Samantha and Sisyphus: Chemicals

She didn't use the word father, only thought it. She touched him where he lay in the bed. His skin was warm, breathing with her. She let the word she didn't say, all the words that were said and unsaid elsewhere throughout the Brooklyn tenement apartment and the walls spare of any decoration save their coats, outdoor attire. Not so much as a mirror, or one mass-produced stock photo of a landscape or a wild animal. 

He didn't guess at her thoughts. He only waited for her thoughts. 

"He's not the one who dropped you in the water. Is he." 

He grinned with only his right teeth, part of his right eye. He said, "No." 

She put her head on his chest, her soft exotic hair like a pony's, where his ancient reborn eyes could count the follicles like straw & rice until the first day of time where it brought them back to the cautious serenity of the room. He thought of her feeble smile and how nothing could erase it from her. 

She'd spent long hours thinking of Jacob & Katrina although she didn't know their names. They were unblemished pieces of paper randomly and deductively composed over, over, over by stranger Americans where they drifted like sound and water, made, forgotten, partly remembered. In there, Jacob's eyes looking at Samantha's eyes and Samantha remembering. 

"That man still follows me sometimes, you know." 

The mention of the unnamed-Levanarskie bothered him. It made him ponder homicide. He realized killing anyone would make his life more difficult. 

"I was in the deli last week," she said. "And I could smell him. I smell't him before I even saw him." 

"What did you do?" 

"I already had my things and I was waiting in line. He was in a different aisle, in a different part of the store." As if to herself, "You'd think I'd get used to it." To Troy, "You Never Get Used To It." It shook his hardwon sense of austerity. "This fucking creep, I mean. If I say no it means no, right?" 

The issue of her prostitution never bothered him. He was very modern. She had a body as firm as a tennisball and every fiber & sinew of it was as graceful as a wooden violin. Why would such a creature lower herself to working in overheated clothing factories or pushing rickety coalcarts to wealthy people's houses when the cost of her future could be harvested from her own being? 

"Did he say anything?" 

"He never says anything. He doesn't say anything to anyone around him and they certainly don't have any fucken thing to say to him... I wasn't even gonna tell you. I was gonna tell you the other day and then I thought it was just dumb." 

She'd stopped talking. 

"It's not dumb," he said. "Tell me anything you want to." 

She looked at Sisyphus. "Alright." Then she put her head on his chest.  

**** 

In the time since Sisyphus's 1926 death, as it is currently referred to, various shared/intergenerational touchstones that should naturally emerge according to the consequence of life blossomed in a multitude of thinktanks throughout the remaining 48 states. The presumed order of these touchstones is: (from birth) the nature of hunger; one's relationship to sex; money economies; media (esp. film); and comprehending the genetics of a family bloodline. 

Samantha's occupation (forgive the pun) escorted her neatly thru all of these stages...save the sudden death of her beloved Troy. 

She would sleep later and later as the summer months went towards August & September as if meaning to coerce him back to life with her memories. Looking through the stationed-binoculars on the pier before the Atlantic Ocean. Asking him for extra quarters. Making him look, or trying to anyway at what she saw through the lens. 

And certain days at the public libraries and the Museum of Natural History when she would hang on his arm when he studied jaguars or 8 foot tall black bears as though to jog his memory and discern his likely origins by imaging how he'd interacted with them, again and again, to find little within their promise. His brain was drunk with its own dopamine yet his eyes had an alertness in them and his arms & legs and everything that ran between them to each other was like some crazy-ladder of deficit, strength and courage that even death itself could only momentarily pause if breath found its way back into his lungs. 

She'd slept, and when she could no longer sleep she'd remove herself to what remained of that day and look at the early twilight of Historic Brooklyn and wonder what new sorrow should find her.  

Of course, by December of that year, with her compulsive thoughts of suicide withering like the string of a decomposing t-shirt, she'd begun -- she'd self-initiated a years-long research project on who Peter Nicholas Levanarskie was prior to his horrid stalking of an ex-prostitute and his successful murder of an innocent man. 

Many years would pass for her. 

Of course, no more years would pass for Peter Nicholas Levanarskie, Augustine "Auggie" Grauerholz and (more likely than not) the third man present at the rally/protest for fair wages and conditions for workers. 

Lest it be forgotten or ignored:These were the only men to continue shooting at the protesters after the Commissioner and the New York City Police Force ordered a cease-fire having noted the hard cracks of live ammunition and not rubber bullets. (Tough shit.) 

Grauerholz and Levanarskie would be hanged for their crimes in a building that was demolished in 2029 colloquially referred to as The Tombs. They were killed by rabid fellow inmates. 

Nice. 

**** 

The deep thump of the vehicle and where it crackerjacked some vital thing from the beast it hit, like some improvised siren of bone and metal called down 19th Street unmistakable from anything. The enchanted pair of them paused in unison. 

The full, slowing breath of the animal took Sisyphus as he had become known to her and she suspected with him some odd, disturbingly meaningful premonition, not dissimilar to say if a horse had materialized through some window/portal of liquid nothingness. The animal's slowing body with the question of its life trickling upwards like a thousand scattered dots drifting through all the lines and curves of the atmosphere. 

The man driving the Ford Pick-up maneuvered it to the right side of the street, pointing just into the way of, of all places Glacier Avenue. (Mostly when other people in our office share notefiles with some carefully improvised group or party in the matter of entropy, you can't help but notice there are three (3) prominent kinds of entropy: the one where materials and the patterns they generate breakdown; the one wear things traveling along a similar, shared trajectory -- like birds forming V-shapes if they plan to travel long distances as a group; and then there's the third form, the third door that only very rarely gets 'opened' or emerges. 

What happened with Sisyphus and Samantha and the dog getting hit and the fact that Peter Nicholas Levanarskie all happened to be on 19th Street is something practicing set-theorists could find in any number of books or stories or such throughout time it can be mildly unnerving to an especially sensitive mind. This isn't to say the consideration of freewill should be dismissed. Or that dogs.... 

So the driver hit the dog. He pulled over and got out of the truck as the unmistakable sound caught the attention of the roughly dozen people standing in the vicinity among whom were Samantha and Sisyphus and nowhere especially that he'd catch your eye if your weren't looking for him was Peter Nicholas Levanarskie. 

Keeping track of all this would have been as simple and convenient a task as catching a thousand marbles rolling down a halfpipe in a skatepark. It's things like that why we believe Sisyphus at all when he tells us he is sure he's died multiple times. All his scar tissue is tucked away in the supplemental-if-not-supplemental-supplemental gyri of his brain. 

What had effectively happened in a general sort of way was that Sisyphus went to the poor animal where it was like some broken god of unmeasured luck and in a semi-frozen way, astute yet emotional, and he bent to his knee so to place a hand under the animal's face where it met the ground and he put the other hand as you would and lifted the tragic creature into his stolid arms. 

The driver came over apologizing, desperate for whatever available credibility someone might give him. His words fell into the gathering strangers and theirs fell into his and with little other consequence save Levanarskie squirming his way into the tangled crowd and beginning to say things to Sisyphus, whom he recognized as Troy and thought of solely as the one who took Samantha from him (regardless it wasn't his decision to make?). He criticized the way Sisyphus was cradling the animal's head, and how much it showed that his path in life was as good as fucked if he wasn't going to get on a more professionally oriented path. (What this path would have been, in light of Levanarskie's untimely death in a building that no longer has ceilings, is unclear-approaching-mystifying. IMGOF (*I mean god of fuck) 

Samantha was desensitized. As is often the case of those who survive their largely unprotected lives and generate and sustain a kind of longterm-moment-to-moment stoicism, her body became a living-breathing-library of heuristics, like anatomical reference-points, the manual of which was conveniently written in her belly. 

If you wanted a quick literary formula for this you could say: there are chemicals and there are chemicals.  

Little else begging for description really happened. The man driving the truck, at some point over-satisfied with Levanarskie's lectures on the banal and his proselytization of a faith more like commemorative Dale Earnhardt dinerware than even the most wretched wandering hobo of some lazy-hindu description might be accused of...and the driver agreed to drive the dog to a vet who might see about what could be done if anything could be done as he'd hit the poor animal and not any other way around. 

And, later, much, much, considerably, later from right now, Sisyphus would remember the sound the vehicle made when it surprised the dog as he fell into the last-moments of that life and the tangible world went up from him and he descended to that familiar darkness. 

****