Monday, December 27, 2010
Novelling DeCal Fall 2011
Sunday, December 5, 2010
PS apologies for the shitty formatting, I didn't know how to attach it as a PDF or something
Role Model
By Harris Kauffman
1.
For the time being, you’re Alexis Silverman, home for summer after your third
year in college where everyone that remembers your existence still knows you as Lex.
This isn’t home anymore, though. Not since your parents separated after you left for
school and moved to opposite ends of the state. Since then, home has been a tough thing
to describe.
You’re seated in the back corner of Don Pepe’s whose carnita tacos are half the
reason you still come back to this I-5 bathroom break of a town. The other half refuses to
answer your calls. Across the table sits your oldest childhood friend and abandoned role
model, Tanner Hood. He fingers the jumbo shrimp protruding from his third Corona,
licks the TapatÃo and salt from its tail, and takes a bite.
All the bullshit conversation has been exhausted. School, good. Family, healthy.
Getting along better with stepfather. Rex is still alive but doesn’t come hunting anymore.
Can’t remember Jason’s last name, but he dropped out, started his own business, and is
making real money. Jess is pregnant, Kait got breast implants, and Tom is in prison. As
the two of you sit quietly, you fidget nervously. Tanner sits oblivious and unfazed. He
does his characteristic neck cracking motion as he checks out one of Don Pepe’s seven
daughters bussing a nearby table.
“Where you staying?” Tanner asks, eating the rest of the shrimp, still checking
out the bus girl.
“With Emma, I think. She still hasn’t answered her phone.”
“Kick it with me for the day.”
You wipe invisible crumbs from the corners of your mouth and scan the taqueria
in search of something to occupy your attention. Tanner notices your lack of interest in
spending the day with him.
“Come on, man. When’s the last time we had a heart to heart? We’ll catch up,
drink some beers…”
“It’s 11:30 in the morning,” you tell him.
“Did those liberal hippies at school cut your ball sack off, too?” Tanner laughs at
his own joke and drinks the last of his Corona. “Senorita!” he calls at the bus girl.
She looks over at Tanner, skeptically, and walks over. Tanner pulls her over by
the collar of her shirt and whispers something in her ear. She smiles and slaps him
playfully with a towel before walking back into the kitchen. Tanner places a five-dollar
bill on the table and stands up, and you follow his lead as he walks out the door.
Outside, it’s hotter than shit. Triple digits and it’s only early June. Don’t want to
imagine what July will be like. Thank God you wont be here. Or maybe you will. You
dial Emma’s number for the tenth time, a bit shocked that you still know it by heart. It
rings once and then goes to answering machine.
“Hey, it’s Emma! I’m not here right now so leave a message and I’ll get back to
you. Thanks!”
“Hey, Emma, it’s Lex. I’m in town for a few days before I head down south to
visit mom and, so, yeah. Wanted to surprise you but can’t seem to get a hold of you.”
You sigh. “Call me back when you get this,” you say, and hang up.
Tanner grabs a Big Gulp from the cup holder inside his car, dumps the ice on the
hot asphalt, and packs a lip from the can of Copenhagen that bulges in his left back
pocket.
“No answer?”
“No,” you reply reluctantly.
Tanner smiles. “Looks like you don’t have much better of an option, now do
you?”
You slide into the passenger seat without replying and slam the door.
“Start the car so I can get some AC,” you tell him.
Tanner chuckles his ghoulish laugh before following you inside his used Firebird.
You spent your sophomore year of high school saving pennies from your job at the local
pet store to buy one just like it, but are now embarrassed to sit in the passenger seat.
Tanner waits for a strand of drool dangling from his lips to fall into his makeshift spittoon
before flipping over the engine.
He takes the long way home, driving through the old neighborhood where the two
of you grew up. Giant eucalyptus trees line the roads casting a sheltering shadow onto
your childhood home. The next generation of delinquents rides by on cruisers and
skateboards. You take turns pointing at houses and telling stories.
“That’s where Krikorian lived before his dad moved them to Tucson,” you recall.
“Yup,” Tanner says slowly, spitting into his Big Gulp.
“One hell of a running back. I bet he could have played college. Wonder what
ever happened to him,” you say, beginning to feel comfortable with your old friend and
happy about your trip home.
“Joined the Marines and got deployed to Afghanistan. Came back in a box,”
Tanner tells you, spitting again.
“Oh.”
That note ends the story telling game, and you sit silently the rest of the ride. The
Firebird passes over the canal, the marking point for real estate depression. Yellow lawns
replace well-groomed gardens. Concrete replaces towering trees. A Mexican family
stands in their front yard barbequing hot dogs. As Tanner pulls up to a stop sign, he rolls
down his window and yells to them to take down their Christmas lights.
A couple minutes later, you’re outside the house Tanner is renting with two other
college dropouts who went to high school with you, but you never really knew. You
follow Tanner up the path to the front door, which has no knob. He knocks obnoxiously
and a stoned, half awake kid wearing only boxers flings open the door. His eyes are blood
shot and barely open, and his hair is ruffled.
“Lex, this is Carl. Carl, this is Lex,” Tanner says.
“Nice to meet you Lex,” Carl mumbles as he returns to the couch. He lies down,
wrapping his arms around a pillow, and turns up the episode of Dexter’s Laboratory
playing on the television.
“Where’s Jon?” Tanner asks.
“Backyard.”
Through the sliding glass door in the living room, you see Jon sitting on a lawn
chair with a pellet gun lying across his lap. He takes long, methodical sips from a
Mickey’s forty oz.
Tanner slides open the door and steps outside. You consider sitting down and
watching Cartoon Network with Carl, but end up following him outside, sliding the door
shut behind you. Tanner has pulled up another lawn chair and begun to pack another lip.
He grabs an empty beer can nearby and fashions a spittoon out of it by crushing the lid
with his elbow.
“Pull up a chair, Lex,” he tells you, so you do. “Big game hunting?” he asks Jon
who still hasn’t spoken a word.
“Yup,” Jon says quietly, bringing a finger to his lips, beckoning silence.
“Might I ask what the Skippy’s is for?” Tanner whispers sarcastically, pointing to
an opened jar of peanut butter sitting at Jon’s feet. A butter knife protrudes from the
container.
“Bait.” He points to a sycamore, the centerpiece of the backyard, where you
notice blotches of peanut butter painted onto the trunk.
“I see. Might I ask what exactly it is you’re hunting?”
“Squirrels. Keep chewing up the goddamn power lines and fuckin’ up the satellite
dish.”
“Any luck?”
“Nope,” Jon says, downing the rest of his forty. He gets up from his lawn chair
and walks over to the backyard fence where he places the empty bottle on the horizontal
beam. Jon returns to his chair, takes aim, and fires, shattering the bottle to pieces. He
chuckles at his achievement, while the two of you sit silently.
“I’ll give you a tour of the place,” Tanner finally tells you with a sigh.
Tanner proudly shows you his single bedroom, kicking away at the layer of dirty
clothing to make a path to its center. You notice the Public Enemy poster, a guitar with
two broken strings, and a dying Venus flytrap by the windowsill.
“What’s the rent like for this place?” you ask, because it seems like the kind of
thing he’d like to share.
“I pay a little more for the single. With Internet and everything, it’s about five
hundred a month.”
“Step dad pay for it all?”
“He doesn’t support my lifestyle,” Tanner tells you in air quotes. He falls over
onto his bed with his hands behind his head, staring up at the ceiling. “I’ve got a pretty
steady income figured out, though.”
“Is that a fact?”
“Yup.”
“What’s your trade?” you ask, clearing off clothing from his desk chair to take a
seat. You grab a nearby Maxim and flip through.
“I sell stereo parts.”
Tanner hops up from his lying position and walks over to the closet. The sudden
movement startles you, and you set down the magazine. Tanner slides back the closet
door and you observe an even larger mess. He pulls back some of the muck and reveals a
stack of amps and subwoofers. Some of them still have copper wire dangling clumsily
from their sockets.
“Quite a collection,” you tell him, not sure how to respond.
“I can give you an incredible deal,” Tanner says. He pulls an amp from the top of
the stack and sets it down on the bed. He grabs a towel and wipes the equipment down.
“Lanzar. 1000 watts. Cost you two hundred at any audio store. Maybe one-fifty at Fulton
Mall. Yours for only ninety bucks,” he proceeds with a devilish grin.
“I don’t even own a car,” you tell him, slightly dumbfounded, unsure how to
respond. “Where did you say you got these?”
“Friend of a friend,” Tanner says. You think you notice a slight hesitation. “Kids
got anything you could ever need. Stereo parts, iPods, pool sweeps. Name it.”
You stare at Tanner for some time with a skeptical frown, eyebrows turned down,
before realizing it’s been several seconds before both of you have spoken, and he’s
expecting an answer.
“Oh, no. I’m fine. Got everything I need.”
“Could have guessed. Alexis Silverman. Mr. College with his perfect life and his
Jew parents giving him everything he could ever ask for!” Tanner smirks. You stare back
sternly, uncomfortable, unsure. “Lighten up, Lex. English major can’t take a fucking
joke.”
“Tanner! Come hit this!” someone calls from the other room. You haven’t known
the roommates long enough to distinguish their voices.
“They smoke weed at the four year universities?” His smirk perspires.
“Some do. I suppose it’s the same everywhere,” you tell him.
You follow Tanner into the living room. Carl is still on the couch wearing only
boxers. He sits hunched over the coffee table rolling a spliff. A z-shaped bong with a
Daffy Duck decal on the side stands nearby. Jon sits in an ancient recliner missing entire
chunks from its armrests. He scans a vintage Playboy, utterly engrossed with the
centerfold. A large box sits by his side filled with them. You’re happy to see the pellet
gun propped up against a lawn chair outside.
“Jesus Christ. Where did you get all these?” Tanner asks referring to the Playboy
collection as he picks one out from the box.
“Estate sale. Only fifty bucks for this guy’s entire collection he started back in
’72. Can you believe it?”
“I can’t believe you spent fifty dollars at an estate sale, but haven’t managed to
pay your rent on time in the last seven months,” Tanner says.
“Well I was thinking it could be like an investment. Sell a few of the older ones
on eBay or something. But now, I’m starting to realize the historical value of some of
these. I mean check out the bush on this chick.”
Jon displays the centerfold to Tanner with a dumbfounded smile. Carl giggles
from the couch, but his eyes remain glued to his rolling job, which is almost finished. He
licks the edge of the zigzag and twists the end. Tanner takes a seat on the couch and you
follow suit as Carl holds the flame of a disposable lighter to the end of the spliff. He takes
several quick inhalations as the thing begins to light, repeating the process several times
before passing it on to your abandoned role model. Tanner emulates the routine and
blows a series of perfect smoke rings. He passes it on to you and you pass it to Jon
without smoking. Tanner shoots you a look of disapproval but doesn’t comment. Jon
grabs it without looking up from the next Playboy he’s grabbed from the box.
“We should get the jumbo clip out,” Carl suggests.
“I don’t know if Lex would find the humor,” Tanner says.
“The jumbo clip?” you ask.
Tanner leaves the room for a moment and comes back with an old shoebox. He
opens it up, and you look in cautiously, afraid to find a dead animal or something.
Instead, you see several steel tools of some unidentifiable trade piled on top of each
other. Jon fishes out what looks like an elongated pair of tongs with scissor handles,
which he uses to grasp the end of the spliff. He takes several more inhalations before
passing the contraption on to Carl.
“What is that thing?” you ask.
“From a set of illegal abortion instruments. Pawned it for an amp to one of Jon’s
friends,” Tanner boasts. You look on, horrified. Jon giggles.
“We soaked it in alcohol before we used it as the jumbo clip,” Carl offers as some
sort of condolence.
“Oh,” is all you are able to get out.
A prolonged silence ensues, but is finally broken by a conversation initiated by
Tanner about whether it would be preferable to be given $250,000 at age twenty-five or
$10 million at age sixty.
“Well you’re not exactly dead at age sixty, you know?” Jon offers. Carl and
Tanner shake their heads eagerly. “There’s still shit to do, you know?”
“There’s a party at the racquet club tonight,” Tanner says a few minutes later,
stomping out the end of the spliff in a nearby ashtray. Carl and Jon nod their heads in
unison, approvingly. “What about you, Lex?” Tanner asks. “Like old times?”
“I don’t know,” you say. “Still trying to get a hold of Emma, you know?”
“My grandpa says he remembers when Jews weren’t allowed at the club,” Jon
says, still not looking up from his Playboy. You look to him questioningly. “Armenians,
neither.” Even Tanner appears slightly thrown off by the comment.
“What about spics and niggers?” Carl asks legitimately curious.
“What the fuck do you think?” Jon snaps.
Your phone vibrates in your pocket, and you slump down in your seat to fish it
out. Emma calling… You stand up and tell the room you need to take a call. They nod
uninterestedly, and you walk out into the backyard. You answer, but don’t say anything
out of mild delusion more than anything else.
“Lex?”
“Emma,” you say.
“Are you alright?” She sounds genuinely concerned and it makes your body
tingle.
“I’m fine. Why? Do I sound otherwise?”
She giggles into the receiver pressed up against your cheek and the vibrations feel
soothing. “How are you? Where are you? Are you still in town?”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m at Tanner’s, actually.”
“Well isn’t that adorable!” Emma says playfully. “Butch Cassidy and the
Sundance Kid back together again. Sounds like quite a reunion.”
“It’s not as glamorous as it sounds,” you tell her. She laughs again, the
conversation growing silent as her voice trails off. “Well, what’s your schedule like?”
you finally ask.
“Open. Very open, actually. There’s a party at the club tonight. Any interest in
rekindling old feelings?” What does that mean? You can’t tell if that’s a pass or just a
friendly invite.
“I heard. Tanner and his roommates were just talking about it.”
“You up for it?”
“Sure. Sounds like a blast,” you say sarcastically.
“I’m glad to hear you haven’t become too mature for our old antics. Haven’t
entirely moved on to bigger and better things.”
You both laugh, but you aren’t sure why. You make plans to meet her near the bar
and say goodbye. Getting a hold of Emma instills you with a new sense of confidence as
you walk out of the heat and back into the living room. The three haven’t moved much
since you left. Jon and Tanner pour over the same Playboy. Carl lays helter skeltor on the
couch, itching his chin, watching Johnny Bravo. You stand in the background taking in
the whole scene, utterly unnoticed.
“Who was that?” Tanner asks, finally acknowledging your presence.
“Mom,” you tell him.
“Oh yeah? How is she? Still turning out dinners seven days a week for the old
man?”
“They separated three years ago.” Tanner stares back perplexed.
“I guess I knew that,” he finally says. There’s a small period of silence. “Well join
the club!” Tanner laughs.
“So what’s the deal with that party you were talking about?” you ask.
“Oh you’re not interested in going, are you?” Tanner asks sarcastically, but
excited by your interest.
“I had a sudden change of heart,” you tell him.
2.
The racquet club sits at the edge of your old neighborhood. Large eucalyptus trees
shade the courts and clubhouse. The parking lot is filled most mornings with middle-aged
men and women playing doubles, lifting weights, swimming in the lap pool, having lunch
in the dining room, having drinks at the bar. It’s nighttime now, though, and the party
going on is like many you’ve been to before. The nostalgia hits you with all its familiar
glory and pain.
The faces are all vague, nondescript, and distant. They morph into one collective
blur as you try to pick out Emma from the crowd. You’ve scanned those by the bar.
Mostly men. Two cowboys in boots and fine straw hats. One of them widdles at a
matchstick with a small pocketknife and the other chats boisterously with the guy
bartending. An array of beer bottles, martini glasses, and mixed drinks fill up the counter.
You spot an empty stool and snatch it before someone else does. The guy
bartending asks you what you’d like and you tell him a whiskey on ice. He asks what
type of whiskey and you tell him you don’t care. You lean back on your stool with your
elbows propped up against the counter, your drink in one hand, fingers tapping anxiously
in the other. You listen in on the cowboys’ conversation. They’re talking about brands of
chewing tobacco. In the distance is a keg. The kid tapping it looks familiar. Jon and Carl
stand in the swarm of people waiting to fill their red cups, both hitting on the same
blonde. Tanner stands nearby, beer already in hand, talking seriously with some kid that
has a tattoo on his neck. No sign of Emma. You try calling her and it goes straight to
voicemail.
You take a sip of your drink and it sends a chill through your body. You
remember that you hate whiskey and wonder why you ordered it. Maybe to impress the
cowboys. It reminds you of a lot of things you used to do for someone else’s approval
other than your own. That’s the past, you hope.
A group of old timers, two pairs of double partners, have stepped off the court,
racquets in hand, sweaty towels draped around their necks. You recognize one as
Tanner’s stepfather. You wonder whose kids’ mothers the other three are fucking as four
or five of your peers approach them offering mixed drinks. They graciously accept. One
of the old men pulls a pack of Camels from his gym bag and lights one. The men and kids
exchange words excitedly, inaudibly. You scan the party for Tanner to ask him his
stepfather’s name so you can go say hello and be polite. You catch Tanner out of the
corner of your eye slipping into the bathroom with a brunette, his hand around her waist,
and another kid. The one with the tattoo. Tanner and the girl slide in, the kid with the
tattoo following, locking the door behind them.
You down the rest of your drink, which makes your throat feel like it could blow
fire. You say fuck it. Who cares if Tanner’s step dad thinks you have shitty manners?
You don’t owe anything to him. He probably doesn’t even remember your face, your
existence.
The party has already reached its final descent. Kids stand in cloistered groups
joking drunkenly. Many have paired off and begun to leech at each other’s necks. A few
of the more daring have stripped to go skinny-dipping in the lap pool. Others sit Indian
style, in circles, on the tennis courts passing joints. Any minute the club manager will
come out and ask everyone to leave on account of a phony noise complaint.
You haven’t spoken a word since you arrived and decide to try your hand at
conversation. You’re mingling skills are below average, though, especially with the
surrounding crowd. You see Jon standing near the keg with a couple other guys that look
familiar. They appear approachable so you walk over and join their circle.
You grab a beer from the keg first so you have something to do with your hands
before standing next to Jon. He looks over at you skeptically.
“Enjoying the party?” you ask.
“Yeah. A lot of people,” he says.
“Yeah,” you agree, reminded that the number of people is the deciding factor of a
party’s legitimacy. You introduce yourself to the other bystanders and they shake your
hand firmly but uninterested.
“Alexis Silverman,” one of them repeats methodically when you tell him your
name. “That sounds familiar. You’re a Fresno alum, yeah?”
“Yup,” you say boastfully, pleased someone thinks they remember your
existence.
“Lex Silverman. You play a sport?”
“Swam for a few years,” you tell him.
“Of course,” he says. “You were a cool kid for a Jew.”
You have to take a piss but see someone pounding violently at the bathroom door.
Someone’s probably having sex inside, or maybe Tanner is still in there with his two
friends. You decide to go around back, behind the tennis courts, to go pee in the bushes.
Back behind the courts you have to step over a blacked out couple lying half
naked in the bushes. Both are topless, the girl’s head resting on the crotch of his
unbuckled Levis. Her long, blonde hair lies draped across her back almost elegantly for
their crass display.
Climbing over without disturbing is a harder task than you anticipated with the
amount of alcohol in your system, but you succeed. You piss into some dried up oleander
letting out a slow, satisfied sigh of relief. As you buckle your pants back up, you hear a
stir in the shadows followed by the familiar sound of alcohol induced vomiting. As you
walk back, you catch sight of the topless girl throwing up into the bushes. The boy lies
nearby, still asleep, curled up into a ball. You stand and watch for some time before
making another step. The cracking sound of dry brush underneath your feet draws her
attention, and it takes you a second before you realize it’s Emma looking up at you. She
roles over slightly, drunkenly and looks up at you with a glazed over look on her face.
You recognize the large, innocent eyes, her small, full lips, and the only slight
discoloration of her nipples visible through an opaque curtain of blonde hair. You even
recognize the perplexed expression from years ago when you held her hair back as she
vomited, her arms embracing the porcelain toilet seat as if she’d forgotten someone’s ass
had been pressed up against it moments ago, as if she believed she’d be sucked into some
spiraling, inescapable vortex if she ever let go.
“Lex?” she asks, vomit caught in her hair, pasted to the corners of her mouth, her
dumb stare morphing into an embarrassed smile. She suddenly tries to pull herself
together as if she’d just stepped out of torrential downpour and into an important job
interview. “Lex, is that you?”
Your legs tremble slightly as you search your clouded mind for the most dignified
action. Your instinct is to spit on her and slit the blacked out kid’s throat. Instead, you
feel obligated to answer her question.
“Hi Emma,” you manage to articulate through your quivering lower lip.
“How long are you going to…” her voice trails off. She begins to vomit into the
bushes again before she can finish her question.
You step over her and head back to the party wondering what it was she was
going to ask. How long are you going to be in town? How long are you going to be at the
party? How long are you going to love me? How long are you going to pathetically
follow me around?
Back at the party, the music is being played louder than ever. It’s Fed Neil’s
Sweet Cocaine. You notice a large crowd forming near the keg. At its center you catch
sight of Tanner being restrained by Carl, Jon, and the kid with the tattoo on his neck. As
you approach, you begin to decipher Tanner’s characteristic curses from the boisterous
uproar of the crowd. Tanner faces his stepfather who is being helped up from the ground
by his doubles partner and some other kid. Grass stains spot his white shorts and a small
stream of blood trickles from his nose. The club manger stands between the two, trying to
prevent more of whatever happened from happening again.
“Tanner, please stop,” the brunette he had his arm around earlier begs.
“Come on, man. Let’s just go home,” Carl tacks on.
Tanner continues to curse under his breath but appears to be calming down.
“Get this kid the fuck out of her,” the club manager says.
His cronies begin to ease their grip as it appears Tanner’s anger has simmered. He
spits and does an about face, walking towards the parking lot, his friends following
closely behind.
“Punk ass kids,” you hear that manager say as you jog over to catch up with the
group.
“Fuck that motherfucker,” Jon says, referring to the manager or Tanner’s step
dad.
“Yeah. Fuck him, man,” Carl says.
All four pile into his Firebird as Tanner flips over the engine. Still trailing behind
trying to figure out what happened, you run over to the car as it reverses out of the
parking spot, realizing that they’ve forgotten your existence and will not be waiting for
you if you don’t hurry. You knock on the window rapidly as the car backs out. Tanner
rolls down the window.
“Tanner,” is all you’re able to say as you try to catch your breath.
“Get in the car,” he tells you, almost sympathetically, more happy to see your face
than you imagined.
You bow your head as if offering thanks to some deity and slide into the backseat
next to the kid with the neck tattoo. You examine his tattoo as he sits sternly, staring into
space. It reads “pride” in cursive. Tanner cracks his neck as he rapidly pulls out of the
parking lot, both hands grasped tightly to the steering wheel.
The car is silent. You notice Tanner sniffling, vigorously wiping his nose. For a
moment, you think he might cry but then remember that Tanner is incapable of such an
emotion. You wish he would, though, so you could cry with him. About what, you try to
articulate in your mind. You’re confident it has nothing to do with Emma. You don’t
even know anymore if Emma is the reason you came back to this town, you think to
yourself as you successfully hold back tears. Something is definitely sad, though. Or
maybe happy. Could they be tears of joy wanting to come out? No. They wouldn’t be
tears of joy.
“Where do you want me to drop you off, Lex?” Tanner asks, his grip easing on
the steering wheel.
“I thought I’d just crash at your place for the night,” you tell him. “I got no where
else to go.”
“I got some shit to do tonight. Mind if I drop you off at the house?”
“Oh, I don’t want to be any trouble. I can tag along or something unless you think
I’d get in the way.”
“Sure. You can tag along.” You catch Tanner’s devilish grin coming back in the
rearview mirror.
“No fucking way is this kike going to come and mess things up,” Jon says from
the front seat.
“Yeah man. What the fuck are you thinking?” Carl adds.
“It’ll be good for the kid. Some fresh mountain air,” Tanner rebuttals.
“Mountains?” you ask confused.
“Driving up to Shaver for the evening. I think it’s about time you learn the ins and
outs of my true trade,” Tanner tells you.
You look over at the Firebird’s digital clock and it’s almost one in the morning.
You don’t imagine they’re trying to catch the sunrise.
“What does that entail?” you ask.
3.
Tanner sips from a thermos filled two-thirds black coffee, one-third Wild Turkey,
a custom he emulates from his deceased father, as he drives with one hand on the steering
wheel up the windy foothill roads. You judge the mixology proportions from the stench
of his breath, which drifts from his side of the Firebird to yours as he vibrantly recollects
the story of how he got to third base with Katie McGrath your junior year of high school.
Johnny Cash moans from the stereo on low volume. The full moon castes a dim haze
over the San Joaquin Valley. You’ve spent the ride staring out the window watching
track home gated communities morph into infinite vineyard expanses, vineyards into
riparian rolling hills tainted yellow from the summer sun, rolling hills into pines and
manzanitas.
Jon, Carl, and the kid with the tattoo on his neck drive in an old, rusty
Volkswagen, trailing closely behind. At certain bends of the road, you catch small
glimpses of the lights of Shaver through the increasingly dense forest. The town’s
existence thrives mostly as a vacation spot. Rich, white people flock up from the Valley
to ski in the winter and boat in the summer. Families fill up the hundreds of wood cabins
that line the banks of Shaver Lake. Tanner is an amazing skier.
“You still spend your winters skiing China Peak?” you ask, interrupting his story.
“Na, I don’t do that anymore,” he tells you sternly.
“Is the snow better at Big Bear?”
“I don’t ski there, either.”
“Where do you ski?”
“I don’t ski anymore, Lex,” Tanner says. Hearing your name aloud is almost
startling. “Had to sell the equipment.”
“Are you serious?” you ask skeptically, remembering the entire winters you’d
spend at his cabin, skiing China Peak in the day, stealing his grandpa’s cigars at night.
“Don’t act so surprised,” he tells you. “You’re a big kid. You oughtta know a man
has to have his priorities.”
“Priorities?” you asked confused.
“Man’s got to pay the bills.”
“Isn’t that what we’re doing right now?” you ask. You’re not exactly positive
what it is you’re doing right now, though. Tanner explained, but the operation is still
fuzzy. What’s more fuzzy is why you agreed to join. You’re not going through with this
for your own benefit like Tanner described. You don’t need the money. Maybe there’s a
benefit other than cash.
“It’ll pay the rent,” Tanner says. “I got my own living expenses, though.”
Before you can ask any further questions, Tanner takes a sharp turn off the road
and a onto dirt road. The other car follows dutifully. At the top of the dirt road you can
see the entire lake including the long dock jetting out towards its center. Speedboats of
every size fill up almost every spot. The dirt road descends towards the lake, but comes to
a trailhead about two hundred yards away. You read the digital clock and it’s almost three
in the morning now. Tanner parks, and so does the other car. All five of you step out. Jon
pops the trunk of the Volkswagen and takes out two backpacks. He tosses one to Tanner
and puts on the other.
The group begins their descent down to the dock. You follow behind attentively,
your drunkenness beginning to ware away, your lucidity slowly returning. Perhaps slower
than you’d like. Your confusion in articulating your role in this operation has transformed
into a burning desire to end this group effort. You jog up the trail to Tanner who leads the
pack.
“What is all this?” you whisper, not exactly sure what you mean.
“What are you asking me, Lex?” Tanner asks agitatedly.
“I mean, what are we doing here?”
“Literally or in an existential sense?” he asks. You think for a second.
“Both. Either.”
“To survive,” Tanner says.
“In which sense?” you ask.
“Both. Either,” he says.
“When we get back to the Valley, we should get you a new pair of skis. I bet you
can get sweet deals at this time of year. And then after my fall semester, I’ll come back
down from school and we can ski China Peak like we used to,” you tell him jovially.
Tanner comes to an abrupt stop, his cronies coming to a halt behind him, and stares at
you with something greater than disdain. The hollowness of his eyes and the downward
curvature of his thin lips form an expression capable of inflicting physical pain all by
itself.
“I don’t know what the hell you’re doing here, Lex. Up here at Shaver, in the
entire Valley, or still talking to me. I don’t know what the hell you’re doing here,” he
tells you. “In an hour or two this will all be done with and we’ll be back at my place, and
then we can have this little heart to heart, but until then I need you to shut the fuck up.”
“Could you try not to wake up the whole damn town?” Carl hisses.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what I said,” you tell Tanner.
“Go wait by the car,” he tells you. With that, he turns away and heads back down
the hill towards the lake, the pack following his lead. You watch them disappear into the
distance wondering what’s the right thing to do. After some time of reflection, you decide
to disobey Tanner’s orders and head down the hill.
By the time you’ve caught up, the group is creeping along the dock. You watch as
they elegantly step from plank to plank before following. The stillness of the summer
mountain air makes every step sound like a strike of lightening. Your heart is racing as
you see the group split up climbing onto separate boats. In the darkness, you are unable to
tell who stepped onto which boat, and decide to climb onto the last one hoping that you’ll
find Tanner. As you step onto the Malibu speedboat, you catch Carl spin around
nervously. He’s relieved to see it’s just you.
“What the hell you doing here?” he asks.
“I wanted to help,” you tell him.
“You can help by staying quiet.”
You sit down on the edge of the boat and scan the horizon. A few lights shine
from the porches of some distant cabins. Utter silence aside from the shuffling steps on
the boats. You reach down and feel the cold water. Carl labors over the amplifier of the
sound system with a powered screwdriver. Some pliers and a flashlight sit nearby. He
sets down the screwdriver in exchange for the pliers and cuts away at the wires leading
up to the amp, exposing their copper insides. Only minutes go by before Carl pulls up the
amp from its roots, wires dangling sloppily from its sides.
As Carl stands up from his crouching position, tucking the amp under his arm, a
pair of red and blue lights flashes in the distance. Carl mutters a series of curses under his
breath. You see the other three hopping off the boats and running down the dock towards
the path they came from. Carl jumps from the boat to the dock still holding onto the amp,
and you follow. You’re running down the dock, Tanner leading the pack. Carl catches his
foot on one of the planks and slips, falling into the water. The rest run past oblivious, and
in the split second you have to process the situation, you slow down to help him out. Carl
tries to keep his head above water, shivering and out of breath. You crouch over and offer
your hand. Carl grabs on. As you pull him back onto the deck, you see Tanner belly down
at the end of the dock. A police officer stands on top of him with his knee digging into
Tanner’s back. You’ve pulled Carl out of the water. He stands next to you, hands on both
knees, trying to catch his breath. As you look down to the end of the dock, you catch
sight of the sparkling reflection of the police lights reflecting off of the steel handcuffs
being placed around Tanner’s wrists.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Winter Reading List: How Many Have You Read?
This is the new Facebook thing--people can brag about how much they did or did not read in high school English class. But I really like it because my first thought was: "Wow! Now I know what I can do during my winter break!" Thought it'd be fun to share with book nerds.
Also: post how many you've read! Brag! It's fun :)
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Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (all)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Travellers Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina –Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - William Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far from the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martell
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On the Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson
74 Notes from a Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Colour Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince _ Antoine de Saint Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie & the Chocolate factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
Monday, November 29, 2010
If this story were its own blog, would you read it?
Last semester, DeCal-less and bored, I wrote some random snippets about Delila & Gordon. I showed them to Casey and a few others mostly for entertainment; there were no long-term goals and no motifs and no bells nor whistles. Now G&D are sitting on my desktop sleepy and lonely (they love attention)...
...think if I made their story into a blog, people might read it?
Here's the little beginning....
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“The only secret people keep is immortality.” --Emily Dickinson
“Marriage: friendship recognized by the police.” --Robert Louis Stevenson
He wasn’t really the kind of person you wanted to have coffee with. People stared. This is what Delila was thinking about when the barista (coffeeboy) squealed her name in a man-boy broken note.
IF it were really true what Delila’s father had always said--that relationships were defined forever within the first ten minutes of the first date--then Delila should be concerned about once again hurting this man’s fragile, love-massacred feelings. IF it were really true that he was now serving as an actress’s sex slave, perhaps a one-night-stand wouldn’t linger in his mind for too long. Delila wiggled her ass when she tugged down her skirt on the way to get the skinny vanilla latte.
Once, she thought she was one of the few people neurotic (and post-anorexic) enough to order a tall non-fat sugar-free vanilla latte. She whispered her order to the Starbucks boys. But then they changed the name of that drink to a skinny latte, one solid two-lettered common-drink title, which signaled that (a) there were several other equally neurotic recovering anorexics and (b) Starbucks wanted to make the women face the fact that they were still trying to be skinny. Delila didn’t think of it at this moment, but it also signaled that (c) the word skinny had a positive connotation in Los Angeles, unlike in much (most) of the world.
Gordon was flicking sugar packets at the wall when she returned to the table. People were staring. Still.
Gordon was the type of man who did not notice that people stared at him. In fact, if you asked him if he felt stared at, he would laugh and tell you that he is not that good-looking. He thought only good-looking people were stared at.
He was also the type of man who did not bathe more than once a week, and did not believe in taking off his snow coat. Even in Starbucks. Even in Los Angeles. Even in July.
Thirdly, he was the type of man who had an exorbitantly thick facial hair, although it was not long. He had very dirty-colored head hair, although it was not (too) dirty. His eyes had a piercingly blue color (which made Delila tense her thighs), although they did not piercingly stare (except sometimes at Delila, ten years ago).
Gordon’s irises were merely a result of God bestowing upon Gordon’s ugly mother one redeeming quality to keep her genealogical line going. It turned out to be unnecessary since Gordon’s father was half-blind and usually piss-drunk.
Delila liked (likes? Delila: no comment) Gordon not only because of the way the light happened to bounce off the insides of his eyeballs. She also liked him because, as much as it made her uncomfortable to have strangers staring at them in Starbucks, there was something liberating about the way they sat across the table from each other, saying not a word for twenty minutes. Especially since she had not seen him in ten years. And especially since he obviously had a lot to tell.
And especially since she usually talked so much, too much, to anyone she could stick her claws words into. Someone once told her, in her second semester of college, that she approached a conversation the way a Spartan woman would approach a cougar near her male baby. It was not the first or last time that someone compared Delila to a Spartan woman. Delila was high at the time and spent the rest of the night obsessing about whether or not cougars existed in the same geographical area and historical time-span as Spartans. It was the second-to-last time she smoked marijuana, and the only thing she could remember about the night.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Work in Progress: The Chair
I'm going to just go ahead and leave this here for you guys to read at your leisure; please let me know what you think of it if you do by chance read the whole thing! I know it's a bit long (but hopefully I'll add many more pages to it once I revise the ending!)
--
From the shadows around me a smooth note swells, high and piercing, blooming into a velvet expansion too big to be contained, threatening to burst its seams. Then it recedes, a torrent of aggressive noise dying down, in the end no more than a blip on the radar. . . .
“Is it agreeable, Ian?”
“Huh?”
“Agreeable, is it agreeable?”
I had the most distinct feeling that my head was floating away from my body; I could feel it, playfully buoyant, like a balloon on a string bobbing far above my shoulders. My limbs tingled; I felt a tremulous sense of surreal danger. I sank further into the chair. Miraculously, something was still holding me together. I was, just barely, still able to think.
A figure loomed before me in the dim light: tall and lean, but strong-looking, and strange, the silhouette of a being more or less than human. Through blurry vision, I felt I was looking at the shadow of a man. His aura was otherworldly—it seemed to undo my sense of reason.
His drifting voice flowed mildly around my head. “Nice 8-track collection. Mind if I put something on?”
“What?”
“Leftoverture’s a nice choice. Kansas’ wayward sons provide such satisfaction, don’t you think?”
“Huh?”
“I said the wayward son, satisfying.”
“You an alien?” The question echoed from somewhere above where my head ought to have been.
“No,” he said.
“Uhkay, sure, right then, play what you like.”
He held the 8-track up, inspecting it. Then he slid it into the machine with one smooth movement, his hand reaching across to the play button, his arm muscles flexing and taking shadows; it was lulling and dreamlike to watch—his movements were slow and hid a stoic strength, with which he could probably pinch my neck in easily.
Now a different kind of sound filled the air: old and staticky, the strange melody of man-and-electric-guitar, upbeat in an old-fashioned sort of way. The first few notes resonated deeply with me, echoing in full color, jarring and oddly flat at first, but then full and ripe in all respects—color, sound, feel, it was all overwhelming my sensory input. I took it in silently, slouching into deeper concentration, wilting in its presence.
I teetered on the verge of spilling through the gaps of my old patio chair. The brittle weathered plastic felt strange against my body. All the while it had been growing white-hot, pulsing with energy, like hot iron spitting sparks straight from the forge. The chair’s arms wrapped themselves slowly around my own, sealing me in. I wondered whether chairs often do this, then shrugged in a relaxed way, overwhelmed once more by a sense of languid ease.
The figure bent down so that his face and mine were level with each other. His eyes were swimming—the centers, though they were still, were brimming with movement and energy. Even gazing into them, I felt an overwhelming stupor reach inside me, grabbing hold of my already unraveling mind…
Breaking eye contact, I strived to put on an appearance of composure.
“This is my basement, yunno.” I could hear myself say it. “And I don’t—know—what—you’re doing here, pal,” my slurred speech had never been more intimidating, “but I’ve got you right where I want you. Just you try and mess around with me.”
He blinked, considering my words, and then reached casually into the folds of his tunic, pulling out a fruit with the demeanor of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. He began to peel the rind off slowly, and I watched as patches floated gently to the floor—they seemed to mock gravity as they drifted lazily. The fruit itself, which I could make out through the grip of his long spindly fingers, glowed a brilliant shade of vermillion, convincing me that somewhere out there more figures like him, clad in overalls and straw hats, were making a small fortune harvesting balls of radioactive marmalade.
He spoke to me again.
“I’m not some benevolent spirit, you know.” He fiddled with his otherworldly fruit. “People always mistake me for the good guys.”
“A benehhvolint spirit wouldn’t play Kaaansas on an eeeight-track player inmy basement,” I said, struggling to let the sounds escape from between my thick loose tongue and cavernous palate. I hadn’t anticipated the difficulty of forming words, but it was overtaking me.
“They consider themselves Bruce Springsteen fans,” he said, a little amused.
I wanted to respond, “I always knew there was a deeper reason I couldn’t take them seriously,” but all I could muster was an, “Erhhhbluuuhhh.”
The figure took one confident bite of his freshly peeled fruit, leaving only a crescent of the foreign flesh left. I felt a little mingled spittle and alien OJ hit my cheek. He did not seem to notice my internal battle against the silence, or if he did, took no interest. Maybe he was not at all benevolent.
A moment of awareness had seized me, out of nowhere (swooping down to me from the heavens maybe), and within that moment the conditions of my current situation stood bare, in all their peculiarity; a sense of urgency had filled me (perhaps it was the impending sense of doom I felt being held in a patio chair’s death-grip) and I blurted out,
“Who the hell are you, man?”
He let the question echo, eyeing me from where he stood. Those large and lively eyes! Within seconds (or hours, or days), my awareness had faded again, and I was returned to a state of confusion. My head, which at first was too light, was becoming uncomfortably heavy and it lolled to one side. Then the heaviness receded a little, and with some effort I pulled myself back up again. His silence had reminded me that the music was still playing in the background. Staticky, coming in like an alien transmission:
…Once I rose above the noise and confusion
Just to get a glimpse beyond this illusion
I was soaring ever higher…
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a small spider weaving lacework into the corner of an old wood table, where the leg met with the under panel. I’d used it to hold my painting supplies at one time, before leaving it to the neglect of my basement. Long ago, I had realized how much of an artist I was not; though it disappointed me a little, I wasn’t heartbroken (more confirmation that I was no artist). The used canvases from those days were probably still around somewhere, beneath their crusting ridges and stagnant stains.
The spider spun slowly; leg after leg after leg, she made her way inward to that singular point—that critical place where everything was connected. She dropped down, her abdomen dipping to attach the new strand at each radial. I imagined spraying her web with water, watching droplets glisten as they fell along the taut lines at angle. And I thought about each crystalline ball falling to that central point, each string reaching inward, and suddenly I was overwhelmed by the immensity of the pattern—the immensity of the web, and the spider, and the table, and the basement, and—
“It’s too much, it’s just too much!” I cried.
“Too much of what?”
“Too much of everything! Everything.” I felt I might cross that threshold into something too overwhelming to bear.
There was a long pause. He stepped back a little, giving me some space. Then his voice filled the dark silence; his speech lulled me again, one seamless smooth note.
“Yes, there is a vastness to it. I was once overwhelmed by it too. It takes much more to bring me out of being so underwhelmed these days. I miss it, I really do. But more and more, I have grown fond of the quiet unrest that fills silences and dark corners and lonely hours.”
“What’s so important about that stuff?”
“That horror greets us only in the dead of night.”
“Are you horror? Should I be afraid of you?” I asked, half attentive, and still half horrified by the web’s lure and bigness.
“You asked me who I am. I’m not a who, Ian. I’m a what. A modifier of consciousness, to be precise. And I am not horror.”
I was dreaming of web-weaving, still struck by the awe of immenseness life around me was taking on. I tried letting his words sink in.
“Modifier of…can I call you Moc, then?” I asked.
“Sure, if that’s what you like.”
Some time had passed before I felt the need to ask another question.
“Moc,” I said, “does horror ever visit you like it does me, or us, people I mean?”
“All the time.”
“You screw around with people’s minds,” I said.
“I enlighten them.”
“Why me?”
“I like your music collection. It’s rare to find people with good taste these days. May I ask why you stopped painting, Ian?” His voice was even and calm.
“Useless. I mean, I am useless at it.”
Moc bent down and picked up one of the patches of rind from the ground, thumbing it in his palm as if to smooth it out. It seemed such an ominous gesture to me at the time, but I had no idea what was to come; maybe that’s what frightened me most.
I looked up and saw that he was still thumbing his palm, but the rind had all but disappeared.
“We’re going to search now. Close your eyes, Ian.”
“They are closed, aren’t they?” They felt shut. A thin light layer was pressing against them from the outside—I could only assume it was my eyelids.
“No.”
“Oh.” The thick feeling of a skin over my eyes doubled, and I was sure they were shut this time.
“Where are you taking me, Moc?” I had asked. There was a childish curiosity in my voice. With this, he moved in closer, resting his hand on the top of my head. I struggled under the weight of something greater; my mind was whirring, whizzing, completely boggled… Then infinite black.
--
I was slumped in a chair that held me as tight as my mother did when I was young; my head was still spinning.
My real eyes had been opened. Moc could attest.
He was looking into them again, the way a doctor might in an examination. I was sure that mine were swimming too, just as his were. Then he said to me in that smooth and serious voice, “Ian, I want to ask you something.”
“What is it?” I prepared myself for something profound and difficult—I had a feeling I could tackle it.
“You got The Doors?”
“Are you joking?”
“No.”
“How about you go dig through my tapes again while I try to readjust to the room being sideways,” I said. It was true. While I had reached a plane of understanding that was beyond mere transcendence, I was still spilling out of myself and my thoughts were bleeding into a greater consciousness that left me nauseated. I wondered if the chair could still contain me in this state.
He was already out of sight by the time I’d said it, and I began to hear shuffling coming from the corner. He didn’t strike me as behaving particularly like a spirit of something or other.
“Once, I created a man’s dream from scratch,” he said, still thumbing through my music collection. “It was an amazing experience for both of us.”
“What did you make him dream of?” I asked, trying to imagine how one might physically create a dream for someone else. What came to me was an absurd image of Moc standing behind a man with a beer hat, feeding a mercurial liquid through tubes which went in through his temples instead of his mouth.
“I didn’t make him dream of anything. I created a dreamscape for him, a place where he wanted to be. In the end, that was enough. He sat there, very content.”
“What did it look like?”
“Dreamscapes are made of fine material; it’s very difficult to describe how the ether of one man’s dreams translates for another. It was a desert. The sand was warm and fine, and the sky a deep, most intense purple. Where he sat, I’d laid a bed of peonies. They were very soft.”
“And he just sat there?”
“Wouldn’t you?” Moc had already given up his search, and had once again returned to the chair. He looked eagerly at me, waiting for an answer.
“Can’t say.” I thought carefully about it, and was not sure whether my answer would be truer to my real self, or to this wiser self.
“Well, let’s try something different then. It’s not going to feel comfortable at first, and you’re going to wonder where you are very literally within the experience. But don’t worry, it will be you; you will be watching yourself from a safe distance.”
“Are you saying this will be an out of body experience?”
“There is no body to begin with. Here we go.”
“Wait! Will I lose anything, will I go somewhere else?”
“You’ll lose precisely one patio chair after everything’s all through. Here we go.”
They were incoherent and insubstantial but insubstantial was good—it meant that he would not have to deal with the full emotions his dreams would otherwise bring. Instead, it was a fleeting image of this person, or a soft, indistinct murmur from that person which, he convinced himself, must be of a comforting nature. Most of the time, he merely experienced colors and a sweet numbing tingle, as if a small tribute was being siphoned from the part of his brain where his most warming memories were kept. Slowly though, these experiences began to lose their freshness, that feeling of being something young and endless. Against all he hoped and wished for, the sounds became more indistinguishable, softer still, and less comforting; gradually he faded away from that place of warmth. The images were now blurs and vague outlines. Desperate to remain and yet unable to resist the changes, his body compensated by filling with an immense sense of paralyzed despair.
The eroding landscape of these dreams soon gave way to a more tangible but airy reality. Soft earth pressed itself firmly against the soles of his feet. The colors ever so gradually materialized into various forms of scenery, the blurs crispening into solid objects. The soft lavenders became a majestic mountain range, taking root in the distance. The warm blues meandered through a thicket of newly appeared flora. Red sky hung high above, intense and harsh, as an unusual but ever-present dawn seemed to employ itself over the landscape, giving the impression that it had never been anything other than red since the earth was young.
He could feel the yellow. Slowly the yellow had gone from being an all-encompassing and permeating feeling of warmth to a soft glow radiating energy on his skin. It was still warm, and it was still, in essence, unchanged, but now it was outside of him, in this alien place which seemed to persuade him that it was not so alien.
The place was not his, it was not familiar, it did not impress or move him. He was unable to find solace in the warm rays of distant yellow. Instead, a feeling of distinct estrangement grew inside of him like a tumor, pressing against his insides, making itself a regular presence.
After the transformation, everything ceased to feel real. Nothing moved, nothing changed. There was no sound of flowing streams, no birds rustling the leaves of trees, no faint buzzing that could indicate a breath of life. It stayed this way for what seemed an eternity.
Without thinking, without so much as contemplating his next move, he took a single step forward. The earth shifted ever so slightly backwards. He took another, and still it moved. Soon he was in full stride, and quickly he discovered that the scenery changed, got closer, disappeared beyond his line of vision. Things began to show the irregularity of nature--places of burnt earth where tiny buds were taking their first breaths, places where rocks stacked up against the soft rage of creek water, places where fallen leaves were tramped down into a gentle nest, places which suggested a subtle pulse of life.
After some time of this, he came to a place that was entirely foreign. There lay before him a stunning field of wild yellow grasses, so perfectly golden yellow that his knees went weak, and he cried for the beauty.
He knew his home.
“What was that all about?” I asked.
“Perspective,” he replied.
“I knew my home. I don’t think I expected that. Did you?”
“To be perfectly honest? I was hoping you would.”
“By the way, Moc?”
“Yes?”
“I painted that picture before—the one with the man and the peonies and the desert purple sky.”
“I know.”
Monday, November 8, 2010
bedtime stories with Temari ☆
Sunday, October 31, 2010
NaNoWriMo
NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow.
I'll be writing at IHouse cafe probably early morning and late at night so let me know via email or comments here if you want to join. Eek!
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Contributing!
Season 3 Episode 7: The Day the Earth Stood Stupid
 |
| it's a good show |
Hello!
+++++
I fumbled open the apartment door, hands barely maintaining their grip on my bag o’ donuts and purse-and-jacket combo, to fall into my dark apartment.
“Hello?” My words fell softly into carpet, and wooden doors. “Hello?”
It seemed no one was home, and I dropped my things on the ground in my room, thud-swish-thud, only to hear another muffled “thmpth” on the other side of the wall. Was someone home? Had they stayed silent out of some strange attempt to be polite? It made no sense. I peered out into the darkened living room where soft yellow light flooding through opened blinds created a drunken mishmash of shadows.
There was the table, the piles of god-knows-what that accumulate in the living room, the support beam, and –
“Jacob?”
I saw his shadow, what looked like the outline of his frame, only barely visible by the filtered streetlights. He was hunched over, head lolled to the left, right shoulder raised as if in a frozen shrug. He was standing in the middle of the living room, facing a wall, in the dark, when an inhuman moan escaped him. It emanated in rolling nasal sounds, it seemed to come out of his pores; it was, in short, not his usual greeting.
“Nnnnnngggnnnnnmmmmuunnnngg…”
As the sound trailed off into a creaky whisper, his shape leaned and lumbered and he turned and faced me in the dark – I ran back into my room, slamming the door, jamming a small bookcase under the doorknob – and wondered if he was one of those fast zombies, or one of the sad undead that can only sort of shuffle. Mostly, I wondered if he knew how to open a door, and if he was strong enough to get in.
The handle turned. That answered one question.
I realized I was trapped and that I had cornered myself in an inescapable place, this third floor room with one barred window. I cursed myself, like I cursed all the fallen damsels in distress you see in the movies who try to run away from murderers by climbing stairs or locking themselves in cupboards. “Irrational!” I muttered to myself, and looked for something to protect myself with.
Luckily, I had found a reasonably small board on the street earlier in the week, and while I had intended on turning it into shelving, it could swing in a reasonably unencumbered fashion. I still played softball with some friends on the weekends, so I felt reasonably protected. Newly armed, I faced the door from which I could still hear a pathetic moaning and scratching.
The handle turned again.
I prepared myself for his hulking assault, gripping my new weapon; I pulled the bookshelf away from the door and turned off the lights. Do zombie eyes see like our eyes? I didn’t know, but I wasn’t going to take any risks. I grabbed my painfully bright LED flashlight, and crouched low, finding my center of balance.
When he finally came in, I turned the flashlight into his eyes, and as he bellowed and threw up his arms, I felt the first tendrils of hope I might survive the night. I jammed the board into his stomach so he doubled over, and went into a clumsy assault about his general head area. I was so terrified, blood was rushing to my head and I could barely see in my desperate attempt to escape what I thought was a terrible monster, officer, you don’t understand!
You really would have done the same thing in my situation, I swear. It’s All Hallow’s Eve, right? Under any other circumstances I never would have been fooled by my roommate pretending to be a monster, only this is the day when our world and the spirit world are the closest, you know? So I’m kind of superstitious! Can you blame me? The whole world is set on being creepy tonight. It got to me. Look, I’m sure when he comes to he’ll blame himself and not place any charges or anything, so could you please let me go home? I’ll foot his medical bills, I promise, and look at it this way, at least he didn’t sustain any internal injuries! Alright, yes, I’ll hear what you have to say.
…
Then he bit you? Really?
…
I thought he was unconscious the whole time in the ambulance. I mean, he was pretty much out after I was done giving his general upper torso what-for.
…
That’s really unnatural. And that bite doesn’t look too good, officer, have you seen any nurses about it?
…
Mm, I see what you’re getting at; you’re playing a joke on me now, right?
…
Right?
…
Ohh, sh-