Tag: Fiction

Beyond the windows the city suffocates and inside the airport an improvised social order has emerged, people placing themselves in like company within the first few hours, migrating either toward others or slinking from them, watching suspiciously. The snow continues its relentless entombment, mountains of snow, so much snow that it seems like a joke, a cataclysm and a joke. Families cluster and gravitate together, a kindred alliance in the struggle to raise children in such an unpredictable world. The erudite, greatly outnumbered, concede space to the philistines, retreating to their darkened corners where they can read or sleep in peace. Lonely travelers linger about the fringes of the terminal and three concourses, sitting in bars desperate to spread the microbe of random discussion. Outside the world is gray and cold and buried in fifty, perhaps sixty inches of snow and ice but inside travelers of exotic speech and color band together and sit against the walls with their luggage next to them, the contents unfolded and unused.

Situated throughout the entire airport there are precisely 891 people, 28 of which are reading books,  41 reading magazines. Only one of those books would be considered by bibliophiles and some librarians, not to mention teachers and many linguists and of course writers and readers of particularly rigid standards, to be a great work, and it sits open faced to pages 384 and 385 on the lap of its sleeping lord. Five hundred and twelve people attend non-literary electronic devices such as television or portable phones and music players and video games. Among the sources of such rapt attention are popular films and pre-recorded sporting events downloaded onto small digital screens. Fifty-four people throughout the airport at this late hour are engaged in dialogue with other people or with themselves, speaking at this very moment, 30 of which are connected to their partner via cellular satellite. Forty-nine adults are staring into the screen of their mobile computers, reading, studying, communicating, formulating their private mathematical balances, chatting on their preferred discussion boards, all of them drunk with fatigue and boredom after two days of near complete immobility. Four children run in circles of Gate 3C, chasing one another and yelping gleefully. A dog sleeps snoring in its plastic cage, another metaphor for the ennui that defines this frozen city in miniature. Two women kiss very passionately in a secluded corner of gate 21A and a young man smokes a cigarette in the bathroom stall in concourse B, fanning unsuccessfully at the smoke with his hands. Of the 412 people fast asleep, 408 of them are dreaming about death.

In the terminal of the airport an impressionable young man has filled his head with ideas of revolution and armed struggle and other romanticized concepts he doesn’t fully understand and yet he’s certain he’s carrying with him all sorts of mental weaponry and knowledge, he’s enlightened, he is the guns of his generation locked and loaded and primed for destruction, and he gets into a bickering match with a much older and equally obstinate man about the difference between Republicans and Democrats, or maybe it was Catholics and Protestants or perhaps warm water and tepid water, and the confrontation of words quickly escalates into shoving and pulling and then rolling about the carpet and two armed guards intervene and haul the fighting men into the underground lair in the belly of the terminal, and government men in suits interrogate them one by one for hours, nearly torturing them, and the revolutionary, or the self-proclaimed revolutionary, rather, begins sobbing under the pressure and he tells the suited government men that he needs to speak with his mother, please, just leave me alone, I just wanna go home.

There is a doctor in the terminal, actually there are two doctors. One of them waits patiently and attentive in wait until his services are needed, the other sleeps with avowed designs of concealing from everyone the fact that he is indeed a trained doctor. He will not deliver any babies tonight, no sir, and no matter what, he will not put his mouth upon another’s and breathe, breathe, unless it’s the soft sugary mouth of an attractive woman, perhaps even a teenage girl with glossed lips and the tiniest of blonde hairs rimming her mouth. He smiles and his hips shift and then thrust slightly as he sleeps.

To read the story in its entirety, you’re gonna have to buy the book when it comes out.

My editor called me into his office and when I got there I could hardly see him behind the great stacks of paper on his desk. I want you to go to Las Vegas to cover the race riots, he said. What race riots, I said.

“Don’t you read the papers?”

There’s nothing in our paper about any race riots or anything in Las Vegas, I said. Not our newspaper, he said, a real newspaper, our paper is shit, and I nodded and drove to the airport in the dizzying heat wondering why he sent me to cover race riots when my beat was local government. I stopped at the airport newsstand and bought copies of all the major dailies across the country and then I started to think about how hot Las Vegas was going to be, sweating, the shimmering heat vapor, and the thought made me very tired. I got on the airplane and once we took off I began leafing through the various newspapers looking for the story about the riots in Vegas and I didn’t see anything. Hate crimes in Georgia, a school shooting in Des Moines. Death in Denver. An airplane crash in Beijing, all eight hundred aboard dead, and I thought it was impossible to fit that many people on a plane, but then again you learn something new every day. Broadsheets and tabloids crinkled and folded, my hands stained black from the ink. Nothing about Las Vegas, nothing about race riots.

When we landed I called my editor and told him that I checked all the papers and there was nothing about Vegas or any riots. Well you’re there, he said, start asking around. What races are rioting, anyway, I said, but he had already hung up. And what are they rioting about, I said to the dead line.

I checked into a cheap motel and showered and turned on the local television to see if I could land any mention of my assignment, but there was nothing about any races or riots in the Vegas area, and I lied down and told myself I could afford a few minutes of rest before making calls and before I knew it I was dreaming of time and madness and I couldn’t convince myself they were two distinct things, I dreamed of open sores and boils on the skin and that my brain was baking slowly inside my skull and I dreamed of bruises and lost loves and poetry written on walls with giant brushes made from the hair of dead babies, and then I dreamed of race riots in Cleveland, race riots in Vancouver, race riots in Buenos Aires, race riots everywhere except Las Vegas, and in the dream I was running, I was always running, a guerilla journalist looking for racial strife and other violence but also the hidden meaning behind news terms like nut graph and lede and kicker. Then I dreamed I was coughing and I didn’t know why until I put on my glasses and noticed the air was hazy with pink and red and I realized I was breathing vaporized blood, choking me, and there was a terrible taste in my mouth that wouldn’t go away. I tried to wake myself up but I just fell deeper into the dream and there was a dancing woman, a woman trained in classical ballet and she was twirling and spinning and contorting her body in myriad ways and it was fascinating, mesmerizing, hypnotic, and then I noticed her hair was on fire, her head leaving a smoky trail wherever it dipped or glided and swung, and then the woman stopped dancing and stared at me with her hair on fire and her eyes mad and she said she could see death everywhere, she could see death on television and in the malls, she could see it emerging from the crowds in the street, she could see it in the jumbled letters of newsprint, she could see it in elevators and on the subway and she could see that death knew she saw it and it didn’t care, it didn’t try to hide the fact that it was death and not just some strange or ominous thing, and she said that death was neither a male nor a female presence but completely androgynous, and I told her that made sense and she got angry with me and said I could never understand something as beautifully complex as death and then she walked away, muttering under hear breath as her head melted. I imagined that death probably looked like a man or a fish or even a church, and somehow I knew that I was not afraid of death regardless of its appearance. Then I dreamed of Haitian kids creating rainbows out of feet fungus and I dreamed of people machine gunning their own in the streets of some strange country, I dreamed of closing doors and baritone saxophone players with their eyes closed and their bodies writhing with their improvised emotive forces, and then I dreamed of race riots in Pamplona, race riots in Seattle, race riots in Las Cruces, I dreamed of worms, I dreamed of giant brown worms with legs like humans who stood upright like humans, wormus erectus, and I dreamed the worms were bred to commit suicide at a particular age and I thought it tragically out of their control, the suicide gene written into their slimy genetic code, I dreamed of all the pain in the world condensed and concentrated into one small room, and then I dreamed of time travel.

To read the story in its entirety, you’re gonna have to buy the book when it comes out.