History of Writing [one of the shortest since the main character/anchor fell out of the sky]
He stepped off the street and into some discount liquor store in Northern Koreatown. The door came to an easy close behind him.
The place was empty except for the clerk. The light of the room went to his permanently startled eyes like a laser in his mudclay face, stone sober.
Charles Anthony had been gone from his apartment in Hawthorne for a shade over two weeks at that point, living out of his car, walking around in the street and the mostly-clean air. He was getting a taste for people.
He noticed how none of the clerks -- how really no one, ever said Hi to you, like they were too old for manners or niceties of any kind.
He went to a cooler at the back of the store and took a large bottle of Guinness out and brought it up to the counter.
Whether the clerk was filled with disbelief or incredulity, he couldn't say. Like so many of them everywhere, the man had the look of an angry stone that was equally afraid of its anger.
"Just this," said Charles Anthony.
The clerk didn't move. Charles Anthony thought, knew the stranger must have seen him but didn't know what to do to prompt him into action. "Is that okay?"
The clerk put his hand on the bottle, tilted it where it stood on the counter, as to scan it with a price-gun, then simply punched a few keys on the register.
The price showed up on the readout on the register. The clerk was silent.
As Charles Anthony reached into his pocket for his wallet, his disgust and his fear for his father and the government glued itself to his temporary perception. The thought that Milo would do Anything & Everything within his outsized means was about as obvious as the cold of the winter night, and nearly as hard to dismiss. Not that he hadn't been smart enough to take precautions, nor lacking in the patience to maintain that discipline, but there were still only so many steps he felt he could take before some casually random flaw in his step or in his navigation would leave him tired where he didn't want to be tired, and surely whoever Dr. Gollander sent from his elite, little fascist army of stalkers, drips and conformists (?) would be there to put his hands on the well-meaning fugitive.
The clerk didn't say anything. Charles Anthony relaxed, a little.
He paid for the drink, took his few coins of change and left the store without saying anything else.
It was almost like the street was begging him to drink.
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The History of Writing
ReplyDelete~
Sisyphus's head rang like a well-done hamburger as the technicians slid his ancestral body into the fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) machine. His body heaved with a virtually unfathomable sort of paralysis. The table he lay upon slid, then stopped. He heard the pounding crack of electrically-generated lights and a soft whirring sound, half-speaking to its non-biological life-presence in perfectly manufactured harmony. The world as a single moment. Everlasting, ever-insisting on reaching the moment it hasn't yet (or perhaps the moment whose accomplishment we haven't realized reaching). The enormously generous sea of time had inextricably, flawlessly exerted its influence upon the cortical- and subcortical gyri & sulci of Sisyphus's brain, his Wernicke's area and basal ganglia-insular regions, most specifically. Inside the walls of their structures, the myelination of centuries, something older than language, older perhaps old than prehistoric stone tools which the pandemonium of the sun and the deathly watchfulness of the moon had burned & winked upon, respectively in the storied depths of humankind. He was something both composed within nature yet recklessly unresponsive to the laws of that feature of reality.
He still didn't know anything about Larry Fiskovitz, or the man, Jerry Ratbaum, Larry had killed in self-defense. He didn't know who Charles Anthony Gollander (then, Jung) or who Milo Gollander were, either.
According to Samantha, the people at the old folks home said they had to have a look at him. They wanted to test his body for certain things. (They wanted to see where the qualities of human beings came from.) They wondered if Sisyphus could rejoin the workforce. So they took their time to see how healthy he was.
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