Eggs, Well Done
March 1, 2010
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.
Imag-ine
February 12, 2010
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.
Roving Hotel: Alfonso
January 5, 2010
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.
Askew
January 2, 2010
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
December 17, 2009
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
December 7, 2009
“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
December 4, 2009
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
December 3, 2009
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.
Customer Service
December 1, 2009
“Sir, like I said before: you have violated the terms of agreement. Your contract will be terminated and we are forced to send this matter to collection if you choose not to pay the $450 that you owe us. It really is that simple.”
Nothing was ever that simple. The system had screwed him one last time and this time, he wasn’t going to take it.
“Listen you. What’s your name again? Melinda. Fine. Listen one last time. I asked you a simple question: how is it that if my phone is stolen while I am on vacation and someone runs up the minutes by making international calls in the 48 hours that I had no way of contacting you, I can not only have my contract canceled but you can immediately jump to sending me to collections? Where is the logic in this scenario?”
He could hear Melinda breathing heavily on the other end of the phone, each breath strained as if it were her last. He imagined an overweight white woman in polka-dotted spandex, Velcro New Balances, permed blond hair, squatting in a gray, musty cube, its walls covered with pictures of her little Chihuahua, an old pink shirt with finger-sized holes on the ends, and a pervasive smell of mothballs and leftover Chinese food.
“Sir, I don’t know the logic you are referring to but what I do know is I don’t appreciate your tone. I work long hours behind a desk taking a number of calls from individuals such as yourself with differing sad stories. I am not immune to your suffering but I will say that I have heard it all before and that’s the truth.”
He felt the anger boil up inside again, thought of the cabbie earlier in the week that drove him across town to a meeting he was already late to and then explained to him that in order to pay, he needed to call in his card number to the dispatcher who didn’t pick up the phone for another 15 minutes. He had utilized a service and he was being made later through attempting to pay for the service. Everything about the situation was ass-backwards and it was infuriating.
“Melinda, look. I take no beef with you.” She grunts into the phone in disbelief. “What I have a problem with is this fucked up system where I, a paying, long-time customer, am being punished for calls I did not make, from places I did not visit, from a phone I no longer had in my possession. It makes no sense whatsoever and to top it all off, from the beginning you have treated me like I was a criminal and threatened to send me to collections. On what grounds?”
He hears the squeaking of her chair over the receiver. He imagines her leaning forward now, bracing her engorged elbows on the corners of the plastic-coated, adjustable desk.
“Sir, I work for the phone company. I do not need grounds. I am not being listened to, nor monitored. My supervisor is my husband, his supervisor is his cousin. We are based in a small town filled with small-minded people who know the few blocks of this town but know them well. We have no need for big-city folk calling in as though they own the place, as if simply because we are a business, that gives you license to call in hopping mad over a missing telephone. Why, if the fact that you are missin’ a telephone has you so upset, we have plenty of those for affordable prices. May I interest you in a new phone?”
He felt like he was in the twilight zone. All rational people had been rounded up like cattle, shoved into trucks, slaughtered and ground up into hamburger meat and eaten by the small town calling center folks down on Main Street USA. Melinda puts a stick of gum in her mouth and starts chewing like a cow over the phone. The smacking grates on his nerves, crawls down his spine, sticks needles into his skin, punches him in the gut.
“HAVE YOU LISTENED TO NOTHING I HAVE SAID?! WHERE DO YOU COME FROM? WHAT PLANET MUST I DAMN FOR SENDING YOU MY WAY!”
He regains composure. “Melinda. I don’t want a new phone. All I called about was…you know what? Let me speak to your supervisor.”
“His name is Roger. He’s my husband.” Her sentences lift at the ends in sickening sweetness.
“Melinda, I do not care who he is. I do not care what his name is. Just get off the phone and let me speak to someone that has half a brain.”
He is breathing heavily now, feels his blood pressure rising, his temples pounding, remembers what the doctors said: breathe slowly, take a break, don’t get too wrapped up in a situation.
“But he’s my husband. A great salesman and knows a ton about phones. He can get you whatever phone you want, you know? But he’s busy right now and can’t talk. Sir, what else can I do for you?”
He shrieks into the phone, slams the receiver into the tabletop again and again. The inanity of the situation embroils him in a sweeping mist of hysterical anger and he curls up on the wooden floor in a fetal position, thumb in mouth, blanket in hand.
Paranoia
November 30, 2009
The little things were everywhere. Robert knew it. He couldn’t see them but he could sense their presence, hear their bitsy bug boots rapping the chipped wood flooring, dark chocolate brown now with burn holes all the way though to the ceiling of the apartment below. Their imperceptible bodies traversed his holey living space, through the patched up gray walls covered in black mold, up along the sizzling electrical wires, into and around the chipped, stained toilet bowl. “Swoosh” and he spins around to find one of the ominous creatures but the sound is outside. The steam from the subway grate languidly rises to his window on the second floor, squeezes itself sideways through the rusted fire escape, and nestles into the nooks and crannies of the cracked red bricks lined green.
“Eh, what?! Where are you?!” and Robert’s down on his hands and knees, face pressed tightly against the grimy floor. He listens intensely for their insidious conversations, their cunning plans to take him down when he least expects it. The rain patters down on the corrugated iron rooftops, cacophonous and jarring, and he cannot hear a thing. But he knows their devious ways and will be ready for them when they come.
A red fire truck rolls past, siren blaring in the still morning air. He has not slept in two days and it is beginning to show: dark lines under his eyes, tired creases in his cheeks, pressed forehead into jagged crossings, coarse facial hair far too long. The clock ticks from the other room but it’s louder now, almost painfully pounding out the seconds. He imagines its bent white hands clawing out time in the Coca-Cola frame, horrifically syncopated, vile and mean. Robert throws his face back to the floor, peers deeply into the cracks between the floorboards, tries to uncover proof of their presence. The dust-bunnies have gathered on his blackened socks, the fabric on the knees of his flannel pajamas has worn thin, the Florida State sweatshirt that he stole from another person’s doorstep in the building smells like putrid perspiration.
“Oh! There!” and he’s digging with a broken spoon into the gaps within the floor, up along the walls, scooping out bits and pieces of plaster and sawdust from the termite nests lining the apartment. Exasperated, he leans back against the failing walls of his tiny apartment, sweat rolling down his battered face. He has found nothing but he hears them still, continuing to march on through his living space.
He places his hands tightly against his ears, blocks out the beating of the clock, the siren, blocks out the scuffling of imaginary feet and serpent steam. It is all quiet now. He squats and merrily watches as the rain pours down on the street below, broken plastic spoon still in hand.
The Storm
November 27, 2009
He awakes to the contortion of palm trees. The salty air singes his nose hairs, the sound of thunder nearby shakes his bed and the almost imperceptible flashes of lighting in the morning sun ring ominous for things to come. He cautiously steps to the window, looks Westward, sees the pitch black clouds rolling in. A ghoulish silence sweeps the land. Trouble is on the way. Hurriedly he closes all but one of the shutters. In red velvet slippers and a tattered blue robe, he runs down the stairs to the kitchen, throws open the cupboards, grabs the hammer and a box of nails, and heads into the garage. He grabs the plywood planks by the armful, opens the door, throws them outside. The hairs on the back of his neck stand up straight. It is near.
All the wood is gone now and it won’t be enough. He knows this and must now choose his best approach to save his possessions of 55 years: his late wife’s photos, his daughter’s school and music awards, the records that his good friend gave him as a graduation present from high school, his diaries. Whereas every impulse in his body is yelling for him to flee, he must remain, cannot outrun it this time for it is but minutes away and it will blanket this country.
Frantically, he is running through that early morning air, wood planks in his left hand, hammer in right. Silver nails stick out of his pursed lips like porcupine quills. His heart pounds against his chest. The present calmness of the setting unnerves him, he looks over the increasing swells of the ocean, sees the rain pouring down in ashen sheets. “Maybe 30 minutes,” he thinks to himself.
One by one, the planks are thrown up, pounded into the side of his house, over the windows, over the doors. He is building his fort, constructing his shell, fashioning his coffin. The wood is gone, windows still remain unboarded. The water will enter these windows en masse once the windows have been shattered, the chorus will sing of destruction. He moves his most precious possessions to the back room where there are no windows, places the items as high as possible, far away from the waves that will fill his home. The sweat rolls off his forehead, drips slowly, methodically into his eyes. He is blinded momentarily, wipes it away, continues.
The humidity has risen. The thick air and whipping winds speak tongues through the gaps in the planks lining his walls. Sewage and sulfur waft through his home. He looks out the one open window–the pitchy billows gather force. Lightly, rain droplets fall, get slammed into the straining glass, blurring his vision of what is to come. The palm tree leaves peel back, rip off, sail through the air and slap into the side of his house. Rolling waves from earlier in the morning now pace violently back and forth on the rocky beaches awaiting entry.
He hears the thunder, sees the lightning at the same time. He has but minutes. He has not prayed since his wife had died but he begins now. In the distance near the horizon he sees it and his stomach drops, his knees give out, he falls to the ground below and has trouble breathing.
He thought it was a cloud but he knows it is not. It is a wave, as tall as a skyscraper, obsidian and pernicious and it is coming his way. Downstairs a window shatters, above his head he hears the planks squealing, the nails beginning to pull out. The palm trees are dead now, the beach upturned. He cannot hear anything but the deafening roar of the winds. The rain sounds like pebbles riddling the sides of the house. All his past enemies are here now at his doorstep, all his mistakes and regrets present. He will be carried away tonight and he is not ready.
In a ball on the moist carpet, he holds himself tightly and wishes he just had more time. And it is here.
Pasts
November 23, 2009
Snow falls to the fire escape below. The rusted black bars become achromatic and plain, the complications of the cities many faces simplify if only for this moment. Edward takes a deep sip of his coffee, lets the air from his nostrils shoot downwards into the obsidian liquid below, the steam rolling upwards, fogging his glasses.
He watches as the squirrels emerge, bound across the Brooklyn rooftops in search of food, the out-of-place seagulls roaming overhead, far from their home at Brighton Beach, thinks of his childhood home which now exists only within his head.
The nostalgia for a simplicity that he knows never existed at times overwhelms him, thinks of the many days of roaming the hills around his home, the plainness, clean-lines, the innocence. Summer days and cool, foggy afternoons the regulated tempo of his younger years, he would traverse the golden grasses, the wind-swept Spanish moss hanging from the heavy branches of the oaks, the miner’s leaf lettuce patches that stretched for as far as the eye could see. The algae-covered pond, the weeping willow on its banks, the tadpoles and mosquito fish and the water bugs. The currencies of his remembered pasts abound and he exchanges them for moments of solace on cold days like these, far from home in the outer reaches of the city that never sleeps.
Someone has stopped in the middle of the street outside, the cars line up behind and frustrated drivers honk their horns with fury. The snow deadens the abrasive nature of their releases, he remembers as a young child playing with his sister on the highway that ran next to their house on a Sunday. That was before it became a major highway, still remained classified as a scenic route. Edward remembers his grandfather and father, father and son, in worn Levi jeans sitting on the alabaster fence watching them play. It was a summer day, the feint smell of tar from the hot asphalt, crisp, dry grasses, and the stillness of a mid-afternoon, the dry heat abounded. These things were etched into his memory forever and he knew that what he sought in life, more than happiness or contentment, was a return to this mythical past. He thinks of many of the mythical pasts we peg our contentedness, our senses of self-worth, our desires, our pains to and watches as the sparrows huddle against each other in the ever-increasing winter winds.
He knows that the memories he dredges up from his past are probably far different from what actually happened, that the contexts are lost, the full range of senses that accompanied each of his actions. His pasts become present through this yanking up and through time of these temporal moments that he commits. Today though, whether past or present, these moments offer condolement against the discord that erupts from the gritty, snow-covered streets of Brooklyn below and he sits, coffee in hand, as a being of remembered pasts.
Wallpaper
November 21, 2009
“Let’s change it to yellow. You always liked yellow, right?” He doesn’t care what color they change it to. All he knows is the wallpaper needs to go according to his wife, it’s his one day off a week from work and they are standing with a balding dinosaur of a man, three snow-white hairs combed over to the side, yellowed teeth and a propensity to coughing without covering his mouth.
“Then again, we could choose rose-petal pink or sunset orange. Hey, either one of those would go great with the shower curtain in the bathroom!” He looks to his wrist. He forgot to wear a watch today, decides to look up through Wallie’s Walls and More’s greasy windows to the indigo sky above, locate the sun, stare into it in the hopes that his retinas will burst into flames and he will get transported far away to an all-white room where a nurse will bring him pre-chewed trays of food, his daily medications, will kiss him tenderly on the forehead and life will be good.
“Then again, really, how often do we use the bathroom? Most of the time you are using the one at work and I am constantly in and out of the house. But this forest green one over here would go fabulously with our living room, don’t you think? And we spend most of our time there, don’t we?” Her mouth moves with the speed of caffeinated mongoose. He watches it, imagines it hurling off its hinges, plopping sloppy onto the shag carpet below, chasing the salesmen and women down the dusty hallways of this wood-paneled, 60’s remnant of a store in the dregs of their fine city.
“The thing is, once we buy it there’s no going back, you know? I mean, we put it up and that’s it! Right, I mean, we can’t buy samples of all these colors. That would be crazy, wouldn’t it?” He nods his head. Yes, it would be crazy and yes, he doesn’t want to be doing this. And while you’re asking, yes I don’t think we ever had anything in common and shouldn’t have gotten married that one weekend back in the 70’s when we were both stoned out of our minds and looking for a dare.
“Sir, if you had to choose between Lime Vine or Gold Stripe for a bedroom, what would you choose? Think hard about it cause we’re the ones that will have to live with it!” She cackles, nudges the elderly salesman who morosely pulls the skin hanging from under his chin. “And you too! Think about those two and tell me which one you would choose!” He thinks of a few means of escape: 1) Fall to the floor and fake a seizure for the second time this month; 2) Go to the bathroom. Never come back; or 3) Attack the old man, get arrested and pay someone in country prison to stick a shiv in him. He starts eying the old man, gauging his weak points, decides upon the knees.
“No, come to think of it, I don’t like any of these. They all seem to say, ‘Boring’. We need something with a bit more pizzaz. Let’s come back next week. Will you have new stock in next week?” The decrepit man nods. Yes, they will have new stock.
As she yanks her husband’s hand and pulls him out of the store, he locks eyes with the wallpaper peddler. Behind the cataracts he senses fear. One day soon he will make his move.
Deadlines
November 16, 2009
Something was due. He knew this and it made him uneasy, rolled around in his stomach, punched him in the gut every time he thought about it. He tried the normal routes of procrastination: the painting of the walls, the cleaning of the bathroom, the mopping of the floors, the washing of the cats. Even these things, once completed, did not not sate his need to forget his impending doom. He drinks copious amounts of coffee, hoping that somehow the caffeine will block the neurotransmitters from firing, that he will fall into a coma and not have to deal with the deadlines. He searches the web for mental diseases, comes across a site for Huntington’s disease. The caption underneath the logo reads, “A disease of mind and body.” He thinks this will suffice and begins reading the symptoms: depression, mood swings, forgetfulness, lack of coordination, personality changes, decreased mental capability, slurred speech, and memory loss. He has all of these, is sure of it, focuses in on the severity of his situation. Somehow knowing that he is doomed to die via Huntington’s eases his worries. “I mean, if I am going to die shortly anyway, what really do a few deadlines really mean in the grand scheme of things?” he thinks to himself. He knows there must be a better way to do this, to avoid getting stressed out, that surely imagining one’s death to avoid physical manifestations of procrastination gone awry cannot be the most healthy decision. He takes a deep breath. “These things will pass,” he tells himself. But then he is thinking of all the year’s to come, all those deadlines of papers due, essays submitted, working papers being sent off to editors, being marked and diced and being sent back to him for revisions.
He is on the floor now in the fetal position and the cats are licking his hair. He notices how dirty the floor is from this point of view, thinks to himself that perhaps he should sweep and mop and remembers that he has already done that and checks it off of his list of possibilities. The pencils and stacks of paper taunt him from atop his desk, tell him he’ll never get it done, that once he sits down he will be in their control and fours hours later will awake only to find that he has written sixteen pages on the benefits of brushing one’s teeth in circles instead of sideways motions. As he topples to the floor from his chair, the pencils and papers will cackle. The deadline will be missed. He will hear the shredding of his grades, the red, downward slashing movements of the teacher’s pens, the “I’m sorry” statements of the doctorate programs in their one paragraph rejection letters. He looks up into the blinding white light in the middle of his ceiling, presses his hands to his temples, tries to go to sleep.
Two minutes pass and he remembers something, takes a succession of deep breaths. He realizes he is no longer ten and in need of adult approval, that the teacher is a mere hood ornament at this point in his pursuit of knowledge, that deadlines are fictitious like so much else, that there is so much else that is far worse than a deadline and that this is a choice that he has made. He doesn’t need to be doing this, can choose to do something else. But he wants to be here, wants to have the deadlines, likes the pressure and the eventual results. “At the end of the day, everything will be fine,” he thinks and he is calm now, knows that he need not worry, calmly stands, stretches his arms. With a determined calm, he takes a seat to begin writing.
The polishing of the kitchen tiles will wait for another day and with fervent determination, he presses pencil into paper.
Indifference
November 14, 2009
She looks at him with distaste, as though he has just shat upon her desk and asked her to take a deep whiff. “I just want to check in and make sure we are okay,” he says, “because, you know, we have two classes together and…” She stops him abruptly. “I know, I know,” she says, “but I do not hold hands. It’s graduate school and it’s not your first semester.” Her sentences turn upwards into menacing smirks, her green, algae-covered teeth scream bloody murder and she stares at him with an indifferent anger unknown to him. A deep breath and he looks away at a poster on the wall, breaks eye contact, slowly turns back and begins to study the beast.
Cropped dyed-red hair, little to no makeup save a light blue eyeshadow and flesh-colored lipstick. Hazel eyes, pursed, full lips, white satin skin marked with dark chocolate moles. She keeps her neck careened upwards facing her computer, meanders aimlessly with the mouse, fumbling through applications and websites. He speaks but she clearly does not care so he stops. Long enough for her to turn around and look at him again and continues. Her eyes roll upwards, he is steadily losing ground while she loses patience.”So we are okay,” he says. “We’re fine,” she responds and turns back to her computer.
Dissonance erupts between the words she utters and the actions she portrays. Her body deceives her darkened intentions and she remains shrouded in steady indifference.
The conversation has ended.
Afghanistan
November 12, 2009
13:00 hours. Baghdis province, Afghanistan. The body of a soldier, submerged in a river in Western Afghanistan, is found. There is another missing. Both are from the 4th Brigade Combat Team of the 82nd Airborne Division. Eight Afghans, including four soldiers, three policemen and an interpreter are killed in either the NATO air-strike or in the fighting that broke out between Afghan and American troops. It lasted for hours.
He puts the paper down. Folds it neatly on his thigh and looks out the window to the cleanly cut grass, the well-managed trees lining the sidewalks, the women pushing strollers down the promenade. Hears the wind rushing through the trees, civilians carousing the bodegas of deep Brooklyn, the laughter of the children as they wait for the bus to pick them up or walk hand-in-hand with their mothers or fathers to the doorsteps of the school. The civilian cars, the airplanes, and the helicopters all carry on as normal.
“These are passing stories,” he thinks, “whims and fancies of newspapers and radio talk shows, 24-hour streaming news channels or regularly updated websites. But pause. Take it in. Allow the story to mean more than ‘bad-news’ or ‘distant suffering’.”
He looks out the window again. Sees the sidewalks have been blown apart, chunks of steel cables lay strew across the ripped up grass. The trees are on fire or already singed, the school buses lay flat on their sides and there are children inside. They are crying. He sees the school down the street has been blown apart, the chalkboards dangle from particle board fibers over the cavernous sides of the decimated building, ruled cursive paper flutters in the smoky winds, pieces of the American flags get caught in embers of mangled civilian cars. He smells the burning of rubber, the smell of a gas that he can’t place. There is silence save for the distant cries and crackling fires of exploded cars, loose electrical wires, and burning buildings.
He knows it’s not like this. It’s worse. There are more smells, more gruesome sights, the kinds of things that keep you up at night, wake you in the morning, grace you with their darkened presence throughout the day. They are the kind of things that can’t be forgotten because they are marked into your skin, wedged in your memory. They are the kinds of things that remind you it’s not too far from the shores of America to Afghanistan and this is harrowing and best forgotten.
He stops. There is more to this, even more disturbing. He allows himself to stop thinking of these people as soldiers, as men and women, Americans or Afghans, imagines them as children playing in the streets of Kabul or Brooklyn. Maybe with kites, maybe with basketballs, children’s things, fun and carefree. But it’s the 1980’s and Afghanistan has another foreign power in its midst. The Russians, under the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev, remain until the late 1980’s when they leave under the direction of Gorbachev. The children in Kabul are immersed in war while in Brooklyn, there are children immersed in the class warfare of the Reagan-era but it’s different, less immediate in its death and destruction. Maybe for some it is not. There is funding of the Taliban rushing in from the U.S. to battle the Russians in the midst of the Cold War. Over 1 million Afghans are killed, 1.2 million disabled, 3 million maimed or wounded. What were their names, where did they come from, what were their stories?
He thinks long and hard on the missing American soldier, thinks about the man found in the river. What were their names, these men and women who gave their lives to protect America or Afghanistan? What was it that brought them to the doorsteps of the Army, the Navy, the Marines, the Taliban? He looks out the window, the sidewalks are back in place, the schools back in order. The trees stand tall, full of the orange and yellow colors of Fall and he watches as a child plays with a soccer ball in the street below. “What war,” he wonders, “will this child fight?”
Armadillo
November 11, 2009
Jeraldo wanted nothing more than to be an armadillo. He had seen them on their family’s trip from Mexico, through Texas to Oklahoma where their mother’s brother, Papillo, lived with his four dogs, two wives, Eline and Enerva, and three shotguns. Jeraldo’s mother had stopped at the first sighting between Austin and Round Rock and they all sat there, amazed at the armored creature as it used its extended claws to dig a hole ten times its size near the side of the road. His sister, Adalia, at only three years old, sat perplexed at the two foot long alien gracing their presence and not being able to hold it in any longer, screamed at the top of her lungs with roll upon roll of gleeful laughter.
“Look at how it moves,” his mother had said. “It knows that it is safe with us so it keeps digging as if we are not even here. But if it is scared, do you know what it does?” She had asked this with an upward cadence at the end of her question, turned completely around in the front seat to see her children’s faces. Seeing that her children did not know the answer, she quietly told them. “You see, if it gets too scared and it can’t run away, the little armadillo tucks its head and its legs into its shell, places its tail next to its head and pulls itself into the tightest ball you can imagine. That way, no one can get in and hurt it, you see?” Adalia had squealed with excitement. “Mami, I want to see the ball animal. Can we make it ball?” Her mother had said no, but not accepting that as a viable answer, Adalia had rolled down the window and thrown a plastic cube at it, smacking it right on the back of the shell. “Dios mio, Adalia!” her mother had yelled but the creature simply looked up, smelled the cube that had fallen to its side and continued digging. Jeraldo just shook his head, looked at the creature. Sensing something, the armadillo had paused, looked up from its ever-expanding hole, its nose covered in dirt and torn roots. For a full minute, it met Jeraldo’s eyes and they sat, watching each other, communicating child to creature, the kind of communication that adults have more often than not lost in the ridiculous toil of taxes and 8-5 workdays. Through eons of time they traveled, creature leading child through the phantasms of moments when man lived in unison with his surroundings, through the soil burrows of the armadillo past and present, across dens where their children lay awaiting their meals, into the depths of the Earth where only silence reigns and the warm bodies of armadillo mothers wrap themselves tightly around their babies. Safety, warmth, history, love. Jeraldo had sensed all of it, caught it and sent it coursing through his veins. The armadillo had lifted its head higher, curled its lips into a tender smile and all the days when Jeraldo felt alone as if no one understood him were gone, all the days of crying in the back of the school yard because the other boys were teasing him melted away, all the moments at home when he hated his father for leaving him, for leaving them, disappeared. He had put his palms to the window, pressed them tightly against the glass, wished that it would burst, that he could leave and live with his newly found friend and just get away. The armadillo had shaken its head and begun digging again.
Their mother had started the car again and Adalia had fallen fast asleep. “Are you okay, hijo?” she had asked, looking in the rearview mirror. “Si,” Jeraldo had curtly answered but he hadn’t been. He had watched the armadillo one last time, taken in the claws, the pink snout, the furry belly. Most of all, he had studied the shell, the nine lines across the top, the dark grooves.
As they had driven away towards Round Rock, he had begun constructing his own armor and had looked back to his friend one last time who had stopped digging to watch them drive away.
Midnight Trade
November 10, 2009
Fog rises from the subway grill, rolls across the face of the icebound midnight moon. Smells of old socks, mildew and burnt chestnuts from the lone vendor a few blocks away on the corner singe his nose hairs as he traverses the lonely streets of the old financial district near Gold and Liberty streets. Spotty lights shoot forth from the silhouettes of the sordid emblems of capitalistic endeavor where the legal crimes take place: the Nordic pillaging of villages unseen, the trades of people’s livelihoods, the desire for more continually unsated. He tips his fedora back, lifts his head upwards towards that chilled night sky and watches through the windows of the first few floors as the immigrant workers clean the cubicles and conference rooms, hallways and offices of those that have much. He shakes his head, looks down at the soiled concrete sidewalks below, the gum and trash, the homeless people bundled up and sleeping in the recesses of the wealthy’s playground, the layer after layer of dirt and grime in the shadows of the pristine corporate headquarters, lifts his head back up to see the workers still toiling away and walks away slowly, subdued by the numbing indifference of it all.
A dusty yellow cab pulls up, “On Duty” shines golden through the mossy air. “You need a lift, mister?” The cabbie looks at him with a sideways grin, pulls his hat back towards his neck to open us his face. He shakes his head, tells the cabbie there’s no time for joy rides. “There’s too much work to be done,” he adds and continues traversing the bowels of New York City.
Right on Liberty and up to William street, he turns left, heads towards Pine and Wall Street, Exchange Place, the belly of the beast. All is quiet. He can hear the scuffle of rats in the black bags of garbage left out for collection in the morning, smells the always-pervasive smell of shit that seeps through the darkened cracks of the city and settles down for a good, long stay. Sees the security guards sleeping at the New York Stock Exchange, the ghostly figure of Washington lit up like a Christmas tree watching over the center of capital trading. The wind rips through the cobblestone streets, lifts the giant American flag on the face of the Exchange and yanks at its ropes, bends it to its will, threatens to snap it off and send it flying into the dirtied Hudson. He pauses for a second, takes in the filtered light of the lampposts, the recognizable hums of vacuum cleaners, the violent whispers of the icy wind. Looks down and sees that here at the junction of Wall street and William street that the sidewalks are spotless, knows that the filth here has moved fully inwards to the weaknesses of man encased in stony structures. A couple approaches, the man in a navy blue suit, slicked back hair, a silk pink tie and a clean, pressed white shirt. His loafers click in step with his companion’s six-inch stilettos, shiny ebony lost in the shadows of the capital-rich calluses. Her flowing watermelon dress, her white sash, her soft blond hair and thick, catty carvings of makeup on her baby blue eyes. They move in sync, robotic marching at a midnight hour, pay no attention to him and walks right past, pauses at the door of the latest luxury apartments around the corner. With a twist of the key, the woman enters. The man pauses, looks back at him and scowls. “You are trash,” he transmits and enters. And they are gone.
The light from the nearest lamppost begins to flicker. He turns to face it, looks upwards. Smoke curls upwards from the subways in droves. The light expands, blinding rays shoot outwards to the murky intricacies of that baleful junction. A high-pitched emission and the light explodes. Shadowed curtains fall, he hears the menacing whispers of those all around him, sits on the soiled corner and pulls his coat in tight around his shoulders, flips up the collar to protect his neck from the increasing winds.
The dimly-lit carcass of the American flag on the Exchange looks on, bemused.
Limitations
November 7, 2009
“Photons, you see, are those tiny elementary particles that constitute the most basic unit of light and all forms of electromagnetic radiation. Without them, we would not be able to see.” He looks around the classroom to see if anyone is listening. Not one but three people are nodding off in dramatic fashion against clenched fists, pens poignantly steadied, tips against paper as if, in their sleep, they will take notes. “Photons are light in a most basic sense and what we see are the reflections, scatterings or absorptions of those photons as they interact with objects in the outside world. What we see, we refer to as the visible light, one of the seven possibilities on the modern conception of the spectrum of light.” A pen is dropped. It slams against the tiled floors, the sound reverberating against the concrete walls. He pauses and begins to think of those first days of his teaching when it all seemed possible. He was going to push the boundaries, expand the limits of the minds of men and women alike, blow up old conceptions of the world and egg students on to offer new ones. But here he was. The guy with the puffy fro in back chats with his latest girlfriend, the blond woman with the pink ‘fuck-me’ dress in the front chews on her gum like she’s a cow chewing cud, the young man with black hair and a solid uni-brow plays on his hand-held PS2. Disinterest marks the minutes of their lives in his class and he balefully continues unabated, teaching of the very matter which constitutes their lives and his.
“So what does this all mean? Why should you care? Well, maybe you shouldn’t as it seems some of you don’t. But I would propose the following: we see only 1/7th of the spectrum of light. All around us, every single day there exists light which we do not see. Of that 1/7th, we do not even see all of it as some of it is either absorbed into the objects, scattered beyond our vision, lost to somewhere else. Think about this and then think of the fact that when you see, you do not see but objects in a way, see you. What does that do, to say this?” The boy in the green sweatshirt and the frumpy corduroys seems to listen intently, leans forward in his chair awaiting the professors rhetorical reply. “Well, I would say it offers a damn good idea towards complicating the notion of human agency. Think about it. If objects act upon us, act upon our eyes, and offer us our visible world that everyday we work with, live in, operate against, where is our agency, how does that idea that we humans are the actors upon this world really hold up? What does it mean that in our daily lives, we operate while seeing only a fraction of a fraction of the possibility of vision, that the vision that we do see is comprised of millions of tiny photons and that even then, most of those are lost or filtered out by our eyes?” Now on the edge of his seat, the boy in the green sweatshirt looks intensely at the professor. His face is strained, the veins in his forehead protrude by what seems to be inches. The boy’s lips tightly pressed together, he stands and lets out a fart that slams against the professor’s face, weaves toxic gases through the nostrils of his fellow classmates, and settles into a grimy soup that wafts through the singed air.
The professor pulls the chafed stool towards him, gracefully takes a seat and ponders the many limitations on vision.
Skipper
November 6, 2009
The watch hangs from a tarnished brass chain stuck to a rusted nail above his desk. Silver lines the edges of a cracked glass front. It was a gift from his father who in turn, got it from his father and the hands of the clock do not move. He would twist the top occasionally to wind the gears, push the heavy hands forward in a march to future times now gone but would become irritated at the incessant clicking sounds emanating from its soiled belly. No matter where he was within the house, the padded ticks could be heard, the calls to the forcibly forgotten patriarchy of his childhood reverberating off of the walled temples of his inner sanctuary. And so he would let it run out in a slow, mournful death; would refuse to rewind it, practice resistance against its presence and hail glory in its lazy habitation of the nondescript wall with no purpose other than to solidify the silent within its furrowed brow.
His father lived across the country, worked in a job for the state, and they hadn’t spoken in months. The casual conversations rarely took place, the cordial calls or letters gathered dust in that locked basement of the childhood home now sold, the grassy hills now dried and left for crows. The watch represented all time that had passed, all time that would pass, an object imbued with the sorrow of conversations never had, connections never made. A stranger’s presence watching over him as he wrote and went about his day, the frozen mouths of a geist in situ.
Across it glassy face, two words were emblazoned in dark black ink: The Skipper. The captain, the leader, the master of a ship. The skipper. He thinks on this, laughs and shakes his head. The silenced skipper encased within a 1 1/2 inch by 1 1/2 inch steel tomb, the functionality of it depending on the winding of the gears by an outside force, the fragility of its face and the mechanical innards in need of care and attention to avoid the severity of coming to a grinding halt. The captain: a leader of well-worn walls and settled, safe seas, white-painted bows and depths of 2 x 4’s and mangled electrical wires. His day has begun, the watch reflects the early morning light, reveals it scratches and divots.
He reaches up, turns it over to hide the face, continues writing.
Escape
November 1, 2009
He folds under the pressure. Backwards into a twisted scene of origami swan meets warty toad. The stacks of paper pile up high on the corner of his desk, the cats have taken a liking to the manifestos in the corner of the room and the silverfish fill the banquet halls of whittled books with their kin from afar.
That nervous beating in the tips of his fingers won’t stop playing to the long-lost beats of the jazzy underground that he dreams of every night. The colors vivid from clocks of tangerine orange and wallpaper of lime green flower petals littering concord grape purple waves to the watermelon carpet and the lemon leather couches. Those women over in the corner near the bar stare, the smoke fluttering over their fake, ebony eyelashes, twisting into furtive smiles, rising into unseemly curtsies and hitting the dust-crusted fan whirling above with a whoosh and it’s gone. One wears silver sequins, apple-red lipstick, tight black boots reaching up her calves. The other wears a snow-white skirt, flamingo top, fire-orange lipstick, cat-eye contacts and calls herself Lucy. She flicks her cigarette across the room, it hits his pants, trails down his leg and falls to the paper below, begins to burn. Everything is alight and the singed papers flutter upwards and out through the window, into the streets below and just keep churning outwards. More and more of fire-lit words into the frigid night air. Kids watch with wonderment, old folks sit on the stoops bundled in their warmest coats following the dragon tails of burning paper. And he’s free. Free of all that has piled up. Free of all that which he feels needs to be done. Free…to start again.
Only a few minutes have passed and the paper stacks remain just as high as before. The cockroaches have congregated on his desk, begin to play hockey with his pencils and erasers. He tries to flick one off, it spins and grabs his finger with a ravenous bite. The others run over, break their friend away from his digit, pantomime apologies and continue with their game. The coffee cup remains half full and he grabs it, sloshes the liquid across his desk, sweeping the creatures off of their feet and into the crevasses of the soiled wall below. He hears them gagging and cursing as they pick themselves up, promising him that they will be back. The silence returns. The deadline is in 20 minutes.
He thinks long and hard of his search for the sky blue whale, his flight through the clouds on feathered arms, the slaying of radioactive Gila monsters, his waltz with the shrew queen through the toadstool palace. The clock ticks. He imagines harder. 18 more minutes to enjoy the innocence of oblivion.
Dust
October 29, 2009
The ringing won’t stop and he’s heard it all before. She moans about his lack of integrity, the longing she has for different days, the hopes and dreams of that better life that she imagined herself living as that small girl curled up in her attic near the frosted windowpanes. That snow has fallen outside and blanketed the neighborhood in silence. The droning of the baseboard heaters rumbles beneath their feet, disrupts the dust-bunnies, sends them flying. The floorboards creak in the silences between her words and within his deep sighs. He looks over to the fireplace, sees the film of dust that has settled into the grooves of the bricks. The matchboxes of their favorite restaurants, the log from the last fire that was lit two years ago, the fancy dinner with white linen napkins and both of them intertwined on the couch. Sandalwood candles, darkened oak, heavy red wines, the brie from the Italian store a few blocks away, the smell of musty books. They dance through his senses and the traces of his memory bank, fall closer to the ground with her every word.
His heart screams through the backs of his eyes. The pressure builds high, he wants to save it all, sees the cards folding as she plays again, and again, and again. And it’s nothing like it used to be. Her words leak from her mouth with garbled everyday nonchalance; as if she’s said it all before a thousand times. She holds her hands in crooked, sharp positions of indifference, fingers dangling like slaughtered mackerel. Outlines the many facets of their finish line with foppish breezes of whittled facial expressions and inconsistent gestures. The wallpaper was always too yellow, he thinks, and the walls too thin. They let in the cold, release the heat, never could hold anything worth keeping. He notices it peeling in the upper right-hand corner of the room and the wallpaper glue reveals weaved webs of decline.
His patience wears pantaloons of aired consent, her words spill outwards in messy splatters. Time’s unending gaze unfolds along their trials of years untouched, gazes never met. On two separate planes, they stare inward gazes to pasts imagined, nostalgia-imbued.
The strangers waltz plainly in the company of forgotten dust.
