Tag: prose

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.

—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.