Category: prose

“That’s just too much to think about,” he said, waving a cigarette. “I mean, think about it. We’re young. We have our games and our bars and spars with emotion. We have our ceremonies. We have sex and pop culture. We have sex, mostly. This is what concerns us. This is how we find value in our lives, by how much sex we have. What more do we need? I mean, who wants to break all this rhythmic lovemaking to worry about elections?”

He sucked on his cigarette, the garden light behind him breathing electricity into the white smoke, thickening it into luminous veined strands. He looked up at the deep black canvas sky, a breathing shadow silhouetted on pale light, a living penumbra of audacity. He smiled.

“But I see what you’re saying. This stuff is important. This stuff should be important. What I’m saying to you is our priorities are confused. You and me and our whole generation. We’ve graduated into ethical destitution. We’ve been moving this way for years. Activism and social justice are irrelevant to us. History and our culture has dictated to us the ignoble farce of our own lives, it has fashioned us into gluttonous instruments of superficiality.”

I shook my head and the woman walked toward us, slinking into our light, a slow dirge of crickets announcing her arrival. There was an empty plastic cup in one of her hands.

“What are you boys talking about out here?”

“Your boyfriend here was just explaining the privation of virtue common to our generation,” I said. “And I was just preparing to refute his bullshit and destroy him intellectually.”

“Take it easy on him,” she said, her body melting into his, their arms disappearing behind one another into those ritualized human folds, those tactile zones of repetitive comfort. The small of the back. The nape of the neck. Gently rubbing and patting. A stray finger jutting somewhere below, a test of safety and assurance but also identity, the interpersonal barometer of another’s mood, the formalized suspension of leeriness, a subtle acknowledgment of partnership. This body, this strange and miraculous human shell of pulsing cells, where skin and hair entwine in the murky heat and residue of dimpled flesh, the lines of animal and operator integrating the fragments of pure behavioral essence. This is what I thought about in that brief flashing moment as I drank from my cup and waited for my friend’s predictably lowbrow retort.

“He told me himself that he uses big words to compensate for his inability to please women.”

“Play nice,” she said, kissing her boyfriend softly on the cheek and filling her cup from the keg of beer nestled benignly between us. Then she stepped out of the light and moved toward the house, chatter wafting lazily from its open windows, men and women laughing together over the sleek resonant drawl of cozy urbane music. These summer nights are heaven, I thought. I’m dead and this moment is the post-elegiac reality of my former life, thrust into perpetual bliss, this is what I’ve chosen to take from the succession of years of toil and reward to project upon the eternal screen of my career as a perceptive agent of experience. This is the crowning jewel of everything I ever was, my skin warm and sunburned, a warm stale beer in my hand and rivers of it in my blood, a smile on my face in the most tragically happy I’ve ever been, I’ll ever be, levity and something like ardor equally on display beneath the incandescence of history’s crescent moon.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” I said, filling up my own cup. “There will come a night when politics is truly useless to men like you and me. It will be a dark night much like this, cicadas buzzing death chants from the trees, the moon looming large and fraudulent in a sky just as endless and inviting. It will be a night of a thousand thousand corpses, a night lit by the profane infernos of man’s destructive whims. The night politics died will be the night before men won’t be around not to talk about it the next day.”

“You’re scaring me,” he said. “I’m trying to stand here on a beautiful summer night and drink beer and you’re concerned with politics and death and revelation. Whoever designed this god-awful scene paired me with the wrong character.”

He filled his cup and we drank and others strolled out of the house in pairs to refill their cups. The music changed, a languid discourse of trumpet and alto over a steady athletic electric piano. The bass and drums were in there somewhere, holding down the measures, keeping everything intact, everything including the meaning of the song itself, and we bounced casual and profound ideas off one another until the dialogue approached that inevitable crescendo of laughter, the apex of the moment before we all reset and start again, shifting in our places, our skin, taking brief solitary seconds with our own thoughts before engaging in the others again, and we all realize in our own peculiar way how our scattered vignettes are somehow united out there in the lamp-lit perfection.

“I wonder if heaven is anything like this,” someone said into the quiet.

“Probably for some people,” I said.

[originally posted to truthfront on 7/2008]

We left the deck sinking into shadow and walked down through the narrow corridors of a labyrinthine ship to her cabin, which was not far from my own. I sat on a stool near her cot and watched as she poured brandy from a small bottle into two plastic cups. She sat on the bedding and we touched cups and drank, feeling the gentle rock and sway of the ship in the water. The brandy was good, almost as fine as something Jorge would have kept stowed in his desk drawer, but not quite, perhaps a bit too sweet. The woman’s cabin was similar to mine and everything was tidy and well kept, much like the woman herself, who looked at me through dark pools and then down to her cup, and in the soft light of the room I could at last make out the delicate contours of her face and neck, the elegant geometry and proportionality, her eyes and hair a matching depth of black, and she said to me, or perhaps to the room in general, to herself, to no one, I’ve dreamt that the world is going to end.

I looked at her and sipped my brandy. She wore a brown sweater with buttons, loose on her, and dark blue pants. There were faint creases in the skin at her temples. Machinery hummed somewhere nearby.

She said, It was all very quick and painless, the end of the world. But what’s upset me is that when I woke I wasn’t sad or afraid at all. I think I was more relieved than anything.

I took a drink and asked, So how does it happen? How does the world end?

It wasn’t very clear, she said. Great suction, an incredible whooshing sound, flickering light. Like being caught in an undertow of lava.

So a flood, then.

Not necessarily. It was more atmospheric, I think. Though I’m not quite sure. Maybe there was thunder.

I nodded.

You think I’m silly, she said, and almost smiled. Her mouth painted the rest of her face up vibrantly, as if her eyes and cheeks and all of her skin couldn’t wait for her to smile, and she looked away, she appeared somehow ashamed of her smile, her face, embarrassed, as if in nearly smiling she’d exposed herself in some intimate way, as if she’d known how lovely her smile made her appear and it was inappropriate, something to fear, a step too far or premature for this casual encounter among strangers. The half smile had made her appear vulnerable and in turn I blushed, embarrassed for her or because of what I’d witnessed. Immediately I felt that I had to compensate and rebalance the conversation by offering up something revealing about myself.

I’ve done some very bad things in my life, I told her.

She studied my face for a moment. What she might have seen I cannot know, but maybe she was grateful for my having spared her vulnerability. For my words, however dubious and impulsive, seemed to ease her anxieties. My admission appeared to have crumbled within her whatever barrier she’d erected between us, the selfsame barrier she constructs between herself and everyone she meets.

The young man dismounted his horse in the mad clatter of battle and forgot 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.

[originally posted 9/08]

—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.