The little things were everywhere. Robert knew it. He couldn’t see them but he could sense their presence, hear their bitsy bug boots rapping the chipped wood flooring, dark chocolate brown now with burn holes all the way though to the ceiling of the apartment below. Their imperceptible bodies traversed his holey living space, through the patched up gray walls covered in black mold, up along the sizzling electrical wires, into and around the chipped, stained toilet bowl. “Swoosh” and he spins around to find one of the ominous creatures but the sound is outside. The steam from the subway grate languidly rises to his window on the second floor, squeezes itself sideways through the rusted fire escape, and nestles into the nooks and crannies of the cracked red bricks lined green.
“Eh, what?! Where are you?!” and Robert’s down on his hands and knees, face pressed tightly against the grimy floor. He listens intensely for their insidious conversations, their cunning plans to take him down when he least expects it. The rain patters down on the corrugated iron rooftops, cacophonous and jarring, and he cannot hear a thing. But he knows their devious ways and will be ready for them when they come.
A red fire truck rolls past, siren blaring in the still morning air. He has not slept in two days and it is beginning to show: dark lines under his eyes, tired creases in his cheeks, pressed forehead into jagged crossings, coarse facial hair far too long. The clock ticks from the other room but it’s louder now, almost painfully pounding out the seconds. He imagines its bent white hands clawing out time in the Coca-Cola frame, horrifically syncopated, vile and mean. Robert throws his face back to the floor, peers deeply into the cracks between the floorboards, tries to uncover proof of their presence. The dust-bunnies have gathered on his blackened socks, the fabric on the knees of his flannel pajamas has worn thin, the Florida State sweatshirt that he stole from another person’s doorstep in the building smells like putrid perspiration.
“Oh! There!” and he’s digging with a broken spoon into the gaps within the floor, up along the walls, scooping out bits and pieces of plaster and sawdust from the termite nests lining the apartment. Exasperated, he leans back against the failing walls of his tiny apartment, sweat rolling down his battered face. He has found nothing but he hears them still, continuing to march on through his living space.
He places his hands tightly against his ears, blocks out the beating of the clock, the siren, blocks out the scuffling of imaginary feet and serpent steam. It is all quiet now. He squats and merrily watches as the rain pours down on the street below, broken plastic spoon still in hand.
He awakes to the contortion of palm trees. The salty air singes his nose hairs, the sound of thunder nearby shakes his bed and the almost imperceptible flashes of lighting in the morning sun ring ominous for things to come. He cautiously steps to the window, looks Westward, sees the pitch black clouds rolling in. A ghoulish silence sweeps the land. Trouble is on the way. Hurriedly he closes all but one of the shutters. In red velvet slippers and a tattered blue robe, he runs down the stairs to the kitchen, throws open the cupboards, grabs the hammer and a box of nails, and heads into the garage. He grabs the plywood planks by the armful, opens the door, throws them outside. The hairs on the back of his neck stand up straight. It is near.
All the wood is gone now and it won’t be enough. He knows this and must now choose his best approach to save his possessions of 55 years: his late wife’s photos, his daughter’s school and music awards, the records that his good friend gave him as a graduation present from high school, his diaries. Whereas every impulse in his body is yelling for him to flee, he must remain, cannot outrun it this time for it is but minutes away and it will blanket this country.
Frantically, he is running through that early morning air, wood planks in his left hand, hammer in right. Silver nails stick out of his pursed lips like porcupine quills. His heart pounds against his chest. The present calmness of the setting unnerves him, he looks over the increasing swells of the ocean, sees the rain pouring down in ashen sheets. “Maybe 30 minutes,” he thinks to himself.
One by one, the planks are thrown up, pounded into the side of his house, over the windows, over the doors. He is building his fort, constructing his shell, fashioning his coffin. The wood is gone, windows still remain unboarded. The water will enter these windows en masse once the windows have been shattered, the chorus will sing of destruction. He moves his most precious possessions to the back room where there are no windows, places the items as high as possible, far away from the waves that will fill his home. The sweat rolls off his forehead, drips slowly, methodically into his eyes. He is blinded momentarily, wipes it away, continues.
The humidity has risen. The thick air and whipping winds speak tongues through the gaps in the planks lining his walls. Sewage and sulfur waft through his home. He looks out the one open window–the pitchy billows gather force. Lightly, rain droplets fall, get slammed into the straining glass, blurring his vision of what is to come. The palm tree leaves peel back, rip off, sail through the air and slap into the side of his house. Rolling waves from earlier in the morning now pace violently back and forth on the rocky beaches awaiting entry.
He hears the thunder, sees the lightning at the same time. He has but minutes. He has not prayed since his wife had died but he begins now. In the distance near the horizon he sees it and his stomach drops, his knees give out, he falls to the ground below and has trouble breathing.
He thought it was a cloud but he knows it is not. It is a wave, as tall as a skyscraper, obsidian and pernicious and it is coming his way. Downstairs a window shatters, above his head he hears the planks squealing, the nails beginning to pull out. The palm trees are dead now, the beach upturned. He cannot hear anything but the deafening roar of the winds. The rain sounds like pebbles riddling the sides of the house. All his past enemies are here now at his doorstep, all his mistakes and regrets present. He will be carried away tonight and he is not ready.
In a ball on the moist carpet, he holds himself tightly and wishes he just had more time. And it is here.
Snow falls to the fire escape below. The rusted black bars become achromatic and plain, the complications of the cities many faces simplify if only for this moment. Edward takes a deep sip of his coffee, lets the air from his nostrils shoot downwards into the obsidian liquid below, the steam rolling upwards, fogging his glasses.
He watches as the squirrels emerge, bound across the Brooklyn rooftops in search of food, the out-of-place seagulls roaming overhead, far from their home at Brighton Beach, thinks of his childhood home which now exists only within his head.
The nostalgia for a simplicity that he knows never existed at times overwhelms him, thinks of the many days of roaming the hills around his home, the plainness, clean-lines, the innocence. Summer days and cool, foggy afternoons the regulated tempo of his younger years, he would traverse the golden grasses, the wind-swept Spanish moss hanging from the heavy branches of the oaks, the miner’s leaf lettuce patches that stretched for as far as the eye could see. The algae-covered pond, the weeping willow on its banks, the tadpoles and mosquito fish and the water bugs. The currencies of his remembered pasts abound and he exchanges them for moments of solace on cold days like these, far from home in the outer reaches of the city that never sleeps.
Someone has stopped in the middle of the street outside, the cars line up behind and frustrated drivers honk their horns with fury. The snow deadens the abrasive nature of their releases, he remembers as a young child playing with his sister on the highway that ran next to their house on a Sunday. That was before it became a major highway, still remained classified as a scenic route. Edward remembers his grandfather and father, father and son, in worn Levi jeans sitting on the alabaster fence watching them play. It was a summer day, the feint smell of tar from the hot asphalt, crisp, dry grasses, and the stillness of a mid-afternoon, the dry heat abounded. These things were etched into his memory forever and he knew that what he sought in life, more than happiness or contentment, was a return to this mythical past. He thinks of many of the mythical pasts we peg our contentedness, our senses of self-worth, our desires, our pains to and watches as the sparrows huddle against each other in the ever-increasing winter winds.
He knows that the memories he dredges up from his past are probably far different from what actually happened, that the contexts are lost, the full range of senses that accompanied each of his actions. His pasts become present through this yanking up and through time of these temporal moments that he commits. Today though, whether past or present, these moments offer condolement against the discord that erupts from the gritty, snow-covered streets of Brooklyn below and he sits, coffee in hand, as a being of remembered pasts.
“Let’s change it to yellow. You always liked yellow, right?” He doesn’t care what color they change it to. All he knows is the wallpaper needs to go according to his wife, it’s his one day off a week from work and they are standing with a balding dinosaur of a man, three snow-white hairs combed over to the side, yellowed teeth and a propensity to coughing without covering his mouth.
“Then again, we could choose rose-petal pink or sunset orange. Hey, either one of those would go great with the shower curtain in the bathroom!” He looks to his wrist. He forgot to wear a watch today, decides to look up through Wallie’s Walls and More’s greasy windows to the indigo sky above, locate the sun, stare into it in the hopes that his retinas will burst into flames and he will get transported far away to an all-white room where a nurse will bring him pre-chewed trays of food, his daily medications, will kiss him tenderly on the forehead and life will be good.
“Then again, really, how often do we use the bathroom? Most of the time you are using the one at work and I am constantly in and out of the house. But this forest green one over here would go fabulously with our living room, don’t you think? And we spend most of our time there, don’t we?” Her mouth moves with the speed of caffeinated mongoose. He watches it, imagines it hurling off its hinges, plopping sloppy onto the shag carpet below, chasing the salesmen and women down the dusty hallways of this wood-paneled, 60′s remnant of a store in the dregs of their fine city.
“The thing is, once we buy it there’s no going back, you know? I mean, we put it up and that’s it! Right, I mean, we can’t buy samples of all these colors. That would be crazy, wouldn’t it?” He nods his head. Yes, it would be crazy and yes, he doesn’t want to be doing this. And while you’re asking, yes I don’t think we ever had anything in common and shouldn’t have gotten married that one weekend back in the 70′s when we were both stoned out of our minds and looking for a dare.
“Sir, if you had to choose between Lime Vine or Gold Stripe for a bedroom, what would you choose? Think hard about it cause we’re the ones that will have to live with it!” She cackles, nudges the elderly salesman who morosely pulls the skin hanging from under his chin. “And you too! Think about those two and tell me which one you would choose!” He thinks of a few means of escape: 1) Fall to the floor and fake a seizure for the second time this month; 2) Go to the bathroom. Never come back; or 3) Attack the old man, get arrested and pay someone in country prison to stick a shiv in him. He starts eying the old man, gauging his weak points, decides upon the knees.
“No, come to think of it, I don’t like any of these. They all seem to say, ‘Boring’. We need something with a bit more pizzaz. Let’s come back next week. Will you have new stock in next week?” The decrepit man nods. Yes, they will have new stock.
As she yanks her husband’s hand and pulls him out of the store, he locks eyes with the wallpaper peddler. Behind the cataracts he senses fear. One day soon he will make his move.
The sparrow twists its little head left, then right. It knows what we are thinking, studies us, flits away and posts itself gallantly on the weathered tree branches now barren.
Thriving off of the growth of civilization, the sparrow has adapted to the ways of humans, in great numbers they exist upon the refuse of mankind. Its movements quick, almost manic, it takes in sensory information at the speed of light, judges whether it is in danger or not, resides within a coursing ball of 15-20 other sparrows just in case. As with humans, they too have a tendency to plunder nature, ripping new plant shoots from the ground, decimating fruit still on the trees, extinguishing flowering plants. But this one simply sits and watches, seems far distant from a signifier of destruction, seems curious, almost playful. I throw a few seeds out along with some bread crumbs. It hops over on its pumpkin-orange legs, twists its head to the left watching me and then decides it is safe and begins to eat, manically pausing every so often to check that I have not moved.
One minute later, the sidewalk is inundated with their little puffed-up bodies, each vying for the best position nearest the food. The brawls begin, two begin pecking at each other, chirping obscenities and while they fight, another swoops in, takes the very food that they were fighting over. The timid or the small remain passive but clever in the background. While they miss out on the larger morsels, they wait for the intensified fights to begin and as the bigger birds go for each other’s necks, calmly they will hop in and begin their long-awaited feast. The old and decrepit are brought pieces by some of the bigger birds that hop them over in their beaks, drop them to the frozen concrete below, and stand guard as the elders eat.
There is a strange sense of commonality between these birds and humans. Perhaps it is no mistake that they have grown in such large numbers with mankind. They have become the backdrop of city-life, the nonchalant decorations in our daily comings and goings. Miniature representations of the radiance and madness that mankind embodies, the sparrows rest calmly within the collapsing branches of an effete society marking time, watching us as we busily ride out our days.
A petite, disheveled sparrow hops in my direction, stopping not four feet from my boots. I smile and it opens its beak, its little pink tongue quivering. “Our day will come,” I hear the sparrow say and taken aback, I clench the bread bag tight in my left hand, turn quickly and go back inside, scrupulously watching that the sparrow does not follow.
It merely flies away.
Faulty beams of fluorescent light
Shine upon the moonbeam corporations
And the red lights of braking commuters
Burn through the dark entrails
Of the never-ending freeway.
Walmarts, In and Outs, Applebees,
Valeros and Shells and I sit,
Encased in a mean, lean Greyhound machine,
The squealing of its worn brakes
Lulls me to sleep on my rock-hard pillow
We who travel at the hour at which I travel
Are lost souls bent on making one long journey
To a hopeful tomorrow.
People get lost on nights like this:
Insomnious circumlocutory time.
And through the haze we realize we
Have had one bag of Doritos too many.
This land wears its people
Like a rag-tag mish-mash
Of hopes and dreams unrealized
And one promise too many.
People are the products of this society—
The seedy underbelly clinging to a bloated beast
The grunge upon our streets
Within their hair
And a tread mark riding on every hip,
How dare the top marshals sing
That we be the land of the brave
And the free
Whilst so many are encumbered by
Their very un-freedom in the face of
Economics.
Something was due. He knew this and it made him uneasy, rolled around in his stomach, punched him in the gut every time he thought about it. He tried the normal routes of procrastination: the painting of the walls, the cleaning of the bathroom, the mopping of the floors, the washing of the cats. Even these things, once completed, did not not sate his need to forget his impending doom. He drinks copious amounts of coffee, hoping that somehow the caffeine will block the neurotransmitters from firing, that he will fall into a coma and not have to deal with the deadlines. He searches the web for mental diseases, comes across a site for Huntington’s disease. The caption underneath the logo reads, “A disease of mind and body.” He thinks this will suffice and begins reading the symptoms: depression, mood swings, forgetfulness, lack of coordination, personality changes, decreased mental capability, slurred speech, and memory loss. He has all of these, is sure of it, focuses in on the severity of his situation. Somehow knowing that he is doomed to die via Huntington’s eases his worries. “I mean, if I am going to die shortly anyway, what really do a few deadlines really mean in the grand scheme of things?” he thinks to himself. He knows there must be a better way to do this, to avoid getting stressed out, that surely imagining one’s death to avoid physical manifestations of procrastination gone awry cannot be the most healthy decision. He takes a deep breath. “These things will pass,” he tells himself. But then he is thinking of all the year’s to come, all those deadlines of papers due, essays submitted, working papers being sent off to editors, being marked and diced and being sent back to him for revisions.
He is on the floor now in the fetal position and the cats are licking his hair. He notices how dirty the floor is from this point of view, thinks to himself that perhaps he should sweep and mop and remembers that he has already done that and checks it off of his list of possibilities. The pencils and stacks of paper taunt him from atop his desk, tell him he’ll never get it done, that once he sits down he will be in their control and fours hours later will awake only to find that he has written sixteen pages on the benefits of brushing one’s teeth in circles instead of sideways motions. As he topples to the floor from his chair, the pencils and papers will cackle. The deadline will be missed. He will hear the shredding of his grades, the red, downward slashing movements of the teacher’s pens, the “I’m sorry” statements of the doctorate programs in their one paragraph rejection letters. He looks up into the blinding white light in the middle of his ceiling, presses his hands to his temples, tries to go to sleep.
Two minutes pass and he remembers something, takes a succession of deep breaths. He realizes he is no longer ten and in need of adult approval, that the teacher is a mere hood ornament at this point in his pursuit of knowledge, that deadlines are fictitious like so much else, that there is so much else that is far worse than a deadline and that this is a choice that he has made. He doesn’t need to be doing this, can choose to do something else. But he wants to be here, wants to have the deadlines, likes the pressure and the eventual results. “At the end of the day, everything will be fine,” he thinks and he is calm now, knows that he need not worry, calmly stands, stretches his arms. With a determined calm, he takes a seat to begin writing.
The polishing of the kitchen tiles will wait for another day and with fervent determination, he presses pencil into paper.
Peacock Feather Bar. The corner of Wells and Ruskat Streets in the heart of the windy city. It was her favorite hangout, the place she went to forget things, be around the people she loved. Her name was Elra Voonique, 34 years of age and a bombshell with long wavy brown hair and a penchant towards the impure and vile. They had met on a wintry night in December of last year, knocked each other over accidentally as he was running around the corner, gun drawn in pursuit of a thief that had just knocked over the bodega a few blocks away. He had helped her up and gone to leave but then saw those eyes, auburn iris’, the most beautiful things he had ever seen and had decided right then and there that cops and robbers was no longer his game. Flowers, the cards, the dinners and drinks–he had tried it all. Day after day, he tried to get her attention, make her listen to his pleas to marry him but he didn’t know her and she sure as hell didn’t want to get to know him.
Those were months ago. The heartbreak of pursuing her through her personal trials and tribulations to no end was exhausting and made him feel empty. He knew she needed time to grow up, he needed distance but still, he couldn’t get her out of his mind. The drink only made things worse and, when a few months back, he awoke to find himself covered in garbage and living in the alley in the dumpster behind the Dragonfly Mandarin restaurant he knew she had almost killed him and needed to get away.
Two months later, back on his feet and working for a Mr. Thomas Young at the Yo-Yo Coin Laundromat mopping and sweeping, he had saved up enough to make a move and one morning, jumped on the train and headed south as far as a $75 one-way ticket would take him. It turned out to not be far enough.
For four months he was able to put her out of his mind. Found a gig working for a bar tender at the Pub Tavern on the outskirts of Scottsburg. It was a dive, the type of place that sentimental statues of lost individuals went to drink their memories away. Dark mahogany walls, red velvet booths, only a few yellow lights and then the long string of flashing white Christmas bulbs that became the annual decor. Smells of stale beer and dropped whiskey, cigarette butts and cheap, fatty beef became his source of palpable vitality. On his one off day, he would hike over to the Pigeon Roost Creek, watch the water pass gently through the stony maze of the creek bed, drink his coffee and his mind would wander back to her bronze skin, long slender legs and that pristine smile, the kind that warms your heart and makes you feel safe and at home. It was the only time he let himself remember. Pretty soon though, he wasn’t able to hold it back.
Wednesday and he was mopping up the slime of some winos last hurrah before being sent off to the recovery clinic. He felt the rimy, cross-grained mop handle in his palm, smelled the rancid remains of alcoholism and broken dreams, and knew that he had to get out, go back upstate and find her. Just to see her would be enough.
He had hit the road that night, thumbed in a few rides on a couple of semis delivering chickens and cheese to some of the big grocery chains in the city, and found a cheap place, the Abbott, in the dregs of battered cars and feculent garbage on Belmont Avenue. It was the kind of place that you would find hairs in the sheets, plugged up toilets and more cockroaches than carpet fibers but it would do for that night. He would be sleeping with the woman of his dreams tomorrow, wrapped tightly in the arms that he would never need to leave again. That next day, he had gone to the Peacock Feather Bar and waited outside in the freezing cold, pulled his jacket up tight against the back of his neck.
Four hours passed, he had lost feeling in both of his feet and was beginning to lose consciousness in the barbaric winds of ice and snow. He hadn’t eaten since the morning the day before, began to feel weak and tattered and slunk down to the frozen sidewalks below, leaned up against the metal dumpster to wait her out. His head was heavy, his shoulders sore. Death waited patiently in the embers of his frozen parlor of lust and fear. The squeaking of the bar doors and she had emerged, fish net stockings, silver sequin top, tightly-woven hair, makeup artistically curved around her auburn eyes, a long flowing black coat. She crosses the snow-lined street with long, careful strides on her stilettos, counts the money she holds in her hand, folds it neatly in half and stuffs it into her purse. She reaches up, takes the hairpins out, throws her head from left to right, pulls a hat out of her jacket pocket and pulls it down tightly over her ears. She’s ten feet from him, headed his way but his eyes are getting heavy, his heart is slowing down. He reaches down into his depths, yanks out the last strings of energy that he can muster to open his eyes one last time. She gallantly ambles down the sidewalk in front of him, reaches into her jacket pocket, grabs a quarter and flips it towards him. The cold cash hits his face, falls to the snow below. She continues walking. His heart snaps, his eyes begin to close. The rippling reverberations of her long black coat now ominous, she turns with a smile and leaves him to die.
She looks at him with distaste, as though he has just shat upon her desk and asked her to take a deep whiff. “I just want to check in and make sure we are okay,” he says, “because, you know, we have two classes together and…” She stops him abruptly. “I know, I know,” she says, “but I do not hold hands. It’s graduate school and it’s not your first semester.” Her sentences turn upwards into menacing smirks, her green, algae-covered teeth scream bloody murder and she stares at him with an indifferent anger unknown to him. A deep breath and he looks away at a poster on the wall, breaks eye contact, slowly turns back and begins to study the beast.
Cropped dyed-red hair, little to no makeup save a light blue eyeshadow and flesh-colored lipstick. Hazel eyes, pursed, full lips, white satin skin marked with dark chocolate moles. She keeps her neck careened upwards facing her computer, meanders aimlessly with the mouse, fumbling through applications and websites. He speaks but she clearly does not care so he stops. Long enough for her to turn around and look at him again and continues. Her eyes roll upwards, he is steadily losing ground while she loses patience.”So we are okay,” he says. “We’re fine,” she responds and turns back to her computer.
Dissonance erupts between the words she utters and the actions she portrays. Her body deceives her darkened intentions and she remains shrouded in steady indifference.
The conversation has ended.
13:00 hours. Baghdis province, Afghanistan. The body of a soldier, submerged in a river in Western Afghanistan, is found. There is another missing. Both are from the 4th Brigade Combat Team of the 82nd Airborne Division. Eight Afghans, including four soldiers, three policemen and an interpreter are killed in either the NATO air-strike or in the fighting that broke out between Afghan and American troops. It lasted for hours.
He puts the paper down. Folds it neatly on his thigh and looks out the window to the cleanly cut grass, the well-managed trees lining the sidewalks, the women pushing strollers down the promenade. Hears the wind rushing through the trees, civilians carousing the bodegas of deep Brooklyn, the laughter of the children as they wait for the bus to pick them up or walk hand-in-hand with their mothers or fathers to the doorsteps of the school. The civilian cars, the airplanes, and the helicopters all carry on as normal.
“These are passing stories,” he thinks, “whims and fancies of newspapers and radio talk shows, 24-hour streaming news channels or regularly updated websites. But pause. Take it in. Allow the story to mean more than ‘bad-news’ or ‘distant suffering’.”
He looks out the window again. Sees the sidewalks have been blown apart, chunks of steel cables lay strew across the ripped up grass. The trees are on fire or already singed, the school buses lay flat on their sides and there are children inside. They are crying. He sees the school down the street has been blown apart, the chalkboards dangle from particle board fibers over the cavernous sides of the decimated building, ruled cursive paper flutters in the smoky winds, pieces of the American flags get caught in embers of mangled civilian cars. He smells the burning of rubber, the smell of a gas that he can’t place. There is silence save for the distant cries and crackling fires of exploded cars, loose electrical wires, and burning buildings.
He knows it’s not like this. It’s worse. There are more smells, more gruesome sights, the kinds of things that keep you up at night, wake you in the morning, grace you with their darkened presence throughout the day. They are the kind of things that can’t be forgotten because they are marked into your skin, wedged in your memory. They are the kinds of things that remind you it’s not too far from the shores of America to Afghanistan and this is harrowing and best forgotten.
He stops. There is more to this, even more disturbing. He allows himself to stop thinking of these people as soldiers, as men and women, Americans or Afghans, imagines them as children playing in the streets of Kabul or Brooklyn. Maybe with kites, maybe with basketballs, children’s things, fun and carefree. But it’s the 1980′s and Afghanistan has another foreign power in its midst. The Russians, under the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev, remain until the late 1980′s when they leave under the direction of Gorbachev. The children in Kabul are immersed in war while in Brooklyn, there are children immersed in the class warfare of the Reagan-era but it’s different, less immediate in its death and destruction. Maybe for some it is not. There is funding of the Taliban rushing in from the U.S. to battle the Russians in the midst of the Cold War. Over 1 million Afghans are killed, 1.2 million disabled, 3 million maimed or wounded. What were their names, where did they come from, what were their stories?
He thinks long and hard on the missing American soldier, thinks about the man found in the river. What were their names, these men and women who gave their lives to protect America or Afghanistan? What was it that brought them to the doorsteps of the Army, the Navy, the Marines, the Taliban? He looks out the window, the sidewalks are back in place, the schools back in order. The trees stand tall, full of the orange and yellow colors of Fall and he watches as a child plays with a soccer ball in the street below. “What war,” he wonders, “will this child fight?”
Jeraldo wanted nothing more than to be an armadillo. He had seen them on their family’s trip from Mexico, through Texas to Oklahoma where their mother’s brother, Papillo, lived with his four dogs, two wives, Eline and Enerva, and three shotguns. Jeraldo’s mother had stopped at the first sighting between Austin and Round Rock and they all sat there, amazed at the armored creature as it used its extended claws to dig a hole ten times its size near the side of the road. His sister, Adalia, at only three years old, sat perplexed at the two foot long alien gracing their presence and not being able to hold it in any longer, screamed at the top of her lungs with roll upon roll of gleeful laughter.
“Look at how it moves,” his mother had said. “It knows that it is safe with us so it keeps digging as if we are not even here. But if it is scared, do you know what it does?” She had asked this with an upward cadence at the end of her question, turned completely around in the front seat to see her children’s faces. Seeing that her children did not know the answer, she quietly told them. “You see, if it gets too scared and it can’t run away, the little armadillo tucks its head and its legs into its shell, places its tail next to its head and pulls itself into the tightest ball you can imagine. That way, no one can get in and hurt it, you see?” Adalia had squealed with excitement. “Mami, I want to see the ball animal. Can we make it ball?” Her mother had said no, but not accepting that as a viable answer, Adalia had rolled down the window and thrown a plastic cube at it, smacking it right on the back of the shell. “Dios mio, Adalia!” her mother had yelled but the creature simply looked up, smelled the cube that had fallen to its side and continued digging. Jeraldo just shook his head, looked at the creature. Sensing something, the armadillo had paused, looked up from its ever-expanding hole, its nose covered in dirt and torn roots. For a full minute, it met Jeraldo’s eyes and they sat, watching each other, communicating child to creature, the kind of communication that adults have more often than not lost in the ridiculous toil of taxes and 8-5 workdays. Through eons of time they traveled, creature leading child through the phantasms of moments when man lived in unison with his surroundings, through the soil burrows of the armadillo past and present, across dens where their children lay awaiting their meals, into the depths of the Earth where only silence reigns and the warm bodies of armadillo mothers wrap themselves tightly around their babies. Safety, warmth, history, love. Jeraldo had sensed all of it, caught it and sent it coursing through his veins. The armadillo had lifted its head higher, curled its lips into a tender smile and all the days when Jeraldo felt alone as if no one understood him were gone, all the days of crying in the back of the school yard because the other boys were teasing him melted away, all the moments at home when he hated his father for leaving him, for leaving them, disappeared. He had put his palms to the window, pressed them tightly against the glass, wished that it would burst, that he could leave and live with his newly found friend and just get away. The armadillo had shaken its head and begun digging again.
Their mother had started the car again and Adalia had fallen fast asleep. “Are you okay, hijo?” she had asked, looking in the rearview mirror. “Si,” Jeraldo had curtly answered but he hadn’t been. He had watched the armadillo one last time, taken in the claws, the pink snout, the furry belly. Most of all, he had studied the shell, the nine lines across the top, the dark grooves.
As they had driven away towards Round Rock, he had begun constructing his own armor and had looked back to his friend one last time who had stopped digging to watch them drive away.
Fog rises from the subway grill, rolls across the face of the icebound midnight moon. Smells of old socks, mildew and burnt chestnuts from the lone vendor a few blocks away on the corner singe his nose hairs as he traverses the lonely streets of the old financial district near Gold and Liberty streets. Spotty lights shoot forth from the silhouettes of the sordid emblems of capitalistic endeavor where the legal crimes take place: the Nordic pillaging of villages unseen, the trades of people’s livelihoods, the desire for more continually unsated. He tips his fedora back, lifts his head upwards towards that chilled night sky and watches through the windows of the first few floors as the immigrant workers clean the cubicles and conference rooms, hallways and offices of those that have much. He shakes his head, looks down at the soiled concrete sidewalks below, the gum and trash, the homeless people bundled up and sleeping in the recesses of the wealthy’s playground, the layer after layer of dirt and grime in the shadows of the pristine corporate headquarters, lifts his head back up to see the workers still toiling away and walks away slowly, subdued by the numbing indifference of it all.
A dusty yellow cab pulls up, “On Duty” shines golden through the mossy air. “You need a lift, mister?” The cabbie looks at him with a sideways grin, pulls his hat back towards his neck to open us his face. He shakes his head, tells the cabbie there’s no time for joy rides. “There’s too much work to be done,” he adds and continues traversing the bowels of New York City.
Right on Liberty and up to William street, he turns left, heads towards Pine and Wall Street, Exchange Place, the belly of the beast. All is quiet. He can hear the scuffle of rats in the black bags of garbage left out for collection in the morning, smells the always-pervasive smell of shit that seeps through the darkened cracks of the city and settles down for a good, long stay. Sees the security guards sleeping at the New York Stock Exchange, the ghostly figure of Washington lit up like a Christmas tree watching over the center of capital trading. The wind rips through the cobblestone streets, lifts the giant American flag on the face of the Exchange and yanks at its ropes, bends it to its will, threatens to snap it off and send it flying into the dirtied Hudson. He pauses for a second, takes in the filtered light of the lampposts, the recognizable hums of vacuum cleaners, the violent whispers of the icy wind. Looks down and sees that here at the junction of Wall street and William street that the sidewalks are spotless, knows that the filth here has moved fully inwards to the weaknesses of man encased in stony structures. A couple approaches, the man in a navy blue suit, slicked back hair, a silk pink tie and a clean, pressed white shirt. His loafers click in step with his companion’s six-inch stilettos, shiny ebony lost in the shadows of the capital-rich calluses. Her flowing watermelon dress, her white sash, her soft blond hair and thick, catty carvings of makeup on her baby blue eyes. They move in sync, robotic marching at a midnight hour, pay no attention to him and walks right past, pauses at the door of the latest luxury apartments around the corner. With a twist of the key, the woman enters. The man pauses, looks back at him and scowls. “You are trash,” he transmits and enters. And they are gone.
The light from the nearest lamppost begins to flicker. He turns to face it, looks upwards. Smoke curls upwards from the subways in droves. The light expands, blinding rays shoot outwards to the murky intricacies of that baleful junction. A high-pitched emission and the light explodes. Shadowed curtains fall, he hears the menacing whispers of those all around him, sits on the soiled corner and pulls his coat in tight around his shoulders, flips up the collar to protect his neck from the increasing winds.
The dimly-lit carcass of the American flag on the Exchange looks on, bemused.
Everything a blur at the moment.
Somehow all, in it senselessness,
Makes sense.
The light turns to obscurity and moons sprout from Aurora’s mouth.
Jackals cry ‘kaw-kaw’ from the branches of the rawboned trees
And I swim through stone in the rugged mountains.
I am free
And what it means to be free
Bursts from my pores in colored fancy.
I glide-paint my rainbows in drag-star fashion
Down the phosphorescent runways
Of these things we call life.
And those that speak of reality
Idly sit by
As the currents of wish-wash babble
Rule their lives
And I long to paddle up
Rolling hills of lubricious sand
To hazard the hope that anything is
Possible.
“Photons, you see, are those tiny elementary particles that constitute the most basic unit of light and all forms of electromagnetic radiation. Without them, we would not be able to see.” He looks around the classroom to see if anyone is listening. Not one but three people are nodding off in dramatic fashion against clenched fists, pens poignantly steadied, tips against paper as if, in their sleep, they will take notes. “Photons are light in a most basic sense and what we see are the reflections, scatterings or absorptions of those photons as they interact with objects in the outside world. What we see, we refer to as the visible light, one of the seven possibilities on the modern conception of the spectrum of light.” A pen is dropped. It slams against the tiled floors, the sound reverberating against the concrete walls. He pauses and begins to think of those first days of his teaching when it all seemed possible. He was going to push the boundaries, expand the limits of the minds of men and women alike, blow up old conceptions of the world and egg students on to offer new ones. But here he was. The guy with the puffy fro in back chats with his latest girlfriend, the blond woman with the pink ‘fuck-me’ dress in the front chews on her gum like she’s a cow chewing cud, the young man with black hair and a solid uni-brow plays on his hand-held PS2. Disinterest marks the minutes of their lives in his class and he balefully continues unabated, teaching of the very matter which constitutes their lives and his.
“So what does this all mean? Why should you care? Well, maybe you shouldn’t as it seems some of you don’t. But I would propose the following: we see only 1/7th of the spectrum of light. All around us, every single day there exists light which we do not see. Of that 1/7th, we do not even see all of it as some of it is either absorbed into the objects, scattered beyond our vision, lost to somewhere else. Think about this and then think of the fact that when you see, you do not see but objects in a way, see you. What does that do, to say this?” The boy in the green sweatshirt and the frumpy corduroys seems to listen intently, leans forward in his chair awaiting the professors rhetorical reply. “Well, I would say it offers a damn good idea towards complicating the notion of human agency. Think about it. If objects act upon us, act upon our eyes, and offer us our visible world that everyday we work with, live in, operate against, where is our agency, how does that idea that we humans are the actors upon this world really hold up? What does it mean that in our daily lives, we operate while seeing only a fraction of a fraction of the possibility of vision, that the vision that we do see is comprised of millions of tiny photons and that even then, most of those are lost or filtered out by our eyes?” Now on the edge of his seat, the boy in the green sweatshirt looks intensely at the professor. His face is strained, the veins in his forehead protrude by what seems to be inches. The boy’s lips tightly pressed together, he stands and lets out a fart that slams against the professor’s face, weaves toxic gases through the nostrils of his fellow classmates, and settles into a grimy soup that wafts through the singed air.
The professor pulls the chafed stool towards him, gracefully takes a seat and ponders the many limitations on vision.
The watch hangs from a tarnished brass chain stuck to a rusted nail above his desk. Silver lines the edges of a cracked glass front. It was a gift from his father who in turn, got it from his father and the hands of the clock do not move. He would twist the top occasionally to wind the gears, push the heavy hands forward in a march to future times now gone but would become irritated at the incessant clicking sounds emanating from its soiled belly. No matter where he was within the house, the padded ticks could be heard, the calls to the forcibly forgotten patriarchy of his childhood reverberating off of the walled temples of his inner sanctuary. And so he would let it run out in a slow, mournful death; would refuse to rewind it, practice resistance against its presence and hail glory in its lazy habitation of the nondescript wall with no purpose other than to solidify the silent within its furrowed brow.
His father lived across the country, worked in a job for the state, and they hadn’t spoken in months. The casual conversations rarely took place, the cordial calls or letters gathered dust in that locked basement of the childhood home now sold, the grassy hills now dried and left for crows. The watch represented all time that had passed, all time that would pass, an object imbued with the sorrow of conversations never had, connections never made. A stranger’s presence watching over him as he wrote and went about his day, the frozen mouths of a geist in situ.
Across it glassy face, two words were emblazoned in dark black ink: The Skipper. The captain, the leader, the master of a ship. The skipper. He thinks on this, laughs and shakes his head. The silenced skipper encased within a 1 1/2 inch by 1 1/2 inch steel tomb, the functionality of it depending on the winding of the gears by an outside force, the fragility of its face and the mechanical innards in need of care and attention to avoid the severity of coming to a grinding halt. The captain: a leader of well-worn walls and settled, safe seas, white-painted bows and depths of 2 x 4′s and mangled electrical wires. His day has begun, the watch reflects the early morning light, reveals it scratches and divots.
He reaches up, turns it over to hide the face, continues writing.
Barbara Wagner always loved a good fondue. Dried meats, toasted breads, succulent chunks of pork, slices of roast duck: she enjoyed dipping things. Taking foodstuffs in her pudgy fingers, she would renew them in a baptism of melted cheese, cackle wildly as they emerged, and set them aside to cool. She would arrange them in a pyramid, cube or some other madly popular shape, going for the aesthetic affect of a towering establishment of curdled milk, referred to it quietly as her nativity scene of deliciousness. Seeing as how she never had guests, the creations would often get eaten by her rottweiler puppy, Turner, who in turn suffered from loathsome bouts of eye-watering gas.
Her holidays were often marked by the silence of lonely years now normalized. The coffee pot more often than not could be heard hissing its woebegone cries from the innards of the lime-green kitchen. The subtle humming of the small burner under the earthenware pot of melted cheese was like the respiration of a baby, the stalwart humming of a carpenter, the calming presence of the silent elder. It’s reverberations imbued every object in the house with a sense of pastoral continuity, grassy highlands on roaming hills, endless sighs of relief in the open lands of forever.
She dipped with fervent regard for the task at hand, practicing metallurgy with product of moo. The downward dipping motion, curled fingers backwards towards her palm, the extended index finger and thumb, the light grip touching the object to the melted mass, the release and the sigh of relief. It was in, it had been placed mindfully, it would remain for two minutes, no more, no less, soak up the milky characteristics and mix them with its own. Then the quick movements to the tray of pronged fondue forks on the right, picking up just the right one that speaks and says, “It is my turn. I am ready to dive in, to prong. I am ready to live.” The gleam of the polished silver, the ebony handle tight within her grip, she sails it downwards into the murky waters below, fishes the food item out with a perfected hooking motion, gasps every time it emerges anew. “You are beautiful,” she tells it. “You have started the day as a piece of salami and now, you are a work of art. Bravo, dear marbled sausage!” She would place it carefully amongst other dipped items, lean back in her worn, oak rocking chair and smile at a job well done.
“To fondue,” she would think to herself, “is an act of God.”
I walk to the convenience store near the train stop and there is a scuffle going on. An older black man is trying to exchange a Banana calling card that he just bought but the man behind the counter calls his bluff, tells him he knows that he is lying. The older man is getting heated, the exchange intensifies, names are called. The man behind the counter explains to me that the older man is a cheat, tells him to, “Get the fuck out,” and the older man disappears. The man behind the counter laughs but is upset, an exasperated “this is how my day starts” kind of look across his face. I tell him that I hope his day gets better, grab a coffee and a stale apple turnover and go on my way, out to the throngs of people waiting for the bus.
On at Marcy Avenue and the train paddles along its rickety tracks. The MTA bus stop below, the weathered faces of the numerical decals shine on the top of the buses, patient individuals wait for patient drivers to get on, open the doors, begin the journey. My journey has begun in cacophonous movement, this one simple trail by which I move criss-crossed by the thousand movements of other individuals.
To sit with this thought is not only humbling but earth-shattering. It is so simple a thought but from it shoots an array of assemblages of other ideas: that there are no universal ideas, that we are one amongst so many and if the numbers were not of humans but animals or plants, bacteria or viruses, atoms, molecules, it would make no difference. And if we are this one amongst so many, surely each and every one of us has to have a slightly different take on any number of issues. While I may call the sky blue and think of the lapping waters of the Atlantic Ocean, another may say it is blue as well but think of the baby blue bonnet of their new infant. Or we may think simultaneously of the Atlantic Ocean but think of different parts, see different images and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. This is an amazing thought: that we operate with simplistic generalizations but allow for deep, endless spaces to exist in between, each person’s visual memories laden with different images connected with senses, interconnecting with lived and imagined experience unending, constantly reformulating, reconnecting, making new connections. This is infinitely complex as the layers unfold. In the case of the remembered sea and its connection to blue, do we unfold each sensory, memorical layer like an onion? To do so would be to imply an origin; if we only could peel enough of it away, we would get to the core. What if we said something more radical? What if, instead, we said that the layers were interwoven like a web, that by plucking on one strand by remembering blue as Atlantic Ocean or Atlantic Ocean as that part of the beach over by the piece of driftwood and so on, other strings vibrated in the process? As if pulling on one would affect the whole, cause new connections to be made, old ones to fail, rearrangements of memories to occur? So the onion fails, the teleological chain of causation fails, and complexities reign supreme. And what if this web was not “my” web but “our” web (inclusive of all that is , ever will be, ever was?) and so if I remember something, is it truly mine to remember and suddenly “my” conception of blue has infinitely complex linkages to “your” blue. This opens our world up, has the possibility if pursued to deeply challenge conceptions of individuality, to draw webbed linkages to not only people but their thoughts, memories, actions, viewpoints, imagined realities, words and the list goes on and on.
My stop has come. I step off the train. Communion has been taken.
Realms of uncertainty abounded. Harri listened as Eddie wept through the soiled telephone in the recesses on the alleyway on South Vernon Ave, her mind rambling through all the reasons she never used public telephones: the germs, the gum on the floor of the blackened metal floor, the dusted-over windows, the flickering orange bulb dangling from the flossy electrical wire above, the coiled steel telephone cord. They were the booths of unseemly losses of virginity, the refuge for the homeless on the snow-ridden nights in the windy city, the scene of the next gruesome homicide on the trail of Rizzy Ricano’s trailblazing string of ten murders. She kept the door shut tight, placing a handkerchief between her body and the panes of glass and pressed her body as tightly against the windows as possible. She sees a well-dressed man approaching, pea-coat, felt fedora and leather black gloves, slams her four inch heel down, wedging it between the bottom of the sliding door and the grime-covered floor. No one would get in, no one would get out.
Eddie weeps uncontrollably on the other side of the line. “I mean, it was ten years ago, right? They didn’t even need the money, said it was a matter of principle. Of PRINCIPLE! Uh huh huh…” The man in the fedora has stopped two inches from the glass doors, looks in with a quizzical look of indifference. Although his fashion is impeccable, his face is bedraggled, his ears pointed, his nose far too small for his face. He is at once comical and ghastly, innocent and guilty of all charges. She experiences his presence to the bone-chilling soundtrack of a man unhinged. “Eddie? I may need to call you back in a second. There’s this guy on the outside of the booth and I think he needs to get…” Bam! The man has taken off one of his gloves and slammed it against the window pane. His palm has been burnt, his fingers are mangled and he trails them down the glass, gathering the dust in the wake of his fingers, leaving clear trails in the dirty mess. “Just hold on. Hold on! Goddamit Eddie, you need to stop! Just stay on the line. I may need you to call the police if this creep doesn’t go away.” Eddie is silent. The man cocks his head to the right, places it inches from the glass, peers through the clear streaks left by his fingers into the booth and eyes Harri. His gloveless hand remains tightly pressed against the door, his hamburger fingers tap fervently on Harri’s nerves. She begins the conversation.
“Can I help you with something? Need to make a call?” She tries as hard as she can to smile, manages a half-hearted upwards turn of her chapped lips. He glares through the glass, opens his mouth. Rotting teeth and purple, veinous tongue. He emits a sound not of words nor of sentiment; it is a hissing, hoarse, gut-wrenching sound, grates on the steel floor of the booth, rises to the roof and rains a repetitive cloud of poisoned nonchalance down upon her furrowed brow. His teeth rattle in the mouthy winds that hit the booth, fog the windows, seep through the cracks and bespeak of rotting apples and fish gone bad.
“Eddie, call the cops. This guy is creeping me out. No, I’ll be fine. Just call them on another line. No, you can’t leave me. Get your damn neighbor’s cell phone. I don’t care if you two are having a feud. EDDIE! Thank you.” Harri breathes deep now, feels that frozen air being pulled into the recesses of her lungs, listens to the frantic happenings of Eddie and his neighbor on the other line. She wants to be somewhere else, not in a phone booth in some alley, not in this city, not here with this man. She realizes this is the closest she has been to a man in months, remembers why she has avoided them for so long. “Eddie? Yeah, I am still here. Thank you so much. No, he is just standing here watching me.” She tries again.
“Mister, can I help you with something? If you just step away, I can get out and let you use this thing. I know you’re not well. None of us are. Let me get out and you can do whatever it is that you need to do in here.”
The man closes his eyes in a prolonged blink. She can hear the sound of them peeling, sticky flesh against flesh, as he opens them. He takes a step back, spins to face his back towards Harri, his pea-coat swinging in troubled beats, his fedora flipping downwards into a coy, playful game of hide and seek, and begins walking away.
“Yeah, he walked away. Weirdos all over the place here, I swear. Anyways, call the cops back. Yeah, no it’s fine.” She turns her back to the doors, nestles in to the corner of the booth. “No, go ahead. Sorry. Finish what you were say…”
Glass shatters and the man is upon her. She screams to the unending indifference of humanity gone awry. The gloveless hands cover her mouth. Sulfur, rancid tomatoes, rotting meat, soiled diapers, fennel, woody smoke: the repugnant smells curl themselves around her weeping eyes, her dilated nostrils. Violence erupts from the recesses of a booth unsavory, the gum clings to her tousled hair, drags her downwards, the bulb swings high and wayward, slams against the door and shatters. The sound of sweeping movement and a meaty fist meets her head, her sight fails. She hears the dragging, feels the snow beneath her body, the unpleasant grinding of stones against her back and her senses fail her, she is gone.
The booth light flickers back on, the blood has all but dried into blackened grime, the windows have been replaced. The dangling phone, the twisted cord. “Duh Nuh Nuh. If you’d like to make a call, please insert 25 cents for the first 5 minutes.”
The gig was up. The time had come. They run to the steel window frame, clamor out and up the fire escape ladder. These next 15 seconds will define their lives forever. They gather steam and leap as hard and as far as they can and they are flying, through that darkening wintry air, the other side in sight. Down below the women scream, the men rush for their guns, chaos has erupted. They focus on the here and now and right here and right now they are mid-air awaiting, God-willing, a landing on the other side. The slippery bricks glisten, the soiled chimneys rise in defiance, bulging black smoke billowing from their innards. They can smell the freedom of times ahead, hear the cries of their loved ones as they nestle in for a good long sleep. 1 more second and they will be there. Then the swooping sound from overhead. Razor sharp claws, curved beak, cries of exaltation, and their bodies are lifted far into that night sky, far away from any rooftops, far from any sanctuary, far from the bread bins, and the garbage cans and the leftover cat food. The stars incandescent, icy stones reflecting in the clawed beast’s beady eyes. Punctured ribs, pounding heads, and that unending cry of that freezing wind.
A high lift and release and they are flailing through that night air once again, headed for those snowy streets below.
He folds under the pressure. Backwards into a twisted scene of origami swan meets warty toad. The stacks of paper pile up high on the corner of his desk, the cats have taken a liking to the manifestos in the corner of the room and the silverfish fill the banquet halls of whittled books with their kin from afar.
That nervous beating in the tips of his fingers won’t stop playing to the long-lost beats of the jazzy underground that he dreams of every night. The colors vivid from clocks of tangerine orange and wallpaper of lime green flower petals littering concord grape purple waves to the watermelon carpet and the lemon leather couches. Those women over in the corner near the bar stare, the smoke fluttering over their fake, ebony eyelashes, twisting into furtive smiles, rising into unseemly curtsies and hitting the dust-crusted fan whirling above with a whoosh and it’s gone. One wears silver sequins, apple-red lipstick, tight black boots reaching up her calves. The other wears a snow-white skirt, flamingo top, fire-orange lipstick, cat-eye contacts and calls herself Lucy. She flicks her cigarette across the room, it hits his pants, trails down his leg and falls to the paper below, begins to burn. Everything is alight and the singed papers flutter upwards and out through the window, into the streets below and just keep churning outwards. More and more of fire-lit words into the frigid night air. Kids watch with wonderment, old folks sit on the stoops bundled in their warmest coats following the dragon tails of burning paper. And he’s free. Free of all that has piled up. Free of all that which he feels needs to be done. Free…to start again.
Only a few minutes have passed and the paper stacks remain just as high as before. The cockroaches have congregated on his desk, begin to play hockey with his pencils and erasers. He tries to flick one off, it spins and grabs his finger with a ravenous bite. The others run over, break their friend away from his digit, pantomime apologies and continue with their game. The coffee cup remains half full and he grabs it, sloshes the liquid across his desk, sweeping the creatures off of their feet and into the crevasses of the soiled wall below. He hears them gagging and cursing as they pick themselves up, promising him that they will be back. The silence returns. The deadline is in 20 minutes.
He thinks long and hard of his search for the sky blue whale, his flight through the clouds on feathered arms, the slaying of radioactive Gila monsters, his waltz with the shrew queen through the toadstool palace. The clock ticks. He imagines harder. 18 more minutes to enjoy the innocence of oblivion.
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
-Langston Hughes, A Dream Deferred[1]
The “haze” returns to the 32nd floor of the World Financial Center near the frothy waters of the Hudson. Outside, seen through the double-paned, tinted windows lining the walls thirty feet away, it seems frigid, maybe warm, fairly sunny but maybe not. It doesn’t matter and the feeling is back, the ebbing pressure of, “Why am I here?”, “What am I doing with my life?”, “What is this all about?” The curled fibers of the tightly-wound carpet with carefully-planned color tiles specifically laid out to denote direction and lead people to the nearest emergency exits feels hard under his wingtip shoes. My cubicle walls rise 5’5” above, cutting me off from any of my fellow co-workers and the only occasional interaction I have is with my nearest neighbor across the hallway, a Puerto Rican woman named Elisa, mother of two happily married and the proud owner of a home in Astoria, Queens. This is all that is shared here. I stand up to stretch my legs, only see the tips of individual’s heads, see someone from my “team” (a co-worker under jurisdiction of the same boss) walking down the hall and the “haze” is in his eyes, within his slow-moving gait and delayed bodily movements. He says, “Hello,” continues on his way. This is the extent of one of five interactions I will have today with physical human beings. I sit back down, hear the rumble of the sanitized air vents overhead, their quiet presence and white noise unnerves me. The clock strikes 9:00 a.m., the day has just begun, and the “haze” has settled in to stay.
The “haze” is the sneaking sadness of stifled desires, deferred dreams. It is the act of mentally checking out of a situation deemed abominable just to get through the day. People wear it in firmly-pressed creases of their baby blue shirts, their tightly-woven hair, downward sloping mouths. It leaks through the air vents in syncopated motions, nestles itself into the gray cubicle walls and the glaring florescent lighting overhead. The deadness can be felt walking down the quiet hallways three hundred feet above the people on the sidewalks below, and the lack of noise, jovial conversation, of any conversation echoes in glass-shattering screams. It drips from the mahogany walls of the meeting rooms, shoots spears of precisioned countenance from newly-bought projectors onto bone-white screens. The “haze” is that feeling of sadness that presses down on your neck, climbs up to your skull and starts pounding, makes you question your sanity, wonder what Is wrong with everyone else. The, “Why are they all zombies?”, or “Humans aren’t meant to spend eight hours a day like this” kind of questions. And once these questions-internalized go unanswered, the sadness turns inwards and implodes into anger and frustration, that feeling that things should change. But they don’t and the anger steps to the background. The “haze” sneaks in and I have resigned myself to its presence.
This paper is about tracing this sadness, anger and resignation through a specific location and time. The institution in which I worked, Three World Financial Center in the financial district of New York City, bespeaks of heavily managed and maintained physical and sentimental structures, constantly in negotiation between the physical spaces of the office building and the workers within, as well as between the individuals themselves. My approach will be to trace these emotions from the point of sadness to the point of resignation, event though I acknowledge that in the beginning of my job there were a mix of sentiments (excitement, financial relief, and wonder) and after quitting (relief, excitement, fear of what was to come). I also acknowledge that the presence of sadness was not instantaneous, on a specific date or time or always felt in the same way, but instead was a gradual development that nestled itself into my daily working life and those of others to whom I spoke. For some, twenty years had passed, admittedly the majority of it enmeshed within the “haze” and on more than one occasion, they expressed a deep sense of regret for not making a change in their lives. I wondered then, as I wonder now, what kept them from making a change, if in a way them telling me this was a performance of sorts that would allow them to get through yet another day by making the change seem beyond their reach? Was this, as Hochschild states, a moment of, “’deep acting,’ in which individuals convince not only others, but also themselves, that they feel some named emotion mandated by cultural ‘feeling rules’ that tell people which emotions are proper in which situations and what to expect in the course and consequences of glossed emotions”?[2] Using this personal experience and the conversations I had with co-workers, as well as primarily the works of Janis Jenkins, L.A. Rebhun, and Catherine Lutz, this paper will trace the emotions of sadness, anger and resignation (collectively referred to as the “haze”) through three specific locations on the 32nd floor of Three World Financial Center: the cubicle, the conference room, and the bathroom. Collectively, these three locations entail a number of complexities including, but not limited to, the affect of physical space tightly managed, the negotiated emotional responses between co-workers, the self-management of what to say, how, when and whom one should express particular emotions to (especially if one is interested in “climbing the corporate ladder”) and the pervasive locations of silence which were at times sought after, at others painfully endured, and yet at others, internalized and incorporated into the ebb and flow of the sentiment-laden “haze”.
Cubicle: Object
The calculated temperance of my cubicle was standard for my rank and position of executive administrative assistant.[3] Twenty square feet of space, ten of which was covered by a desk, ten of which opened to a neatly-woven Berber carpet, gray in color. Two foot long cabinets adorn one side of the cube, each one foot wide and one foot deep. A standard, well-used, black ergonomically-correct chair and one black garbage can. The cube was a standardized prison, far from the windows, well cordoned off from other individuals to increase productivity and decrease talking, and placed strategically in front of my boss’ office, the panopticon, the baron’s lounge. Directly above the cube, an air vent fervently regulated the temperature, in the hall one of the many white noise machines droned on. The hallways between cubes had widths particular to the floor’s duties, finance floor’s hallways smaller (so that more people could be fit in) than those of the graphic designers. The colors on the floor in identical squares were representative of which corner of the building one was in (a post 9-11 development to aid in evacuations). Those that were lower in rank such as myself were placed in the middle of the floor, far away from the windows. The harder one worked, the more dedication one showed to the company, the more one navigated the managed channels of speech and sentiment, the closer one got to the windows. In essence, one could not imagine a more controlled setting, save some of the trading floors a few blocks away on Wall Street. What does this do to an individual working within it? What sentiments do such surroundings elicit and disparage? What role does the regulated airflow and calculated proportions of the cube in which 40-50 hours of one’s life are spent play in producing a deep sense of sadness?
Against the ethnopsychological view of emotions that Lutz outlines, in which, “the essence of both emotion and thought are to be found within the boundaries of the person,” the physical regulated space of the cubicle engendered sadness through the physical limitations on movement, harsh florescent lighting overhead, and impersonal schemas of a mechanical nature.[4] In her discussions of the mind-body dichotomy that, “pervades Western thought, emotion is identified with physical feeling,” later identifying the physical images which are so often accompanied by discussions of emotions in the West: “his stomach knotted up, she was fuming, his eyes popped out of his head.”[5] What is perhaps lost in these discussions is the interplay between the physically and mentally felt emotion and the physical space itself. After years of working in the same regulated space, what work do the fibers of the carpet do to a person? Where do the drab walls and countenanced measurements permeate? Does the sadness begin as a recognition of one’s physical limitations, of the color and lighting’s affects on one’s moods, as a recognition of existing within a physical uniformity reserved for a particular rank? Or does it creep in slowly in a drag show of normalcy?
Particularly in the beginning of my tenure at the corporation, there were many days I would ponder whether or not I should decorate my cubicle walls, give it more a sense of home or personality. These thoughts found their way into conversations with co-workers and it was often the case that I would receive replies akin to, “I want as little of myself in this place as possible,” “I don’t see the point,” or, “Forget it. They don’t pay me enough to care.” People wore these thoughts daily within their balding heads, their well-polished shoes, in well-trimmed beards and calculated fashion. So many had become their cubicles, become that which was regulated and managed, cordoned off the personal from work and embraced the corporate impersonal. The sadness resounded in complicated and sedimented layers of emotional work, on forming the appropriate responses to those of a higher rank, of making every effort to successfully manage oneself into the uniformity of the physical and expressed emotional space of the office. Some co-workers that I spoke to were quite happy doing whatever they could to climb the corporate ladder while others of varying ranks would often express thanks to the company but soon after, speak of regrets, things they wished they would have done, chances they might have taken. A sense of resignation could be heard from co-workers as young as 29, ostensibly with much more life to live. In a dramatic episode one day, a male co-worker of about 30 years, came over to my cubicle to speak. After exchanging the normal pleasantries, he looked at my cubicle wall where I had pinned up a small world map and placed little dots of where I had traveled and where I longed to go. He said something very near to the following: “You’ve gone all those places? Oh, that’s great. I wish I would do something like that. I feel like I haven’t gone anywhere. Man, I feel like killing myself in this place.” He quickly moved on to another subject but what he had said and the fact that he had said it with a strained smile stuck in my mind for the rest of the day. What place is he really talking about? Does he actually feel like killing himself, is this just a saying and if so, what does saying such a thing do in the context of a casual conversation with a co-worker? Why do I sense that I know what he is talking about and what is that commonality? What happens to dreams deferred, desires stifled? Where do they go, how do they come out, how do individuals wear them within their bodies, upon their faces? The “haze” is undoubtedly felt by some but not all and invariably experienced in different ways while perhaps retaining a traceable commonality. The cubicle and its location of sadness and later, anger and resignation, is, to say the least, complicated and as Rebhun states: “Emotions have interacting cultural, psychological, and biological aspects, and are experiential, interpretive, and interpersonal.”[6]
Conference Room: Sentiment
The central hallway led in a pre-meditated fashion, into the main mahogany conference room which seated twelve. At the head of the long, polished teak table would sit my boss, on her right and left her closest confidants, her directors, and her managers would fill in the seats afterwards. I was strategically placed in the middle of the table as it was the location closest to the outlets. As people would shuffle in, it would be my duty to be on the floor plugging things in, unwinding cords and making sure the projector was properly set up. Very seldom would anyone offer to help. Said always with a very wide smile and a cheerful thank you, my boss was teacher, I and others were students, and she had just begun the school of managed sentiment.
Often as the boring presentations proceeded, I would look not only at the physical space of the room (those sharp, clean architectural lines, dust-free tables thanks to the night staff, the adjustable halogen lights above) but also at the physical posturing of my co-workers in relation to our boss and paid particular attention to not only my boss’ physicalities but also her cadenced release and control of verbal and non-verbal expressed emotions. One of my boss’ directors would throw her back into an over-exaggerated posture of attention, her hands always folded neatly on the desk in front of her, her gaze attentive on my boss’ presentation and her head tilted up ever so slightly as if to elevate herself above the rest of us at the table. Like clockwork, one of the managers would laugh at everything the boss said. The pitch and tone identical, the manager waited, intensely poised for the precise moment in which to let loose her calculated laughter and this became her meeting-occupation. Others would hold themselves tightly-wound, listening intently to our boss’ words, legs sometimes crossed but always in a mechanical, broken manner. The control expressed within the cubicles and the hallways became exaggerated to a laughable degree in the conference room were it not how things operated within the office. The insane had become sane and this entailed a lot of work.
My boss was a woman in her late 50’s, having doubtlessly climbed the phallic corporate ladder through a number of blockades and hurtles, limitations and derisions. She was, by my tenure, a well-seasoned corporate professional and demanded much from her “team”. She spoke with perfect cadence, measured tones, smiled at the appropriate times, always stayed “positive” or knew exactly when to keep quiet or change the subject. If one stepped out of the acceptable boundaries of sentimental allowances, she would quickly inform you of the infraction. Having met my first emotional limit to the “hazy” corporate days, I informed her at one of our weekly one-on-one meetings of my frustrations in a straightforward manner. Her look of repulsion was immediate and in five seconds, she had realized her facial expression, reeled it in, and changed it completely to one of controlled attention. It was this controlled expression she so often exhibited at her meetings and it was endemic to many of the individuals I interacted with at her rank. As Rebhun states, “Emotion is more a negotiation than an event; it constitutes a vocabulary that is manipulated, misunderstood, reconstrued, and played with as social actors attempt to understand and control both themselves and others.”[7] Constantly being an outsider to this performative display of negotiated emotional controls and releases due to my lowly rank and overall disinterest in climbing the ladder of the corporation, I and others like me were given the opportunity to observe the syncopated motions of individuals more often than not doing whatever they could to meet the right people, say the right things, work on the best projects. This was achieved by internalizing not only the managed physical space of the office but the constantly negotiated sentimental allowances carved out by those of a higher rank. To ignore these negotiated rules was to forsake promotion and for many that I spoke to, it was either the case that they didn’t have the stomach to do what it took to rise or they unconsciously missed the mark when it came to saying the right things, wearing the right clothes, smiling at the correct moments and were now silently ostracized from the “in-crowd”. As Elias states, “This whole reorganization of human relationships went hand in hand with corresponding changes in men’s manners, in their personality structure, the provisional result of which is our form of ‘civilized’ conduct and sentiment.”[8] Within the conference room of the 32nd floor, men and women’s sentiments were honed and refined in manners decided upon by the upper echelons of management who then organized trainings for middle management. This “trickle down” effect of sentimental negotiation and management was only effective when people were interested in promotion or were fearful of losing their jobs. For individuals such as myself, toleration was practiced as long as too many questions were not asked, as long as I remained within one of the lowest possible positions in the company hierarchy, and importantly, as long as I did not display the emotions of anger that would surface after experiencing bouts of prolonged sadness or resignation. Jenkins writes of the cross-cultural reviews of ethnotheories which culturally configure anger as problematic.[9] Rebhun notes the Brazilian folk metaphors which describe anger as a, “dangerous force that can accumulate inside the body or even leap out through the eyes.”[10] Lutz aptly states the following: “Those individuals [expressing emotion over thought] can be expected, as a result, to stumble crazily through social life, potentially harming the delicate and proper social coordination that has been achieved by the application of reasoned thought.”[11] In all of these ways, the expressed sentiment of anger is seen to, “push against the restraints of the socialized, cognitive self.”[12] The constant negotiation to keep emotions such as anger out of the office was aided by well-paid, high-ranking corporate employees, the internalized self-monitoring of emotion well learned by those interested in promotion, as well as the monitored physical spaces of cubicle, hallway, and conference room. As Foucault speaks of in great length, the body has exercised, “upon it a subtle coercion, of obtaining holds upon it at the level of the mechanism itself—movements, gestures, attitudes, rapidity…”, the economy and, “its efficiency of movements, their internal organization…”[13] Escape from such coercion and management was found only in the most sacred of places: the bathroom.
Bathroom: Release
The bathrooms were located, as they often are, furthest from human work areas, neatly tucked away behind a corporate-insignia covered wall and out of sight of the corporation’s ceiling cameras located throughout the floor. I quickly realized, as others had before me, that the bathroom offered a legitimate excuse to not be at my desk and offered itself as a site of respite from the “haze” of the workday. Whether or not I had to use it, it became a place visited 4-5 times a day, often to read or write poems on that particular flavor of the “corporate cloud of gloom” on any given day. It was common practice by many to change their habits of consumption to legitimize their bathroom trips, drinking prodigious amounts of water. This at the time seemed absolutely necessary but now seems at once troubling and comedic. The bathroom itself was a well-oiled machine, its sinks with automatic faucets, its walls lined with laser-sensored towel dispensers. Even the soap dispensers sensed the presence of a human in need of cleansing. Two separate stalls and an over-sized handicapped stall offered ample room to camp out and once the stall door had been closed, the “haze” was temporarily assuaged. A sense of dignity was regained from locking myself in a three foot by three foot box and this was both a widely-practiced habit of many and a well-known part of people’s workplace schedules (well known particularly by those of higher rank). What then, made this escape acceptable? What about this space was imbued with an impenetrable force field? Was it merely impossible to monitor because of privacy laws or was there something else? This widely-practiced action bespoke of a sense of resistance and thinking of it this way caused reverberations in my mind to the bathroom-centered resistances of childhood: the tantrums over diapers, the conscious and deliberate defecation and urination in “unacceptable” places, the sense of pride a child has after defecating in the toilet for the first time and the sorrow of having it all flushed away. What state had things gotten to if the bathroom was our last site of sentimental respite from the tightly-managed corporate structure?
Through the closing of the bathroom stall doors, co-workers and myself were cordoning off physical space to feel what and when we wanted to feel, think what we wanted to think, make whatever strange and twisted physical gestures we felt we needed to make. It was safe space; safe from the constant management of bosses, safe from the over-zealous, internalized self-management enacted particularly by those looking to be promoted, safe from the harsh world of financial acting, the Goffman presentation of the self, which sees society as a great stage on which actors work to direct others’ impressions of them, concealing some aspects of behavior in a “backstage” while presenting others for public scrutiny.[14] But what were we all really staying “safe” from? Feelings, as M. Rosaldo states, “are not substances to be discovered in our blood but social practices organized by stories that we both enact and tell. They are structured by our own forms of understanding.”[15] Perhaps, then, we were seeking respite from these stories, from the hearing of them, the re-telling many felt compelled to enact, the formation of new stories within this corporate structure. Perhaps the “safety” came with not wanting to understand for a few moments, to escape the harsh realities of a cut-throat, competitive world.
Importantly, it must be acknowledged that his story of the “haze” is not universal in how people understand it or respond to it, nor are the ways in which individuals practice agency and creative manners of resistance homogeneous or lost altogether. Admittedly, there are complexities here glossed over, perhaps topics for a longer piece to come. What can be offered are subjective expositions by myself and those I spoke to on commonalities of sentimental experiences in the workplace of a highly organized, hierarchical, managed and controlled atmosphere of the corporation. As invariably the bathroom was a site of respite for many, so too would other places (both external and internal) offer the same in particular settings of our increasingly busy lives where occasionally, we just need to “get away”. But the interest of this paper has been to ask where the feelings of sadness, anger and later resignation come from, where they reside and how they are managed?
The end of the day approaches. The shuffling of papers, zipping up of bags, closing of computers, locking of filing cabinets all sound from the seemingly people-free recesses of the floor’s cubicles. Those currently resigned to proving nothing towards receiving a promotion ready themselves for a five o’clock departure. Those looking to move up the corporate ladder buckle down to see who can last the longest. The vents above quiet the silent spewing of mediated air flow, the white noise machines continue unabated. There is a sense of resignation that I have, a sense that even though it is the last thing I want to do, I will be back tomorrow. The cubicle will not have changed but the trash will have been emptied. The hallways and meeting rooms will have been dusted. The weekend becomes the goal of a Monday morning. Pervasive is a sense of nostalgia for how things could be, but aren’t. The, “curious phenomenon of people’s longing for what they themselves have destroyed,” is perhaps a pernicious take on the complicity of those of us who at once denounce the measured corporate structure but subscribe to it nonetheless, receiving monthly paychecks.[16] Within the physically and mentally layered structures of sentimental management and negotiation and the agency and resistance of corporate actors working in tightly managed private enterprises built to maximize profit, however, complexities beyond the scope of this paper remain to be explored.
Note:
There are an abundance of questions that I would love to explore in a longer piece: what agency do individual’s working in such environments have? Are there forms of resistance to the hierarchical and heavily managed control of this corporate space? How are these sentiments managed or negotiated amongst employees and what specifically occurs in the interactions of people of a higher rank and lower rank, two people of the same rank and what, when the people are of the same rank, occurs in those interactions when one or both of the individuals are looking to be promoted as quickly as possible? Are there connections between the use of sites of defecation and urination as a site of respite in corporations and the use of such sites in other areas of oppressive management and regulation (i.e. plantations, highly-regulated factories, abusive households, small homes with large numbers of people)? What is the entity of the corporation, where has it come from and what are the many connections between the structure of the corporation and Norbert Elias’ work on the civilizing process? Where are the places people go when they need to get away but can’t use places such as the bathroom to do so? What are the connections between pharmaceuticals, sentiments and the structures of the corporation?
[1] Hughes, Langston. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York: Vintage, 1995.
[2] Hochschild, Arlie R. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley, Ca: University of California Press, 1983.
[3] It is standard to issue a numerical rank to all employees ranging from 25 to 70. This directly corresponds to the existing hierarchy within the corporate structure.
[4] Lutz, Catherine. “Emotion, Thought, and Estrangement: Emotion as Cultural Category”. Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 1, No. 3 (1986): 289.
[5] Ibid., 294.
[6] Rebhun, L.A. “Nerves and Emotional Play in Northeast Brazil”. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1993): 146.
[7] Ibid., 132.
[8] Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2000, 231.
[9] Jenkins, Janis Hunter. “Anthropology, Expressed Emotion, and Schizophrenia. Ethos, Vol. 19, No. 4 (1991): 395.
[10] Rebhun, 139.
[11] Lutz, 293.
[12] Lutz, 293.
[13] Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
[14] Goffman, Erving. Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959, 34.
[15] Rosaldo, Michelle Z. “Toward an Anthropology of Self and Feeling” in Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion by Scweder, Richard and Robert A. Levine (eds.). New York: Cambridge University Press, 143.
[16] Resaldo, Renato. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993.
