Flash Fiction (New York City)

Re-Creation Pt. 1

As I walk the streets I can see as clearly as ever that there exists within our midst a very clear problem of wealth inequity. It is not only the problem of the haves and the have-nots, the spreading gulf between those that have become further enriched by the downfall of the rest of us. Perhaps more insidious is the fact that so many of us who have so little will fight each other, stab each other’s backs, undermine one another at every chance that we get for the short-term gain. In doing so we fail to see the big picture: all of our energies are to further the wealth of those at the top while lining our pockets with just enough for mere existence. And while this story is by no means new, it seems more and more the case that the majority of us that serve for the benefit of the wealthy have lost sight of this inequity and have convinced ourselves to be content with the pittance afforded to us by those that make millions off of our labors. When one sees clearly, there is a simplicity about this, a black and white, right and wrong. There are those that have and then there are the rest of us. Importantly, this is not wholly dependent on cold hard cash. The majority of people that actually have very little (compared to those that truly have amassed reproachable sums ) subscribe to the mentality of the haves without actually having at all. This is a sickness that must be rectified through class education and rebellion.

The strength lies in not having rather than spending one’s every waking moment attempting to have. There will always be those that do not have and we will always be in the majority (as we are more and more today) as troubles beset us all, including those that for years thought themselves beyond the scope of financial ruin. Many speak of the dangers of having such an either/or outlook on things and in the majority of cases, I would have to say I agree. However, in the case of the economic I believe an either/or mentality is not only possible but extremely useful in clearly demarcating those that subscribe to the have mentality and the rest of us that face increasing financial constraints. The more one is willing to stand back from all the noise and allow oneself to observe what is occurring within the societal theatre, the clearer this becomes. The result from this will be an anger insurmountable by media pundits, pay-offs and political consolations. There has come a time when we will demand our share. This will come not only through demands for money but meaningful jobs where we are allotted as workers a semblance of autonomy, able to direct our energies and labors towards the creation of things we deem meaningful to our lives. The days of alienation are limited and a new demand is arising. This is emerging in pockets around the world. It is guerilla class warfare fed through the idealistic yearnings of a youth dispossessed. So rises the re-creation.

Poverty Chronicles Pt. 3

Immersed now in the corporate building of three world financial center with the recent acquisition of a temporary administrative assistant position, it seems strange to write of poverty. All around me there now exists signs of an overabundance of wealth. Through the  words of colleagues down the hall, within padded executive offices come voices speaking of luxurious business dinners, the latest and hottest New York shows, the trifles and tribulations that come with having too much money and too little to ponder such as minute stains on the corporate carpet, a chair that sits slightly too high, a computer that must be reset a few times a day, a window that needs washing, the complaints of self-inflicted time restrictions (Barbara said that she was going to come. Where is she? Can we call security? I don’t have time to wait!) and the resulting increase in levels of general stress that spread like wildfire from the top of the hierarchy downward.

One day, $.25 is all I can attribute to my name. The next, I am here, immersed in a world where I am still exceedingly poor and yet, something has changed, a weight has been lifted, access to things such as food, drinks, comfort exponentially increased. This again has something to do with vision, a shifting of the limitations we see ourselves within, the limitations that are both real (I can only buy a bag of chips today because I do not have enough money for a full meal) and imagined (events of importance created by oneself which then emerge as cause for discomfort or increased stress levels, self-inflicted). While I am in nearly the same monetary bind, I no longer feel the heavy constriction of lacking a means of survival, of wondering what will happen tomorrow. And so it is that time is affected. It is expanded. My vision no longer becomes of the day, the minute, the hour but becomes that of the week, the month. The future is a benefit of those with the means to look into the future, the present that of those both restricted to the worries and concerns of the day, the past something those of us excessively poor have no use for and that the rich seem to avoid or use as a means of bolstering their position should it be a positive past.

There is a release in knowing that payment is to come, that the time I must hold out now is limited whereas before it rolled out endlessly, the stone-studded expanse of a horizon I seemed I would never reach. This is both calming and anxiety-producing for on the one hand, my head and body tire of the constant worries related to money but on the other, there is a present-ness, a consciousness of each step throughout the day which I fear will be lost as money-troubles wane.

Solidarity and Legitimacy

I step onto the train and whereas before I feel camaraderie and solidarity with those I ride with (all of us in some manner immersed in monetary woes I tell myself), I now feel defensive, as if I should reach out and tell people that look at me, “I am only wearing this sports coat because of where I am going. I only wear these pressed trousers because they help me play the part. It is a costume and nothing more.” But I remain silent and I imagine a disdain directed towards me. This is likely not coming from anyone on the train. It is likely coming from myself. To be poor and feel oneself in solidarity with the millions of others who are poverty-stricken in America and across the world is a gift within the rough and tumble lifestyle of the tumultuous life of poverty. It is something which can be taken away, a feeling that exists only in a particular moment, in a particular time, dependent on a number of complicated and constantly-moving parts. One cannot feel this and truly understand it without having experienced poverty for an extended period of time or being currently immersed in it. It is because of this that others should not speak of the poor as if they were a topic for discussion. We have our own voice, quite particular, each unique, the state of being run through with commonalities which can be explored through some of the aforementioned points in Poverty Chronicles I and II. The question then becomes, “How poor is poor enough to speak of the poor?” and I do not have the answer to this question. What I can say is that as one speaks of the poor (and any other topic outside of oneself really) there is a feeling which arises in the heart, a warmth and quiet that is an indication of a genuineness, a true knowledge, a legitimacy. Alternatively should a feeling arise in the stomach or gut, a twisting turn, it is a sign that one should keep one’s mouth shut as one is literally “speaking shit”. This, I believe, happens often in our societies here in America and around the world and will no doubt persist for as long as human beings exist.

Relativity of Wealth

The relativity of wealth emerges as a complication as I see my monetary problems easing in the future. Whereas before it was quite simple to state, “So and so has the ability to buy a pair of jeans or flippantly buy a full meal at a sit-down restaurant and therefore have money,” a new complication emerges: money, once obtained, never fulfills a purpose of meaning. More is always needed, any amount is never enough. There is then an ease in working to the bottom. Somehow knowing I have $10 to my name and that this $10 must last me for 3 days has a much more fulfilling purpose to it. There is an anxiety in having excessive amounts of money and this is the anxiety of want. One then seems trapped in a cycle of anxieties, that is until one can devise a way to avoid entering into the cycle in the first place, transcending these complications to experience the wider view of the world, the “big picture” so often referenced and so little actually seen.

Sidewalk Windows

The sidewalk window has  a different meaning to me as I am immersed in the state of poverty. No longer is this a window for looking-in. Rather it is a glaring representation of what I cannot have. It becomes an outward projection, the internal stage transposed onto my eyes and mind, my body, my dreams. People sitting comfortably at restaurants laughing with friends or loved ones emerge as aggressive caricatures, the careless and short-lived meeting of our eyes through window panes filled with a distant void. As if watching animals in a silent zoo, the scene plays as an unreal moment in a movie, a greeting card. And for them too, I imagine my voiceless body means little, if anything, at least nothing worth breaking a dinner to ponder. In looking through the window, I am both onlooker and looked upon and both parties are temporarily voiceless, silent caricatures. Unpleasant in its projections, the window then becomes something for me to avoid. Walking past without looking in then becomes an act of resistance. The window then allows for the following: to be shown what one cannot have, to look in to buy or ponder a purchase, to look in to dream of what one could have but don’t, to walk past in defiance of the window’s aggressive projections to deny its entry into one’s body, eyes, dreams.

Homeless Assault

As Thomas exits his home he is asked almost immediately for money from a homeless woman. Now as homeless women go, she was quite plump, far from the verge as it were. But when he states quite quickly that he did not have any (which was true at the time) she asked him for change. There was an aggressiveness to this second question, subtle yet present. He imagines her pressing further, asking for specific types of change. “Do you have any quarters? Pennies? Nickels?” she asks, leaning closer and closer to his face until he could smell the sherry and day-old croissants. Receiving a no once again, she would press further, this time asking for foreign currencies. “Any Rands, Yen, Euros, Pounds?” her voice rising with the “ounds” of Pounds. He would state the negative once again and it would be at this point that she would pounce on him, pounding on his head with her chubby fists. He would say nothing strangely for the guilt of continually saying no to the poor woman (poor for she had no money) would leave him feeling worthy of flagellation. Once flagellated, he would sigh with relief, throw the overweight cow from his shoulders and continue on with his morning. In the distance he would hear her yelling, “What about food?! Any of that?!” This time he would not stop.

He thinks about homeless people a lot, wondering how it is that they came to be in their present positions. He no longer feels sorry for such people for he knows that the lines of separation between himself and them is a fine line, one easily transversed given the right set of misfortunate circumstances. In his current situation, it would be a matter of weeks before he could find himself in the same position as that woman near his doorstep. Homeless people is an amorphous label of a group of people as varying in stories and psychological propensities as the rest of us walking the streets and Thomas thought it would do us well to rid of it altogether. In many ways Thomas thought it to be a marketing tool. Falsely group a number of people together under a given term such as homeless and one can make charities to raise money for such people, make people feel sorry for them. To label anything and have such a label stick requires enormous amounts of energy as anyone that knows that history of labeling knows. Additionally it requires an almost pathological urge to exert this energy daily, concocting creative and innovative means to enforce such concocted labels. Thomas felt this to be the case with ideas of race, natural classification, objects of varying sorts (for what, really is the difference between a table and a chair other than a historical energy exerted to divide up such objects?), and colors. There were more and these included homelessness.

If one got even the slightest bit philisophical about the topic of being home-less instead of taking the term at face-value, Thomas thought, one would almost immediately come upon the vexing problem of defining what it means to have a home in the first place, let alone lose that home to become home-less. For Thomas knew that it was often the case that so easily people refer to their homes, common sayings being, “Home is where the heart is,” “There is no place like home,” “Welcome home,” “I’m home.” Stated with such conviction and so often it is no wonder that human beings often do not stop to think of what this term means to them. For anyone that has “lost” a home, it becomes immediately apparent that “home” need not be a physical space, that there is something altogether internal about this concept of home. As Thomas knew, this term was not static, not simply to be found within a cupboard or a stairwell, a kitchen table, a picture. These were accompaniments, colors upon a broader fabric, encased within them the signals to remember particular things and moments in a particular way. Just as important as the internal conception of home (for the two fed off of each other) these objects could be replaced, re-created, new energies injected into the dialogue of the body and the material world. So too could the internal conception of home be re-worked, reconstituted, renovated, reborn. Thomas was no closer to understanding what “home” meant but wondered if it was not the case that the majority of human beings spent their lives in search of this conception of “home”, whether it be in the bosom of a lover, the smile of their children, their jobs, cars, drugs, or religion. The quest for home, Thomas thought, was born of a spiritual crises, a search for meaning. To be home-less then would be to be in quest of meaning, perhaps a quest to give the body and mind up to a conception greater than oneself. “Your father worked hard day in and day out for this home and all of us in it,” would not be surprising to hear. This “giving up” of oneself then requires finding a concept to “give up” to and perhaps, Thomas thought, this is what we are all searching for more often than not.

He passes a man on the corner asking for change, feels nothing more or less than he would seeing anyone else on the street. He notes this as progress, continues on his quest.

Moments with Orwell No.1

When I really think about it, money has been at the root of most of the problems in my life. Really the lack thereof to be specific. Money is time as any good businessman knows. Time for those of us without money is usually marked by the number of hours we must work until we do not have to work. The week becomes a Monday to Friday, 9-5, so that I can then live the weekends and early evenings free. Free without work but with enough money to enjoy life, as much life as one can enjoy with the limited amount of time allotted to being “off”. Money for employers is that which is used to buy the time of x number of workers for x number of hours. A small business owner may think to herself, “This month I can afford 3 workers to work varying shifts during my store’s business hours from 7-7:00. If x amount of dollars are made by x date I may be able to employ 2 more workers who will then help my business bring in x more amount of dollars.” This is basic business sense but it is clear that working then, and money, is a transaction of time. I often think were I not to be in constant need of money I would very easily find creative ways in which to spend my time, most likely devising my own manners of making money through a basic entrepreneurial spirit that seems to have been with me since birth. But as it is, often when I do have time off I am thinking of how little money I have, marking it out over a calendar and figuring out quite quickly that the little money that I have will only be good for one or two more weeks. This omnipresent anxiety is well-known to anyone who has, at some point, been “hard up” as it were and forgo listening to anyone who begins to romanticize the state of poverty for it is either the case that they have never truly been hard up or they are complete lunatics with no real grasp of the consequences of not eating for three days in a row. Perhaps then they are fed institutionally and you have just happened to meet them on their “day off” from Ward X.

Snow Drifters

It wasn’t beyond Peter to eat the woman’s leg. He knew this now after hours of internal debate and reprimanding himself for even thinking the thought. It was plush, vibrant, and in stark contrast to the drab snow banks building up on the outside of the A train on the upper platform in Queens. His stomach growls, he places the palm of his right hand, sweaty, against his brow pushing the skin upwards into burrowing folds.

On his right, an aged woman who smells of moth balls and whiskey, tight purple headscarf wrapped tightly over red, dyed hair. Her nose protrudes as probiscus, her legs like slender veined ropes tossed carelessly over the hard plastic of the subway seats.

On his left, a young man, tight curled black hair, deep brown eyes, a pair of earbuds snuggly resting against his ear drums, the beat of a loca-loca riding the still subway air. His foot in Timberland taps fervently against the black, speckled floor, the sole of his shoe smacking as it rips from the stale brown snow agua.

Above the air ducts suck in the freezing night air, run it through worn, warm coils, send it spirling down against huddled passengers. Down the car, a young child screams.

Across from him, the woman’s leg, supple, protrudes from a heavy cotton, plaid skirt. Heels frame the toes, lift the leg, position the muscle to drumstick, to sideways steak, to leg of lamb, rosemary and the family just around the corner. “Just one bite,” he thinks and down the car, the child screams louder.

The snow is getting higher. Six hours in. No one knows how much longer. “This could be it.” He thinks it, thinks how silly it is but thinks it nonetheless. “And what if?”

“That train won’t move, that platform frozen still, those lives in those cars, and those cars upon cars, and roads all blocked. We are stockpiled, frozen meats, the forgotten in a wintry Armageddon. But at least we have each other,” and he looks up and down that rounded, meaty leg. “At least we have each other,” he says leaning forward.

And the woman takes notice of a man leaning towards her, hands outstretched. She sees the hungry look in his eyes, that crazed “What does it matter?” glaze and she’s swinging her purse as hard as her arms allow and the passengers are screaming, that child frozen still. She’s beating that man to keep warm, just because she’s wanted to for so long. Not that man but other men. Other crazed and shitty men and her arms feel like they are going to fall off, can feel the steam plowing through her blouse, escaping at the crest of her bosom, warming her chin.

That snow piles higher and that woman stops swinging. There’s a silence to match the snow nearly covering the car windows and that child starts in again until that woman just looks, a look to end all looks, and that child is silent and the car is silent and there’s just more waiting to be had.

New York: Exit 3

“But he has nothing to say Debra,” Tom would repeat, each time higher than the next. “You keep asking him his opinion on this and there just isn’t one. He’s said it straight: he doesn’t know. What else could you possibly want from the boy?” Debra, the calloused lush that she was, simply scoffed.

“If the boy ain’t got nothing to say, he might as well die. This world ain’t for living with a sealed mouth, I can tell you that much.” She swayed back and forth on her heels, her cheap boxed Cabernet sloshing against the sides of her over-sized glass.

Yano, it was true, was a quiet boy who, more often than not, felt not the need to speak or give an opinion on the matter. It was often the case that in a matter of seconds he could see both sides of the argument or given situation and this understanding led quickly to a cancellation of not one in favor of the other, but rather a cancellation of the argument altogether. On matters of low importance such as the color of a shirt to wear to school, or a particular food to like or dislike, Yano excelled. These were definitive moments, decisions easily encased in the consumption or retrieval of a physical object. On matters such as lying as in, “Yano, you said you loved me but then you lied to me about doing the dishes,” the grays overcame the particulars and the absurdity of the claim deadened his lips.

“When a boy don’t talk, it don’t mean nothin’. He’s just tired Debra, that’s all. No need to go on about dying and all that. Leave the boy alone.” Tom would often defend Yano. It was Yano’s belief that this had nothing to do with him at all and in fact, it was the case that Tom was defending not Yano, but the childhood version of himself against an overbearing mother who, like Debra, was tanked nearly 23 of the 24 hours in a day.

Debra glanced at Tom flippantly, bringing the glass firmly to her lips with both hands. Smacking her teeth, she retorted, “The boy has the skin of a pussy Tom. If I can puncture him that easily, what do you think those moronic masses out there on the streets are going to do to him?” Debra would often speak in generalizations about “masses” as if she were their muse and knew their every move, let alone their names. Masses, according to Debra’s logic, were responsible for the large majority of the world’s problems including, but not limited to: global warming, obesity, speeding, water contamination, rug burns and that, “little pain just in the back of the head, sort of like a needle banging my brain” as Debra would put it or, as the rest of us would call it, a common headache. Yano, after hearing his mother’s rants about the woes connected to the “masses” and Tom’s sub-par retorts, quickly came to the conclusion at the age of eight that both of his parents were write-offs in his larger pursuit of a life not devoid of meaning and would wall up in a shroud of silence and contemplate things complicated, of which Yano found many.

Yano supposed that, at the end of the day, not much needed to be said. It was often the case that everything had already been said before or there were few, if any, to listen. To find someone willing to spend time to have a meaningful conversation, one in which both parties were forced to confront uncomfortable realities in their own lives in the pursuit of some understanding of a larger reality, was uncommon to say the least. To many, Yano found, he was much too young to take seriously or people quickly became uncomfortable with the idea that once one truth was reached, it would be refuted and the search would continue, undoubtably unabated. Perhaps too it was the manner in which Yano began such conversations: “I’d like to talk to you. But not just about anything. I want to talk to you about something really important, something that makes you uncomfortable. I want to talk in a manner befitting what the tool of talking was made for in the first place: to communicate. To pass on information but to grow with each other, move with each other, challenge each other, to create and destroy simultaneously, to…” He would continue in such a manner for minutes on end and, for a child that was known to speak so little, Yano on these occasions was quite literally unstoppable. He found very few to live up to his standards and as a result, lived the large majority of his formative years completely devoid of conversation or communication for that matter.

Debra hated the child, swore against the very day he had emerged from her womb. One could blame it on the drink but the distinction between the woman and the bottle was nearly impossible by now. Tom dealt with it through long business trips and sour whiskeys taken steadily throughout the day. Yano coped by conversing with himself in fanciful inner dialogue and walking nearly everywhere he needed to go. He was a prime suspect to be one of those children on the back of milk cartons and, in a matter of days, he would be.

New York: Exit 2

The subways seemed like a distant memory to him now. The oranges, yellows, reds on the cracked plastic seats, the greasy poles with layers of human grime upon them, the scuffed and speckled linoleum floors. He would later remember only the sensations of urine and feces, frozen moving airs of each subway car, the occasional homeless man or woman slouched in the corner, every other passenger a safe distance away. Safe enough to avoid the stench, safe enough to forget their resemblance to the blanketed mass.

His memories would soon become impressions really, existent nodes of operation implanted in the dark recesses of his mind. The synaptic flows associated with navigating a largely mechanized metropolis would slow, his life would become more countenanced, he would remember the follies of his high-speed lifestyle, laugh…sometimes cry. Chapters in his life would feel foreign, as if noir episodes, dream-like and of an ulterior being’s life. Such was the city he would come to find: as distance traveled, the grit and grime remained, the city engrained within his very being. Within his brow, the gum-laden sidewalks of Union Square. Within his neck, the towering skyscrapers of the financial district. In his toes, the stony sway of the Brooklyn Bridge. A place as large and divergent as New York congealed into a recognizable being and the memoried sensations arrived in pregnant waves. The hot dog vendor on 14th and 4th Ave, the schwarma truck on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, the guards standing glassy-eyed on the stoops of rich residences on Madison Avenue: the recognizable New York arose again and again, only to recede into white noise washing the walls of his quiet, new life.

New York: Exit 1

He looks out the window, hears the garbage men rolling past, their tired bodies lumbering out of the dirtied vehicles, veiny arms straining to lift each bag and throw them into the compressor. The pigeons have gathered early this morning, congregating in front of his Haitian neighbor who sits, bent back and bag of bread crumbs in hand, tossing wistful handfuls of crumbs to the ground below. The pigeons proceed with regularity, as if composed of a daily musical movement, their contribution to the overture of the grand metropolis written in fluid steps, bobbing heads, the occasional flutter of grayed wings as a boy rides his bicycle down the tree-lined promenade. The air is thick, womb-like, hot and sticky and he wipes his forehead with the back of his sleeve, looks at it in his left hand, checking for dirt left behind. There is none and this comforts him. He feels himself a beacon of cleanliness in a city dampened by the downtrodden, the filthy rich, the grit and grime of a never-ending pursuit.

The trees droop in the increasing heat. Yesterday his downstairs neighbor, a jazz singer and makeup artist, had come up to ask for sugar. It was cliche yet it was only the second time he had ever seen her so he engaged her in conversation, lent her the sugar and they exchanged smiles, forced into a joint suffering by the stifling heat and the longing for sweetness in their lives. She had smiled at him only once but it was a deep smile, a carving into the loamy soils of his persona that had rarely been touched. It was to be the highlight of his week and he treasured the exchange, rolled it around in his brain for hours on end, creating alternate scenarios whereby the request for sugar turned into hikes through unchartered forests, swims in the purple oceans in the Eastern coastal waters of the Atlantic, jovial dinners and lusty moments in public places. In the end he would return to himself as a dying star which collapses in on itself. He was left alone, an observer of the chaotic movements of the world of New York City which he knew only through the picture frames of his window panes, mere snippets of a city too large for any one person to ever truly understand.

The garbage men had now moved on, replaced by the criss-crossing movements of the sidewalk gentry. Older men, now retired, carved out the sidewalk spaces with their presence. As if surrounded by orbed forcefields, space was allocated to these men through furtive glances, downcast eyes, outspread arms and crossed legs. Their casualness was an enactment of force, a silent attack on the territories of the Parkway promenade. Their victories were pronounced through relaxed non-chalance, the fact that they did not move was a statement that they did not need to move. And so it goes.

He wondered if ever there would come a time when he would leave this place. He had never grown up Catholic but believed that flagellation was as common as breathing in New York. Perhaps it was through drugs or alcohol, stress or the continual pursuit of money, cloistering oneself in one’s home or flitting about as a manic social butterfly, but everyone seemed to have a guilt of sorts to expunge, a need to punish oneself, a need to deny life and wallow in the shallows or darkened depths of the dead. The metropolis was a place to lose oneself, to in a way give in to the notion that we are all born guilty or sinful, to accept this and in a way, give in. New York City was the whip near everyone’s back, the dirtied sore which everyone navigated on their way to work, to meet friends for drinks, to pick the kids up at the private schools, or have meetings at an upscale Manhattan restaurant. He had known other places, knew that the quality of life in New York City was poor as compared to other places he had been, and yet the allure was still there, that guilt-ridden pleasure of enjoying something that is so very bad for you, that thing which you say to yourself, “I’ll quit this just as soon as…” but never do.

He was quitting the city, taking a break and the scenes from his window became those of sepia moments of grainy film in a picture show. With a steadied right hand, he turned the handle of the antique camera, heard the whirring of the film through the feed, documented in memory that which he was so near to saying goodbye to.

Therapy

“There are three people here. Maybe more. I don’t know but I get the sense that they are watching me, that they are trying to figure out what it is that I am thinking.” Gertrude looks over Harold, feels like telling him to shut the hell up, that no one cares what he thinks or who he is, that he’s just another human being on the face of a planet littered with people.

“And what kind of feelings come up when you are in this space?” she says, tight-lipped and well-calibrated.

“Angst, sorrow, fear. I don’t know. All of them. I feel like I am about to burst, that I won’t be able to hold in the anxiety any longer. I am afraid of what will happen when that occurs.”

Occurs. Gertrude notices particular words that he uses. Occurs instead of takes place. She despises this man, dreads the 45 minutes they spend together week after week. One day, when violently ill, she decided it would be in her best interest to come to her appointment with Harold and proceeded to cough with full force into the air above and around him in the hope of spreading her sickness. He had offered her a tissue with a polite smile. It made her hate him even more.

“The space is small and their eyes seem to devour me inch by inch. I feel like if I stay in there, I will emerge only a piece of the man I was when entering. How does one deal with this feeling, the feeling that one is literally being devoured, lessened, ripped apart?”

She sighs. Calmly she states, “Well, you could leave.” She rolls her eyes a bit to the left as she says this. He takes momentary notice and grinds his teeth.

“But I can’t just leave, can I? I work there. People come to me, they order their food, they demand service, conversation. I’m in the cross-hairs of a social dilemma. At times I imagine them as a sea of insects clawing at croissants, drinking lattes, ordering frappacinos and other nonsensical coffee beverages. This makes me smile but then people watch me more. As if smiling is a crime in this city, right?”

“Hmm,” she says. Gertrude had been seeing Harold for years now. At times, it seemed to be decades that he had annoyingly engrained himself into her schedule. Son of a wealthy client, blessed neurotic, her hand was forced in taking him on as a  client. Perhaps it was his incessant repetition of the same narratives: the eyes, the feeling of being watched, a delusional self-importance, a fear of being forgotten. Perhaps it was the fact that on more than one occasion, he had stood up on her leather couches yelling bloody murder, grinding the soles of his dirty wingtips into the cushions, claiming that she wasn’t helping him fast enough. Whatever it was, she despised this man, longed for a car to accidently swerve off the road and flatten him on the sidewalk, a beam of steel from a construction site to lose its grip, plummet to the ground and bore a hole through his skull. She wanted his worst fears to come true, have his clients at the cafe turn on him and devour him in a 1970′s zombie film scene, the walking corpses leaping over the counter ripping him to shreds, the intestines and various other body parts flying up in the air for dramatic effect. But none of this would happen and knowing this makes Gertrude deeply disappointed.

He continues talking. She stays as neutral as possible. The daggers lay dormant in the recesses of her skull.

Animate Inanimate

“To really imagine the wall as communicative: this is maddening,” Edward says, his eyes bulging outward to the brink of popping. “You see, it’s truly all around us. The force. The actants. Energy. Things. Whatever you’d like to call them. We are in constant dialogue with every step we take. Can you imagine this? I mean really imagine what this means?” He leans into her face, his right hand stroking his cheek, his knees tightly-pressed together, his neck bunched as if a forehead deep in thought.

“To realize that the inanimate, the dead, the things (as we so brazenly call them) have agency, that they act upon us constantly, that they waltz in tandem with us every moment–to realize this brings responsibility, a responsibility greater than most are willing to take. It is the responsibility to see, you understand? To perceive clearly the web that we exist within. It is to recognize that all that we have considered inanimate, animates our lives at every moment whether it be the wind, the food we eat, the desks we sit in, the walls of our homes or workplaces.”

She looks at him as if he is mad, rolls her eyes to the left in a dismissive manner that allows her to hear but not hear, rock her head back and forth in understanding but not truly understand. It wasn’t that she wasn’t intelligent, nor disinterested, nor was it the fact that Edward had broken her heart twice and she had resolved to shut him out forever. She was afraid, afraid of what it might mean to begin to see and explore the ways in which her cubicle walls at work were in constant dialogue with her body, that the fibers in the Berber carpets were talking to her feet, her feet talking back to the carpet. That in a way, she was that cubicle and that cubicle was her. Nor did she want to imagine that her run-down apartment in deep Brooklyn with the sordid, stained walls and moldy shower, the cockroach-infested floorboards and broken mirrors actually composed her life, that the shambles spoke to her, that the materials infused her existence, were part of her. She was revolted. And afraid. There was a longing to expunge such thoughts, distance herself, block those feelings from entering into her purview. For her, to recognize that the material, cold, spoiled and indifferent world in which she lived was alive was overwhelming and sad. What would her cracked tiles say should she choose to hear them speak? What of the pencil she grips as she writes her letters to her ailing mother? Does it beg for warmer words, less sadness? Does it long to write words of love and healing in the place of regret? She shakes her head, can take no more, and looks Edward in the eyes.

“It is true that this can be frightful for we have created what at first glance seems to be a cold and indifferent world of the machine. But look closer. Mystery and magic are right before our eyes. If I look quickly at my desk for instance, I notice only a few things: the biggest scratches, the fact that it is a desk, the coffee stain in the right hand corner. But if I look closer, spend more time, I see deeper, through gradations of the object. I notice the speckled face of the wood, the chaotic pattern of the chipped veneer. If I look very closely, I smell the remnants of lemon pledge, see a crack that runs lengthwise across the desk, a strange discolored diamond at the head. If I spend enough time, I come to know the desk, little by little, with patience and love. And it is not simply a desk that I come to know. Encased within the desk are so many others: those that once sat at this desk, perhaps the child that ran her scissors across its face accidentally while cutting paper, those that made this desk. Then before, the saws which sliced the wood, the workers at the sawmill, the trucks that carried the wood, then the tree that once stood tall amidst other trees perhaps in the Great Northwest, perhaps elsewhere. From the tree to the water that the tree fed upon, the nutrients within the spongy ground which we ourselves are composed of. In moments of personal crisis I remind myself that we are all collectives, every last person, desk, bowl, hospital, apartment complex, taxi, pencil, book. If I look closely, I begin to see the mystery of all that surrounds me, all that supports me, all that constantly speaks to me if only I am willing to listen. When I feel alone or scared, you see, I remember that I am not alone and that everywhere around me the traces of all those past, present and to-come are here, all around me. It is not a metaphysical statement but one based on the material realities in which we wade. What would it do to see this?” Edward smiles, closes his eyes.

She pauses, looks to her wrist. Hanging loosely from her arm is a stone bracelet her daughter gave to her on her 40th birthday. For the first time, she notices in one of the amber stones a white streak shaped like the curved tail of a lion. She smiles.

Belle: An Introduction

Belle was a prima donna, a true believer in the power of “I”. Her ego washed the walls with the scented trails of cheap perfume and lotion wherever she walked and when entering a room it was the palpable annoyance that Belle brought that one first noticed. Loud and forceful, it was not uncommon for her to plop herself down on the couch, wedge her way awkwardly into conversation and speedily take it over with the force of a newly-born calf. The conversation would soon digress into ramblings of the latest pop culture motifs, the dress and circumstance of the feigned acquaintances gracing the television screen that Belle did not know but somehow believed took into account her opinions in their day-to-day lives. Others would listen as Belle, seemingly unconscious or uncaring that she had willfully trapped others in her web of, “Oh, did you see what he was wearing? Are you kidding me? Who does that?”s and “She was nothing but a hot mess. Did you see her on the latest [enter any TV show]“s, would continue unabated for minute after minute until everyone was strategically able to exit the room. Alone was something that Belle dreaded and after emptying the room, she would sit, her right leg thrown over the left haphazardly, staring into space until the silence had become too unbearable and she would begin the hunt for her next victim.

Perhaps it was her childhood that laid the foundations for the forceful and vacuous presence of Belle. Perhaps it was that she had never felt loved enough, that her parents never paid her much attention. Then again, perhaps it was just Belle. But when faced with the stench of a Belle let loose, one truly could only think of getting away and no manner of excuse could pave the way to any sort of understanding.

Her hips were wide, her ass large, her breasts over-ripened melons. Her hair was pulled sideways with the loose carelessness of a workday morning begun late, long strands of black hair curled at the tips from the incessant use of her index finger and thumb to play with the locks that had begun forming. Long, press-on nails graced her fingers, each painted with red and orange sunsets over oceans, little white sailboats near the lines of the horizons. These she would click on the hardened surfaces of her desk or a coffee table as she talked, creating a far more interesting distraction than the dribble that emerged from her mouth. Belle’s cell phone was her additional appendage that she seemed to focus in on with all her might, straining at the exercise of texting any number of the men she kept within the recesses of her vapid mind. She considered it rude to ignore texts while talking to a real, live person but this was more understandable when one realized that more often than not, she talked at a person, not to and that she simply never stopped talking.

Survivors of Belle’s conversations would later state that in a way, her presence was productive. It enabled them to drift off, daydreaming to the warbling of a woman unconcerned that her words were not heard, her points not taken seriously. One man later claimed that it was during one of Belle’s sessions that he came up with the design of his later heralded apartment complex, a building covered in wall-to-wall glass which gave it the veneer of transparency while directly behind most of the glass stood concrete walls, 2 feet thick. For many, surviving Belle’s onslaught was an apt lesson in the meaning of thoughtful speech. Belle, however, would continue to be oblivious.

What was perhaps most fascinating about Belle was her uncanny ability to fabricate authority on topics she had next to no knowledge about. The woman had an opinion on everything. Anyone that challenged this was met with the onset of rolling menageries of words violently piled upon one another in no particular order, her voice rising continually when met with resistance as if by being loud she would magically be right. The heavy silences of her victims would resound with spiteful deference and Belle would take this as victory, rearranging her chunky ass cheeks on the sofa, the leather squealing under her unwelcome weight. Transparent, aggressive, inane and superfluous, Belle would more often than not find herself alone, steeping in the uncomfortable recognition that human lifeforms seemed repelled by her presence.

Approaching Finitude

Ten sentences in, he stops. “What’s the point?” he thinks to himself and suddenly with that thought the keystrokes seem infinitely distanced, the ideas far-fetched and overdone. The pens, the pencils, the lined tablets and crusted coffee cups: they all remind him of that which he is not doing, that which taunts him from the emptiness of evenly-spaced, papered lines and a fatal cursor left unsatisfied. The old man in the corner that always threatened to rise up from his slumber does so now, his eyes droopy, his beard long and unkempt and riddled with food particles. His left leg slides and scrapes against the wooden floors of the one-man bar, his jacket hangs in tatters from the edges of his bony limbs, his cane held tightly in his right hand thumps periodically, resounding in the hollows of the bar’s underbelly. This is the man that he longs to forget, the man that haunts his work-less days, the man he wishes never to become.

The approach is long and slow, motion in lines of drawn certitude that weave through the fibers of the bar stools, the floorboards, the empty glasses and resounding silences on dusty lamps and crooked paintings. Memories flash before his eyes of times that once were, nostalgic rememberings of falsified simpler times. Vivid colors resound through the recesses of his troubled mind, mix with the images of a childhood birthday party: cookies and cream ice cream cake, birthday balloons, six magic candles that light again once blown out, the clown with the smeared makeup. There is a wanting to return but neither happiness nor sadness associated with these images. Simply to return which he knows, through all meanings of the word tragedy, he cannot.

The old man is closer now, bearing down upon him with his cod-fish breath, his rotting green teeth, his one glass eye slightly turned inward to the right. He says nothing, merely watches as the man approaches in a dreaded waltz. His craft is one of giving in, of accepting that which comes and rearranging it through fanciful prose, of seeing that which everyone else sees but in a slightly twisted manner, one not accountable to the rigid laws of a mankind bent on destroying the will of the imaginarians.

The old man is here, within him, nestling into his veins and begins to roll out prose through the tips of his fingers.  The fear gives way to exhilaration. He has given in to the man’s presence, embraced him within the lining of his being, and in tandem they jauntily walk through the empty lines of the pages, scattering color, expounding upon love, death, life and all the other nonsensical rantings of beings possessed by the power of the written word. He has returned momentarily to the land of the living through the embraced presence of a small and withered death.

Eggs, Well Done

She was there again, leaning with each arm draped over the carved wood door frame and the puce and lime green wallpapered walls. Achromatic hair tied tightly into a nest of black steel hair pins, each roll well-placed, a manicured perm of transcendence. Her face, crumpled and crimped, lights up the room with its fiercely-driven marks of amethyst and henna. Her eyes of steel gray are half open, glinting in the overhead diner lights and she looks forward and meets my eyes. I imagine her sanguine lips meeting mine, our teeth clattering in the lawless pursuit of pent up passion now released. Her milky breasts will falter and strain against the worn fabric of her over-sized brassiere and we will throw caution to the wind as our hips pop and diner customers run wildly out the door, hands over their mouths. The rolls of our flesh will intertwine and for that timeless moment, our bodies will become enmeshed in olfactory inquisitions of Dove roll-on deodorant, Old Spice cologne and baby powder. We will laugh as our teeth fall out to the grimy tiles below and we gum each other into eternity. Her figure is perfectly imperfect, her every move sensually slow and wizened. Our endless times alone will come to pass and all the singular moments of watching cars out the window and sleeping and eating alone will melt away in the presence of two. Her warm fingers will trace my body, along my jaw line, on the edges of my cheek and ear. In her ears I will whisper notes of longing and long-awaited love and she will quiver. Fully embraced, the world will cease to exist and time, for all of its menacing faces, will simply cease. The eternal through embrace, the eternal through love. She puts her arms to her side, still watching me, and takes uneven steps using the backs of the booths for balance as she approaches. “The hunt is on,” I tell myself and with a swig of OJ, I take my pills in anticipation for what is to come.

Barnes and Noble: Union Square, 16th Street

Up two escalators made by Schindler, polished stainless steel with dark gritty grooves running along each step vertical to my feet. The cafe expanse of the cloistered cafe rolls out before me, Roman white columns slice into the tiles below, littered with flowered decals and topped with crudely-shapen leaves which curl to meet the soiled off-white ceiling above. An intrusive light brown air duct intersects the common eating area above, drawing air from the roof or one of the other four floors and disperses it evenly over the patrons below. A multiplicity of forest green signs lead from escalator to the entrance to the cafe: “No outside food or beverages. Barnes and Noble café tables are reserved for our café customers only. Additional seating located on the 4th floor,” “Café tables are for our cafe customers. Please enjoy the seating in other parts of the store,” ” and then again inside the cordoned-off cafe area: “This area of our café is reserved for café customers only. Thank you.” Emphasis is placed on the igrec above the “e”: café not cafe. It is a place of prestige, a place of privilege. More than anything, it is a place of business.

The lights above, shaped like ill-informed, halved gel capsules shoot down countenanced rays of bitter halogen light. The tiles below my feet white and black, framed with dark black grout, bespeak of a corporation cognizant of the fact that although a bookstore, tiles are easier to clean, black grout easier to hide the dirt and grime collected over years of patterned trapsings by bookstore patrons. On the walls, cardboard posters of “great” novels: The Natural by Bernard Malamud, Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck, Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell Jr., The Great Gadsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. They look cheap, stand askew on the wallpapered walls: large forest green stripes interspersed with light teal and dark gray stripes, the bottom covered in a dark wood siding grooved with gold bands at the top. This is a mass-produced cafe occupying a chain bookstore. As with any successful corporations, its surroundings are not left to chance. Each color, each poster, each seat cushion and tabletop has been chosen unquestionably from a set of pre-made choices that would fit the corporate image, the “feel” of the store. High along the walls, ironic billboards of written masters stand plastered to the wall with cheap poster glue and thin poster paper cut into even, manageable sections for those that rolled them on. Singer, Kafka, Neruda, Tagore, James, Wilde, Twain, Shaw, Hardy, Dickenson: all are depicted striking intellectual poses, distant gazes peering over the endless swarms of people moving in and out of their presence. The irony abounds from the simple fact that this place is far from an intellectual hub of cultural activity. It is a corporation donning the wigs of writing masters to sell a product, further an image. I turn to the right, see Nabakov, Joyce and Shelley plastered in a hidden recess to the dirty wall. Shelley has a “First Aid for Choking” sign on her breasts and is side-lit by a neon red “Exit” sign on her right, luminescent against the bright white door.  I have had enough and I turn to walk away. A sign greets me as I exit and step on to the escalator: “Treat yourself. Enjoy Starbucks.” I am gone.

Imag-ine

Roberto desires something fantastical, a drawing that will transport him elsewhere, a painting that will cause him to inwardly traverse the knotted realm of neural fibers and wooded pathways of his mind, perhaps a film that will insist upon furthering the edicts by which he currently lives his life by. He has none of these things, simply looks out the window to the snowy street below, one older man ambling through the carved-out pathways of soiled snow having been shoveled carelessly to the side. Worn and torn knit hat, gold-rimmed glasses, a cardigan pulled too tightly over his overbearing frame, and a scarf, just long enough to wrap itself around his neck once: Roberto sees these things from three stories up, wants more than the meaningless details of a person’s costume seen from afar. The man’s speed is carefully mediated, each step seemingly a debate between mind, foot and earth as to where to step, in what manner to lay foot to ground. Roberto notices his cane, the elongated mahogany fibers spotted with rings of oxidized copper, the curvature of the handle, the wood sliding seamlessly into the man’s furrowed palms.

Roberto thinks of the much-mediated distance between himself and this stranger. As if trapped within a bubble of solitude, it is from afar and encased behind a pane of glass that Roberto observes the world. The strangers he watches carousing the sidewalks are the peopled fancies of his mind, the creative whimsies of his non-personal existence. This is a safe distance, far from potential pain, far from unwanted conversations. It is a distance which, when destroyed, has the potential for utter disruption from the normalcy of life’s mechanical operations.

The man has walked ten steps by now, stops to rest and arches his back, his shaking palm placed gently along the grooves of his lower back. He looks up to the sky. The gulls fly by. One cries into the frigid air. The sun is warm against his body now, his back has settled. He begins to walk again.

“What distances must we forego to be admitted to the personal sanctuaries of another human’s life?” Roberto thinks to himself. He knows the well-mediated distance, the distance imposed through personal defenses. But he imagines two bodies and perhaps they are shaking hands. He thinks of the physical distance which still, even though embraced, exists between those two palms. The physical distance that cannot be closed, the space between the atoms which only lends itself to further inquiries of deeper spaces unbridged. Roberto takes these spaces or distances as metaphors for the representation of distanced existence, the glassy windows which from behind we view the world and ourselves.

The man has walked farther now but remains in sight. His steps are more steady, his placement of foot to ground more pronounced. The light filters through the clouds and worn tree branches casting shadows along his aged body. He knows this man no better than himself and like a dream, takes his representations of this man to be a vector of his own subconscious, his readings of the man’s existence that of a dream analyst catalyzing imagery for the meaning of the here and now, now past. Through the partitions of this window, Roberto views the apparitions of a world of people unknown.

Grander significance erupts from no where but the recesses of his muddled mind and fervent imagination and he awaits his next image.

Capsule Hotel: Kotoyo

**This should be read as a pairing with Capsule Hotel: Sumi and other Capsule Hotel entries

Kotoyo holds the mop firmly in her hand. “The animals,” she thinks to herself as she absorbs the semen-stained sheets, the used condoms, the empty poppers. With a gloved hand and a grimace, she removes the evidence, attempts to bring the capsule back to a sterile state which is what her job’s end-goal truly is: utter neutrality and sterility.

For years she had worked the cramped halls and washed out stalls of the Green Plaza Shinjuku, had watched as the elite businessmen and women that had missed their commuter trains out of the city were replaced by vacancies, then semi-vagrants, then the long-term residents who stayed for months on end because the rents were cheaper than regular apartments and occasionally the rich, white, teenage tourists that prowled the streets of Tokyo looking for an “authentic” Japanese experience. Kotoyo was the unknown constant in all of their lives, the woman that weaved in and out of their lived experiences, readying their living spaces for the next day. In essence, she was the keeper of time within the capsule hotel, making sure day in and day out that time, at least within the hotel, had not moved and that in a city besieged by entropy, the Green Plaza Shinjuku remained static.

She walks around the corner, sees a forlorn boy sitting on the edge of his cubicle. It is not the first time that she has seen someone with such a look nor will it be the last. Many young Japanese men and women have traveled from pristine and spacious landscapes beset by utter poverty in the hopes that here in Tokyo, life would be easier, that they could attain what they see on the television. Most found what this boy and others had found: a dirty, fast-paced metropolis that shoved its inhabitants into smaller and smaller spaces and charged them more and more money, a city that seemed utterly indifferent to the quality of life of its citizens. Kotoyo slaps the mop to the ground, begins to weave it though the crooks and crannies of the tiled floor below and watches the boy as he slumps to the ground and his knees nearly give way. He rolls off down the hallway, dirty towel in hand, to begin another day in the Tokyo grind.

Sounds erupt from inside the steely capsules. She had become accustomed to the coughs, the wheezing, the snorts and farts but hears a woman crying and this, she knows, she will never get used to. She mops harder, tries to drown the sound out with the scraping of the metal now worn through the dirtied fibers of the mop on the hallway tiles. She can hear it still, remembers when she was just a girl and had traveled up from Akitakata near Hiroshima after her mother had died of cancer and her father was in need of hospitalization. Her plan had been to come to Tokyo, find a job and send money back to her father’s brother who would give her father the necessary care to ease the pain of his prostate cancer. She had planned to do this within the month but things hadn’t gone according to plan. That month had turned into six and she barely had enough to buy food and shelter for herself, let alone send money back to her father. She had found the Green Plaza, had been able to rent one of the capsules for cheap if she worked there, and soon after quit her job selling clothing at a run-down department store to mop the halls clean of transient decay. It was a few months later that she received a letter informing her that her father had passed away. It was then that she had cried within the capsule, heard the reverberations of her pain along plastic corridors and cement partitions.

Kotoyo continues her daily routine, finishes mopping the corners of the hallways and pulls out the disinfectant spray. She walks calmly down the hallway, her rubber sneakers squeaking on the newly polished floors, reaches the communal sinks and with a sweeping left to right movement, coats the sinks with an even coat of cleanliness. She hears the bacteria whimpering, imagines them writhing with pain and she smiles faintly. This is the favorite moment of her job.

She thinks of the time that has passed, the different inhabitants that have marked the years. She has traversed the social standings of servant to caretaker, from the lowly worker under the careful watch of the wealthy business elite to the nice old lady that cleans people’s sheets to the tourists and long-term renters. She has become many things to many people and in so doing, has largely lost what it means to be anything to herself.

Toilet brush in hand now, she begins to scrub away the feces of yesterday hoping to attain once again that pristine, white ceramic bowl that brings her comfort, lathers her with ease. “One day soon,” she thinks to herself, “I will go home.”

Roving Hotel: Steven

**This should be read as a pairing with Roving Hotel: Alfonso

Steven’s body aches from sitting all day. He had told his team leader time and time again that his chair was not ergonomically-correct and was going to cause long-term damage to his spine if it wasn’t changed. She had listened and the chair had been ordered but it wasn’t fast enough for him for he could feel his spine beginning to pinch at the tailbone.

He enters the station at World Trade Center. It’s 9:00 PM and Steven sees that the E train has just arrived. He runs, his cashmere coattails trailing behind him and his wingtips click on the dirty cement platform. Once in, it is a race to get a good seat. He sees a woman searching as well and swoops in to grab the seat before she can get there. She is displeased and to avoid her darkened glances he opens up a newspaper and pretends to read. She is made invisible.

The train is moving now. Steven places the paper in his bag, reaches up his well-manicured, white hand and runs his slender, soft fingers through his well-combed, blond hair that he has swept back and to the side not unlike his father used to. A strand of hair falls on the right side of his face and he gently takes it and weaves it back into place. With his left hand he loosens his silk tie, flips open the top button of his shirt. He is loose now, letting go and relaxing. Steven pulls his right leg up, places it squarely across his left knee. His hands are now folded on top of the other on his lap. He averts any gazes from the other passengers for the moment, stares out the subway window into the black and white flicker of the subway reel. West 4th Street stop. Students from NYU get on, most likely headed into the depths of Queens where the rent is affordable.

Comfortable now, he looks around. There are not many people in the subway car. He looks to his left and at the far end of the car he sees a man, probably in his late 40′s, unkempt and dirty, most likely homeless. Steven thinks he is a Mexican or Puerto Rican, one of the two but doesn’t see the difference. He didn’t smell anything before but now he is sensing a disgusting array of soiled sheets and urine. He reaches into his coat pocket, feels the soft fibers brushing against the hairs on the back of his hand and grabs his glasses, places them neatly on his nose and around his ears. Through frame-less spectacles he watches as the man curls himself tighter into a ball in his dirtied sleeping bag and plastic bags. “Like an animal,” Steven thinks to himself and is revolted yet fascinated to observe his epitome of laziness. He thinks to himself how nice it would be to sleep all day, beg for money from complete strangers, treat the subway as your personal hotel and never have to deal with a boss or responsibility. He doesn’t think he could handle not being able to bathe regularly.

42nd Street stop. An older Puerto Rican woman gets on, looks over at the man and shakes her head, moving clear down to the other side of the car. Steven has four more stops before he gets off. A police officer crosses cars while it is moving, the doors slide gracefully open and slam shut. The homeless man jumps but falls back asleep. Like a breath of fresh air, Steven welcomes the cop’s presence and the justice he will reign down upon this man. He pays $90 a month to ride the subway and sees no reason why he should have to smell this man or all the others like him that just use the cars for a place to sleep. The cop grabs his baton and nudges the man with it in the ribs. He starts but then falls back asleep. Steven thinks he is most likely drunk and swears he can smell some type of booze coming from his direction. The cop nudges him again, this time continually. “You need to wake up,” he tells him. “You can’t sleep in here.” The man wakes up and with tired eyes he looks up at him and agrees. “Collect your stuff and exit the car please,” he says and he obeys, wrapping his things back up in the plastic bags from whence they came, tying his sleeping bag into a manageable ball. The constant movement releases all the odors which were once before contained and Steven scowls, tries to stop breathing through his nose. The cop sits to the side, watching. The 7th Avenue stop is next. Steven shifts in his seat, his suit pants sliding across the subway benches, ice skating on a field of plastic. The homeless man stands, looks over and for a moment, locks eyes with Steven. Steven sees his tired, brown eyes, his ragged, dark beard, his hands that are toughened over with calluses and scars. He sees his hair, tousled and worn, his pants ripped, his shirt torn. The train stops, the man leaves and Steven breathes deep as the cop exits and his comfort level is restored. “Glad for the NYPD,” he thinks to himself and looks up to the stop map. Two more. He’s almost home.

Photo Courtesy of Downtown Express

Capsule Hotel: Sumi

**This should be read as a pairing with Capsule Hotel: Ebisu

Sumi wakes to find that the screen on the edge of her capsule has been lifted and a small white boy named Mark is looking in curiously. It was becoming a daily ritual for the boy, an exercise in naturalist tendencies and Sumi felt like a rhino on the plains of Kenya, the ones she saw on the small television screen above her bed. She yells ‘Dette!’ and kicks at the boy with her sore feet and aching legs. The boy scatters, looks on from a distance and disappears down the yellowed hallway. There is no use in trying to go back to bed she knows and moves her body forward down the cylinder enclosure towards the entrance where she will sit and listen to the crowded capsules birth their occupants into the morning air.

She had come from poverty, a house with poorly maintained infrastructure that blurred the lines between nature and clean, demarcated living space. Her father, Akio, was a farmer who grew rice in the terraces left untouched by the major agricultural companies that had taken over Japan. He still worked by hand, refused to use mechanization to increase productivity and as a result, produced little more than what was needed for their subsistence. Her mother, Cho, was a weaver and made mats and Fedoras out of the dried rice stalks which rarely sold but kept her occupied throughout most of Sumi’s childhood. Sumi had come to Tokyo with only a few yen in her pockets and an idealistic dream of becoming the next big Japanese pop star. Years later, she found herself working at a department store selling shoes and suits to well-groomed men and expensively-clad women and was disappointed only temporarily that she had not achieved her dream of stardom. She was proud to have a steady job, enough money to pay for a place to live even if it was pretty small and enough to eat and send some home to her ailing parents. It wasn’t much but her life in Tokyo was far better than it ever had been back home.

Sumi’s legs are dangling now over the edge and she looks to her left where the long-faced Ebisu is sitting, face ground into the tiled floor below. She never understood how he could be so depressed all the time. She knew his daily routine like the back of her hand. He would wake screaming often, sit dazed at the edge of his capsule, pouring over the dirty tiles on the floor and then would lean back temporarily watching some trashy television before he would get up and as if in a daze, walk down the hallways without looking anyone else in the eye. He was a strange character, one completely internal to himself and she often felt like reaching over to shake him from his waking reveries, letting him know that it wasn’t as bad as he made it out to be, that there were many positive aspects of their lives in Tokyo. Instead she watched him, day in and day out and was grateful that the vision of life that she had carved out for herself nourished her soul and allowed her to give freely to those around her. She watches as Ebisu jumps from the edge of the capsule, dirty towel in hand and slowly walks towards the communal baths. She feels sorry for him but has her own life to worry about.

Sumi slides her legs out completely, turns around and steps down to the floor below. It is cold against the soles of her feet and she arches them to keep them from touching as best she can. Others are waking now and she greets those that sit on the edges of their capsules with cheery and heartfelt sentiments. Like a ray of radiant sunshine she walks the hallways of clouded gazes and warped visions and bids sordid specters to return to their darkened recesses if only for her temporary presence. Sumi has begun another day and makes her way valiantly to the mossy communal baths of the capsule hotel.

Roving Hotel: Alfonso

It was 6:00 p.m. The night had turned to frost. Another day, another unsuccessful attempt at getting work. The E train pulls into Jamaica Center, slows to a halt, bumping gently into the black and yellow bumpers at the end of the platform. Alfonso grabs his army-green backpack, throws the right black handle over his left shoulder, collects his two plastic bags with The Strand written across them in red and white, one with his toiletries, another with his blankets.

Alfonso had come to America seeking work, promised the glory of a land where the rich or well-to-do were lazy and would pay someone such as himself a large sum of money to do odd jobs. What he found were decent jobs in construction with long hours but good pay, nice people, many of whom were from places near to his hometown of Linares, Mexico, and affordable housing near the construction sites. New York City, for its reputation for being cold and heartless, was far from it for Alfonso and he was able to not only make enough money to live comfortably but was sending a large sum of money back home to his wife, Yesenia, and two children,  Amada and Sol.

Deep in Queens, he and his fellow expats would build new condos and apartment complexes for the influx of white kids moving in from all across the country and Manhattan, where the prices that were traditionally astronomical had only gotten worse. They would spend days throwing up walls and stucco, nailing 2 x 4′s, running electrical wiring. It was meant to be fast, cheap and shoddy but Alfonso and the others would take their time to make sure that while they were fast, they were also thorough. He couldn’t imagine living in one of these places and wanted to make it at least livable if it couldn’t be hospitable due to mindless design and anti-human, pro-money sentiments.

The jobs had come one after the other and the boom of the 90′s and 00′s kept he and his compatriots in work from 8 in the morning till sometimes as late as 8 at night. But the idiots on Wall Street had thought it their right to play with the hearts, minds and money of those looking for a better life, a house, maybe a new car or small business. The loans had flowed freely to anyone, irrespective of their income or ability to pay them back. That bubble had burst and burst fast. From sometimes working 2-3 jobs a day, Alfonso and his friends soon found themselves working one job 5 days a week if they were lucky but more often 3-4 days a week. But the economic strains ran deep and the cranes stopped lifting, the buildings stopped growing, and Alfonso soon found himself competing with people he had at one time worked with for even the most menial of jobs. He had gone from building apartment complexes to washing dishes in the back of some Italian restaurant in the dregs of Queens and while it was still a job, here they didn’t provide affordable housing nor did they pay well enough for Alfonso to send money back home to his family. He spent the days which had now turned cold in the onset of winter working hard at the job he did have and trying to help his friends who had not been as lucky as he to find some type of work in the restaurant or somewhere else nearby. But his job was long and at the end of the day he was tired, his hands were worn and slowly, he began to sleep more and help others less not because he didn’t want to but simply because there were no jobs and he was tired. His savings rapidly dwindled.

The doors open and Alfonso steps in, moves to the far corner where there is a single seat near the end of the train. The cabin is warm and he pulls his jacket up tight against his neck, places his plastic bags underneath the seat and sets his backpack on his lap. “Please stand clear of the closing doors.” The intercom sounds. He pulls a scarf out of his bag, lays it across his forehead to block the dim yellow light of the subway car and settles down for a long sleep.

It had been December 1st that Alfonso had gone to his landlord to explain that he was unable to pay that month’s rent. He had talked to his boss, asked to be paid early for that month but his boss had declined, said the business was hurting too and didn’t have the extra cash to be paying people early. Alfonso’s landlord had said he needed the money, that if Alfonso couldn’t give it to him, he would get it from someone else. Thirty days later, Alfonso was homeless, tried going to friends but they too had been run out of their places and the few that hadn’t already had six or more people staying with them. The restaurant would fold one month later after being open for 25 years and Alfonso would be out of a job. The “hotel ambulante” or “roving hotel” of the E train was his only realistic hope, the shelters being filled with violence and drug-use, things Alfonso was not used to and had always warned his children about.

Jackson Heights/Roosevelt Ave. and the train comes to a halt. Alfonso removes the scarf. Some white kids in their teens get on, give him a look of disgust and move to the other end of the car. An older black woman gets on, sits near him but gives him sideways glances to make sure he knows he is being watched. He knows he must smell. It’s been over a week that he has gone without bathing and his clothes are soiled from the constant walking and accumulation of dirt that happens over time. A cop gets on, the NYPD, that blue force of steel that so often made his life more difficult than it already was. She’s a kid, no more than 25 and she walks over, cocky, one finger of her right hand tucked under her belt. She asks Alfonso where he is going, Alfonso says World Trade Center, the last stop on the E train. Next thing he knows, the cop is pulling him up and pushing him out of the subway car with her nightstick. “Find another place to sleep,” she says and the doors close. She is gone. Alfonso is used to this by now as are most that have chosen to make the subway their roving hotel and he waits on the platform for the next train.

He will find work soon he hopes but in the meantime will continue looking, continue visiting the soup kitchens, friends, the churches. Wall Street had its best year yet he had read in the discarded papers as they haggle over million dollar bonuses and bail-outs to the tune of billions of dollars.

The next train arrives, he enters and settles in for another fitful night of sleep.

Capsule Hotel: Ebisu

*Note: this should be read after reading “Askew,” the post from January 2nd, 2010.

Ebisu screams and rises up in bed, slamming his head against the cubicle ceiling and lies back down. Another nightmare where he is being pushed by an unseen force off of the Toshimbo Cliffs and there’s nothing he can do to stop it. He shakes his head, tries to forget and gently turns over to his right, looks at the beige plastic wall not inches from his face. His knee grazes the slippery confines of his sleeping cube, reminds him that he is no longer in Yamagata. He is in Tokyo and inhabits cube number 505 in one of Tokyo’s many capsule hotels in the dregs of the failing metropolis where the gap between rich and poor grows exponentially and people like Ebisu fall through the cracks.

The wall doesn’t comfort him. He lies on his back, reaches his right hand over a few inches and turns on the yellow light near his head, the switch covered in the oils from past inhabitant’s hands. He can adjust it only a few inches to the right or left and the light shines directly into his eyes either way so he closes his eyes. The light pushes through his eyelids, makes him see red, and he takes himself far away to the mountains near his home, the face of his wife expecting him to come back soon with riches from the big city as he had promised, his little boy, now 6, playing with his kite along the river who will run towards him upon his return. They will embrace and he will smile once again. Happiness. Somewhere but not here.

The old man from Tainai three cubes down is coughing again. Everyone says he has tuberculosis, the new kind that is resistant to the drugs doctors have and people shun him, tell him to leave in whispered tones and angry looks. But he doesn’t have anywhere else to go. Like most of the people here, he had come to the big city looking for work, promised by the papers and friends in Tokyo that work was there awaiting his arrival. But things had changed and changed quickly. People were out of work, the once-rich were now poor and jobless and things were no better in the countryside. People still flocked to the city in search for a better life. Most ended up here, in the capsule hotels, where their living spaces were constrained to 30 square feet of a plastic cubicle, one of hundreds, all exactly the same.

Ebisu can’t get back to sleep. He edges his body down towards the entrance to his cube until his legs are sticking out and folds them over the edge where they dangle in the doorway to his downstairs neighbor’s home. He pulls his torso up and to the right at a diagonal so as not to hit his head again, lifts the cheesecloth at the entrance to his cube and leans forward, head and chest exposed to the chilly, thin corridor lined with cubes. There’s an art form to exiting these things that is learned only after time. He will sit here for a few minutes to wake up before chancing the communal bathrooms.

Aneko, an older, gray-haired woman who came from a fishing family in Imizu, is crying again. Her sobbing fills the plastic corridors, the corridors that smell like bleach and forced sterility. A new man at the end of the corridor leans out, lights a cigarette and looks over to Ebisu, nods his head. Ebisu nods back, knows the man is in the early stages of coming to accept his new living situation, knows that no matter how hard one tries, there are more bad days than good. After a while, one wears it in one’s forehead, across one’s eyes, in one’s slow-moving gait and countenanced forms of a hazy apparition. The smoke trails along the old man’s cheekbones and rises in a straight line to the ceiling above, now brown with tar stains and mold from the showers down the corridor.

Ebisu leans back, lets his legs dangle freely, reaches his hand over to the TV set and grabs his headphones. He used to care that they were covered in past inhabitant’s earwax, used to hold the headphones near his ears so that they wouldn’t touch. Now he pushes them into his ears tightly, has come to own the earwax of past and present, feels that if he can leave a bit of his own earwax on these things, he will in some way own at least these, that even if he leaves, some new inhabitant will be forced to reckon with the remnants of his existence in this cube, along this corridor, within this hungry city filled with wandering ghosts.

The TV buzzes in his ear, the picture is fuzzy and the sound is no better. These capsule hotels used to be the overnight hotels for the wealthy businessmen and women that missed their last trains home. They used to be well-maintained, the TVs used to be top-of-the-line, the headphones were replaced daily, the sheets were washed constantly. Now things went untouched, unimproved. Poverty, or the presence of the poor, has a way of breeding indifference in landlords.

Ebisu shuts it off, throws the headphones to the right and edges his way out, jumps to the cold tiles below. In a stooper, he walks past the sleeping inhabitants of dreams gone awry, listens to the constant buzzing of the florescent lighting overhead, passes the smoking old man, the crying old woman, the man with TB. Passes so many others, some long-time inhabitants, others merely transients working their way through the musty alleyways of Tokyo. He turns the corner, sees the communal bath, the other naked men wrinkled and worn soothing their pains in the warm waters, filmy with the oils of the cubicle colony. Ebisu takes his clothes off, joins the men as naked as the day he was born, lets the pungent steam enter his nose, roll across his mind. He is elsewhere now, in a big space filled with nature, his family, a semblance of happiness. A young man across the bath begins to cough, the woman’s sobs from the corridor intensify. He is nowhere but here.

Askew

Eddie opens the New York Times as per his daily routine, cup of coffee in hand, wipes his glasses off on his shirt. His eyes trail down to the story at the bottom of the page, “For Some of Japan’s Jobless, New Homes Just 5 Feet Wide,” accompanied by a sepia photo of a miserable-looking young Japanese man sitting on the edge of what looks to be a morgue cabin marked “505″.  Eddie begins to read and gets an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach as if he is reading the dystopia novel 1984 but knows that he is not, that this is real, that people really live like this. The article outlines the impoverished existence of the inhabitants of the “capsule hotels” of Tokyo, 6.5′ x 5′ spaces that resemble coffins far more than homes. Each space is furnished with a light, a small TV with earphones, coat hooks, a thin blanket and a hard pillow of rice husks. Noises reverberate along the corridors of cubicles stacked one on top of the other, fresh linen and access to the use of a communal bath and sauna are the only things which slightly resemble saving graces in this plastic hell. The spaces used to be used as overnight beds for salarymen who had missed the last train home. But that was decades ago and it had now turned into the last refuge for those looking to find work in a collapsing economy. For these cubes, each inhabitant pays roughly $640 per month. Eddie shakes his head, puts down his coffee. His stomach is now in knots, he imagines himself coming home to a plastic cube, barely big enough to move in, inserting himself into the capsule and pulling the ragged, widely-used blanket up to his chin. He imagines the fuzzy buzz of the small television in his ears in the overused headphones lined with the earwax of past inhabitants, the smells of sterility coming from the daily-bleached corridors, the lingering smell of cigarette smoke that one must wade through on the way to the communal bathrooms where mold grows in thin grooves along the white tiles of the shower stalls. Everything from the bathroom stalls to the lockers are slightly too small, his clothes are stuffed tightly into miniscule spaces and every time he wakes to go out into the streets of Tokyo, he imagines he must roll his shirts along the edges of the metal lockers to rid them of their creases. He imagines that the cubicle rests itself upon his brow eventually, seeps into his eyes, that his vision begins to fail and he begins to think of the world as limited as that of his living space. Eddie shutters and turns the page.

New York section and he reads of day laborers who have recently found themselves homeless as the US economy continues to collapse, reads about Carlos Ruano who was kicked out of his house for not being able to pay rent and spent the nights riding the E train. So many people have begun riding the E train overnight that it has been called the “hotel ambulante” or “roving hotel” by other day laborers. Eddie can’t believe it, can’t imagine what it must be like to ride those trains through the underground with the noise and the stench the constant movement all night long. Can’t imagine what it must be like to piece together a sordid mattress if one is so lucky, a few scraps of food, some clothing in the mean and freezing streets of New York City after coming to this country on a hope and a dream that somehow life would be better here, that this was the land of opportunity, that people could make it here if they just worked hard enough.

Eddie turns to the next section, sees the decadence on page after page of the Arts and Leisure section, reads about the opening of the Bizet’s “Carmen” at the Metropolitan Opera, the Travel section about the most posh places in Cairo and just heaves. He throws the paper to the side, is so sick of it all. “This is not right,” he tells himself. Over and over again he asks himself how things can be in the state that they are in, that in the same paper with not four pages separation one can read of homeless laborers riding the trains all night long because they are homeless or people across the world living in cubicles no bigger than coffins and then read about the inane trials and tribulations of the rich and famous who discuss the rawness and daring of Bizet’s opera,”Carmen”. Eddie was furious and it boiled up inside of him like raw steel. Everything was off, askew, twisted and fucked up and backwards. Things were not fucking right.

4 Train Normalities

Crazy Jamaican woman on the 4 train and it’s the end of the day. She sits in the corner facing the passengers encased in an oversized, poofy blue jacket.

“Dirty hands,” she repeats time and time again. “Been putting your hands all over your piece.”

“You talkin’ to me?!” the guy sitting next to me says. I think his reaction is a little too adamant, that perhaps he has been putting his hands all over his piece and he believes he has been found out.

“Naw,” his friend says. “Forget ’bout her. She’s crazy man.”

“I don’t give a fuck what she is. She better shut the hell up,” he says, now furious at the woman clear across on the other side of the train.

This really gets her going and she starts talking about how her, “Withcraft gonna turn your world upside down, you man with the dirty hands.”

An older man dressed in a khaki jacket and loose-fitting khaki pants then runs into the car and we are still at a standstill at Crown Heights/Utica. Already I feel like I am in a crazy house and I can’t escape. I need to take this train. At the top of his lungs, he starts explaining that he needs money for Jesus. “And don’t you know, any money you give to Jesus, I take 10%. 10% and the rest to Jesus,” he says, a sly grin on his face. Apparently, he meets up with Jesus later in the day to turn in his earnings. “Ya’ll need to accept Jesus into your hearts. This much is true. Give your money and support to Jesus and he’ll give it right back. But I’ll take my 10%. If you want to give, I’ll be in the car next door. Just come on over.” As if we will follow, dollars clenched in hands outstretched. And like that, he dashes off, a Jesus nymph of the subway tunnel.

The crazy woman wears a white scarf tied tightly across her head, big dark sunglasses, sits with her left leg crossed over right, remains silent as soon as the train begins to move and other people start getting on through the stop-starts of the train working its way down the tracks. Suddenly, she bursts into song but I can’t understand what she is saying. Her voice is muffled by the repetitive clanging of the train wheels against the crooked, rusty tracks.

Anybody that gets on hears her singing and moves to the other side of the car. People without their headph0nes to drown out her warblings simply look at one another  and laugh. She is quickly marked as just another crazy person and will most likely be forgotten once they leave the train.

“I know somebody rich and famous too. I don’t blame you. I feel your aches and pains,” she says. I think to myself, if only for an instant, that she is speaking to me and it is my twisted ankle she speaks about. “I would do the same thing too. I feel your aches and pains.” She says this over and over again until the train drowns her out as we approach Bowling Green. With the overwhelming numbers of new people, she silences herself, sits quietly with her black sneakers, grooved white socks, messy and unkempt legs, long fingernails.

An older man in a London Fog walks in surrounded by four young men, short haircuts, business suits, extended cuffs and cheap but shiny shoes. The older man wears dark brown loafers well-polished, gray slacks that rest perfectly on the tops of his shoes. He wears a beige, red and white checkered golf hat, has white bushy eyebrows, kind gray-blue eyes, a shortly-cut white goatee beard, a brown cashew-shaped hearing aid under his left ear. Vericose veins on his rosy cheeks–perhaps he drinks heavily, perhaps it runs in his family. Red silken scarf adorns his neck, blue and white flowers very small, perfectly puffed out of the V of his jacket. He leans forward to talk to his boys, his followers, perhaps his students, perhaps his workers. They listen intently, lean in, crowd around him to protect him from the surging crowds, perhaps own him in a way but he smiles. He owns them right back.

The train continues, the characters are many. They are the normalities of the subway train in NYC.

Cubicle

“1968 and Max De Pree, then CEO of Herman Miller Inc., and Robert Propst, a successful and young designer at the time, create, market and sell a piece of furniture that would forever change the face of the workplace: the reviled cubicle. Faced with the failed transplants of the open, bullpen style offices of newspapers to other facets of corporate life, Propst created a box he called the “Action Office” whose initial underpinnings were primarily moral in nature. Propst wanted to open up conversation, create a free, egalitarian flow of information and battle the staunch bureaucracies, the immovable hierarchies, the solid walls of offices. The cubicle was his solution: movable walls, no roof to allow for easily passed information, an open-air feeling to increase the well-being of its occupants, and the easy to use walls where one could pin up any information they were currently working on. Economics didn’t enter into Propst’s mind at the time, perhaps his biggest mistake.”

Ned pauses, scans the classroom of well-groomed school children sitting with near-perfect posture in Herman Miller Inc. school desks. They are in their twenties but might as well be in their 50′s. He imagines them all in suits and ties, skirts and blouses, high heel shoes, wingtips well-polished. They are sitting in Herman Miller Inc. cubicles, typing away at their computers while encased in a pristine, well-designed and tightly-managed piece of “systems furniture”. Florescent lighting overhead pulls the blemishes on their faces to the fore, makes everyone slightly unsure of themselves, as if in a nightmare, they have been transported back in time to middle school where Tom Turner is referred to as “pimply-ass Tom” or Betsy Buranco is nicknamed the “Bumpy Bronco”. They will leave their cubes only occasionally, look over their five foot walls before exiting, ducking wildly if a co-worker happens to be walking their way. Conversing will become painful, an activity to be avoided at all costs. Coffee-runs become a steady jog, bathroom breaks become power-walking exercises, time outside the cube is limited for fear of having to interact.

“So, once corporations started to run the numbers, it was more economical for them to rid of the extra-large offices and cram as many employees into cubes as possible and people bought it. At first, people really seemed to be sold on this idea of an open office, talking to co-workers, reaching over to grab paperwork, yelling over rows of cubes to get the next estimate on the cost of Project X. But it didn’t take people long to realize that they missed the privacy and it was not uncommon for individuals to raid storage closets for pieces of cardboard, plastic, anything that they could either place over the roof of their cube or fill in the gap where a door used to be. People began to hate the cube and it hated them right back, slowly eating away at their sense of self, alienating them from an already alienating job where no one really knew why they were there or how their superiors made fistfuls of money.”

A few of the girls sweep their hair to the side at the sound of money. The boys lean in as if he is about to share the secret of how, in fact, these top brass folks make their money but he is at just as much a loss as they are. He imagines all of them doing synchronized stapling along the long isle-ways of identical cubes. Some will personalize their cubes with family photos, little cartoons, a few awards, maybe a plant or two if the management will allow. Many will not though and the cube will be treated as a coffin of sorts, a black hole where the soul goes to rest, to rarely return. He imagines looking over the sea of gray cubes, seeing only the tips of their bobbing heads as spreadsheets are filled, papers are filed, phone calls are made and answered. Their misery would be his creation this time, a new and revitalized sense of depression-inducing furniture.

“But I come to you with an answer to the cube: the octagon. In a new feat of office engineering, I have made for you, the future workers of this great country, a sensational apparatus I like to call “Blocta”, the blue octagon. Not four but eight sides will now compose your charming new home away from home in a light blue color adorned with puffy white clouds painted on by our well-calibrated machines at Herman Miller Inc. Four drawers under your desk, one on each wall, leaving you with more space than ever to store all of those things that you are going to want to bring to your scintillating new workspace. Added to this, imagine you could close yourself off from other co-workers when handling sensitive materials. With Blocta it’s never been easier. Simply close your eighth wall and a sensor automatically turns on the camera stationed above your cube so that your manager can watch from their corner offices far down the hall. Privacy, comfort, and color. Blocta will change the way you do business and all this can be yours once you graduate and come work for us!”

He raises his voice at the end of his sentence to the feeble clapping of one red-haired girl in the corner. Noticing she is the only one, she quickly stops herself and blushes.

“I am done presenting now. Thank you.”

He says it slowly, methodically. When he is done, all of the students stand up in unison and clap wildly. He has been a great success. The company will retain 95% of these children upon their graduation. The other 5% will go to prison for challenging the status quo. Business will continue to be good.

Elevate

George wipes his glasses, pulls out his handkerchief and slides it across his sweaty brow. From 100 feet above, he sees something down at the base of the shaft, luminous and ashen, ghastly and waxen. It moves from left to right in a frenzied pace, seems to bounce off of the dusty, cob-webbed walls. George pauses. In the ten years that he had worked this elevator shaft, nothing had happened, no sudden plummets of the elevator cars, no snapped ropes, tangled wires around his legs. Others had warned him that many had died in the exact spot that he so often found himself but after the first few years, he brushed it off as a bunch of gossip from some jealous, out-of-work do-nothin’s. But this was strange and George gets the eerie feeling that he is about to understand what all of them were talking about.

When George thinks about it, this town was riddled with the happenings of the paranormal. The church, still the center of that town, had been built on the remains of Iroquois indians. Upstate New York towns had burgeoned with new populations moving in from across the country and across the seas and with that new movement came a number of strange accidents. The most common story that George had been told, growing up on the outskirts of town reserved for the poverty-stricken, was one of a white woman named Lucy that had just rode in to town from lower Maryland in 1845. She was well-to-do and at that time had a number of servants to aid her in her lifting her ridiculous number of suitcases from the cart. Stopping at the church to pay her respects, Lucy had met with the deacon who had warmly welcomed her to their new town. As the story goes, it had been stormy that afternoon and as they were jovially speaking, a bolt of lighting had shot down from the sky above and slammed into the church spire, ripping it off of the roof. In split seconds, it had plummeted to the ground below and lodged itself firmly in Lucy’s breast. Needless to say, she had died on the spot. The church had planted an oak tree to commemorate her life, a tree which recently had begun rotting from the inside in what arborologists called “odd”. There were many other such stories: candles exploding, shower water suddenly turning boiling hot, collapsing homes, and unexplained screaming coming from inside people’s walls.

George stops thinking about it, focuses back on his task at hand. He is turning the wrench, tightening the bolts, when he feels a tug at his rope. George tilts his head up, sees that the ball of light has moved to the top of the shaft where his rope loops through the belay device. It hovers ominously, hushed. Sluggishly, it wraps its incandescent body around his rope. George feels himself being lifted as if ten men were simultaneously pulling him upwards. He is being pulled closer and closer towards the phantasm, begins to smell mildew and rotten eggs, and opens his mouth to scream but begins choking. One by one, rose petals begin to pour from his mouth, floating dreamily down the sordid elevator shaft. George feels them coming up from nowhere, everything in his being wants to scream. The phantasm is near now, stops pulling, and they sit not four feet from one another. The spirit has unleashed the rope from the belay device and holds George 200 feet above the steel elevator base. The rose petals have stopped their surreal flow, George takes a deep breath and begins to scream at the top of his lungs. He screams until his temples feel like they are about to explode, the phantasm begins to shake forcibly and pounds itself against the shaft walls. George stops. Something is crawling up his throat.

The ghost pulls him closer, expands to cover George’s head. He is immersed in a nightmare of darkened imagery, a bouquet of rotting food, and one by one and then by the dozens, the bees start to fly out of his mouth, angrily battering against his esophagus.

The phantasm explodes, its light covering the entirety of the shaft, rippling along its dusty sides, riding George’s nerves to the brink of insanity. The bees swarm now, clambering over one another to escape his mouth, stinging his tongue, the roof of his mouth. George feels the release, the air moving quickly past his ears, the flapping of the bee wings against his lips.

The light has all but gone.

Patient

The therapist tilts her head to the right, pen pressed tightly against her temple.

“So I am walking down the street and I look over and I see this sign. Not like a sign from God or something but an actual, physical sign. I goes over to it and I look, long and hard. ‘Let it Snow’ it says. And I’m sittin’ there wonderin’ who the hell they think they are. I mean, it’s a challenge, right? ‘Let it snow bitches, see what you can do to me!’ That kind of thing, right? There’s a lot of small things like this all the time, as we walk down the street, go into the subway cars, wash our hands in the toilet. ‘Stop’, ‘Do not hold the car doors’, ‘Employees must wash hands before leaving’. Or what!?”

Tom is yelling now, standing up on his chair as per his usual routine and flailing his arms left and right as he speaks. He expectorates profusely and it flies in gobs through the ruffled air. Some lands right in the middle of her glasses. She leaves it until the end of the session, uses its filthy body to mask her sleep-seeking eyes.

“I mean, who are these people that are going to come and get me? Police? Yeah, ok. Sometimes. But are you telling me there is a policeman just waitin’ around the corner of every stop sign to bust us, a security guard to catch us in the heinous act of holding a subway car door? No, it’s all bullshit and it’s everywhere, all the time. Just that we’ve gotten so used to it. Drives me crazy. Go this speed, don’t cross here but cross in the white lines, ‘If you see something, say something’, speak softly, ‘No Eating or Drinking’, ‘No Bare Feet, No Rollerblades’, ‘No Loitering, No Smoking Within 20 Feet of this Building’. Too many damn rules, too many, too many.”

Tom’s head falls to his chest. Round one has ended and he is tired, roles his head back and forth across his chest. His stubble rubs against his loose-knit scarf collecting jade threads. They hang like moss on oak tree of a man, twisted and slightly psychotic.

“It’s not the rules that bother me really. It’s that so often we blindly follow them. I mean, who needs police when we police ourselves, right? Who thought this up? Fucking brilliant! Why exert the energy and money of keeping a physical security force on alert all the time when you can just make people watch not only themselves but others? I mean, really, listen to this: the other day I am walking down the street and this person is just walking so slow, like really taking in the scenery, smelling the roses. But this is the city, you know what I mean? People have places to go and although I’d love to walk in the street, we are relegated to walk on the sidewalks, a very limited amount of space. So I go around. I clear her rather large body and step in front and I am off like a cracked-out bunny, headed as fast as possible to this meeting I am already late to. What do I hear from behind me? ‘EXCUSE ME!’ she yells, in that tone that says, ‘You should have said this, you know?’ I look back at her and I can’t believe it. So I grab my left ass cheek, blow her a kiss and I am gone.”

She watches as he places one leg up on the chair and the other on the ground and proceeds to massage his left butt cheek as he tells the story. She will never admit it but she is slightly attracted by this, pulls lightly at her silk collar.

“And this is what I am talking about: these small, seemingly insignificant happenings that all add up and finally, I just feel like exploding or shaking people and saying, ‘What is wrong with all of us? Why is this stupid shit so important and why are we so intent on regulating each other?!’ But I don’t and instead I come here and tell you, get a few nods of the head and blow off some steam.”

He sits down now, looks her straight in the eyes. She is uncomfortable under the spotlight which is why she always took on the talkative types. It allowed her to remain in the background, far from detection. But now he was leaning in, four feet from her face and she could smell the over-powering stench of his cologne.

“You know, I never told you how gorgeous your eyes are. I know it’s probably not ethical or something but hey, you know by now how much that shit holds sway for me. You are really and truly a beautiful woman.”

She shifts uncomfortably in her chair, taps her pen on the arm of the leather chair. He smiles.

“But you’re also a great doc.”

He stands to leave, she remains seated.

“I’ll see ya next week.”

He walks out, closes the door behind him. She breathes deep, pulls her glasses off and polishes them in petite, precise concentric circles, sets them aside. She rolls her index finger through her auburn locks, gently places her left leg over right.

One day soon, she knows, she will have to speak.