further down

Where I am, there’s little opportunity to check in, and my on-line journalling has suffered because of it.  These moleskin notebooks, though – I’ve been filling them up.  It’s not quite the same, however, having no-one to read them.  I complete the last page of one, toss it on the stack of others, and start a new one.  It all seems rather impotent.  Though, should something happen to me, I guess it’s a nice thought that I’ll have left something behind.

Eight hundred kilometres away from any sort of major centre, I’ve been instructed to wait.  I do.  Wait and watch, they said.  And I have been.  Beginning to feel like I’ve hit the pause button on life, it’s as though I’m on standby.  And I am, I suppose.  I await further instruction.  They’ll call someday.  In the meantime, I count the days to the next airdrop.  More food, more water, more moleskin notebooks, more pens.  Contact.

I can’t say much more than I have, but I can tell you a bit about the sand.  It’s everywhere.  It’s there, as I push my bare feet further down into it.  It’s always between my toes.  I recline a little, pushing the palms of my hands back further behind me, fingers outstretched, digging them deep down into hot sand.  I push them further down until I find the cool layer beneath.  It reminds me of growing up on the beach in Santa Monica.  Remember that?  I’m only missing a red plastic pail and your little hand to hold.

The sky here is a different shade of blue than back home.  I can’t explain how or why, but it is slightly different.  Almost imperceptible.  The sky, it’s so clear, bright, and blue that I can barely stand to look at it without squinting most of it away.  My eyes water a lot.  I can sit like this beneath the blazing hot sun for a short time, an ocean of sand all around me, but I eventually have to move to shade.  I retire to my khaki canvas shelter for the rest of the afternoon and write.

Yesterday afternoon, I thought I saw someone coming over a dune in the distance.  It was a motorcycle, I thought, but when it disappeared over a ridge, it never came up again.  Afterwards, I walked in that direction for about a kilometre.  I found nothing.  Thinking about it today, I feel like I probably imagined it.  It’s not unusual for gusts of wind to kick up small clouds of debris now and then.

I can say I miss home.  I prefer to be in the city, surrounded by concrete and glass.  But, here I wait.  Limit your contact, they instructed.  And I do.  Curb your signals, they told me.  And I will.  You’re a ghost, they said.  And they’re right.

to get by

I’m in a mall, standing in line at a chain jewellery store, while Boney M’s Christmas Album plays through crackling speakers.  Feet shuffling along a filthy red carpet, inching ahead about one spot every five minutes, we work our way through a maze of burgundy velvet ropes like cattle through a corral.  There’s a constant cacophony of Christmas shopper’s chatter hanging in the air, and my mistletoe-adorned travel mug brims with equal parts eggnog and black rum.  Thank God.  No-one can say I’m not making an effort here.

Mostly, the Christmas season makes me feel somewhat antsy.  Perhaps it’s the break in routine, perhaps it’s the pressing consumerism, perhaps it’s the underlying confused religiosity, but mostly, I look forward to January 2nd coming around.  I can’t wait for normalcy to return, to settle back into real life.  Me, I try to convince myself I’m not the only person who feels this way.

The girl in front of me, she’s maybe in her mid-twenties.  You know this girl.  Over her tights, she has one of those big red, white, and green Christmas sweaters on, with what might be a reindeer pattern knitted into it.  That is, if the supposed reindeer didn’t look so much like moose.  Her one hand grips myriad shopping bags, and her other grips a Chestnut Praline Latte.  She has mukluks on her feet and smells like Peppermint.  This girl is Christmas.  I look down at my own attire: my battered blue jeans, pink Converse high tops, and band T-shirt.  I pick a piece of fuzz off my pilled cardigan.

Taking a big drink of rum and eggnog, considering that maybe I don’t meet dress code, the girl turns around and asks me how long I think the wait might be.  At the front of the line, I see an exhausted hostess of sorts handing each customer a piece of paper with a number and the name of a sales associate.  Then they wait for a space to open up.  “Like, what are people even doing in there that takes so long?”

“I don’t know,” I say, “are we sure we’re not in line at a nightclub or something?”

The girl rolls her eyes.

I roll mine too.  “I know, right?”

“Why can’t they just, like, let us in to shop like normal?”

I shrug.  I have no idea.  Fire codes, maybe.  Fear of theft.  To build excitement.  “Your sweater,” I say, “those moose?”

“They’re reindeer,” the girl spits, looking at me as if I’m some kind of monster.

I take a drink.

“Ah, no matter,” I say.  “Both are simply varieties of deer; ruminants, from the Cervidae family.  What’s the difference.”

The girl crinkles her nose, sniffing the air.  “Do you smell booze?”

I sniff the air too, and suddenly the pair of us are like a couple hounds at a Louisianan barbecue.  “I think I do.”  I lean in closer so only she can her me.  “I think it’s him,” I say, throwing a thumb over my shoulder at the guy behind me, a frail octogenarian in plaid pants leaning on his walker.

“Disgusting,” the Christmas girl sneers.  “Some people can’t even make it through a trip to the mall.”  She rolls her eyes.

I roll mine too.  “I know, right?”

unactualized stranger

It sometimes gets so I can’t tell a memory from a daydream, can’t tell if a memory is from yesterday or twenty years ago, can’t tell if any of this is actually happening at all.   I write the word ‘sometimes’ in my notebook so many times it starts to look like it’s spelt incorrectly.  So strong is my suspicion that it is wrong, I reach for a dictionary to look it up. There, at home on the page, in beautiful, bold black on white, it still looks peculiar.

I get up and make myself a drink; two fingers of Scotch. Not the good stuff – the stuff I save for when guests are over – but the okay stuff, the stuff I save for when I’m sure I’m losing my mind.  I don’t sip, I drink, and it’s gone it three gulps, burning all the way down to my core.  I feel better.  It’s afternoon, and I’ve yet to pull the curtains back to reveal the outside world.  Outside, a cold, grey sky meets a cold, grey ground.  I can’t bare it.  My cozy study, it’s dark but for a small lamp throwing dim light into my armchair.  I balance the empty whiskey glass on the tips of my fingers. I close my notebook.

A gentle rustling comes from my bedroom, someone twisting in the sheets, waking up.  There’s a stretch, a yawn.  It sometimes gets so I don’t know if any of this is real.  I hear her call my name, a voice smooth in timbre, pleasant in tone.  “Hello?” she calls out.  “You around?”  That feeling you have after a night of drinking: like you’ve gone and misplaced your soul.  You feel a little lost, a bit out of order, slightly out of time.  She calls my name again, and I can’t quite place the voice.

“I’m here,” I tell her, “in the next room.   I awoke with a thought, and had to write it down, sort some things out.”  I set my glass on the end table, and place my notebook beside it. I can still taste the Scotch on my lips, can still feel the slight burn in my throat.

“Why don’t you come back to bed,” she suggests.  I hear her roll over, pulling the covers up.  She fluffs the pillow.  “This is the kind of day I know we wouldn’t regret wasting on our backs.”

That voice.  Familiar, yet foreign, it simultaneously invites me to stay and inspires me to flee.  I swear it sometimes gets so I can’t tell if a memory is recent or from decades past.  I shake my head.  “I’ll be there soon,” I say.  “Just finishing something up.”

From the next room, I hear a click of the bedside lamp followed by slender fingers flipping through a magazine.  “I’ll be here,” she sighs.

And I know she will be.  More to myself than anyone else, I mutter, “Just need to finish up is all.”  There’s always something to finish up.  Picking up my notebook, I turn to the page where I left off and write ‘sometimes’ once more.  Twice more.  Again.  I continue writing that word repeatedly until it looks like alien scrawl.  Sometimes it gets so I can’t tell a memory from a daydream, real past from re-imagined past, the figments from the fragments.

takeaway

Atop the railing, right in front of me, is one of those cats with the waving arm you often see on the counters of Chinese takeaway restaurants.  It’s white with red ears and a gold and green bib of some sort.  That cat, it keeps grinning in the dark, looking right at me.  One arm keeps going up and down, and the other holds a gold coin; this cat is lucky, they say.  What most westerners don’t know is this cat, this maneki-neko, isn’t Chinese at all – it’s Japanese.  What a greater number of Westerners don’t know is this maneki-neko isn’t waving, but beckoning.  Come here, the maneki-neko say, come into this shop, this restaurant, this drycleaner's, this massage parlour.  Come here, this one says, come right this way, over the railing.

This place I’m at, it’s not easy to get away.  In fact, following the maneki-neko’s directions would be the easiest way out.  I’m out on a balcony overlooking the city, fifty-one stories up.  The city lights spread out like a twinkling blanket before me, and the streets and freeways cut through it like stitches.  Crisscrossing this way and that, the stitches are a grid in some places, jumbled chaos in others.  The seamstress, she sewed this quilt while drunk.  Each patch on this mad quilt contains hundreds of people and there are countless patches.  Me, I want to get away, but I’m balancing on the tip of a sewing needle stood on its end.  There’s nowhere to go.  Trapped.

Reclining in one of those rickety folding lawn chairs, it’s the type made from aluminum tubing covered in woven, striped polyester pieces.  Frayed on the arms, the frame bent in places, this thing has been around since the 80s.  I take a sip from my drink, admiring its soft green glow in the faint light filtering outside through the French doors behind me.  This drink, my speciality, it’s equal parts gin, absinthe, and tonic over a full tumbler of ice cubes with a sprig of fresh mint for garnish.  It doesn’t have a name because I’ve never given it one.  Drinks, they don’t need names.

There’s a rattle from the door behind me, and it isn’t long before it opens, causing a toxic mix of music, drunken babbling, and laughter to spill out into the chilly winter night air.  I sigh and pull the collar of my coat up as if to shield myself from the onslaught.  A slender female figure walks out and leans on her elbows over the balcony railing.  Her back to me, she’s shivering in her light cotton T-shirt as she takes in the view of the city.  Then, not looking back, she asks, “Why are you out here by yourself?”  Her words briefly hang in clouds of frozen vapour before dissipating.

“Why are you outside without a coat?” I reply.

She doesn’t answer, but shifts her weight from one foot to the other, and rubs the backs of her arms, her triceps, in an effort to stay warm.  “You usually sit out your own parties?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say.  “Every time.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“Thank you,” I say, and drink down a full half of my green drink.

She seems to suddenly notice the maneki-neko beckoning madly beside her, and turns her head to look at the cat.  Her profile becomes a perfect silhouette against the three-quarter moon.  Her lashes are long, her tiny nose, upturned.  She’s turned into a cameo.  “What’s this thing?” she asks.

“A Chinese fortune cat,” I tell her.

“Is it lucky?”

“Define luck.”

There’s silence for a time while I watch this girl watching the maneki-neko.  With a long index finger, she reaches out and stops its plastic paw in mid-beckon.  “I know why you have parties,” she says, glancing at me out of the corner of her eye.

I consider that for a moment.  I look away.  “I know you do,” I say.

the cabin: a still-life

My grandfather published his last full-length novel when he was seventy-four years old.  It wasn’t his longest, it wasn’t his most intellectual, but it would become his most well known.  It was a work which would bring him critical acclaim, and it was precisely this attention which would ultimately push him all the way down the rabbit hole of reclusion.  He died alone in these woods, continually hounded by various media outlets, and a troupe of university students hunting him down for a where-is-he-now documentary.  They had it all written, all planned out, all they were missing was their subject.  He was dead and in the ground for about a week when the students finally located this little cabin in the woods.

Walking around his cabin now, the floorboards creak and moan in spots as I step, each plank cut and planed flat by my grandfather himself.  The walls are thick logs cut from great, old trees and chinked with a homemade cement of clay, wood ashes, salt, and water, all mixed and applied by his hands.  It’s all still in perfect condition.  As always, I’m struck by the austerity of the interior.  There’s very little here.  The walls of the living room are lined with bookcases, still crammed with the works of his favourite authors: Kafka, Poe, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Goethe, Bradbury.  There’s an armchair in the corner, its chocolate brown leather still supple and smooth after all these years, well cared for by the cleaning staff.  On a tiny wooden table to the side, his reading glasses, a coaster, and a plain white coffee mug.  By the front door, a black, iron wood stove squats, radiating heat.

The kitchen is similarly sparse, featuring an old stove, a bit of counter space, and a small table for two.  Past this, through the back door, one could walk straight out, around seventy feet, and come to an outhouse at the edge of the woods.  Though covered in a thick blanket of snow now, in the summertime, the caretakers keep the grass around the property cut, and the bushes trimmed back.  Flowers, an assortment of zinnias, Californian poppies, and daylilies, will grow alongside the house in handmade wooden boxes.  That outhouse by the tree-line, it hasn’t been used in nearly forty years, but the structure is still sound, its door still hanging straight.  Instead of the traditional crescent moon cut into the door, there’s a letter K.  No-one knows why.

The third and last room in the cabin is a combined bedroom and study.  The room is clean and still, smelling of lemon-scented wood polish and cotton.  The pale winter sun filters through the aqua chiffon curtains giving the room something of an otherworldly glow.  There’s a small bed in one corner, and a desk in the other.  The bed frame was handmade by my grandfather, and the desk was purchased at an antique shop sometime in the 40s.  Even then it was old.  Atop the desk is a typewriter, a baby blue Smith-Corona from the 60s.  It was with this machine that my grandfather wrote his last novel.

As I do every time I visit, I pull the little straight-backed wooden chair out from the desk, savouring the scraping sound of wood on wood.  Taking a seat, I open a drawer, the drawer still sliding smoothly despite its great vintage, and pull out a piece of paper which I stick into the typewriter behind the platen and roll into place.  Then, I sit, hands in position.  I don’t type anything.  Not a word.  I just sit there, still, at my long-dead grandfather’s typewriter with my hands on the cold metal keys.  I’m imagining what it must have been like to be him.  I don’t type because nothing I could ever write would ever compare to what this machine has already seen.

Existing in a time when the literary greats clustered together like algae in a still pool, schmoozing at fancy parties, lecturing at universities, travelling the world, my grandfather lived alone in these woods far removed from the intellectual echo chamber.  He was building this cabin, growing his own vegetables, hunting his own meat.  Perhaps his greatest work wasn’t his last novel, or any of them for that matter.  Perhaps his greatest work was this cabin.

My hands on the keys of this old typewriter, I look through the gauzy curtains to a large oak tree fifty feet beyond, its branches bare of leaves.  Beneath this tree lurks a craggy grey boulder marking my grandfather’s grave, at its base, a smattering of smaller black stones.  Perhaps his greatest work was an honest life; not a whirlwind, but a still one.

an impossible visit

The opposite of being inspired, whatever that is, that’s what these headaches make me.  And I’m not talking about simple writer’s block here.  No, that’s easy; anyone can work through that.  I’m talking about life coming to a dead stop.  These headaches, when I get them, all I can think about is the pain.  I can’t work, can’t write a goddamned word.  I can’t even think.  I can’t drink coffee, I feel nauseous.  All I want to do is lie in a dark room.  It’s the opposite of being inspired, whatever that is.

I’m standing in line at the grocery store when the lady behind me asks me if I’m all right.  I’m not, of course, but who really is.  I glance back at this lady for a second and find someone’s favourite aunt smiling back at me with the type of peaceful closed-mouth smile usually reserved for the deeply religious.  I turn up the corners of my mouth into a semblance of a smile and give her a quick nod.  I tell her I’m fine.

Unable to figure out why this lady would ask me such a thing, I look to my groceries for an answer.  Waiting in queue on the conveyor belt, there’s Sugar Crisp cereal, boneless skinless chicken thighs, a tube of original flavour Pringles, two Archie comics, a jar of olives, toothpaste, a loaf of wholegrain bread, and tinfoil.  Nothing to suggest I might not be okay.  I look down the line, and there’s some kind of hold-up two costumers ahead.  There’s always some kind of hold-up.  This time it’s something about a coupon.  It’s expired.  Or it’s for another location.  The manager is coming to attend, and all of us, we wait.

This lady behind me, she explains that it’s just that something doesn’t seem right.  She feels things.  She tells me how it’s not even that I have a headache, there’s something else.  I look up.  There, high up, resting against the corrugated metal ceiling, nestled among the painted steel beams and hanging fluorescent lights, is one of those helium-filled aluminum balloons.  It says GET WELL SOON.  This lady behind me, I didn’t tell her I have a headache.

It’s just that she gets impressions, she explains, and sometimes but not every time, she feels compelled to say something.  This time, there seems to be some insistence, she says.  I turn around to look at her, and I have trouble making eye contact.  She’s got greying black hair curled sometime in the last few days and now hanging a little flat.  Her blouse, a silvery thing, was given to her as a birthday gift from her tween granddaughter.  She wears practical shoes.

This woman, she leans in a little closer, necessitating a meeting of our eyes.  Hers, they’re lively, the fluorescent light dancing across her dark brown irises.  She asks me, quietly, if I’ve recently had a death in the family.  I tell her no.  She stands straight and looks me over, at my hat, my scarf, my coat, my pants, my shoes.  This lady asks me if I’m wearing anything belonging to a dead person.  I shake my head.  I tell her no, sorry.  The line starts moving, and I turn around to follow my groceries already moving down the conveyor belt.

The manager thanks us for our patience, and I’m now only one customer away from paying, two transactions from freedom.  The strange woman behind me, she whispers in my ear, close enough that I can feel her minty breath hot on my cheek.  She tells me, “He says he regrets he had to leave so soon, but there wasn’t anything he could do.  He was old and it was time.”  I don’t turn around.  This isn’t the kind of thing I believe in.  The cashier, she’s scanning my things, so I know it’s my turn.  I pay as quickly as possible and leave the store.

Walking across the parking lot to my car, I pull my coat closed against the cool winter breeze.  It’s this winter coat I always wear, the one that doesn’t need replacing because it’s still fine.  It’s the plaid one with fur around the collar and cuffs.  This winter coat, the one that’ll never go out of fashion because it was never in fashion, it was my grandfather’s favourite hunting coat.  He died before I could form any memories of him.  Nearly forty years ago.  In my car, I swallow two Tylenol and chug half a bottle of water.  With the key in the ignition, I stare through the windshield for at least ten minutes before turning it.

saturday night shoe

You ask what I do, and I tell you I’m labourer.  And it’s not far off, I suppose.  All of us, from the president of a cosmetic company down to that weird chatty guy in the mail room with the mismatched shoes, we’re all labourers.  We labour.  It’s what we do.  When it becomes clear you’re not satisfied with that answer, I add how I’m like a street photographer, only I don’t use a camera and I’m something of a misanthrope.  I’m joking about the misanthrope part.  I’m being facetious.  You’re not laughing, and instead, you regroup.  In your head, you’re rearranging the words in your question.  You, you’re a professional.

The name of this scene is When Interviews Go Wrong.  You pull your cinnamon hair back over an ear, and shift your slight weight in the chair.  Mustering for battle, you take a sip from your Toasted Graham Latte and ask, “How would you describe your method?” From the sly inflection and subtle smirk, I can tell you really think you have me.  You take a decisive bite off your Mini Snowman Donut.

I tell you how I create something from nothing.  It’s supposed to be impossible, a violation of the laws of nature or something, but I do it.  I go on at length about the smithy in my mind and the pint-sized me in there, a diminutive blacksmith, hammering away at ideas on an anvil.  He makes figments into the physical.  This blacksmith, he has all the rippling muscles I was never given.  He wears a tough leather smock to protect himself against the chimerical sparks exploding like supernovae off these rough thoughts.  When you cut me off, I’m in the middle of describing the beads of sweat dripping from the blacksmith’s forehead as he leans over the forge, heating abstractions to a more malleable, workable temperature.

This Starbucks, you chose the location because of its blandness.  You had heard how fanciful I could be, and you thought this might keep me grounded.  Don’t think for a second I don’t recognize and appreciate your moxie.  “Very interesting,” you say.  “I wonder if you could elaborate a little on the ‘creating’ part.  Where do your ideas come from?”

Where do they come from, these unformed concepts?  A lot of them, they are indeed from the everyday, borrowed from mundane goings-on around me.  A handful, I steal from private conversations between strangers.  Some arrive in loads of ore by horse and cart straight from the grand kingdom of Shambhala.  Others turn up in loads of ingots stacked in shipping containers aboard boats sent all the way from Lyonesse; these, these are among my most prized.

As I pry open each sizable wooden crate, the radiance of my flickering torch bounces off the kaleidoscope of hammer marks beaten across the beautiful faces of the oval ingots.  Down in the inky black of the ship’s cargo hold, my face is aglow, not only from light reflected off this newly arrived treasure, but in happiness.  Each ingot features the image of a majestic horse stamped above an indecipherable word of exotic symbols.  They’re stacked at least fifty deep in the crate, and—

You interrupt me again when, this time, you reach across the table and close the voice memo app on your cell phone.  The interview, it’s over.  “Sorry,” you say.  “I didn’t mean to interrupt – continue.  You were saying something about crates?”  The Mini Snowman Donut reduced to crumbs on the tabletop, you dab at the corners of your mouth with a paper napkin.  My mouth slightly ajar, the d from the word ‘and’ still hanging from my bottom lip, I’m trying to remember where I left off.  Crates.  Something about ingots.  With the side of your hand, you’re obsessively sweeping every tiny crumb on the table into a minuscule pile in front of you.

I tell you not to worry about it.  “It’s not important,” I say.  The one thing I don’t tell you about these ingots, as exquisite as they are, they’re fleeting, fragile.  Look at one the wrong way, and it’ll disappear.  Mishandle one, and it’ll shatter into infinite useless pieces.

I’m studying the tabletop between us, an intricate mosaic created of broken tile and sealed with some kind of liquid polymer.  The tile has been carefully broken in a factory somewhere so that it’s broken but not too broken.  The mosaic pattern is imperfect but not too imperfect.  The colours are unobjectionable.  The whole thing, it’s some kind of strange imitation of an imitation of art.  The table next to us features the exact same design.  Every table in this place is identical.  You, you reapply your lipstick.  A red, its name is Saturday Night Shoe.  It looks nice.  I’ll write a story about it later on.