History of Writing, part two, number 8. Part three, first chapter/s
Exile & The Kingdom of Gears
Home is where you make it, and nowhere else. It can be invented. It can be found. It can be created, stolen, taken away. Home is where Larry Fiskovitz was going one rainy afternoon, in the year 2034, on a Thursday in August, when the cool, drizzling rain pattered through the sky, splashing onto his crisp, black windbreaker/skicoat and he stood on the corner of Marigold and Broca Avenue, attempting to catch a cab the old-fashioned way: by hailing one out of the casual, constant herd of the rest of the traffic. Meanwhile, another man by the name of Jerry Ratbaum, a resident of the New Life Center situated in Hammlett New York (formerly Queens) was piloting his "cab"/a 2016 Ford Chrysler with a rebuilt engine and the assorted technological add-ons like advanced gps radar for superior navigation meant to provide the driver (in some--perhaps unkempt, circles, "Captain") with a convenient shorthand in order to collect more passengers, etc. if only the computerized pharma...
PART THREE: I.
ReplyDelete~
Sisyphus's body ached with the double-reincarnation. He'd no idea who Jerry Ratbaum or Larry Fiskovitz were nor a great many other things that had changed since his 1926 life. He knew that his body felt like a potroast, kicked in the ribs and with painful hands and knees dog-walking on the sidewalk, with barely the strength to cringe or squeeze the discomfort from his eyes.
The city moved in a soft, white haze around him, gentle in its indifference, some time in the lazy hours of the early afternoon.
By reflex alone, he found his way to a wall (a pharmacy storefront, of all places) and he set the palm of his left hand to the brick and with slim chance of determination, pressed his legs, (his) torn-boot feet to the ground. Nauseous, scared, angry: Sisyphus reeled from the ghastly torture produced by his body, wanting to be dead without qualification or appeal, wanting to prove his wrath the belligerantly insensitive forces that cast him upon this unlikely earth.
The street held little resemblance to the one/s he'd known. The sturdy, dignified neighborhoods of yesteryear had become gradually, then decidedly transformed into something between a family theme park and some cybergeek's plastic wetdream recreation of the 1980s. It was a world of yuppies who didn't identify themselves as yuppies and those whose financial security depended on them and whatever remained of people who wanted more than to live in a paradise-bubble of digital sound effects and machines that said, "I love you."
The sight of a dockhand apparently climbing from death's door, the toxic, corrosive, burnt-rubber scent of him about as welcoming as euthanizing your own pet for a modest discount...was plainly not what anyone strolling along that avenue would find familiar. They were a characteristically delicate people, who moved like silk & powder and with a heightened, almost unsettling degree of control in all they did, no matter how unimportant. They were not oblivious to car accidents or pain or the body's imperfect relationship to its own death. However, nor were they curious to learn of these matters firsthand. So the stranger was something that was quickly ignored, assuming another would aid him, or, better still, divine intervention would settle without fuss nor hassle.
Here, a young man, fashionably dressed, with sculpted facial hair and a red baseball cap with a sports logo printed on its brow, slowed in his travel upon taking note of Sisyphus, and the young man approached the hero of heroes with a kind of practiced familiarity. "Hey, bro," he said, "what're you doin' out here like this?"
Sisyphus swallowed what tasted like blood and straightened himself and tried to find the person the voice had come from. He saw the continuing fog of the world, undisturbed in its indifference, and little else.
"Is you homeless or something? What's up, dog?"
He suddenly felt the urge to vomit, but reflexively discovered his intestines were unresponsive to this wish. Contempt, anguish: the rules of karma and the rules of biology beared humbling comparison to each other. Perhaps what the Buddha discovered in his own living heart at that time was was revealed to him by the same introverted contemplation that the existence of germs was revealed to Ignaz Semmelweiss, or how the force of electricity had signaled its presence through the fabric of unconsciousness to Benjamin Franklin. Patience, want, the requirement to overcome misfortune: they all demanded a certain equanimity for their success. And in the painful, confusing ineffability that Sisyphus seemed to be permanently attached, he dearly yearned for equanimity.
"Maybe I need to call you a doctor, bro? You got any family?"
The vomit came. With a hot snap of sound that rattled the very air around both men and the lazy humidity of the day, the random & awful liquid whacked upon the pavement like some crazy semaphore within such a map-legend of the past & the future could be read.
ReplyDelete"Fuck the what?" the young man begged. As though the vomit had secretly come from him or reminded him of some personal revelation he'd struggled to repress for a long time. In his fresh attire, in his casual obliviousness to all that was grim or cruel in nature, the young man was remarkably at odds with his predicament, like, perhaps, an escaped puppydog who'd returned home lonely and was greeted by a house littered with the sudden corpses of his owners. "You can' act it like that! What's wrong with you?"
His agony turned somewhat towards relief. A cold calm rippled through his blood. He heard a distorted sort of music where the torture was replaced with anything else. As though he had experienced, directly, an unthinkable rebirth from hell-being to grateful demi-god in the seconds from the young man's arrival to this moment. The white haze and fog of the city marginally withdrew. A dull sophistication entered his being. He looked at the young man with the authority of a guardian, or even a probation officer. He said, "Where am I?"
"You in Brooklyn," he said. Then, "Bitch." He said, "What'd you just come back from Mars or some shit?"
Mars: the name rang a bell, but neither the god of war nor the celestial body were considered: It was merely a place within the eternal cosmos, or lesser still: a guess neither reasonable nor tempting efforts of reason. Sisyphus said, "I've seen Rome and I've seen Manhattan, but I've yet to enter the place we emerged from."
The queer limerick of a response only made the young man loathe Sisyphus further. He was close to- and ready for violence. In a different setting, perhaps under the cover of night or in some part of the city more shadow than inhabited, the would-be sportsplayer would've lunged at- and assaulted the hero of heroes and completed the work that time & existence had initiated a long, long time before his arrival by punching and hating and destroying his earthly form and returning it to the parallel plain with which Sisyphus was quite disdainfully familiar with.
As it was, an employee of the pharmacy exited the store to inquire about the unfolding scene. "Everything okay out here, gentlemen?" He saw the red, viscous aftermath of Sisyphus's nausea. "I hope I don't have to call the police."
ReplyDeleteThe player jerked with paranoia. If the police arrived at that moment, had seen the vomit and the battered-looking Sisyphus coupled with him in this infuriated state, they'd surely request identification from both individuals, and upon scanning that of the young man would become instantly aware that he was a recovering (*"recovering") opioid addict with a record of petty theft, breaking and entering, and (some of the most uninspired) racist graffiti within and tangential to Brooklyn, New York. That is: fucked: He'd no tolerance, and even less poise, to deal with that level of bother. "Forget about the police. This dude needs a doctor."
That word too -- doctor -- met Sisyphus's ear with a certain strangeness, but invited more thinking than the notion he'd flown to Earth from some neighboring planet in our solar system. He looked from the player to the pharmacy employee and back and forth once more, he said, "I've been shot."
"Shot?" said the pharmacy man with dry disbelief. "Can't say I've heard much of gang activity in this area for some time. Are we being invaded by Puerto Rico or some other newly discovered shithole island off the coast?"
He remembered Levanarskie. He remembered the captain of DIck's Button. He remembered Persephone.
"Ain't no one been shot, bro. This dude's just fucked up."
The pharmacy man studied Sisyphus for bullet holes and other wounds. In his fried clothes and horrible condition he inspired a profound sense of pity, which the pharmacy man readily neglected in his searching. Homelessness and the nomadic schedules of drunks and ne'er-do-wells were almost mythical things in 2036. For at least 20 years, America had taken cautionary, borderline-hopeless steps towards eradicating the pestilence of substance abuse among its citizenry, as well as virtually anything displeasing with the facts of mortal existence, and what remained of the uncomplimentary affairs had been corralled into the recently-erected New Life Centers that were posted selectively and discreetly where the former slums had been in New York and those other places in the country that such selfish and embarrassing disease could not be undone into the memory of itself. Equally so, there was no obvious blood on Sisyphus save perhaps the slightest marks in the corners of his mouth from where he'd expelled the trauma of his caustic re-entry to the living world, and the tears and blemishes upon his clothing were clearly produced by fire of some sort, but what kind -- in the context of the rest of Sisyphus -- proved a rather un-cooperative mystery. "I gather you two aren't related in any way?" said the pharmacy man to his chance of a partner.
"I think I doubt it," he said. "I just met this idiot."
Samantha hadn't though. She'd awoken to the tease of premonition that same morning, in the retirement home that had adopted her some years previous, and the psychic happening prompted the super-centaurian into a cautiously hopeful attitude, whereupon she brewed a pot of coffee and sat down in the community dining-area to devise a plan to address the feeling. She smiled at the memory of the man from 1926. She (of course) was lacking serious agreement from the logical to support these nostalgic feelings, but no matter. They were at least spared any record of compulsive obsessiveness, as in the storied decades between his murder and her return to New York from Appalachia she'd wisely chose to renounce her earthly connection to him and endure the karma that was inseparable from her natural lust until it was finally worn down to the weight & pressure of something little more burdensome than a dead butterfly in one's pocket.
ReplyDeleteShe'd finished her coffee, washed the cup and spoon and set them in a plastic tray beside the sink, then swiftly seen to her bathe & dress and went into the world towards a place without name, with only direction.
She saw her beloved there, with the boy in the red cap and the man from the pharmacy. Her heart filled with incomparable joy. She moved like a girl hardly beyond her 20s, and as she took Sisyphus into her arms, kissed his delicious mouth with hers, he knew once more that his trials had found him again.
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History of Writing: Part 3, Number One, part two ~The door of the pharmacy closed, clasped, and the boy with the red cap was alone with the pre-era lovers, his face like a potato unconvinced of its vegetable nature. His hard breathing. His massive senses in a limited body. He was the first of a lengthy score (that is perhaps still growing at time of this writing) to be troubled by and to trouble the questions that begged inside his brain. He glared at her, intensely mystified. Her appearance said almost nothing of the years she'd lived: there were the subtlest wrinkles about her face and her skin was neither over- nor under-exposed to the sun, and her hair, that fell to her ear-neck line, was a faded auburn touched with silver, and her movement was unaffected by anything feeble nor grotesque. She'd exerted herself upon the much-wounded Sysiphus with a wise dexterity, careful, loving, quietly horny, and he in turn made predictable effort to respond, something like a small child trying to push a car out of the mud. The stranger continued speechless for some long seconds without further intention. He said, "Do you know this guy or something?"
ReplyDeleteShe wet her mouth. "I've never known anyone else like him."
Though this body, like the one before, was nearly a foot taller than Samantha's, he fell to her shoulder & her breast without care, letting all of the dirty weight of it into her capable arms.
"Shouldn't you be in school or something?" she said.
"I'm a 3-c," he responded. "That shit's for somebody else."
'Dear god,' she thought. 'Another one. They'll probably have him running his own Halfway in five years...if he isn't a client of one.' "Well, in any case," she said, "would you mind leaving me and my old friend here to our business?"
Obviously offended, with those cow-eyes and that cartoonishly bulbous nose and that voice like molasses brought to life with artificial estrogen, the stranger said, "Whatever bitch, I got better things to do anyway."
"Happy hunting."
And he moved away down the street and he was gone.
"I've missed you, you piece of shit. I have so many fucking questions."
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While the lessons of her southern pilgrimage and the monastic world she was to enter had been readily sewn through her memory, her being were of a certain piece that could be lifted to the forefront of her mind almost upon reflexive will, Samantha had let the minute details of those hallowed years slip beneath a veil of the inconsequential & the unimportant. And it was not until Sisyphus became the hot matter/subject of the week of broadcast news, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, when I and the co-authors of this document came to learn of their place in this world-- not until then their contents had been excavated from that neuronal hibernation and took the breath of attention from life once more.
ReplyDeleteShe could not recall with specificity the date she crossed from New York into the unknown continent waiting for her, but concluded with stubborn faith it'd been no later than the Fall of 1931. By then she'd had enough her own pity (and certainly that of others) to weed among her possessions to sort the useful and dear from the excess of their close-tos and lesser-than replacements, and she packed these things into a trunk and a pair of cardboard-suitcases, and the trunk and suitcases into a cab, which took her to Grand Central Station. In the station, her loneliness became a kind of opportunity. In the hot press of air, the steady percussion of locomotors thudding, clacking, spinning, resting, relieving themselves, etc: the 29-year-old girl/woman found a crisp, snug serenity within herself. Her beloved's untimely demise had, most unwantedly, earned her a status of both fortune-teller and psychiatric patient in need of either mildly insulting or utterly banal advice. Men and women alike came to her home (uninvited) or stopped her rudely in the street and the convenience store to share some dull gossip refashioned into wisdom and deeply heartfelt consolation. They came at her with faces that were all but parodies of themselves, meat-blobs with features that became briefly distinct in their harassment and communication-- a steeply arched eyebrow, or a mouth drawn down like a deflated float, or stretching ears that dripped away like some stale approximation of a Salvidor Dali...or something like that. And their voices pushed the words where the words had no logical place...to a logical or decent mind. She'd feel her stomach folding in like an infinite deck of cards, and for some months she made attempts to entertain her would-be consolers, but each time felt herself searching about for the exits, or a way further up the street, or reaching for the door, the lock, the bolt, the chain.
In the train station, as she remembered these things, the automated place around her was like the fortune-teller missing in everyone's accounts, and it told her a far more promising life stood wide and immovably before her, so long as she had eyes to find it.
She arrived in Tennessee a few days later.
....
The history of everything seemed to shine in the trees that towered with fairy-tale splendor and invincible majesty about the two acres of property that seated the stone & iron theatre that was Anjelica Station. Their roots dug into the soil for more years than perhaps the combined living ages of all people in that town, had stood witness to all the births and passings of centuries, if not millennia, and the station itself, of glass cleaned daily, floor swept, mopped by janitors who weren't permitted to use many of the stations resources...and wooden surfaces waxed no less than four times per calendar year...the station itself fell as neatly as a postage stamp at the foot of their cosmologically gigantic assembly where it feathered its heavenly branches to the floor of an endless sky. There were approximately a hundred other passengers on the train when it carried Samantha and her trunk and her anti-glamorous suitcases and a pair of conductors in her car helped her with the heavier item and she carried the smaller luggage almost like sad groceries that anticipated their eventual disposal. Mr Johnson met her himself, standing on the platform in the professional wear of a gentleman. He'd sent a photograph in his last letter sometime in the Spring of 1930 so that she wouldn't fret her ability to discern him from the crowd, and by luck or design she thought (then, or many years later) he was sporting an identical or near-identical outfit when they met in person. "He was graceful and generous beyond some strange girl wandering into the world like that could hope for," she told us, the creators of this document, when we interviewed her last year. "He was kind without phoniness, proud but never condescending. At least as I remember. He never did creepy things like manage my hair or my clothing like so many of the boys -- or so-called men -- I'd known in the city. People said later, maybe a month or two after I was staying in the house, that he might try to rape me -- as they said he'd molested his own children and sometimes cruelly mistreated his wife. But it plainly wasn't so. They were just jealous. Houston -- he let me call him Mr. Houston after the first year, which of course I was too nervous and shy to do until he..." here she smiled with inner humor, "slyly cajoled me into doing. He told me to call him Mr. Houston and his wife and I got along quite well after the first few weeks of breaking-in. And those two children could be somewhat intimidating-- I thought they were intimidating, even though they weren't: they were just children and I was self-conscious because of used-to being a whore."
ReplyDelete"You're not a whore," one of us said from his seat in the parlor of the old folks home.
ReplyDelete"Oh, there's no shame in it, young man. It's just a word to me, now. People make an absurd fuss about these things and they see pride & tragedy in everything the least bit controversial or intimate.
"I was a whore. I make no qualms about it. And I had every right to be a whore. It was my choice to make and I made it. It kept me out of those ghastly sweatshops and those dreadfully depressing shelters as a young woman. I never had a pimp. The men certainly weren't any more skilled in the art of lovemaking than I was when I began.Their hands were hard and greedy and you couldn't break the worst of them, which was most of them, from the delusion they were Don Juan or some pitiful shit. So if I was a whore, they were dependent on a whore to become men. Which they typically failed at regardless after the fact. Judging by *my* assessment of men in the city in those days.
"This is besides the point. Well..." A small, previously undiscovered genius seemed to move in her of a sudden. "Perhaps nothing is truly besides the point, it's only that people fail to see the natural...affinities between things. We're always in such a rush to expose or conceal things that no one makes the effort to bother anymore what anything has to do with anything else. People are ridiculous. They can be sweet and brilliant and all sorts of other things, but I think most of the time they're just simply ridiculous."
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