The History of Writing -- Part Two (I)
The uneven sound of truth that rises and rolls over water, over water where the shadows of fish flicker beneath the waves in the Atlantic's futile, indefatigable salty approach to Dock 181-72 oppressed by the early hour and the Brooklyn sun's grainy fireworks glow, and the horns of ships painted red or white disappearing, disappeared where Troy Thompson (Sisyphus) and Charles Redford secured one end or another of an eight foot long/two foot wide/two foot tall (*deep) waxed oak container carrying gun parts they had no formal business to inquire the natural or official fate of, and with stoic dexterity maneuvered the crate away from the hoard of the dozens of others of the same or similar or complimentary paraphernalia and parcels and as their feet only quietly awkwardly tipped from one to another as they moved along the floor of the vessel and they gripped as partners, both with meaty fists enlarged by repetition, flexed with daily exposure to the sea, and Troy walked cautiously backwards in his pre-Union Doc Martin's as the men came to the vessel's exit-ramp that pointed to the receiving area of 181-72 where the sulphur glow burned in the moldy & fungus-rich morning, touching gently to their cavities in its crude bouquet towards an opposite horizon and away from where Troy and Charles set the cargo on a pallet where it waited for a forklift to be replaced into temporary storage.
They regained their breath. They let the strain evaporate from their nerves. Either man asked few questions of the other yet there was a razorous breath of knowledge attached between them. Sound of the sea and foghorns scaffolding towards implied diamonds in their ears (in their aural canals) as they each braced their hands against their own hips and straightened their backs, their lungs, and made steps back up the ramp to collect the next crate.
Troy Thompson liked his job. It was profoundly different than what he'd experienced in Medieval and Ancient times. Those eras contained little, if any, of the machinery and the landscape that New York proffered seemingly by default. The world and everything in it was a satisfyingly textured thing. It was dirty, cut with thousands of sounds at any moment. It entered up through his boots and down from the heavens at least since Uranus. Like a drumbeat with no collision or echo, the city and every city people mentioned in conversation was like some perfect animal he could only dream of, but the dream stayed through the ineffable entropy, its paroxysm & undulation like..
Charles Redford acknowledged him. "You ready?"
"Lift." "Lift."
The Statue of Liberty wasn't looking at them, but it was there. From the day he was rescued and taken aboard Dick's Button by that ship's crew, when Sisyphus had showered and changed his clothes, he'd gone topside for no reason he could think of. The day and the sea met his resurrected form with a kind of alien amiability, an earth that contained none of the people or institutions of whom he was even scarcely familiar. The fish and the traffic and the palpability of concrete aggressively washed into him and he wanted to stay for at least a hundred years.
He did not find his work to be tedious, and he considered it odd, dismaying whenever his coworkers or New York citizens without anguished and made halfhearted, flippant, little protests about each little hindrance or distraction or requirement related to their occupation. He often wanted to put his hand on their chest, delicately, and tell the man complaining (*women wouldn't be invited to these opportunities for over another ten years) (and Sisyphus wouldn't be there to see it) and he, Troy Thompson, merely swallowed his confusion and contempt, let it down.
"Damn, Thompson. There's no delay in you. Every other partner they give me seems to walk like he's half-octopus and smells about half as good but you move these energy coffins like you were settin' out luggage for a train voyage. You positive you ain't e'er done this before?"
Sisyphus didn't know how to respond. He remembered the name Captain Richardson had given him, the one forged upon his driver's license, s.s. card, work permit-- but the name of Troy Thompson had somewhat jarred him and in its jarring he found a gulf of possibility lingering in the form of its title, its question. The other men sometimes teased him like he thought he was going to be a millionaire if he moved enough crates in a day, a week, a lifetime. Nothing like the abrasive, relentless, direly needy small talk of future generations, but you get the idea.
"You wouldn't believe me if I told you, Charles."
"Call me Chuck."
"You wouldn't believe me if I told you, Chuck."
Chuck's face showed sympathy. He knew that Troy didn't mean to beguile him by saying something that was conveniently familiar. He knew Troy was a man who was very quiet on the job. Where, on average, the other men would typically make slanted excuses about their performance or responsibilities, or else they spoke of their labor and their pay and their lives in a condensed appreciation of what truth they mentioned... He knew Troy to say what was on his mind, directly, and if he'd no opinion or answer he'd tell you so... Charles, Chuck looked at Troy with a kind of meditative excitement.
"Can I ask you something, Troy?"
He thought a moment. "Go ahead. I don't see why not."
"What do you think of this Union business everyone's been jawing about? I mean...that is...what're the odds of anything like that seeing the light of day?"
"I'm afraid I'll need more information. What's a Union?"
Redford thinned his lips with quiet pleasure. The conversation's irony was vaguely fortifying, however peculiar. "That's what I'd like to know," to himself. To Sisyphus, to Thompson, he said, "It's this idea that if they don't start paying us better wages we can tell them that we'll all stop working, you know, in unison, until they pay us. You know, until they give us what we all know the workforce is worth." He said, "What do you think about that?"
Sisyphus, Troy, enjoyed a good question, and this was a good question. He said, "I used to push a boulder up a hill for what seemed the entirety of eternity." He was undistracted by the surprisingly candid remark. "There, no one spoke of wages. The heat of existence soaked into one's flesh like the breath of an unlikely Satan. No one spoke of wages." He turned at the eastern horizon. Diamond melange of office buildings, agencies, delis, skyscrapers.
"I mean, they find all the money to make this shit, and they pay someone to watch the door and to lock the door at night: When are we supposed to get a decent share? I mean, that doesn't make any sense, right?"
He'd been snapped out of his troubled musing by Redford's tone. "I'm slow to understanding money." Some line in his face begged the other's explanation.
"I used to think I could, maybe ten years ago. Most of the time we're lucky to have any money at all. An extra dollar for cigarettes or diapers I'd say you're as far ahead as a wise man ought to expect. Not that I pretend to be wise. I'm just... I know what I'm talking about."
Sisyphus thought of how money was printed. It was nothing, a singularity before it was printed. "It's meant to be traded. How should they count every effort?"
Neither moved at the question.
"Well," Redford put in before they'd return to the duties of their shift, "Figure for now the people holding it need it more."
The problem was drowned hopelessly in obfuscation and circumlocution and it would continue for over another century, long after Redford and anyone had turned away in the nothingness of the Earth's rotations to sleep in environs without form or sound. In the meantime, Troy Thompson performed his duties without protest or braggadocio, sleeping the on the couch of an older woman familiar to Captain Richardson. Persephone would never re-enter the landscape of his dreams, however some elusive new muscles began to grow inside of him.
****
Sisyphus said, "Where are we going?" He leaned his weight on her, the wide avenue of buildings and sparse traffic and the warm sun peeling across the cityscape. The extremes of his pain subsided to something marginally more tolerable but a stubborn itch of delirium had seamlessly replaced it. He pivoted back & forth between his shocked-apprectiation of the world and the terrifying imbalance within himself.
ReplyDelete"I'm taking you home, you foul mess. "Where have you been? How did you get here?"
There was no space in that brain for questions. By natural reflex, his body had muted all signals irrelevant to its immediate survival and preservation. It was everything to stand, to look and blink and stumble. He trusted his feet, the organization of his bones. He trusted her and had no means to weigh the uncertainty that trust invited.
People saw them. Some stared, some looked away. Perhaps they secretly imagined Sisyphus and her as some half-crippled man in his 20s, who had money for personal assistance but not for new clothes or effective treatment with his disability, and they imagined her as a resilient woman just over the hump of middleage, only too stoic and proud to relent in her efforts but rather carry the burden of the mythical personality like some test of her deepest vigilance and her faith in equanimity. Perhaps they were only disgusted, or mildly alarmed. At any rate, Samanthatoted him and allowed his leisure to control her excitement.
They reached the retirement center about an hour later. There was a man standing by himself in front of the building, smoking a cigarett. Samantha recognized him and was glad for the opportunity to be amiable. "Good afternoon, George!'
He took a drag on the cigarett, ashed, exhaled. "Good afternoon, Miss Samantha." He said, "I see you've brought home a friend today." His eyes moved over the charred hulk of Sisyphus. "Looks like he had quite a night."
"Yes, well..." she began, arranging and rearranging Sisyphus in her arms like an awkward bag of groceries. "He's not the debaucherous scoundrel he looks like at the moment. Really. I was gonna talk to Margarett in Admin as I could get a hold of her. Have you seen her?"
ReplyDeleteGeorge continued smoking his cigarett. "Earlier this morning. She might be in the office still."
"Oh good, good." How was she supposed to handle this? How was she going to tell anyone that she'd woken up with a strange feeling for someone who'd by all natural records been killed during a worker's demonstration over a century previously, only to be violently pounded through a an unlikely wormhole in time & space to wind up in a future he could hardly have imagineed in his own lifetime let alone found an effective method to travel to? Sh'ed never been forthcoming with anyone about her actual life & place in the world. (Except for Laura, in the 1950s and 60s. But we'll get to that in due time.) The way Margarett in Administration understood her Samantha had been born in New York City but moved to rural Tennessee when she was very young, her father having moved the family there upon being hired by an advertising agency interested with his proficiency in digital software during the Internet Boom of the 1990s (a fabrication she'd deeply impressed herself with when she first imagined it, and a far more likely explanation of herself than what actual reality had proffered.) As it was, she'd explained to Margarett, her father died of sudden heart failure in 2028, leaving Samantha and her mother his considerable savings. Samantha's mother, Samantha told Margarett, was a plainly unagreeable woman. She'd held little, if any, true affection for her husband and her daughter, and took her inheritance as soon as it was available to her and fled to California in the early months of 2029, less than one week after Jacob Button was interred at the cemetery. Margarett, hearing this story from the then 130-something-year-old Samantha who scarcely looked a day past natural middleage, felt something suspiciously convenient about this as she heard it, but saw as well a rare,uplifting kindness and even bravado in the misfortunate woman's account. Samantha did, for what it's worth, have all the documentation required to present herself as she did, and she kept the name provided to her at birth: Fitzgerald, to avoid any problems that would conjure, manifest themselves as being a stranger who'd been unable to recall her own name of a sudden, say, when talking to a police officer or some random figure of authority. (The first of these were a gift of Laura's, as a sort of joke, in 1972, when the handful or so of whitehairs sewn through Samantha's lush, auburn crown began to blur back into the nothingness they'd emerged from -- without remedy or intervention whatsoever on Samantha's part. The first documents said Miss Fitzgerald were born in 1922, a year treasured by both girl/ladies, for it was when Mr.Clarence Darrow defended Mr. John Scopes for his teaching schoolchildren the theory of evolution in a time when religious mania and the presence of cult-responsibility was not nearly so suppressed in the coded language and mannerisms it enjoys now in the 2030s. In so many words Laura had suggested that Samantha were some extraordinary recapitulation of human biology and the handsome grace which she applied to everything were all the evidence required of it. The driver's license, the social security card and the birth certificate were merely dressing on the cake of her seemingly unaccountable perfection.)
"Well," said George, bringing her down from whatever delirious introspection she'd entered into upon her second "good" -- "let me know if you need me."
ReplyDeleteSisyphus swept past George, as if love itself had activated some profoundly private nerve, fat with hibernation, explosively ripe with its potential. He heard the soft chorus of voices of old people talking about different meaningless things. The hospitable chill and the unobtrusive, pale light of the old folks home slipped upon him with unsuspicious ease. The old peoples' voices had a similarly bewildered twang as the men on Dick's Button once had but even in his compromised state Sisyphus had the psychological integrity to realize he was no longer in 1926 anymore. Whether his future cohabitants at the New Life Center did was another matter.
****