Tag: writing

The man looked over at Corine and then up at the television. He looked at the people around him. Children stood and walked around. A blonde kid in a white hat ran down the aisle chasing a paper airplane fashioned from a table mat and the mother scolded him, told him not to run, where were his manners, and then she laughed, another mother nearby laughing with her, both women shaking their heads. The atmosphere in the diner was festive, even gay. A teenaged couple cuddled in a booth near the window. A man and woman nearby commented on the television’s image of the volcano, how big, oh my dear, have you ever seen anything like it. The din in the room was quite pronounced and laughter rose from the corners, enveloping the patrons like descending ash. He wondered if what was happening was some type of theater, artifice, not real. He wondered if he was part of some large joke or maybe a test, the subject in a diagram, that maybe the quake and the volcano weren’t real at all but were elaborately staged to observe the reactions of the American people. The diner was alive with gaiety and a strange sense of adventure and he didn’t care for it, it wasn’t real. How could it be real? He looked outside to find his anchor to the world and saw cars in the dusty lot gleaming in the noon heat, shimmering with light, unreal and staged just as the scene inside, the girl across the table from him whom was just another actor, the girl whom had not spoken except to order since they’d come inside, the girl he didn’t know and whom was likely going to take advantage of him, wait for him to fall asleep or walk away and then take him for everything. The older couple behind him laughed and people everywhere in the diner laughed, food particles flying from their mouths, and he wondered if the people were in some type of severe denial, they didn’t want to accept the situation or the fact that many people had died and many more were in serious danger, they chose levity over responsibility, or perhaps the horror of it was too much for them to process, their minds simply couldn’t handle the thought of it, the reality that they might all be dead by sundown. But then maybe it was him. Perhaps he was thinking about it all wrong, he should lighten up, take it easy, everything was going to be fine, just as he said to Corine thirty minutes ago, he had lived alone for too long and had lost touch with the world, no longer recognized its ornate veneer. No, he thought, it couldn’t be, he knew something imperative had changed, something terrible in the world had happened and it was only as he sat there so close to other people and observed their interactions, it was only after he acknowledged their plight as pilgrims, refugees, just like him, that something fundamental had changed within himself in an instant, as if he’d decided while looking at the others around him that the world was now forever changed and many more people were going to die, only those with resolve would deserve to survive. He made a tacit promise that it was either going to be them or him, and he watched them laughing and blowing their noses and imagined them reading while sitting on the toilet and watched them with their heads down fumbling at their mobile devices and he decided that it was going to be him that survived, it was going to be him. His wife would have demanded it of him. He looked around and understood that people just like them, people just like himself were dying terrible deaths just three hundred miles to the west and to the north, people suffocating and drowning and immolating, killing themselves for lack of a better option.

Finally the food came out of the kitchen and it looked nothing like what he ordered. He didn’t remember what he ordered, but the food didn’t resemble food at all, it was something arranged on a plate for him or others to look at, to regard as food, just a prop in the overall production, and it was almost too much, the window and the world outside, the girl next to him looking up at him, her face blank and pale as if something were wrong with her, or maybe her face a reflection of what was inside himself, the horror she must see while watching his face change, but still all of it a replica, simulacra of life rather than life, and at that precise moment he understood and believed wholeheartedly that the worst was indeed yet to come.

Madness is a sign of illumination. We yearn for the answers and yet fail to ask the proper questions. Illumination like insects on the skin, clearing out the pores. Water boiling in the next room, filling our heads and lungs with curative vapor. The advantages of madness include overall physical and spiritual clarity, seeing objects and phenomena when physically blind, telepathy, telekinesis, extrasensory perception, intense cerebral musicality, meditation, levitation, lucid problem solving, pronounced physical strength, a sense of weightlessness, fearlessness, penetrating spiritual guidance, complex and thoroughly explicating dream activity, intensive linguistic capacity, immortality, total loss of time and place, perpetual wakefulness, if desired, varied revelations of the eschaton, complete loss of spiritual inhibition, and more. The advantages of madness are not wholly revealed to the mad, just as not all youth are without wisdom. True madness and illumination touches only those who are prone, who are willing, who reach out to it so as to benefit from it. Madness is a spiritual state.

I often feel that I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t recognize the guy walking into work while he thinks of his tobacco pipe, he flinches at his aching hip and thinks of his tobacco pipe and walks into work this morning chilled with the light of dawn and the headlights of other vehicles sweeping past him, irritating him but enabling him to feel alive in the pale glow, he woke this morning into a haze of sleepiness as if birthed from a subconscious womb but feeling somewhat rested lying in the darkness while his lover stirred next to him. The winter is going to be cold, he thought, not recognizing the voice nor its source, and can it be that we’re all not who we think we are in this strange world of wind and porous skin cells and grotesquery and kindness. We don’t recognize ourselves and that’s why we move through so slowly, so silently, adjacent to our true selves, invisible, that selfsame creature whom we would recognize if only we could see.

“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—