The History of Writing: PART TWO: R.N. 6 (S's + The Future)

Premonition bleeds into insomnia deftly as a mouse surveying a stone floor of some anonymous building when, where 'Troy' opened his halfnumb eyes where he lay in the bed beside Samantha, Samantha sleeping. His nude body tolerably stiff in the vacancy of the bedclothes and the quiet room. Brooklyn everywhere without expiration. 

In the week before that death, the dockworkers, machinists, engineers had arrived, collectively, at the sobering & final understanding that the careful, accommodating approach they'd thus far maintained as the spearhead of their persuasion for better pay, healthier environs and reasonable working conditions had arrived at some natural apogee (in so many words) and some do-or-die atavistic gesture was all that would satisfy their position if any further progress was to be regarded seriously. 

They were going to rally & protest. They were less than 200 men, total, a pithy fraction for such a thing by today's standards. In each one's mind the mass of them standing, shifting foot to foot, perhaps, on the Pier of 181-72 like some stern cacophony of amateur professionalism staring-down the bitter, greedy demands of their so-called benevolent employers. Each of their few number to the last with a naked want for fairness and respect. Each of them the son and grandson, etc. of the first people of Earth, and the hero of heroes among them; some previously unfathomable effort of gestalt. 

He felt the thoughts of centuries past raising, rolling into themselves like quiet waves, with the crispness of statues, humming of the inevitable like the air that should add to the fierous  material of lungs, heart, bone, like the shape of cave walls within a soul, like the thunder of some memory that refused completion and erasure, both. 

His insomnia reminded him of Persephone in the rare way of what cannot be conjured independently yet is semi-permanently, semi-permanently wed & sewn into the very fabric of existence. 

He stood up from the bed and the blankets and into the darkness of that docile, cherub night. Figure of angry grace and kind determination. This impossible poem of strength. Where his feet moved across the floor like a mouse cleaning its nails on wood. And he went into their small, private bathroom to urinate and urinated and rinsed his hands in the sink and then returned to the bed beside her. 

Levanarskie, Grauerholz and the third man might well have been awake at that hour, massaging L-E shells in their palms, in the separate dimness of their rooms, each one already dead in the phantom world of a terrifyingly loud animosity. Even now, over 110 years after the fact, the question of their existence unanswerable. 

In other ages, they easily would have been Klansmen, Social Fascists, the most racist/sexist/repulsive Hell's Angels, Interpreters of Reagonomics or, god help us yet: The ones who voted for Donald Trump three elections in a row. As it was, they only killed an innocent man and sent him towards one of -- if not the most bizarre channels of reincarnation to date. 

He slept.  




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