Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Great Article on Kafka in NY Times Magazine
Friday, September 17, 2010
Friday, August 20, 2010
The Enclave has a new website
http://theenclavereadingseries.tumblr.com/
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Henry Miller's Bathroom
Monday, August 2, 2010
Roman Athletes Make More Bank Than Tiger Woods
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Spy vs Spy vs Spy
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/05/10/100510crat_atlarge_gladwell
Friday, May 14, 2010
Thursday, May 13, 2010
The Red Carpet
http://nplusonemag.com/the-red-carpet
All Across the Universe
Walking out of the bookstore, A feels charmed by the ancient cityscape. The beautiful façades adorning every building provoke a fairytale atmosphere that is unlike anything he has ever seen before. Up above the sky is a deep artless gray, the perfect weather for reading. A thinks about all of these things, yet none of these things as he walks into the Old Quarter of the city looking for a place to stay.
*
Much to his surprise A only gets a few pages into his new book before putting it aside. The following day the weather becomes much too pleasant to read Kafka. At first he tries to force himself to continue, but sun has an awakening effect on the city, one he wants to take part in. People pour out from every corner into the streets. A wanders aimlessly through the tendril alleyways running off Old Town Square and feels at home in the maze of cobblestones around him. There is a small café lacking a sign paces from the Astrological clock empty of tourists that he frequents each morning where he befriends the proprietress, a friendly German woman who is thrilled to meet A because she is trying learn English. In the afternoon often he sits in the middle of Wenceslas Square gazing at the façade of the National Museum. All around him traffic groans, but he doesn’t mind the sound. He likes this spot because the wide boulevard and the surrounding towers remind him of New York. Some days he sits there smoking, writing letters to the people he used to know and on others he just reclines back on the bench with his eyes closed letting the November sun pour into him.
*
Two days later the temperature drops and the gray clouds return so A slips back into his reading. He identifies with the struggles of Josef K and his inability to bring about any conclusion to his fate, though early on A thinks more than the absurd premise of K’s arrest Kafka’s masterpiece is really about the senseless ways man is forced to spend his time. When he is not reading, A wanders through the same streets he had walked the first few days but the frigid gusts that cut through the alleyways make it unpleasant to stop anywhere too long. No one he passes on the streets seems to want to be outdoors. Most rush by him, towards some interior where they will be warm again. But A doesn’t have anywhere warm to go, so he passes his time in a perpetual state of motion.
*
A few more days pass like this and nothing much happens. A tries his best to smoke less because he begins to notice a chest cold coming on. He drinks a lot of orange juice and spends more time in the hostel than he would like to. One morning at breakfast some fellow backpackers, two Brits who call him mate and two Canadians (he can tell from the patches on their backpacks), approach him. They ask A if he would mind if they join him at the table where he is eating, a request of course A obliges though he would have preferred to be left alone with his book. Not wanting to come across as insulting he closes his book and allows the scenario he had seen so many times before play out. He does not interrupt them as they offer him their friendship through stories of the places they’d been and the places they planned to go and the details from their sexual exploits with a certain French girl staying at the hostel who had apparently packed clothes that most backpackers didn’t pack. A does his best to act polite. He smiles and nods as they share the complimentary breakfast together, though A has no interest in anything they say because he has already heard these stories many times before. Most of the travelers he has met in the four months he has been on the road have either come to Europe to find life or death. It was always either a matter of indulging in some secret fantasy in order to come to terms with the death of the self that will come once they return home or a matter of killing off some reckless part of the self in order to prepare for the life that awaits their return. When it becomes A’s turn to share his own story, A does his best to keep things simple. Because he failed to understand himself it was difficult to explain himself to others. The truth behind why he had come to Europe, the messy web of disappointment and displacement that he had run away from, betrayed weaknesses that he wasn’t willing to volunteer to strangers, so instead he tells them the things they expect to hear. He offers them a loose catalog of the cities he had passed through and tells them a few dirty jokes and they respond to his stories with stories of their own and it’s only a matter of time before everyone seated at the table feels like old friends. They think A is one of them so they invite him to join them. Their plan is to sit on the Charles Bridge all day and get drunk. A declines and mentions he already has plans, though really he has none. But they press him, expressing interest in joining him if what he is planning sounds fun, so he is forced to deceive them. He makes up a lie from the text before him and he tells them that he has come to Prague specifically to see if he can find the tenement described in the first interrogation chapter of The Trial, which was said to be located on a certain Juliusstrasse. He explains that while many Kafka scholars didn’t believe that this street actually existed any longer, noting that when the Communists invaded Prague it was not an uncommon practice to change the names of streets, he believes that it does exist because it has been his life’s work to prove the existence of this street, his own personal crusade to further illuminate Kafka’s masterpiece. He makes up a Kafka scholar, allegedly his mentor, who had researched the location for over a decade and explains that it was his intention to spend his day wandering the streets on the outskirts of the city in the hills of the Lesser Quarter to see if he could verify the research of his academic friend and find the location of Josef K’s early torments. The elaborateness of his plan scares them off and once again he is alone. He sees the four of them speaking to that certain French girl in the entry way as he walks out the door. They wish him the best of luck and mention they will be around later. So perhaps it is out of a sense of guilt that A finds himself heading off toward the direction his lies prescribe, but then again it may have been just because he can’t think of anything better to do.
A doesn’t make it too far towards the Lesser Quarter before sunlight breaks through the dense clouds. The possibility of pleasant weather makes him change his mind and walk north instead. He crosses the Vltava at the Czech Bridge and climbs up to the top of Letenské Sady because he has read somewhere that it has a great view of the city and he finds himself in the mood to see a great view, though he is not sure exactly why he has this craving.
Once he reaches the top he sits on the ledge and stares out at the cityscape. The Kafka sits on the ledge next to him closed. He is not sure what he thinks of Prague yet. He is not sure if he wishes to expedite his time there, so he is hesitant to read too fast. Something about the vastness of the cityscape before him makes his thoughts grow abstract and meaningless, nothing he could explain to anyone. He picks himself up with his arms and then puts himself down again and wonders if it would be possible for him to survive if he were to slip off the ledge. There is a book that he has read that takes place over the course of an hour where the protagonist contemplates his fateful flick of the wrist, though A doesn’t remember how it ends. He is at a loss to name the book or even exactly when it was that he read it and it occurs to him that it is just as possible that this is something he had imagined, a book that he would have liked to read. So strange, he thinks, the things that one finds himself thinking about when they have come somewhere to be alone.
He closes his eyes and lifts himself up again, then puts himself down, then lifts himself up and counts how long he can hold himself up before growing tired, but then he hears a bus pull up behind him so he puts himself down and turns toward it. It’s full of tourists. They filter out of the bus and it is only seconds before the clicks of cameras and incessant chatter overwhelm the scene. The spectacle of their arrival makes him want to leave, but before he does he thinks about what they would think if he stood up, greeted them and dove off the edge. Obviously they’d be shocked, he thinks, but really they wouldn’t care.
*
A starts back down the hill towards the Vltava. The sun rays reflect off the cobblestones and the light has a blinding effect on A that takes his thoughts elsewhere to other stops along the continuous stream of cobblestones that Europe has been to him, the same street he walked upon just two months before in Amsterdam along the concentric canals that Camus once compared to Dante’s concentric chambers of hell. The book was Rimbaud, Les Illuminations. A had gone to Amsterdam to find his own illuminations. The idea was to grow sick of himself. He wanted to see if he had it in him to become a degenerate in order to eliminate his degenerate impulses and see if eliminating these impulses would offer him something illuminating. He spent his days sitting among addicts in squares and his nights chasing skirts and drugs and whatever else he could find to chase. There was one square in particular where he would often pass his afternoons with some junkies he befriended watching an awful juggler try to juggle who always had a cute little whore by his side. A would sit on the curb and get high and make bets with the junkies on how long it would take the juggler to drop one of his balls. Loser had to score the next bag; winner got his fix for free. A must have spent at least two weeks doing this, just nodding out and watching the juggler. Eventually he came to understand that there was an arrangement between the juggler and the girl. It seemed that for a cigarette every 10 minutes she would stick around and watch him try to juggle. If there wasn’t a cigarette forget about it. A few times A saw her walk. Without her watching him the juggler preformed even worse. It was a curious arrangement and after awhile A began to wonder which of them had the better part of the deal. A wondered if it was better to be watched or if it was better to have something to watch. A’s first impulse was to side with the girl. At least she was getting paid for her trouble. A wasn’t sure what the juggler was getting out of the deal. One of the junkies thought that maybe having her around got the juggler off, but A didn’t buy that. A thought it was lucky for the juggler the girl liked to smoke and all it took was a pack of cigarettes each day to get whatever he was getting out of having her around, but in the end he never really figured them out. He finished Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations without finding any illuminations of his own and left the city and the junkies and the juggler behind. This was all Amsterdam had been to him, just another book he had begun with the highest of intentions only find that he was in just another place that was easy to walk away from. Just another stint of cobblestones among endless strains of cobblestones that were the same as the cobblestones he was currently walking on in Prague, the cobblestones in Old Town Square that were already thick with tourists even though it was barely noon.
*
There was a sizable crowd gathered around a Mariachi guitarist playing beneath the Astrological clock that was still frozen from the recent flood. Up front A sees a wealthy American family whose youngest son, a boy not older than 5 or 6, was dancing to the lonely sounds of the Mariachi’s guitar. A smiles at the sight of the boy and nods his head in sync with the beat, as do many other people in the crowd. An old gypsy woman carrying a Polaroid pushes her way through the crowd near the guitarist and snaps a photograph of the boy from a low angle that’s sure to capture the dead clock behind the Mariachi. 100 crowns, she says waving the picture into the face of a well built American man standing nearby and wearing the same white tennis sweater as the dancing boy. His father, A thinks. The American turns his head from side to side and holds his hands in the air, as if he doesn’t understand what has been said to him, though the gypsy is speaking in English. A wonders if he doesn’t understand that she only wants $5, but then again maybe the American is just cheap. At his refusal the gypsy turns away from the man and holds the photo up to the rest of the crowd. An old Czech man wearing a bright purple sweatshirt steps forward and pays the gypsy for the photo. He holds it up in the air and waves it in the American’s face as the gypsy had done, though more to mock her than to be insulting it seems. After waving it he shrugs his shoulders and makes eye contact with the boy’s father as if to say where do people like the gypsy get off. Then he slips the photograph into his back pocket and disappears into the crowd. The Mariachi continues to play and the little boy continues to dance. The American looks away from them out into the crowd, but the man in the purple sweatshirt is gone. A loses interest in the scene and walks away.
*
The café is more crowded than it typically is at this hour of the day. On the left side of the small room six noisy Germans, tourists A thinks, sit around a table full of beer mugs. Five of six men in working clothes are slumped around the back bar. The proprietress approaches A from the back, greets him in English and motions for him to take a seat at a table on the other side of the restaurant from the Germans where he typically sits. A coffee, right? she says. Not today, A says, I think I’ll have a beer. It’s my birthday, he says, though it is not his birthday. It’s just something A says because he feels he needs to explain his request for a beer so early in the day, though as the words come out his mouth he realizes that it probably isn’t necessary for him to explain himself. She asks him what kind of beer he would like. A tells her that whatever the Germans were drinking would be fine. But she protests. I’m afraid I can’t do that, she says rolling her eyes in way A assumes is meant to be flirty, though she is at least thirty years his senior. A is not quite sure how to respond, so he maintains a neutral expression. Excuse me? he says. They’re tourists so I serve them Budvar, she says, but you my friend are a poor student, so why not let me serve you another nice Czech beer that costs half the price? A agrees to this and thanks her for the suggestion. It can be our little secret, she says, because we understand each other. A looks at her ass as she walks back to the bar and thanks her again when she serves him his beer.
A tries to lose himself in writing letters and entertains the idea of purchasing some birthday cards to send to the people he knows, only writing the notes inside the cards to himself using the voices of his friends. He could write what they might have to say to him if it really were his birthday. He likes the idea and starts to make a list of people he’d send cards to and jot down what he thinks each person might say, but once he starts thinking about the ways his friends might react to this, he decides that it isn’t something he wants to do.
Instead he opens his book. A tries his best to immerse himself deep into Kafka’s dreamscape and abandon his own troubles. He tries his best to become Josef K and adopt his troubles instead. He had read the book years before and recognizes the chapter he has come to. It’s the part when K’s uncle takes him to see his friend the lawyer, only K doesn’t end up listening to the lawyer’s advice on his pending case. After his uncle and the lawyer start talking, K slips out of the room and fools around with the lawyer’s maid. The chapter is all about K’s growing indifference, though not in the sense that K is indifferent to his uncle’s fury over K’s lack of social etiquette and arguable indiscretion (though clearly he is), but more so because indifference is one of the few freedoms K has left. The idea, A thinks, is to point out how absurd it is to have everything taken away from you but your right not to give a damn.
A likes this idea and wants to contemplate it further in terms of himself, but the table of noisy Germans makes if difficult for him to concentrate and continue these thoughts. He sees the proprietress speaking to them, taking their orders he assumes, so he tries to capture her attention by nodding his chin, intending to ask her if she’d mind asking them to quiet down a bit, but she only winks at him in reply. On her way back to the bar, she winks at A again and tosses her hands in the air. Her smile is a suggestive one, as if to say aren’t you proud of how easily it is for me to rip them off. Under the dim interior light her eyes are a deep murky blue set in a musk of stale yellow light like the reflection of the sun setting on the Loire he had watched when he had been in Tours with his friend S two years before.
*
A was composing a poem entitled J’adore le whiskey though he wasn’t drinking whiskey at the time. It was the summer after his sophomore year of college. S and him had spent the previous spring selling drugs in order to avoid another summer of working restaurant jobs and go to France instead where they had been bumming around for a month. Paris passed like an acid trip. The weeks they spent there were one long endless night nodding out from dream to dream. But in the end the city drained their resources, so they had to head down to the Loire valley to find seasonal work on vineyards in order to avoid returning to the States early. They were sitting on the riverbank on the north side of Tours splitting a bottle of cheap red wine when the auburn reflection of the sun sinking into the river reminded A of whiskey so he wrote about whiskey because it seemed that the universe was telling him to write about whiskey and back then that was all the motivation he needed to do anything. His thoughts were simple those days, and he was never ashamed of the things he thought to do because he never cared about explaining himself. S was smoking cigarettes one after the next and saying that all his life he’d been a chameleon in the same way smoke disappears into the air and is lost forever only moments after it is exhaled. In front of them a young man was riding a bicycle along the riverbank precariously close to the edge. Je suis immortal, the boy yelled to A and S, winking at them as he rode by. Je suis immortal, the boy said again and then he started screaming it, repeating the phrase over and over again as he rode on.
A was uncertain if the boy said these words to urge himself on or to entertain his friends, a group of French students gathered about twenty feet away watching the French boy ride and cheering on his intoxicated proclamation of his inability to die. A and S stood up to express their interest in joining the students’ party that would perhaps commence after the boy finished his ride. They passed their bottle back and forth and watched the French boy ride on. And at that moment A wanted to be the French boy; A wished that he had been born in France and was as drunk as the French boy and that he had the guts to ride a bicycle so close to the riverbank and was heading back to the group of students twenty feet away where French girls and a case of beer awaited. He watched the boy ride on with a mixture of pride and envy that made it easy for him to second guess himself when he saw the boy slip over the edge. But then there was the sound of the splash and A’s memory of peering down into the water when he and S arrived at the riverbank earlier: a 10 foot drop into the strong current below, then the sound of the girls crying out in terror and the sensation of being overwhelmed by everything.
*
A stands frozen. He watches S follow some of the French boy’s friends down the riverbank. He feels the fingernails of some of the girls clutching into him, the sound of their voices asking him things in a language he can barely understand. He thinks that he should go for help but he doesn’t know where to go so he stands still. He looks across the river and takes another drink. Out across the water a movie A never wants to end plays out before him. The boy emerges from the slick surface of the river near the middle of it still on his bicycle and rides into the sky away from the commotion he has caused. He levitates through the air that smells fresh with wine and the first hints of summer. It’s the most beautiful thing A has ever seen. Because he is dead there is no direction for him to go but forward, no reason for him to look back any longer and he doesn’t. A drains the rest of the wine and throws the bottle as hard as he can out across the water as he watches the French boy disappear into the gray horizon.
*
A few hours later A is on a train somewhere east of Prague enroute to Budapest but his thoughts remain in Tours. It is still a blur to him, but he remembers that the rest of the night had gone badly. Loud sirens and questions he doesn’t understand. The next day he and S caught a train out of town first thing. On the way to the station A stoped by a used bookstore and found a copy of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in the foreign section. He bought the book and easily entered into its the universe as the train sped off towards the south. S suggested they go to Bordeaux because he heard it was cheap and had plenty of jobs, so they went there. After working on a vineyard for a month they spent the rest of the summer living in modest room that had a television and a shower. They passed their time drinking the cheap wine, smoking cigarillos, and watching soccer. It’s the best summer A ever had. When the time came for him to go home he didn’t want to leave, but he didn’t have it in him to stay, the guts to ride out into a river and not give a damn about sinking.
A reaches into his bag for his book but he can’t find it. He must have left it on the table in the café in his rush to leave. He is frustrated by his carelessness because he was enjoying Kafka’s story, but reasons that he had never intended to take it with him out of Prague in the first place. He could always buy another copy in another city and pick up where he left off.
Outside the window it is too dark to make out any of the landscape. The opaque glass reveals only the reflection of his face. The black eye the German gave him doesn’t hurt as much as he thought it would. The cool feel of the window against his skin seems to relax the swelling. Beyond the window a world blurs by that he cannot see but knows is there. Hours pass by before A is able to get away from himself through distraction. The idea is for his only thought to be that he is sitting on a train enroute to Budapest traveling away from Tours and Prague and all the other places he has been. The idea is for A to think of motion in order to stop dwelling on his sudden departure from the café, which he eventually does, though he is uncertain if the ease at which his thoughts shift speaks positively or negatively of him. He doesn’t know if it is good or bad that it only takes him a few hours to get over the fact that there was nothing he could have said them, that there wasn’t a damn thing he could have done to stop them from beating him, nothing he could have said to the Germans that would have convinced them he hadn’t meant to throw his glass.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Translation of Bolano's Infamous Heroin Essay online
http://www.eyeshot.net/bolanobeach.html
Thursday, April 8, 2010
The Ghost of Jack Kerouac
apartment in Brooklyn because I’ve never been near Omaha, but that
doesn’t mean the things I am about to recount here never happened.
Because as far as I’m concerned these things did happen much in the
same way everything tends to happen. And in this sense I am certain
that one night, either just outside of Omaha or in Brooklyn, I met
Jack Kerouac, and this night was one of the most disappointing nights
of my life.
When I encountered this Kerouac, it occurred to me that he had been
dead for at least 40 years, but I kept this to myself as I shook his
hand and told him that I was a huge fan of is work. He said thank you,
and then I asked him how he was. Bored, he said, so bored, you
wouldn't believe it. But how can that be? I said. You’re Jack Kerouac?
This is true, he said, but my identity isn’t a remedy for boredom. It
isn’t? I said. I used to think it was, he said, but I think I was
wrong. And why is that? I said. I don’t know, said Kerouac. Maybe it’s
because I’m not Jesus Christ.
Shortly after he said these things, the man who I thought was Kerouac fell silent. He seemed to want to be alone with his thoughts so I excused myself and went to the bathroom where I snorted some cocaine. I snorted so much that for a moment I was back in Brooklyn lying on my bed in my apartment just feeling my blood pulsate through me and wondering how I would come down enough to fall asleep and make it to work on time. But then my hallucinations took hold of me again and rescued me from these thoughts so I walked out of the bathroom and told Kerouac about Brooklyn and not sleeping and every problem I’d ever had. He told me to relax and try to write a story about how I felt. Then, I should try to sell it for a million dollars
so I’d never have to go to work again and have plenty of time to deal with all my issues.
I ended up taking his advice and going home. But later when I tried to
write all I came up with was a bunch of horse shit.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
A Melodrama Composed for my Father on the Occasion of his Birthday
These are the things I meant to tell you. These are not the things I told you or the things I thought to tell you. These are the things I never thought to tell you but always meant to say. This is what I wrote on so many postcards I threw away.
In a dark room there is always a door. There is not always a window, but you can count on there being a door. Even if you forget how you ended up here, you know your act of coming here most likely involved a door.
There is a piercing noise coming from someplace outside of me. It is a syncopated beeping noise I remember slowly the deeper it resonates. I remember that it is coming from the other side of the wall and that my room shares a wall with my mother’s room. I remember that the sound is her alarm clock going off because it is time for her to get up and that this time is quarter to six. I remember that I still have another two hours before I need to get up myself. There is a book I often think of as I roll away from the wall and place my pillow over my ears. It’s a book Elizabeth gave me. Something she read long ago when she had time to read books, she said. Something she said she still didn’t completely understand. Something I definitely don’t understand, though for what it was worth I told her that it seemed to speak of death. I remember she nodded vacantly when I told her this but didn’t say anything back to me, though her glance seemed to suggest she agreed.
Across the room from the door there is a window I see dawn push the darkness through. Slowly a silhouette resumes its features beyond the glass. The shapeless buildings of the town where I live grow clearer. In the distance the mountains rise out away from the horizon. I lay still and watch the grayness carve a humble portrait of disgruntled sky. I don’t care how it happens, but I appreciate the fact that it is happening. I lay in my bed and contemplate the uncertain attachment I feel towards all of this. My little town. The sounds of the people moving beneath my window on the street. The grayness that makes the Pennsylvanian sky so easy to blame for everything. I contemplate this uncertainty because it seems that there is more to it than finding comfort in not being alone. Even though I don’t understand these things I contemplate, I continue to contemplate these things because I am determined not to be the reason why these days the only way I ever feel is alone.
First there is darkness. Then there is morning. The road is dark and my car is dark. I never turn on the radio until I see the sun. My coffee is dark because it needs to be dark. Because the road is dangerous I need to be awake. Because on the road there are a multitude of possibilities that will kill you. Because being here my dreams are dead. Each morning I find myself here the first thought I have is that I should forget about my dreams because then maybe I wouldn’t realize that on this road they are dead.
Elizabeth recited a quote from the book before she gave it to me. She wrote it on a napkin at the bar. Her eyes sunk into something, maybe sadness, as she scribbled it down. ‘In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep you are not. And when you are filled with sleep you never were. I don’t know what I am. I don’t know if I am or if I am not.’ It’s by Faulkner, she said, though I didn’t really care who it was by. I tried my best to understand what it meant but I couldn’t. I didn’t want to offend her by saying that I didn’t understand, saying that when I went to sleep I just slept and when I awoke I took up wherever I left off the day before. I didn’t want to say that I didn’t understand all that I am and I am not stuff, that more or less I’m an it is what it is kind of guy. I didn’t want her to think I wasn’t trying to understand because I didn’t want her to stop telling me about things I didn’t understand so I wrote down the lyrics to my favorite song on a napkin and gave it to her. ‘I’ve got some chords they fit just right I wrote some words don’t tell me they’re trite cause I was up all night just trying to get them down and you can say I’m crazy but you can’t tell me that I’m wrong cause I’m betting it all on this song all on a song.’ I tried to tell her that it was by FOD and called ‘Commercial Success,’ that this was the best I could do to help her understand me, but she wasn’t listening. She looked away from me into the mirror behind the bar and her expression didn’t say anything back to me. She ran her fingers through my hair and then rubbed the small of my back. So often when I can’t get to sleep I think of the feeling of her fingers in my hair and that memory puts me to sleep. The memory of the book makes me think of her hands but that doesn’t put me to sleep. To get back to sleep I need to think of the feeling of her hands.
I don’t know why I feel connected to these things so I try to understand the way I am living. But the way you are living never strikes you as interesting enough to understand when you are living it because when you are living it you never think it is going to end. Because there is no end in sight, there is no reason for serious reflection, no reason for you to try to understand the links between the scenes because the fact that it is happening is more real than anything you can remember. It is only much after the fact that things begin to resonate, much after the fact when things physically stop happening when mentally things start to happen, when the connections between the places you have been begin to take root and the concern shifts from where you are to where you have been. Only when there is distance of some sort do you begin to assess how you have gone about spending your time and wonder if your conclusions mean anything. This is where the story begins, never before, but always much after the facts have occurred, once you have lived your life and your life belongs no longer to the present, but to some distant past that hardly seems real any longer because it means less than the place where you find yourself. It is only when things mean less than they formerly have that you can understand them and use this understanding to construct an honest story. This is what I aim to do now, now that I am dead.
These are not the things you want to hear. These are the things I want you to hear, the things I need you to hear if there is ever to be an end to this.
I don’t want to be here. I never want to be here. I am only here now because I have to be here. Because I have no other choice but to be here. I am only here now in this car racing away from everything I claim to love because it has become economically necessary for me to make a productive use of my time. I need something to show for myself, something to share with those who depend on me, all these people I love, all these people I claim to love. That’s why I’m here now and why my decision to be here is an easy one to accept. This is why it is easy for me wake up and walk away from my family and get in my car and drive 100 miles to meet with men who I have no interest in meeting with. This is why it is easy for me to go wherever my boss tells me to go even though I don’t wish to do any of these things. If it were up to me I’d spend my days home with my family. Because I would like to give myself an adequate amount of time to think about why it is that all the things I say I love are things I no longer understand. I would like to have the time to figure out what it is I’m fighting for and maybe find a new way to fight for these things. But this thought of what I love, the people who love me, the people who depend on me, all those I claim to love makes it easy to dismiss these questions and do whatever I have to do to raise the capital necessitated by our relationship of love. Today I don’t feel well, but I have come here anyway because I always come here regardless of how I feel. Today I have come here because somewhere inside of me I still believe that it is worth fighting for the things you love, even if you feel these things are things you may only claim to love.
There is a café I sit in with B and spend the early hours of my Saturdays I meant to tell you about. There are always people sitting at the tables around us in mismatched clothes whispering. There is always something by Pink Floyd blaring on the stereo that makes conversation easy because the perfection of David Gilmore’s solos is something I can rely on, something that makes B’s smirk bearable and makes it easier for me not to speak of the newspaper office where I spend the duration of my week. There is a war raging on inside of me. There is a war going on that I am growing increasingly concerned with. It’s not clear to me which side is winning anymore because I’m not sure which side I want to win. I’m not sure I give a damn anymore about which side wins. I only tell this to B because E isn’t around. Right away B’s advice strikes me as thoughtless but I listen to it anyway because I don’t have anyone else to listen to. B asks me why I’m asking his opinion on the matter and not writing about it. B tells me that my war (a perfect instance of internal conflict is how he phrases it) is the perfect thing to write about because there is always a lot you can do with internal conflict. E would have just told me to pick a side and do whatever I had to do to win. I tell B that I don’t want to write about it because I don’t know how to begin. You writers are all the same, he says. I only let him get away with saying this because he used to be a writer. B used to be a culture critic but his inability to find success as a critic drove him to become a nihilist and his nihilism drove him recently to enter law school. Either write or don’t write, he says. Quitting writing was the best thing that ever happened to me. I know, I say. You’ve told me that before. Did I tell you about the little slut I nailed last week in DC? he says. No, I say. Right before I finished I pulled out and ripped off the condom. I told her I wanted to cum in her mouth. Rather nice of her to oblige don’t you think? I tell him that I guessed it was nice of her. Then I took her into the shower for round two. When I was ready I pushed her down to her knees and told her to open up. Her cheeks got nice and rosy. I might stop down there to see her over Christmas, maybe make her wear a Santa hat while she sucks me off. But I don’t know. I’d like to go to Vermont, do some skiing. You got anything going on for Christmas? Just going home to see my folks, I say. If you could only realize how hard you try to make yourself miserable, he says, but I don’t answer him. I pick up a section of his paper and start reading. He does the same. At least an hour passes this way. Neither of us says a word.
I hope for the right words to come to me but when I think of my story it is difficult for me to say anything other than that it is painfully typical. It is difficult for me to begin telling it because I hardly think I have an interesting story to tell unless it is interesting that the first adjective I have used to describe my story is painful, which implies that I am in or have been in possession of a sort of pain that is worth speaking of, which implies that this sense of pain isn’t one that has already been exhaustively depicted, that the degree to which my story is typical is in an illuminatingly painful way. Perhaps I just need to flatly describe the day I died and try my best to avoid all these circular thoughts. Perhaps it would be best to start with my name, to just say that it is Elizabeth, and the first thing I remember that morning is Tommy gazing into me through the mirror. Understand that he didn’t look directly at me. Otherwise he would have known I was awake. It was still dark outside, maybe an hour before dawn. He stopped before the mirror to fix his tie. A half hour earlier I heard his alarm go off and watched him walk into the bathroom. I should have been trying to go back to sleep but I couldn’t help but watch. I saw him stare diagonally into the lower corner of the mirror at my reflection in bed. After a few seconds I rolled over because I wanted this moment to end and then it ended. Then the sound of his shoes scraping against the planks of the floor, then the sound of the door opening, and then the sound of it closing. That was the final sound.
These days she only calls me early in the morning. She calls me before I know what is happening. It’s like a dream but it isn’t a dream. When the phone rings I resist it for a moment because I’ve always had a thing about being woken up by the phone, but I know it can’t be anyone else and then I remember I like talking to her so I answer it. It is a welcomed intrusion at first but then I sit up and look at the clock. I’ve never brought it up with her, but I know she times out everything. She must. Almost exactly an hour before I have to be at work. About a half hour before I typically get up. ‘Hurry up. Use the shower at my place. I want to see you so hurry up.’ I hang up the phone and get dressed. Then I drive over there. When she calls me early in the morning I find my keys and do whatever she tells me to do because after I talk to her, after I hear her voice, it becomes easy to follow her instructions and do what she tells me to do. Her voice is too tempting for me to do otherwise. I trick myself into believing that going over there, that seeing her before my day begins had been my intention all along and that there’s nothing wrong with this. After all, what could possibly be wrong with doing what you had originally set out to do?
I lay in bed and looked at the phone. I looked at the phone and lay in bed. I heard Lucy’s alarm go off down the hall and wished I was Lucy. I wished some stupid acid trip hadn’t made me name her Lucy. Out the window the clouds became violent with the colors of the sun. I couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t watched the sun rise each morning. I wondered how long it had been but only thought about this for a moment because I knew that it had been longer than I could remember, longer than I can phrase in a way to imply the impetus behind an interesting story. So then I stopped thinking and got out of bed and took a shower. I dressed and made Lucy breakfast. She spoke fast and incoherently, something about social studies. I found myself looking forward to the days when she would be 15 and we’d finally have something to talk about. I sent her to school and after she was gone I crossed off the date on the calendar and found it funny that I had become the sort of person who crosses off the date on the calendar.
I continue to drive away from myself, here on this road far away now from all the things I claim to love. I continue to drink coffee and drive and listen to the radio now that my car in filled with light and the warmth of the morning sun. I keep driving because I have no other choice but to keep driving. But then something sinks inside me. At first I disregard it. But then it comes back. My stomach rises. My heart begins to palpitate and it seems a fever is coming on. I turn off the heat, but even still I can’t stop sweating. Beads of perspiration run off my forehead into my eyes and my stomach sinks into something nauseous. I don’t know what is happening so I decide to take a moment to try to figure out what is happening. I turn off the highway and pull into a truck stop and empty out everything inside of me behind a dumpster in the parking lot before going in. Inside I sit at the counter and order water and some toast to settle my stomach but the greasy smell of the trucker food makes me feel worse. I pretend to look over my papers so the people inside the restaurant won’t think I’m in trouble, but their stares are everywhere and unavoidable and I realize that my act is useless here because these people already know my story. I realize that these people have seen men like me stuck on this road before so I stop caring about caring about them and think of only the ones I love, the ones who love me, the ones I claim to love. The thought occurs to me that I need to pull myself together and do whatever it is that I need to do and get back in my car and continue down that road. Because if I don’t continue down that road the ones I love will die and if the ones I love die I will die because then I won’t have anyone to claim to love. But then my stomach rises up again. At first I’m able to suppress it but then it comes back stronger. I stand up and walk away from the counter but when I stand my vision fades to black. My head pounds. I make my way to the restroom and empty out more of me into a toilet stall. After I finish my head fells okay when I stick it under the faucet in the sink, but when I get back to my car it starts pounding again. I want to ignore this pounding and get back on the road. I want to do this because this is what I have set out to do because this is what my love requires me to do. But the pounding doesn’t go away. It gets worse. It pounds so hard I feel tears welling behind my eyes. I feel sick again so I get out of the car and let myself be sick. Then I call the office. I apologize to my boss. I hang up the phone and drive away. I turn on the radio to give me something else to think about but can’t help but thinking that there I am driving away, that I have a job that means so much to me that I feel bad about needing to drive away.
Woke up cotton-mouthed but not hung over and felt pretty good before I rolled over and realized I was lying next to K. The memories rushed back to me forcefully all at once and my mood sank into self-disgust. I got out of bed and saw that I was naked. I found condom wrappers in the wastebasket just I imagined they would be. Then I walked into the bathroom and tried to think of what to say but before I could think of anything the phone rang. I guess you could say I caught a break. It was B. He wanted to see if I wanted to grab coffee. We agreed to meet in a half hour. The rest of it shouldn’t have been so easy but it always is. Even walked her to the subway and bit her lip as we kissed before I turned away.
My choice to pick up the phone is my choice to throw everything away. It is a choice to challenge the place where I find myself, the only way I can think of to convince myself that it means nothing, that this place means nothing. Because it means nothing to me, it is still within my power to walk away. Calling him is how I walk away. I call him and he doesn’t answer so I keep calling him until he does and I tell him to come over and then I hang up and wait. I don’t straighten up or put on makeup. Maybe I clean up some of Lucy’s things, though I doubt Billy cares if the house is messy. Sometimes in the summer I go outside and smoke a cigarette but in November it’s too cold to go out for a smoke. The second time he came over he brought me flowers. I told him if he ever brought me flowers again it was over.
Just tell me you came in her mouth, B says when I join him at the café. I tell him I doubt it. What do you mean you doubt it? he says. I tell him I don’t remember what we did. Well you might as well say no, he says. Trust me. It’s not the sort of thing you easily forget. To change the subject I ask B how things are going with him, which always works because this is what B enjoys talking about most. Like most people B loves to speak of the things that prove he is succeeding in life. I’ve heard his stories many times since I met him, but even still I can’t say I know him well. What I know of B is exactly what he wants me to know of him. First there were the tales of his critic days and then his nihilist days when he’d criticize me for reading the paper. Now there are his tales of law school. These days B speaks with his hands and is excited about everything. He tells me about some OpEd he read in the Times, a law article he was working on concerning intellectual property rights, the girl he slept with the previous night, the conversation he had with some hot shot lawyer at the Oyster Bar and his dream to become a diplomat one day. His excitement makes me believe that this cycle of change has been good for him, not because he is better or worse off than where he started, but because change proves he has evolved and evolution proves that he is alive, that he is leading an active life. Seeing him like this makes me wonder what he thinks of me. It makes me wonder if it occurs to him that over the two years we’ve known each other I have been saying the same things, if to him this means I haven’t evolved. I wonder if people who have evolved need people who haven’t evolved because as in so many things in life a certain amount of balance is often required. But I don’t think about this any further after I finish my coffee and walk away. I think about how I am sick of people who don’t know a thing about my life asking me if I came in a girl’s mouth and I think about how much I miss E, even though I know I shouldn’t miss him. The only thing I know for certain is that I’m done with B. I want to be done with thinking about evolution too, but I don’t know how to stop. I don’t know how to stop talking to myself or why talking to myself always makes things seem worse when the idea is that talking things out will facilitate understanding and should potentially make things better.
The farther I drive the easier driving gets. The idea of going home grows easier for me to accept. It grows easier for me to find the positive things in a disgraceful situation, to think of how it will be nice to spend a quiet day at home being looked after by my wife. I begin to think that it will be pleasant to spend a day away from the world and the man the world has forced me to become and concern myself only with what I understand to be love surrounded by those I claim to love. I think about how love is the worst thing that ever happens to a man because it is the best thing. But it is the worst thing, because it is an awful thing for a man to have to admit that he has found what he thinks will become his all time best. Even if this thing is truly what he does best, because admitting you have stumbled across what it is you do best forces you to find the courage to dismiss all the millions of other things you have ever contemplated and concentrate only on what it is you do best. Lesser men dismiss love by saying it is a confusing thing but I don’t buy that. I say love is hell. Everybody goes through hell. If you want to get to heaven you got to go to hell.
Even still I don’t know how to begin or if anyone ever begins anything. I don’t know if the act of beginning is something that anyone can ever claim to do, if saying now I will begin or the time has come for me to begin is anything other than a way to retrospectively paraphrase time. The idea behind a claim to a beginning will always be a false one because claiming that you knew where you stood in the beginning means that you are speaking from the view point of gained experience that is only possible to grasp at the end of things. So maybe the only way to actually begin is to speak of the end. This is all I have to offer, what I so eagerly wish to explain to you. All I have are endings, facts and recollections that mean little now that they have passed. My ending is the only way I can think of to offer a way into the mess that has become all of this. Cursory statements such as with E gone there is no reason for me to continue living the way I have been living. Without E there is less motivation to engage myself with the outside world. There is less motivation to do cocaine. Without E there is more reason for me to need a name.
Everything changes when Elizabeth opens the door. Everything changes when I see her. Before in my truck, on my way over there, I always have doubts. On my way over there the thought occurs to me that maybe what I am doing is wrong. But once I see her I forget this thought. Once I see her I get caught up with seeing her and don’t think about anything else but her, about being with her. Seeing her makes my head feel light; the weight of my body is no longer heavy. I take her into my arms and inhale her scent and hold it deep within my lungs. I feel her fingers in my calloused hands. Then she closes the door and I follow her upstairs to the bedroom and then she closes that door.
Meet the man alone tonight and thought of E. I thought of all the clever things E used to say to the man that I didn’t have to say. I was alone at a bar when I called him. I think it was about 11. He called me an hour later. I walked a block away from the bar and got into his car. Then I bought the stuff and he dropped me off a block away. I went back to the bar and did most of it. I thought of E while I was doing it but it wasn’t the same because E wasn’t there. I felt guilty that I was out and not home writing. At the end of the night I heard myself saying never again, saying I was finished with drugs that this was the last time, a thing I’ve told myself so many times before but without E there is less reason to contradict myself. There is less of a reason to go back to where I don’t want to be. It got late so I gave the last bag to some girl in line for the bathroom behind me and then I walked away.
They tell me there was a truck pulled up out front that I probably didn’t notice. They tell me that certain ideas entered my head once I saw the truck but I don’t remember any ideas entering my head. I barely remember pulling up. My headache was pounding too hard for me to remember much. It was pounding too much for me to think of anything other than lying down and maybe taking a cold shower. All I remember is the pounding. I remember being glad to get off the road and feeling so lousy. I hoped that I hadn’t caused any accidents; it was that bad. Then I opened the door and walked inside and then I walked upstairs to the bedroom and then I opened the bedroom door.
There is loaded pistol sitting in the drawer you told me to tell them about. There is nothing else in the drawer. No answers, only bullets. Stories aren’t about happy endings, you said. They’re about evoking tragedy, about tricking the reader into feeling happy about tragedy. The idea is as long as that ain’t me. I get that. I get the conundrum of self-examination that can only come through false self-reassurance – the what if that could be me argument. But isn’t the question really more about wasting time? Consider that everything here I have written for you. The question then becomes in writing for you have I wasted my time and consequently your time because in a sense you asked me to waste it because you asked me to write about what happens when people I don’t know a thing about all open the same door.
There was a scuffle. I think I remember a scuffle. I remember it killing me. A shouting match and then a punch to the face. All I had on was my underwear. I didn’t know Tommy kept a gun in his drawer. I didn’t know that for who knows how many years I had been sleeping in the same room as a gun.
On my way home some guy, I’ll call him G, comes up to me. He’s wearing a fedora and mentions some young guys he saw on CSPAN I remind him of. I tell him I don’t give a damn about who I remind him of. Then he puts his hand on my shoulder so I shrug it off and tell him to fuck himself. He laughs and steps back. As I walk away he calls out after me. The light is energy and energy is the light, he says. It took me forty years to figure that out. Don’t make the same mistake. I don’t know what he means by this, but I think he’s wrong. I don’t know why I think this. I just wish people would stop telling me things. I wish people would stop telling me the way I’ve been living is wrong. I wish people would stop telling me things that make me want to walk away.
He punched me harder than I thought was possible to punch a man. He punched me so hard my heart fell out, so hard the pain I felt made me feel embarrassed. That’s the only way to describe it. Embarrassment. I guess I should have known what was coming, what to expect from all of this and her, but even still none of what I knew I should have anticipated kept me from feeling like a jerk. I love both of you, she said. I think I heard her say she loved both of us the same but that didn’t make me feel any better or less embarrassed. It made me feel worse and maybe ashamed. Hearing her say that only made me feel like a fool and fight that bastard harder though I knew that there was no legitimate reason to be fighting him. Both of us knew this. His expression was a mirror of my own. I knew that when it was over the reason behind all of our fighting wouldn’t mean a thing because as soon as the fight started I knew that life as I knew it was over.
In the distance a shot rang out. Only then did I realize I was shooting the gun, that I was shooting them and everything. I blew apart the mirror and then I shot myself. I needed for everything around me to stop so I shot it. Because I was sick of talking and didn’t know how else to make it stop. Because I didn’t know how else to say I love you. Understand that I only say this because I love you. Because I don’t know how to talk about love. I only know about talking about saying it. In a dark room there is always a door. There may not be a window but you can typically count on there being a door. You can count on the fact that your act of coming here most likely involved a door, that regardless if you acknowledge that this is a way into all of this or a way out, there remains the option of the door. There remains the option of whatever you consider to be the door.
New Years Eve. E shows up unexpectedly. I have plans but cancel them. We drive to some girl’s place he knows, somewhere far out in Brooklyn. Once we’re inside he pulls out his bag and dices it out.
I waited a moment before I put the gun in my mouth. I didn’t cry. I just waited. I didn’t think about how my world had come to this. I only wondered why I wasn’t crying – why after all that had happened nothing had caused me to cry. I thought that maybe that was the lesson to be learned from all of this. I thought about what it means to come to a point in life where you realize that there is nothing around you that makes you cry – not that there is nothing worth crying about (there are always too many things) – but just that you are no longer capable of the actual act of crying and that in the face of death such inabilities mean nothing.
We pass the stuff back and forth and have our fun. First we speak of old times and then E asks me what I’ve been doing since he left. Are you still writing, he asks, so I tell that I am. Then he asks me what I am writing about. I’m writing a story about trying to write a melodrama but being unable to do so, I say. That sounds deep, he says. Does it? I say. Here, he says, have another line. You could definitely use one. Then I take the line and ask him what he’s been up to since he left, but he doesn’t go into things. He lights a cigarette and looks away from me back towards his girl across the room.
Even though I want to care, I don’t really want to care. Even though I know that I should care, I find it difficult to care. I find it a challenge to care about bullets and all this death.
After awhile I realize I am alone again. I may have dozed off. Maybe I just stopped paying attention to what was going on around me. Somewhere down the hallway I hear E and his girl. Through the window I see that it is already starting to get light outside. I stand up and walk out the door and let it slam behind me because I want it to.
There doesn’t have to be blood on the walls for things to come to this. That was the last thought that entered my mind before I pulled the trigger. It was the best and most hopeful though that I have ever entertained, one I knew additional thoughts could never live up to.
Outside the sky is gray and full of clouds. The air is cold, but feels moist. It is raining slightly. No one is around but me. The streets of Brooklyn have never seemed so silent. I pick up my pace and it feels good to breathe deep. It feels good to be awake and out so early. For the first time in awhile it feels good to be alone.
I pulled the trigger because I didn’t want to have to deal with feeling inadequate. I pulled the trigger because I found it impossible to believe that everything could be fine again. I found it impossible to keep believing in the lies I tried to tell myself. Because when you have a gun in your hand it is impossible for you to know how things will turn out for sure.
Then all around me the morning explodes into sounds. All the incarnations of love I’m not experiencing. My former tranquillity is lost but I don’t miss it. I can’t find it in myself to go back underground so instead I opt to walk home. The tangled streets lead me to the East River, which glistens under the morning grayness. The surface becomes a confusion of spheres with every drop of rain.
This is what I need both of you to hear if there is to be an end to this. I need you to hear this because for me this is the end. You will both go on existing but my existence is over. I don’t care which one of you wins. I’m sick of picking sides because there’s no point in picking sides. Shooting is more responsible. There’s no point in shooting anyone but myself.
I watch the reverberations in the water form bubbles that rise towards me. Bubble after bubble floating aimlessly in a world it cares little for. Just trying to find its own way home away from the world. Insulated by its own indifference. I identify with the bubbles because there are many factors we have in common. I become one with the bubbles and imagine floating away with them into the sky. Then I forget which way is up or down and that’s the end of this.
I shoot myself because both of you have been here forever but I haven’t been here forever. Some days I trick myself into believing we are the same, but today I know we are not the same.
I float away in solidarity with the bubbles content to be indifferent, my eyes barely open now, just feeling my way through the streets without actually feeling them. Without actually seeing them. Everything I hoped to find here, everything I hoped to see first becomes liquid and then fades to black. Because there are never any answers, only bullets. I let the bubbles become my bullet.
