization, sluggish prose, wildly inconsistent grammar, and puerile use of language in what basically amounts to a list of avid personal attacks. Most messages are critical in all the wrong ways, ultimately empty, useless, a waste of time.

But as this particular letter arrived from Canada, a home of mine for many years after having fled my childhood village, I read it and chose to respond. This is what I answered privately:

Dear reader, the first time I read The Book of God I didn’t understand it. I tried. It took two days of reading and rereading, and my first reaction was that it was incomplete. An adaptation of god’s words spoken through man, or so they say, the chosen son: an unknown and unauthenticated person of male or female gender writing from somewhere inside former Argentina. Sexless, they say. I read it after leaving the courier’s guild of North America to begin working for the New Collective. I remember hearing the story about this sexless child who could heal the sick and summon rain during drought. A demigod who could redirect streams of water to where it was needed and sate the hunger of its admirers when resources were hopelessly low. All of this according to legend, and all unauthenticated. Of course I never had the fortune of meeting this person (to date no one claiming to have met the child has been validated), but the stories I encountered pushed me toward the child so that I found myself at the New Collective, chasing leads across the world, a mercenary in the dialogue of ideas. If you’re still reading this.

I am no religious scholar and do not pretend to be. The first time I read The Book of God it seemed to me like any other holy text, though, as I wrote — incomplete. All the traditional elements were in place: stern and merciless (but absent) authority, promises of redemption or punishment, engaging narrative, eschaton. I’ve read it three times, and don’t believe there will be a fourth. My current critical opinion of the text mostly mimics my first impressions of it. Perhaps if more of the text survived, a meaning would emerge for me (for you know as well as I that the “book” is incomplete).

I can understand how some interpret the text as a salvo to rejuvenate a spiritually complacent human race. Perhaps there’s something to that. Religion has failed, they say. Man’s spiritual role in the universe has evolved. For that reason alone I gave your holy text a chance, dear reader. I read it carefully, three times, and it is only after careful thought that I believe the book to be an interesting historical artifact but logically unsound. I also believe the text to have been grossly misinterpreted by those who espouse it.

The world has changed as it always changes. The human experience is a unique emotional phenomenon and people create a framework (or multiple, overlapping frameworks) in which to best interpret and understand it. The Book of God is one of those frameworks. Another is the anonymously penned The Enlightenment Project, the champion of man as the ideal spiritual guide. Or so they say. As I stated before, I am no religious scholar, but isn’t The Enlightenment Project critical of religion, and don’t those who use the Project as a social tool understand the terrible irony in their abuses against worshippers? These questions are further reasons why I believe The Enlightenment Project to have also been dreadfully misinterpreted.

Unfortunately the authors in question are not present in the public forum to comment on the interpretations of their respective works. And so the readers and interpreters interpret and read at will, which is perhaps as it should be.

I signed the letter and delivered it to a courier from the European guild. Then I left to investigate and write another assignment.

December 17, 2014
Excerpt: time machine

In the dream I leaned over a workspace surrounded by bolts and plastic casings and wires, writing and rewriting the user manual for the time machine as I built it. Every part or piece of the machine had a precise function and I used common household items like cloth and a plunger, I whittled hundreds of tiny working gears out of wood and I didn’t sleep for five days. When I was finished the machine stood just over three feet tall and four feet wide and I stood there in my workspace, staring at it. There were parts and wires and fragments of my life strewn everywhere and I pressed a button to set the machine into motion. It vibrated to life in cascades of light and sound and the scent of almonds and I knew it would work, it was inevitable. Then I took a sledgehammer and smashed the machine to pieces.

In the dream I fell asleep upon the broken machine and dreamed again of time travel. In the dream’s dream I fashioned a drug rather than a machine for traveling forward and backward through time, a chemical compound of basic household ingredients in precise measurements, a subatomic cocktail in one compressed pill, and all one had to do to visit the Sixth Dynasty in Egypt was swallow that pill, all one had to do to help fight the imperialist invaders in the great galactic war of 3016 was snort a quick line, and when I woke from both dreams in simultaneity it was dark in my apartment and I didn’t know where I was until I looked out the window to the familiar lights of New York City across the bridge.

November 29, 2014