truthfront

Tag: prose

  • A memory in algorithm

    smokespirit

    Sometimes I recall those memories of my father and me in his garage and view them cinematically. Jutting images of deep emotional warmth, close-up frames of his pallid head, his face folding in wrinkled gaiety. The stories we shared were the background music of our film. Quaint abstract close-up of my fingers holding a cigarette, smoke rising in creeping braids, the lens focusing past the smoke to my father’s face, his head bent forward in meditation, listening. In the garage we were safe. The world had its troubles, its violence and fakery, its small-mindedness. Our world was in the garage beneath the bright fluorescent glow, it was the two of us learning, reaching into parts of ourselves and pulling out the truths, extending them out for the other to take and digest. The garage was retreat, lectern, prayer room. I view those deep moments in montage, powerful imagery flashing about the screen of my mind, the moments before the credits roll up from the disconnected abyss.

    Then in the garage one Saturday afternoon he collapsed to the ground and couldn’t move. His legs wouldn’t support him. He was conscious but his brain wasn’t communicating with his limbs. The overhead door was opened wide to the sunshine. I’ll never forget his face, that expression of shock, understanding, submission, helpless analysis. My father knew in that instant that he had been beaten by his own mortality. It had stepped in front of him and choked him down. How sudden and jarring death claims our attention. How strange to be alive and commanding one moment, a sycophant the next. He saw the rest of his life spread out thinly before him, the decay, the mindlessness, the vibrato and stink of his organs shutting down. He realized in that flashing madness that he wouldn’t live another month.

    I helped him to his feet while my stepmother called the hospital. He was still stunned in silent thought. I could see the fear and awe on his face. He knew he was looking straight into the heart of that wide visceral truth. He thought he had envisioned it, he told himself repeatedly that he was ready. As I set him in his folding chair and lit him a cigarette, he realized he hadn’t even known what ready meant.

    Just before my stepmother drove the two of them out of the garage and down the driveway to my father’s sun-soaked reckoning, I took off my necklace and placed it in his hand. He was almost too weak to hang on to it. I said I would meet them at the hospital and watched them drive away, the car shrinking away from me into the luminous maw, my hand where my chain had been and that naked, vulnerable feeling there.

  • Stuck

    rainrock

    I was driving down a narrow one-lane, one-way, thinking about a woman I used to love when the flashing red lights halted me. The train was slow and long and I put the truck in park and sat there watching the railcars roll past my headlamps, daring myself to jump the curb and weave back through the line of parked vehicles behind me, but it was hopeless. I was stuck, watching the sides of the rusted and beaten cars, graffiti-soaked and bullet-battered, seized into rapture by the hypnotic pulsing red. I thought of that former love now dissipated and I thought of how much of my life I had wasted apologizing, how slow my maturation had been in relationships. I was stuck. My truck was stuck and my life was stuck. I reached up to the dash and pressed a button and jazz tickled at the edges of sound and so I turned it up, very aggressive drums and horns blazing, and it hit me in the chest like a cannon shot. My mind wriggled free from its shackles and began to accelerate toward various points of light and so I killed the engine and blasted the sound fully, reclining back into the seat and closing my eyes, thinking about my life, missed opportunities and forgotten dreams, the laughter, handshakes of various consequence, all the bad decisions and the mysteries of the future. I thought of people wearing masks like Mexican wrestlers and I thought about poetry and all the men and women of the spoken word, hypnotic verse in iambic pentameter and other various poetic structures, the true guerilla fighters in the bloody war of life, and I thought about that time my editor mistakenly sent me to Las Vegas to cover race riots that never occurred and instead of coming straight home on the first flight I floundered about the casinos on a three day bender before finally walking into my editor’s office on Monday morning still drunk and two thousand dollars poorer and telling him to go jerk himself and finish all over his shitty newspaper. Then I thought about what happened after, the journey from newsroom to newsroom across the country, each of them growing more desolate by the day. I recalled the men and women cleaning out their desks full of notepads and pens and road atlases and stylebooks. Boxes of dictionaries and thesauruses and strange tokens of America picked up here and there: a mannequin’s torso painted the colors of the Maltese flag with a wig made of zebra hide, a three-foot squid fashioned from old harmonicas and peanut butter and aluminum cans and charcoal, a shoebox full of photos from the National Elvis Impersonators and Taxidermists convention. Then I flew north to try my luck at a Vancouver newspaper and was fired my first day for smoking pot and strangling a photographer outside of the courthouse and then groping two female TV reporters. I hitchhiked down to Mexico but none of their periodicals were searching for a trained reporter so I took a bus to San Francisco and started up my own Online product with three other failed journalists. My particular beat was time travel, all five of my articles each week were somehow related to time travel.

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

  • Exit strategy

    Ghost

    He emptied out the contents of his drawers onto the bed and was surprised at how very little he had. Plaid boxer shorts very old and worn, the fabric thin and nearly transparent. Socks with holes. Old baseball cards of retired players he had no reason to save. Ratted t-shirts in various shades of faded tints and tones and a box of matches, half used. Folded papers, old parking and speeding tickets. His rejection letter from the publishing house, the only new item in the drawers. Seven keys of mysterious origin, a broken flashlight, little balls of dust and lint. Two pairs of wrinkled shorts, a checkbook, one long-sleeved t-shirt, a sweatshirt, an expired coupon for a free cup of coffee at Dunkin Donuts. Three condoms expired over a year ago. A stack of creased photos from his early twenties, the travels across state and country, camping trips and rock concerts, moments in various stages of inebriation with old friends he hadn’t seen or spoken to since. He leafed through the photos to one taken almost a decade ago, his last girlfriend, his last serious girlfriend, the last woman to care about him at all, and the photo nearly brought him to tears, not because it was a beautiful image even though it was, not because he missed her or longed for her even though he did a little, but because he realized how alone he was and had been, how long it had been since he’d been with a woman, shared his life with a woman, how long it had been since a woman cared for him, needed him in her life. He placed the photo back into the empty chest of drawers, a token revelation for the next person, an image from his past to cause whoever opened the drawer and saw the picture to pause, at least for a second, and imagine who was the smiling woman with red hair and freckles sitting on the hood of his truck, what her voice sounded like first thing in the morning, her fragrance on moonlit summer evenings. He tried to remember these things and couldn’t. He fit everything that he didn’t throw away into two duffel bags and zipped them, walking out in the rainy night to his beat-up pickup. He turned and looked at his apartment for the last time, such a small and dark little place, and got into the truck, driving out and away from that town, not looking back, his life and memories contained in his mind but also in those little black bags on the seat next to him.

  • The skeptic

    librodephantasmas

    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.