“Book stores are on their way out”.
I agree.
“Libraries, too.”
“Not just book stores. All stores. The way of the past.”
“People in other countries done hate us. They hate our government.”
“So do I.”
“Not in theory but in practice.”
“It’s okay, though. I hate most so far.”
What we talk about when we talk about time-travel
Silence engulfs the room like a shadow.
or
Maybe it doesn’t and just seems that way.
“We won’t make it out alive.”
Lyric from some song that's playing.
Not playing.
Playing in my head.
My inner voice is so loud now, booming at distracting volumes. It alternates between intensities, much louder than the noise from whatever else is going on around me. Hear the colors in the music, when I close my eyes.
My eyes are closed.
They are open.
Outside me: Jack and Zoë and Kathy just seem to exist, right now. Silent. Forgotten. Lost in their thoughts, maybe.
I guess they could be talking, asking me questions, even, and laughing at my total lack of response. They could be loud as hell but I can’t listen.
Don’t. My mind is louder.
Me talking to me.
Is this voice always there? Am I only super aware, now, because of the volume of my thoughts?
Now, I’m aware that I’m aware.
Fear the voice.
And then
don’t.
Try to listen.
Instead, see.
Kathy is slumped, relaxing against Jack, who in turn supports himself against the side of the frame and mattress of the bed. Plaid sheets grip the mattress.
Zoe is next to him. Along the floor against the bed.
I’m cross-legged and hunched on a throw pillow on the floor between Zoë and Kathy.
We’re a set of knocked-over dominoes, suspended mid fall.
The interrupted 360-degree pan makes me dizzy.
The camera cannot see the camera.
I don’t see myself.
There’s no mirror to allow it,
but I know I’m here
by looking down
at my hands.
Kathy watches the screensaver on the computer monitor. It’s the one where little white pixels that are supposed to be stars fly by, pass you, to provide the illusion of traveling through space.
Very Star Trek. Very retro.
Jack is on his cell phone, surfing the internet or something. Here, but not. The joint clip smolders in the ash tray just before him.
Zoë smiles and slowly twirls her costume-jewelry necklace. It looks cheap. It’s probably expensive.
I’m thinking about the way it used to be.
Define it.
College. People. The world. Life.
Before all the bullshit. Before we all started pretending to be adults. When the world was what we could see and we could see whatever our limitless imagination could show us.
Before the humanization of the god.
Before the sins of the father.
Before the destruction of the friend.
Before the de-idealization of love.
When we lived in the present and not through retrospect.
Before the forced concepts of the real.
Before we decided we had learned as much as we would, could, satisfied.
Before all our minds were made up.
“Stop narrating,” Kathy tells me, unmoved from her reclined pose against Jack.
Maybe.
I jar.
I question if she's actually said this or if it’s a phantom thought.
“Bad,” she points at me. Pseudo-stern and playful.
I’m sure she's actually speaking now.
“No,” she says.
Smile back. Notice that Zoë doesn’t get it.
Smile wider. More sinister.
She smiles at Kathy too.
“Isn’t Kathy awesome?” she asks me and means it. “I fucking love this girl.”
They hug.
A knock at the door.
It opens.
Light pools in, very allegory of the cave.
Eyes adjust.
Smoke spills out like a river around the edges of the door frame.
Jason stands there with his hair gelled into fine spikes and his whole face a smile. He lives in Milton, on the third floor.
“There’s beer pong in the living room, if any of you are down,” he informs us.
“I'm down,” Kathy says, stretching and sitting upright. “Let's dominate.”
She’s bored.
Jack says, “Yeah.”
Phone away in a pocket, he stands and looks at me.
I grumble an excuse. “I don’t think I can move.”
“Wimps.” Kathy sticks out her tongue. I can see its reddish pink.
Exit: Jack and Kathy.
“And then there were two,” the hipster laughs.
I laugh.
It’s no longer funny but that doesn’t really matter.
I resign myself to the thought of smothering her with one of the pillows if she tries to have a conversation about how people use language incorrectly. She hates it. Hates them. Those people. People who do this. Murderers of language.
I tell myself that I should shut her up.
Stop her mouth.
Busy her lips.
But I really can't move right now. Or maybe I just think I can’t.
Maybe I want to hear what she’s saying.
Probably not, though.
happy. hopeful. Scared.
don’t disappoint or let down.
doubt. the negative.
EndFragment
I know what's happened. But I don't even know why it's happened. And that, not knowing, drives me crazy.
Mental illness is just a mindset everyone feels.
A little crazy from time to time.
All of us.
And there's nothing wrong with that. It’s healthy, okay? Sometimes it's alright to feel a little off.
It's a crazy world that constantly tries to leave you feeling depressed or manic or antisocial or pathological. There have always been those who let themselves feel this way. It seems like there’s a lot more of them now.
There's nothing
Wrong with that. In fact,
Not getting a little crazy from time to time
Is the crazy thing.
“Me thinks she doth protest too much,” she tells me.
“Me?”
“No one’s disagreeing with you about that, but because it's something that's kind of a no-brainier. It's weird to bring it up. To talk about it, in social settings.”
“Gotcha,” I say. Nod.
She nods and plays with a strand of her hair.
“Thanks for the advice, K.”
“No problem,” she replies.
Anna disappears. Lose her at a party. She vanishes. Forget. Panic. Run through the worst case ones in my head. See Anna dead in an alley somewhere. Grow angry. Annoyed. Mad. Alternate the layers. Mad that I worry. Mad at the possible. The impossible, consider it too. Gone forever. Until she eventually comes back. Can't concentrate on the combo with Kathy. Christian. Drift. Be cold. See her go with some other dude. Jack I think. To the deli. The ATM. Forget this. That I stayed behind. Distant the rest I the night. End in fight. Real blow out in her apartment. She asks me to leave.
Fear. Feel it.
We've touched on something real here.
Trudge home. Get drunk. Hook up with the field hokey girl who would be real cute if only......
Out side the building in the front near the street. Chain smoke. It's raining. A drizzle really.
McCormick appears. Has he been watching me?
He asks if I've made up my mind.
If I have an answer.
If I'll help him
Help my father.
“I'm not even sure you're real right now,” I tell him.
He takes a drag off his cigarette. Smiles.
“That's a good thing.” He says, “Always question.”
“How do you figure?”
“Crazy people don't think their crazy.”
Remember.
Tell him, “Sure. Yes. I'll help.”
“Of course you will. We have been working and I have a lead that looks promising.”
“What do I do?”
“Well be in touch. Tomorrow. The next day. Soon”
“When?”
“Soon.” He repeats.
I want to know, “But what do I do?”
“We wait.”
He leaves.
Drink some more.
As I pass out on some floor, later, I hope it's mine.
Emerge from the wet heat of the underground. The stairwell became congested with human traffic, conditioning movements to crawl-like steps. 28th Street greeted me more hostile than refreshing, though, causing the exposed skin on my arms to go all prickly in the early April air. I inhaled with a sharp breath appropriate for pain. Shuffling, increasing pace, I struggled to distance myself, breaking free of the herd, despite any clear motivation to meet an ex at that café she loved so damn much and listen to her verbally berate me for the next hour. Report on the status of her five-year plan.
Broadway was not paved down here. Approaching a crosswalk, I saw the old cobblestone of some lost, depressing decade peek through torn away blacktop. The City was probably planning on construction, repairs, soon, but for now conditions were rough upon the spinning tires of the honeybee taxi cabs and anyone else crazy enough to travel by car down here.
Transportation, no matter how you look at it, in all its forms, had the inevitable downsides. An elderly woman, wearing floral-patterned drapes as a sun dress sneezed on me this morning on the One train. The light, moist sprinkles splashed my bare skin without apology, warning, or even acknowledgement. Eyes vacant, she didn’t miss a beat and continued watching the blur of lights sail by amidst the darkness.
“Bless you,” someone mumbles, but not to me.
Forget about light being at the end of tunnels.
Back on the street, the buildings rose up from the graying concrete, attempting to stab God.
In the darkness, there was a cold. This was years ago, before the slowed blood and aching heart, before the apathy and five-figure-a-month paychecks. The streets were lonely and still. The unforgiving night taunted and teased its victims. In the darkness, the faint feeling of warmth smoldered as a trashcan fire flickered to the strength of the December night and a group of strangers huddled together to fight off the frigid finger-tips of winter.
Warmth was only an elusive memory on the corner of Madison and Thirty-fifth. Feelings like those are often difficult to remember, while it’s the heartache you never forget. The silence, except for an occasional wailing siren, was eerie. New York, New York: if you could make it here, you’d make it anywhere. Sinatra said it, so it must be true. However, those who can’t make it are never heard from again. They slip through the cracks, devoured by darkness and cold.
Somewhere, a small caravan of vehicles snaked its way down the desolate streets. The tiny glow from their headlights pierced through curtains of darkness. Two mini-vans slowly came to a stop at some lonely corner as if giving in to the hopeless cold. But occupants emerged: middle aged men, house-wives, maybe a priest, a balding man who was slightly over weight, a woman whose glasses hung too big for her face, and a fourteen year old boy. They weren’t anybody special.
“BECAUSE” is sprayed, in rust-colored paint, upon the side of the building. The simplicity of the message holds my attention while someone from work is talking at me, not to or with me. Forming the word with my lips, I’m thinking, “Because what?”
I used to watch the clouds.
And I would see faces in them.
Stories.
Now, all I see are these looming warships.
As though, heaven stages an attack.
If you work with clowns, you end up putting on a circus.
“Who needs this anyway?” I ask Kathy, the girl who lives down the hall from me later in the day. I’m in her room playing beer pong with a few others.
“Beats me,” she says handing me a quarter filled cup of cheap beer. “Just worry about making your cups. They’re killing us.”
She’s right, my heads definitely not in it, tonight. All I can think about is my academic advisor’s glasses slowly slipping down her face when she told me that I was a failure. How attracted to her it made me. All my life this is a title I’ve strived to achieve. I should be proud, happy, anything.
Kathy’s computer speakers belt out some garage band music from the early 90s and I’m trying to focus on the lyrics. They’re singing something about losing hope in everything and being mad for no reason. Typical.
Then, just when I’m starting to understand, I feel my face lightly splashed with the sprinkles of some liquid.
“Jeez, you’re killing me,” Kathy scolds.
Looking down into my cup, I find a ping pong ball floating there, mocking me.
The death cup.
“Game over,” someone on the other team exclaims, jumping up and down. “We win.”
“Pull it together,” Kathy warns me when we sit down to watch some one else play in our place. “What’s with you tonight?”
I’m at a loss. The song changes to rap. Jay-Z.
I ask Kathy, “You ever feel like no matter what you do, you are destined to fail?”
“I hate this shit,” she says to the room, not hearing me at all. “I could never respect a genre of music whose sole aspect of creativity comes from stealing other people music and putting such crappy words over it.”
“Beat your wife. Smoke a blunt. Fuck the police,” I mock sing over the bass line. We both laugh.
Kathy finishes another beer. I think she’s five ahead of me now. It’s rare that she out drinks me. Scratch that, it’s rare that anyone out drinks me.
Opening another can, she confides, “I just don’t know how anyone can listen to this.”
“You reap what you sow,” I mumble, losing interest.
Paul E. Sy
and
Simon Says
And We need a doctrine
our current collective beliefs.
There can’t be
sides
anymore.
not the kinds of parties
you’d want to attend.
Just the universal pursuit .
Find that human
voice.
Consciousness.
Then, later, include the robots
when they want equal rights.
Whatever.
Growing as we grow.
For living money has no place.
Contribute
experience
in some way, participate positively.
Everything that everyone has .
Across the board.
Embrace difference,
new ways of thinking
of thinking
of thinking.
Advance
.
Yet.
They can’t control it yet.
I ditch Becky and go back into the bar. It’s crowded and loud. The music makes my head ache with pain. There’s a bunch of high school kids here getting drunk for the first time.
Roger, who I played basketball with in seventh grade, sees me and offers to buy me a beer. I accept the drink from him, even though I don’t remember that his name is Roger until I’m almost ready to leave.
“How’s it going, my man?” Roger asks me for the thirty-first time this evening, with the same genuine interest as every single time before.
A false sense of helplessness sweeps over me. For no reason, I reveal to Roger, “I almost never really go to class.”
“No shit, son,” he says and I almost want to call him dad. Then I remember that Roger is not my father.
“I just don’t go,” I shrug. Miraculously, I find empty space somewhere in the overcrowded bar and stare off into it. It’s a framed poster of John Bellushi on the wall. His eyes, the smirk: they haunt me.
“I feel so empty.” The words make me shiver with cold.
Roger hasn’t heard me at all. Almost knocking me off my bar stool, he booms, “Shit! Did you see that? That bitch just took off her shirt!”
I didn’t see it, nor do I care. At the moment. Tits are tits.
“You treat women horribly, you know that?” I ask.
He’s already departed, heading toward the girl without a shirt, I guess.
Enough.
The bartender makes eye contact with me and points down to the beer bottles with his index and pinky finger. He tries to communicate using telepathy. He wants money. I shake my head. Roger didn’t pay. I slam a ten dollar bill down at the bar and turn. Make my way towards the door.
When he looks at me for a tip, I smile and tell him, “Go fuck yourself.”
Continue moving towards the exit.
Before I can get outside and call a cab, Becky, the Goth girl, flings herself at me. She wraps me in her arms.
“Want to come home with me?” she asks, touching my shirt again. “You feel so soft. It’s nice.”
She’s probably on something. But what, I wonder. The mystery vaguely intrigues.
Looking around, I sigh. A part of me doesn’t want to go back with her. That part of me wants to go back to my dorm and drink myself to sleep with an understanding bottle of Southern Comfort. But a much bigger part of me reminds me that I haven’t gotten laid in almost a week. Needless to say, that bigger part wins.
“You’ll never be Batman,” Anna informs me.
“That’s for sure.”
Little arcs.
I quit smoking. The unfinished pack is thrown out the window. I can do this, I tell myself over and over again.
On my way to the cafeteria, I see that girl with the eyebrow piercing. I don’t remember her name but her face instantly triggers an emotional response. We’re walking in opposite directions. There are forces driving us apart. I’m famished and she probably has more pressing concerns than talking to me. But as our paths cross, I sense a smile on her face even though I look away and keep going with out breaking my stride. I want to stop but my stomach won’t let me.
Food in the cafeteria is just below the quality fed to people serving life sentences in a penitentiary. Worse, it barely qualifies as sustenance. The laxatives they mix into everything don’t let anything linger long enough for nutrition.
Tonight for dinner, we have flat circles of meat, which reminds me of cheap hamburgers, but is being passed off as steak. They are yesterday’s meatloaf and tomorrow’s Sloppy Joe. The mashed potatoes have strange gray chunks in them. There’s always something hard in the food that you bite into while chewing.
All the beverages taste like water. All the food smells like gas.
I sit alone at dinner, not making eye contact with anyone as they walk by. My meat circle is crunchy. I think I chip a tooth in the process.
I leave and discover rain, outside.
Open a bottle of whisky in my room. Wait for the night to unfold.
Kathy calls me some time after I get back from dinner. She says she’s got a bottle of liquor and some time to kill. I tell her that it sounds like a plan. A bad plan, but a plan, nonetheless.
From across the crowded room, everything looks like the ocean. Bodies contort in chaos. Sweat and salt in the air. This random college bar, not far from campus, is packed to the brim with the worst that college brings out in people. Everyone is hunched over medieval-looking, wooden tables or flapping their limbs in some sort of dance, resembling, more and more, a featherless duck.
Pitchers are passed back from the bar towards the outskirts of the room. Rain can be seen through the large pane of glass in the window, splattering against it. Everclear’s “Father of Mine” comes belting from the jukebox and the drunks, they all recite the words in a throng of voices.
I’m at a table with Andy and he’s sloshed, rambling on about God knows what, now. We’ve each got a pitcher of this bottom-shelf beer. I’m drinking straight from mine and Andy keeps missing his cup, each time he attempts to pour. I’ve been chain-smoking for the last five minutes, inhaling furiously before stubbing cigarettes out on the table’s sticky surface and flicking into my friend’s pitcher of beer.
“There’s a drug that makes people eat other people,” Andy says to me like he’s reporting for the evening news.
“Right,” I reply, letting the orbs in my head take in the surroundings. “Cannibalism. Got it.”
“No,” he tells me, gravity in his throat. “If there is someone you envy or someone has something you want, you eat them and in essence, you become them.”
Surprised at Andy’s essence, I see Kathy, three tables down, with Jack and he’s whispering something in her ear. She laughs but doesn’t look at him. Her eyes wander disinterested. I think she can feel my stare. Kathy looks up, then away.
“Are you listening?” Andy asks. He still hasn’t noticed the cigarette butts in his beer. He’s drinking with greed. His Adam’s apple rises and falls with every swallow. It reminds me of a sick-man’s heartbeat.
“Do you hear yourself sometimes?”
“It’s science,” he grumbles.
The beer doesn’t quite agree with him.
“Read about a girl who envied this cheerleader and she took this drug and ate her. Well, not all of her,” he pauses, chugging the rest of his cup. “They found the cheerleaders body half eaten, missing, like, one side of her body.”
“If you say so, man.”
I'm not quite sure how it all fits. But it’s something alluring about the mystery.
The magnus cephalgicus.
Its written on a wall in the alleyway I duck into to take a piss.
Caput capitis poena.