Category: prose

Walking through the streets, I thought. When I wanted to write about something, maybe I was stuck in a creative block, I was thinking too acutely or not acutely enough, I would always imagine someone walking through the streets. Downtown, at night. Someone alone, a man wearing a hat, a dark hat with a wide brim and dark coat, his hands thrust deep into his pockets, shoulders hunched. Because he’s cold, that man. He’s cold, living in perpetual winter, and in this man’s mind is a tempest of grave designs, and he walks swiftly, with a dignified purpose. It’s an unfamiliar city, where the man walks. The streets are all strange to him and yet he knows where he’s going, it’s as if he’s equipped with a detailed map or maybe a wireless receiver or other phonetic device nestled in his ear, a voice on the other end guiding him through the streets with names like glyphs etched into steel signs or else there are no names at all, avenues and boulevards empty and desolate save for heaps of trash piled up in their dark alleyways. Yes, walking through the streets, this is what I thought, these four words, as if their sequence were significant or as if my own history was sketched somewhere therein. But then again my own story is irrelevant, worthless, for I know as well as anyone (better than most) that the value of a tale always lies in the tale itself, never he who tells it. The story has always existed and will always exist regardless of who happens to translate it into language, it lives eternal upon a current of energy or thought (selfsame) and only requires someone to intercept it, some poor, afflicted, receptive soul to translate and enumerate it, to unleash it from its shackles deep in the cavern wherein it stews and stews.

Walking through the streets this man has his hands in his pockets to protect them but also to cradle something else, something buried in there, something like papers crumpled in his sweaty palms, because despite the cold blowing in from Lake Michigan or the Hudson or the North Sea or wherever our man happens to be, his palms sweat, which tells us, the writer and the reader, that he is either a nervous man or he is nervous at this particular moment. Or, of course, it could be none of the above. Perhaps his palms are not sweating at all and it’s not crumpled papers buried in his pocket but some sort of charm, a lucky coin, a religious talisman.

And then beneath a streetlamp our man’s erect figure is ablaze, lit up for the world to see, or perhaps lit up just for us, perched here on this building ledge (or studying him from an apartment window), awake, aware, watching as our man (or his outline) exudes a plume of steam (or smoke) from his mouth and then continues his easy stride through the light spectrum and then out of it, drenched in shadow yet again, with us still watching, and as we see him we cannot be completely certain that the figure we saw in the glow was indeed a man and not, say, a woman, or just as plausible, an apparition, for just as quickly as he had appeared beneath that bone white glow he has moved out from under it, walking through the streets alone, our only evidence of having seen him the image burned residually into our brains and the clicking of his shoe soles on the concrete.

Back at the circle of storytellers, an old woman tells the group: They were married very young and had a house built in the heart of the city. They felt it necessary to construct a concrete wall around their house to keep out the felons, the transients, the cannibalistic businesspeople. The couple felt alone in the world and the city and so they chose to transform their feelings of loneliness into a veritable reality. They had no family or friends; only each other. Nobody ever saw them. People in the city just assumed the couple was in there, aging behind the walls. Their strange behavior began to garner rumors which soon metamorphosed into legend. It was purported that they were getting very old, or that one of them had died and was still inside the house, rotting and decayed, and it was also rumored that the couple had a child long ago, by accident. The tale goes that one rainy night many years ago the woman gave birth in the bathtub and the couple, as terrified of the outside world as they were, couldn’t bear to allow such a sweet and lovely and innocent creature out into the maw of horror and so they killed it and ate it. It was a rumor, of course, because no one had ever walked through the gate in the wall and asked the couple if it was true, did they really kill their child and eat it like people say. So the house behind the concrete walls soon became the locus of community legend, it became an integral fragment in the vernacular, the baby eaters and the baby-eater house was mentioned weekly, perhaps daily in the city and the surrounding communities, it grew to hold a temporal and spatial point of reference regarding the identity of the people born and raised in the city, generations of families who had grown up with the specter of the baby eaters haunting them from behind the walls. It became a rite of passage for all teenagers in the city that one night, amid drunken clamor and bravado, bets would be made and solidarity would reign supreme and the young men and women would decide to scale the concrete wall to become more intimate with the baby-eater house, which was symbolic of their departure from childhood and arrival into the adult realm, for their entire young lives the baby-eater house was one of the city’s most consistently frightening features. The scaling of the wall would wipe the slate clean, as they say, of everything they had ever known and said, in terms of legend, identity, what was real and what was make-believe, all of their fears and questions confronted in one great leap. When they finally scaled that wall in the middle of the night, one or two of them boosting up the bravest or most reckless of souls to traverse the fold himself, for it was usually a young man driven solely by the desire to impress the others, what he found was a very old and abandoned house, windows cracked and broken and weeds sprouting up through the floorboards, the furniture inside rotted and caked with dust, a home, truth be told, so abandoned that not even the city’s stray animals lived there. The young man alone on the other side of the wall, wracked at once with emotions in myriad learns and understands many things in those few seconds, before re-scaling the wall and returning to the other side. He understands things he hadn’t before, about life, about assumption and discovery, about the power of secrets and legends, about himself, and he knows that nothing will ever be the same for him again, there will always be something separating him from his friends, there will always be deep within him something no one from that city or its surrounding communities will ever touch, will ever match, unless they too scale that wall and witness the baby-eater house or the so called baby-eater house for what it truly is. The young man holds a tremendous amount of power in that moment, for he realizes the future of the community is in his hands, so to speak. He can return to the other side and tell his friends whatever he wants, he can choose to keep the legend alive or destroy it in one fell swoop, and the choice is his and his alone.

Ask yourself why you love literature, he said to the students in the room. Ask yourself why you’re devoted, what’s brought you here to this room.

He paced. The room was silent.

I love literature more than any other form of art because it is most often the tale of the Everyman, he said. It is language, yes. It is storytelling in its purest form, yes. I love it for these things. But most of all I love it because of the Everyman.

What do you mean by Everyman, a woman asked.

The Everyman, said the man in front of the room, is you. It is me. It is the ordinary man or woman who lives in extraordinary times. Just like us. The Everyman is the character in the work, moving through it, making decisions, performing routine tasks, assigning obligations to him or herself. But the Everyman is also the composer of the work. Man must have firsthand knowledge of the Everyman in order to narrate him. The Everyman is also the translator of the work. Man must speak the language of the Everyman in order to translate him. The Everyman is also the great liberator of the work. Man must have a notion of the Everyman’s captivity in order to free him.

The room was silent. The students watched the man pace slowly in front of them, back and forth.

For years I’ve toiled as a sculptor would, drafting by hand and chiseling away the stone to fashion my life into a work of art. Until the project is complete, the sculpture lacks shape and context and appears to be its very antithesis. The art appears to others, perhaps even those who know the sculptor most intimately, to be disorganized madness, ripe with error, a mess, a living joke. It is human to stumble. For when he is not sculpting, he drinks too much, he is easily distracted. But he finds solace in knowing that his mistakes are wrought of temporary moments of weakness rather than complacency, indifference, or obstinacy.

Is it so uncommon for a man to will himself to become something more than himself? His enemies are numerous; they wish passively to destroy him, to fashion him into the antagonist of the common man.

*

Loneliness is crafty, it infiltrates the fortress of solitude, poisoning the seer’s sense. Zarathustra, lend me your wisdom and experience, provide me with the strength to bear the weight of my fellow men and women.

—I prefer to crack my window when I write, particularly in the winter months, in the dead of night the sounds of the city soothe me, the sounds of the city guide me down into my cellar of self reflection, exactly where I need to be in order to examine the shadowed recesses, to peer down into the hidden places where no light nor exposure exists, where all things go to remain unobserved. These are the very things I’m looking to discover, secrets, the crawling, slithering forms of the mind, this is where they live and the open window on the wall behind me helps cast light upon those forms to send them scurrying, to upset their patterns of concealment. I don’t know why or how the sounds of the city can bring me such clarity during my ritualized introspections, particularly when the city I live in the world I live in the walls I live in are bathed in violence and grotesquery, all attitudes of famine and indoctrination and injustice. Wind, insects, vehicles, midnight pedestrians, distant sirens, rain, gunshots, screams, howls, silence—all of it like some cipher upon the door to those sacred inner spaces, allowing my entry.

There is a voice in my head as I write this. The voice tells me to stop writing, to keep writing, the voice tells me to look away. Focus, the voice says. Beyond the golden arch of your soul is the tired old man, the tired old man you’ll never be, the voice says.

Afterward, she stroked the long scar on my chest like she might stroke the skin of a snake. She touched the scars on my neck and abdomen, and I held her misshapen hand in mine. We allowed the other to explore our defects because that’s what they were for. Our imperfections can’t help but tell others and even ourselves who we are. Though she was alarmingly fit and shapely for her age, her naked body betrayed her years, as our bodies eventually betray us all.

Will you stay with me tonight? she asked.

I said I would and then retrieved the cups from the floor.

My name is Anya, she said.

It’s perfect for you, I told her, and we lied there drinking until the brandy in the bottle was gone and the sweat on our skin dried and likewise became part of the past.

You want things to be different. You want to live in a world (imagined or unimagined) where wickedness doesn’t always prevail, where neither socialization nor prejudice breed conflict. For human beings do not understand each other, which would be acceptable if they would only accept it. Human beings fail to understand their role in each other’s lives just as they fail to understand their role in relation to the world — while the Earth quickly and rather seamlessly adapts to drastic change, mankind does not. And that failure to adapt, to subvert the destructive element inside us, presents a demise that appears more imminent each day.

(Written for publication in The New Collective for Inquiring Journalists)

The Democratic City of Budapest welcomes all refugees with hysteria and perpetual movement, as if both were one and the same or as if one needed the other as its lifeline. Boats full of visitors and eastward refugees come gliding into this old dual city on the mighty Danube which, if reports and old photographs are accurate, has been largely unaffected by the great quake and its years of aftermath. Vessels of all types and purposes move across the surface of the water, which appears to be relatively clear and pure, millions of people move harried about the assorted ports set up categorically at the city’s edges, and the city itself seems to move erratically and en masse with the news of Senator Mayberry’s election victory in Zurich. Already many citizens of this city have begun their self-pronounced “frantic exodus of shame” eastward to the open arms of the Democratic Port City of Bucharest where President Sobo has said he and the people of the port city “would welcome the Hungarian people with open arms, as brothers and comrades.”

The city churns with refugees from Prague and the Republic of Vienna who, like the loyalists of Budapest, fear the delicate balance of European power has shifted into the hands of the west.

Still thousands in the Democratic City of Budapest have rejoiced at the news of Mayberry’s victory, and thus, the apparent stranglehold in Europe now commanded by the POG. Supporters gather in front of the Országház parliament building each day waving blue and white Zurich flags or large banners stitched with the POG symbol while the Hungarian loyalists threaten across the street with flags and banners of their own. The city’s security police watch the conflict poised on horseback, fully armed, but no serious violence has yet been reported.

Budapest’s President-elect Farkas has not addressed the people of his city publicly since the news was reported out of Zurich. He is thought to be preparing a statement with his closest aides inside the Országház, but his office has refused to comment on his current whereabouts. Farkas’ absence has worried many of the Hungarian loyalists and has appeared to strengthen the resolve of the POG supporters, who seem to double in volume everyday.

The tension in the city is as real as the clamor, but the weather is pristine. As sunset darkens the sky behind the Országház with hues of orange and purple and red, a frayed tri-colored Hungarian flag whips about from a third-story apartment window.