Tag: writing

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.

Because what happens to all the things that never get written down? What happens to all the notebooks and pamphlets that sit empty forever, throughout the span of this world and the next, what happens to the people who never get photographed, their stories untold? What happens to the undocumented percentage of our lives, the moments and memories that go unrecorded? I’ll tell you what happens to it all: It doesn’t exist. If we don’t exist in history, as a name in a notebook, as a face in a photo, as a voice on a digital recording, we don’t exist at all. How could we? There is no evidence of our walks through rainy downtown streets at dusk, no evidence of the love we feel even when we shouldn’t, no lasting record our labyrinthine dreams, no evidence of our battles, our scars, the relationships we’ve built with emotion and skin and courage. The present is only a condition of the future, Jennifer. I need to write everything down because I don’t know who I am. Whoever I am, whoever this person is writing in his notebook, I want to live on, I want my experience to have meaning, I want to be remembered, if only to one person, I want to prove that I exist or once existed. I want my life to have a defined purpose, and I want to fill that purpose with significance. It doesn’t matter how long it takes, how many notebooks I fill, whether you’re reading them or not. Nothing matters anymore at all because someone will read this notebook someday or maybe one of the others I’ve habitually filled with words and sent off to a childhood friend that either moved away or died years ago.

The day was gray and overcast. I had to deliver a small parcel in a neighborhood on the north side of Edmonton when I heard the nearby shots. The neighborhood had recently become a locus of gang activity and I knew it, pedaling through reluctantly, but it was particularly quiet that day until I heard the shots. I immediately plunged the bicycle into some roadside brush, scratching myself up and landing awkwardly on my right side. My memory becomes a bit vague after I fell off the bike but I remember that the package had been opened by the security police and then re-sealed before I came into possession of it. I don’t remember the name of the recipient of the package but I remember it was a woman who had begun teaching at the new college there in Edmonton, an intellectual with supposed subversive leanings, a focus of the local security police. I craned my head over the brush to see where the shots may have come from and there was a man near me dressed in all black. He even had a black mask covering his face. The man jumped out from behind a parked sedan with a silver pistol in each hand. He fired three or four rounds down toward the other end of the street and then he darted back behind the sedan. I tried to see who he was firing at and what sounded like rifle fire was returned to the man behind the sedan, tearing a chunk from the vehicle’s passenger side.

I thought I might be able to crawl out of the bushes and get my bicycle and ride out of there. I thought that maybe they would recognize my navy blue uniform and let me go, let me ride peacefully out of there, how stupid of me, and just as I got the bike upright with a leg astride it a bullet sung past my neck and then another ricocheted off something behind me and buried itself into my shoulder, knocking me off the bike. I felt like I’d been punched by an ape. I felt another shot explode into the ground near me and I remember thinking that whoever shot me must have thought my uniform was black like the gunman’s. The pain welled up inside and right before I passed out my eyes focused on the parcel and the name printed on the label and I realized I’d been delivering it to the wrong address.

They said that with an intellect advanced far beyond one’s years there will always accompany it a cognitive malady or other neurosis equally advanced, because the universe must always find a way to balance its extremes. And the boy’s gifts were indeed extreme. This is how he came to suffer adult phenomena at a very low level of maturity, due to this balance, or imbalance, if you will. He was so sick that he couldn’t translate his fears and feelings into language in order to articulate them to others. They said that because of this, the boy suffered through a debilitating anxiety throughout his childhood and adolescence while the few people who bore witness to his gifts had no idea of the struggle inside him, the strain and terror gnawing at his spirit.

And it was due to this complicated element in his life that the boy, or the prodigy child, as they called him, grew into the world as well as into himself with a very gentle disposition but also a deep contempt of the world that would accompany him unto his death.

We fight furiously to deny the circumstances and events that scar us, if only to ourselves, as if our scars didn’t disfigure us but instead represent what has disfigured us.

I long for the cold streets of Manhattan. If only temporarily. I walk those streets and feel the city pulse through my feet, music at my ears beckoning entrance, something hard, as hard as the city itself. Steam and screeching brakes. Being where I belong and don’t belong at the same time. Pizza and jazz, fireside chats with bourbon, shredded door mats and cold eyes flashing, people walking briskly, so many people. Truck doors slamming shut, steam shot out in front of faces. Knit hats and deliverymen wearing gloves. The smell of coffee and baked bread, the smell of vehicle exhaust, fragrant with doom. Book shops and restaurants teeming. The familiar Manhattan scent of shit, somewhere nearby there’s shit, gray sky and air replete with cold moisture. Concrete and asphalt dreams. Brad Mehldau maybe, I walk past a shop and see people sitting inside by candlelight, laughing, holding mugs. People inside eating and talking about Socrates and how he fucked the world. The birth of tragedy. Cars stacked atop each other in garages, filled cages of cars and men in coats attending them. Violence in my ears, the city is violence incarnate, jutting glass and steel, phallic and arrogant. Men and women walking dogs or it’s the other way around. Old women leaning and plodding toward some unknown destination. Where do old women go? People across the street yelling, I can hear them through the music, young black man gesticulating. The park frozen over but still children bound bundled and padded down. John Coltrane is angry. The lower west side hums with a past I cannot see but is nevertheless there, ghouls in crossing. It is never dawn here, never dusk. Only light and darkness. Street signals flash red then yellow, then maybe green. Hold my hand, baby. Look both ways. Don’t ignore the man in the wheelchair, his cup extended out toward you. We have nothing, sir, we also have nothing, a different type of nothing, bless you. Freighters in the water carrying ungodly weight less than half a mile away. Imagine all lady liberty sees, bearing witness in stone silence. You could live here, they say, you could live here, too. Give up everything but your anger. In fact, Dave Douglas and the cornet speak, in fact, take your anger and sharpen it down to a needle-point. Hate the city and thereby love it. Hate the people, move past and through them at all costs. The subway is your friend and nemesis, screeching intolerably, this is where artists live, this is where killers live, rats too. Black men and old white women, Portuguese cooks and Korean shop owners, lucky charms of yesterday crushed, pounded into the pavement. The smell of piss, ex-con bar owners with shifty eyes talkin bout the Giants, fuck em, I’m done, thirty years I been a fan but I’m done. Pizza and jazz. Young people in second-floor taverns working three jobs to pay the rent, a cell of their own choosing, a haunted closet of paradise. Can I get you something, they say, a question that tapers off and descends so it’s not a question at all but a challenge. Yeah, a bourbon, Brubeck says, sitting at the window and watching em walk through the east village with a purpose lost to me, carry your weight,