Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2005 19:11:32 -0800
From: Timothy Stillman <comewinter@earthlink.net>
Subject: Empath
"Empath"
by
Timothy Stillman
"Fly me to the North/to where the gentle lilacs never
bloom/to where their fragrances never once again will
enter my room/to where the whiteness is the only thing I
can see/I just can't stand to have your sadness all around
me."
Rod McKuen
It was his fear, his broken heart that gave him the
violence of gentleness. And that is what frightened me
the most.
You don't need to pull back the yellow speckled oilcloth
curtains in the dingy dirty cluttered kitchen of this dingy
dirty apartment in order to feel the imprint. At least I
don't.
It's happened time and time again. The way the cold gets
in when there is winter and this is Seattle. For this must
be Seattle and it must be winter, for if it isn't, then my
life is over even before it is.
I sit at the rude wood table, small, in one of those
yard chairs of cloth and aluminum with a bent left leg
that half tips me over from time to time, and causes me
to always steady myself with my hands on the little table.
And my hands were born in 1981 and that is the truth. As
someone from some long ago TV comedy said so,
sputtering at the end of the word "truth."
I am a baby chick and he has been imprinted as
my mother and Seattle has been the same way stamped
on me, marked on me because any other retinue that
comes forth, that says I don't have to be here or even be
me will destroy me more than he has already.
He knows things about me without my telling him
and he thinks I am this boy he was in college with, and I
am not I am not. There is no human thing about him. Or
there are nothing but human things about him. There is
always that pained hollow in the center of him that I am
always in danger of falling into. In this cold little flat in
the center of the city and these endless days he proved
me so. Proved I am the golden boy he remembers.
That morning, early, dark and the bedroom where
we sleep and where we find our things mixed up and
confused--His hair, perhaps, on my brush--my toothpaste
different from his on his side of the bathroom sink--(how
generous he is to me, but that is His toothpaste on my
side, not mine) that morning he had the proof laying on
the breakfast table as he called me, sleepy soaked so I
couldn't think, to breakfast.
He is tall and slippery and he smells bad. He had
fixed some cocoa and had poured instant oatmeal and
warm water into a chipped bowl with a clown of a little
bear drawn three times round its circumference. And in
front of me between the cocoa and the bowl was the
morning newspaper, creased and turned to the obit page,
folded and the obit he wanted me to see circled with a
grease pen, for he works at a laundry and has to get to
work early each morning. He will not let me work. That
would be wrong. He says so. It is so.
As I folded down my compact body into the chair
and put hands to my mouth to keep from yawning, and
letting him thus fawn, because he says I am enormously
cute when I yawn and I hate that kind of thing. I hate it
especially since lately, and how long as he held me
captive here?, I have come to slightly, slightly mind you,
enjoy it. Feeling a little surge of happiness as apparently
the Stockholm Syndrome is setting in.
The light in the ceiling over me is dim and yellow
and sickly. It makes my captor's sickly skin even more so
as he sits on the opposite side of me. His glasses spark
and his eyes hold to my face as I brush the long wheat
colored hair out of my eyes, for he wants me to have
long hair. The wheat color was added by my own
genetics, so far at least, independent of this man.
The news print is a shadow of vague marks with
dark little eyelids covering up each word. There is a
photo of grainy man face beside the article, and I feel the
graininess of this man, in a yard chair like mine, sitting
across the table from me. This man with the sad skin and
the sadder eyes and the mouth that maybe has never
smiled since Golden Boy left and persuaded me to take
His place. It is all reverential.
The man, he does have a name, I know he does, speaks
of Joel as Him. All the time. There is no getting around
the inflection and the preacherly tone of smote and fire
dragons entering the papery walls of this place and saving
Him from the dragons that took him away from this man,
that smote his true love forever more. His glass lenses
are not thick but are like little streams of water beaded
together to form the lenses. His eyes are always shifting,
if that is you can see them at all, for no one tries, though
I have lately, because there is no point to it. He is
unremarkable and uneventful any way you look at it.
The cocoa is almost cold when I put it to my lips
for he hates hot food and hot drink because He hated
such and therefore i (i am lower case right now for him,
his inflection lets me know--until I become Him--for I am
the chrysalis, the fetus not even begun to grow yet, from
which Joel will one day be culled and birthed and made
certain and for always, this time of all the lights in
Seattle which are rainy against the window this wintry
wind blown night and that morning of the newspaper
obituary.
I tried to focus on the words for the man's entire
body was an exclamation mark pointing right at them,
signs on him flashing in bright hurt eye red and yellow
neon--READ READ READ. For this man who must
have a name other than the humble follower of, the most
humble keeper of the flame of Him, forever be the day
and the crevices in each minute of it that he fills with
Joel, and this little me who he says is Him almost sure.
Like a baby duck imprinted with the first thing he sees in
the summer barnyard and takes to be his mother forever
and a day. I am no child. I have been on my own for a
long time.
And the long time I have been on has always been
Seattle. Otherwise, once the windshield wipers cleared
the sleep and wet out of my green--sorry, sir, I mean blue
eyes, for He had such blue eyes you could stare at them
all day and never feel the facets of them were to ever be
explored for all eternity--this from him about Him and
the little me him, sort of--eyes and I saw the face and the
words "Perry Como, Popular American Crooner for 50
Years, Dies One Day Shy of His 89th Birthday." The
man across from me read me like a filled in acrostic. Like
a New York Times Sunday word puzzle that he blocked
the right words in such a short time, and sure of himself,
as he had never ever been sure of himself, this nervous
twitch itch of a man of middle age, so he filled it all in
perfectly with his Blue Bell Laundry grease pen.
And he looked at me as I read the article.
Suppressing a yawn and his smiling was like a snick on
me, like he had taken part of me, such as my DNA and
was now analyzing it in the laboratory of himself, all the
green walls and the sterilized test tubes and the glass
beakers and the jars and the centrifuges and the wall
charts of chemistry and anatomy schematics and the
denizens of the light that was pure reflective glow that
would find my DNA stolen from me as though he had
taken my fingerprints and my fingers. And the things he
had stolen from me all these weeks (?) before had been as
nothing.
As it seemed I was now truly trapped. Now there
were suddenly runnels seeming under my forearms laying
on the table and my hands holding the square of his
miracle in their long fingers, as lead handcuffs covered
them and chained me and braces came across my
forearms and I was lost to him forever. The sacrifice of
Joel to find the Joel in the cross who had, sorry, Who
had died for the sins of little men in shabby apartments in
cold cities where the street lights and distant office
building lights were the laughter signs of everything over,
dead ending, park benches for him soon and then much
worse.
This was his proof. This was His proof. All the
winters had gone to me because he had not revealed this
last key to me. Because I knew he was somewhat
agitated but I didn't know by what, and yet when I read
that Mr. Como, whose face I recognized, How?, had had
a hit single after a long television variety show career,
when he made himself famous world wide for his slow
almost comatose tempo rendition of songs as he wore his
trademark cardigan sweaters, had after this sung a hit
song that was the theme of the 1968 television series,
"Here Come the Brides."
And it fell, the paper square, to the table, from
my hands which were not handcuffed after all, as I
looked out the oil curtains in the tiny square window at
the city stretched out before me. Which was Seattle.
Which was where the now totally cool and cold bowl of
oatmeal took me because the gruel taste of the stuff
sliding down my throat like a greasy spelunker made me
here, was that final coffin nail that did not suggest, as the
man lit his own coffin nail and blew smoke at me without
saying a word, without giving a hint why this obituary
was so important that I read it--
As my lips of their own volition, had my eyes
turned truly blue?, as though this were the final eugenics
experiment that Mengele had tried on who knew how
many who had come before me?, and this time the magic
worked without having to resort to crude debasing pain
and horrorshow, began singing the opening lyrics to the
theme song Como made famous and which was played
on radio all the time, "Seattle." Because it had to be.
Otherwise I was too young to have seen the series.
Otherwise I had seen it on rerun. And heard the song
played on one of those golden moldy oldy radio stations.
But-I-Had-Not.
But I had to have had. And I put my arms around
my chest, around the thick gray and white plaid over
shirt--the kind He had worn, (my jeans were also like
His, Wrangler's). We seldom bathed, the man or me,
because there was no heat in the apartment, save the
kitchen stove; thus, the kitchen was our nexus. Anyway
the rusty cold water from the clattering pipes, in spits and
starts, did not appeal to either of us. So we smelled and
felt pretty rank most of the time. I had no clothes to
change; he had few changes. I only had to put on my
socks and boots (yes, like Joel wore) in the morning, to
be dressed for the day.
I suspect Joel made much fun of this man who
never knew, rather like Margaret Mead had believed all
the ridiculous stories about mating rituals the Somoans
had made up all those years ago right into her
grandmotherly eyes and ears which surely were never
shocked by anything, and surely believed anything
anyone said, being a dedicated anthropologist looking for
the edge of forever in her study subjects. Joel who loved
grass and whiskey and a good joke. The man was his
most opportune joke. I tried it on the man myself when I
got braver. It worked. It made him feel closer to me. And
that did not work.
Like I was a study subject for this man. Like he
was pulling my cells out of my body right this minute and
like I was dizzy with the contempt he felt for me that I
had been denying all the time I was Him, and not a little
egg implant prototype of Him, calling him around,
making him lose count before he decided on me, making
me make fun of him because he had let me and a fellow
has to do something to get away when he can not
physically get away.
All of this, the obit and the read and the
revelation took a few minutes. And I knew that "Here
Come the Brides", whatever that was, was a series that
he and He loved. Their signature series. Their ritual
nightly program which pressed deeply into both of their
hearts. As they had adopted the theme song about Seattle
and the bluest skies--see?, I know the words, how?--as
THEIR SONG. Forever and a day. And I looked at him
as I had not looked at him before and his little pointed
chin quivered a bit and I looked him straight square in the
face and then I shamed myself and looked at the table.
The little newspaper like a square and now twisted
croissant of paper and type face laying before me.
This was Joel's biggest joke on him. He could tell
the man anything, for He was loved so. Did He even
know that? Did it mean nothing? Why am I asking this? I
can't abide him. And was all the legacy they had had
together. That Joel had picked a puerile TV series, and
surely a puerile song and made the man believed it was
THEIRS, thus to torment the man when Joel and his
shadow went away for good and how much I wish I
could go away for good too, though I knew at that
moment I could not. That bathos and stupid and laughs
behind hands held inside while the man was around and
let out in spluttering glorious hysterics when the man left
and He went to call his friends to tell him about the latest
gag that the fool believed totally.
Surely, Joel would have been--into--heavy metal,
Black Sabbath or even "The Who's Tommy" or surely
the rock opera of "Hair." Maybe the song about wearing
flowers in your hair when you go to San--and then it hit
me, present and past, and place and time, and identity
and lack of it, all of this--how do I know this stuff?
Sixties music? And the more I thought of it, the more I
knew about it. The more details, and coming on strong
was more than I cared to think about--a dorm room and
a study table and a concrete floor and the sound of the
shower coming from the bathroom door between our
two beds. But had that been him and Joel? Or him and
somebody else? And if Joel could move, transmogrify
from body to body, or of a body could do that same thing
with a spirit or soul or something....then who was
anyone? Who was this man if not the knight he wanted to
be?
And I held onto the table edge with my hands.
Hard. The grainy wood, with the edges of splinters biting
into my left palm, as I felt the world--tilt. As though
there should be a graciousness to falling down that fabled
rabbit hole. As though there should be a kind of rabbity
time clock ticking the minutes away now, because I
didn't remember these things as from having seen a TV
program about them, or heard these songs on golden
moldy radio. It was--I felt them. I felt them, the songs,
the times, this city where I went to university--and that
was not true--I did not go to university here. I did not go
to university anywhere. I couldn't afford it. I barely made
it through high school, though you can tell I read a lot I
guess, but it all just bored me and seemed pointless.
But that time long before me--this was more than
a recitation of facts. This was a feeling in the marrow, as
though the imprint had turned so deep, so powerful that
it was a gale pulling me into itself, and making me not me
anymore. Remembering the feel of the afternoon naps I
took in the room before chemistry class each Tuesday
and Thursday afternoon. Remembering how he and I
took turns reading "Desire Under the Elms", which was
required for play writing class, and we used the accents
in our rendition, the ah mebes and the ayeahs, and
laughed ourselves silly as we sat by the wall heater on the
concrete floor and had our arms around each other and
laughing and feeling close and feeling that lovely little
winter spark that makes warm and good friends. That
makes the songs sweeter and the day and night more
important. Spangly. As though I was wearing glitter and
had flowers in my hair.
It was not guessing at all of this, because I had
maybe seen "Animal House." It was feeling that kinetic
surge of power when I had read back then, with him,
"Future Shock" and "The Medium is the Massage." It
was that love of "Rolling Stone" and their daring articles
and exposes and professed love for what we loved or
perhaps it was only "the news that fit", and they changed
for each generation. It was the corridors I ran down and
the stairs I ran up at the end of every class day to his
arms. Or that he ran up and into my arms when his
classes lasted longer.
It was holding and denim jeans and hands that pulled at
tugged at each other's hair and I saw him as he was
then--rangy and smart and hollow eyed and high
cheekboned and face texture of lovely oatmeal in a
winter sun when Christmas rolls around in the kitchen
windows of the house that I knew we would someday
have and be together forever. The knuckling of our hands
and the secret ties. The secret indentations that were
made by nature and fate and by us. That constant rush in
the chest. That heat. And longing.
That I have never felt before. I have been a
hustler for six years now. I have never felt--this. Instead
of being caged, I am free. Instead of remembering
vaguely a place I lived in and left, far from here and went
to a place also far from here, like L.A. or Frans Sanfisco
perhaps. By the bay. Joel wasn't making fun of him and I
was glad for him and I put my head so suddenly heavy
down on my arms. And the man put his hands on mine
and I remembered him as a boy and me as a boy, grown
full now, grown from that chrysalis, the fetus ready for
birth full form. His hands smelled of cigarettes and I
wished he were young again and I wished--
"Remember," he said, his voice fog bound,
uncharacteristically hushed and husked, "when
`Portnoy's Complaint' came out in paper back and I got
it before you did because it was supposed to be so sexy
and we thought it would be so great, all the critics said
so--"
As I pulled my head up and smiled at the dark
interstices of outside the window, and continued for
him--"and you got back to the room, god it was hot as
hell that day, and I was already on my bed reading it--I
was going to surprise you--"
"And it was the biggest load of crap we ever read
in our whole lives."
And we laughed. Back there we laughed. And I
was nothing. I was a bigger nothing than this man
because I had been once someone of import and power
and legion, and then I doubled into myself and folded like
a paper flower and took myself away from being Joel and
the ability to house him again as a harbinger to haunt this
man down through all these sad desperate dangerous
days of his. And I was angry once more, because this was
wrong. He had chosen the wrong image and the wrong
fun house mirror and the wrong customer and he could
keep me here locked in this place until he rotted and fell
dead of old age which might be a minute or two from this
very moment.
And I said:
"I hated Norman Mailer. And I don't give a damn
what His father thought about `Of a Fire on the Moon',
all that intelligencia garbage and Norman being the star
of his book, referring to himself by his first name and in
the third person, and dad and you and my mom and some
other teachers sat round the house that day being piss
arrogant beyond words about all of that. And Norman
was wrong. The consciousness, the philosophy of the
world did not change and expand and become far more
intelligent, that we did not, as Norman believed, waft off
to join the cosmos and leave our little problems behind
and become the Star Child or something. Norman's
prediction was wrong, the whole lot of it."
You had always hated the intellectual things.
Though You faked it because of your father, the English
teacher. You had found that teachers, not even
professors, in that little community college, were dallying
away the hours in their ivory towers, even before the
song came along. And you are here with me now and I
don't want to be you, not the small case you or the larger
reverential case You or YOU for that matter. I am not
you. You are not me.
This man has brainwashed me for weeks or
months and I have had to adapt like a snake has to adapt
when taken from one climate to another and I am not a
snake. You are and he is. Because you played him and he
has been playing himself ever since. I know the you
inside You. I see the little man behind the curtain and I
am not going to listen to you telling him as well as me to
pay no attention to that, but to look at the great god and
powerful Ruler of Oz there in green reflection and pasted
projection and blue smoke blown so carefully with that
craftily drafted compelling breaking in small parts voice
of Yours. You used him and you used me and I figure if
he was dumb enough, the hell with him. But you can not
use me. I refuse to be your conduit to Mars where this
space goofball lives.
And all this time, the man across the table from
me. Lost in his reverie, remembering things, letting
jagged words come out of his mouth, words like slivers
of hard winter ice, and I saw him insane. I saw him
slipped out of whatever small sluice was holding him in
all this time, and he had taken off his glasses and he was
rubbing his face madly, rubbing it hard with the palms of
his hands and knuckling his eyes hard and making his
face blush with red that even I could see in this badly
darkly lit apartment kitchen without the sun even close to
being up yet.
As though he was trying to wipe the years off him.
Trying to prove he waited as long as he could and it was
not his fault that he got old in the waiting. Trying to
prove he held onto his youth because I and all the various
incantations before me--and I was determined, after
me--were all You, the moth of ingenious design. The
tiger moth flown from the moon. The lunar moth big as
the moon and drifting in the midnight cold Seattle--where
I have never lived, where we are not now, but it all shifts,
you believe it's this city and it is. You believe someone is
someone else far distant because they look alike or you
want them to look alike.
You tire of living just in your mind. You
remember too well and not well enough at the same time.
Ghosts of haunted eyes for far different reasons pick at
you and clutch at you like mad winter witch claws of
winds and you have to pick at them, pick them up, and
make them something because obviously street trash,
they are nothing at all. And they do it, because, like me,
they needed food, they needed shelter, they needed
closeness that they could pretend--that THEY could
pretend, see it cuts both ways--someone cared for them.
But this man like all the others did not care. Did not
know I was there.
And had stolen my identity, probably not much of one,
but it had been mine once, I think. Like someone steals
your identity on the computer and takes over being you.
And makes you remember "Seattle" sung by a Mr. Perry
Como, this theme song from "Here Come the Brides"
with Robert Brown, David Sherman (big heart throb
back then) and David Soul. With Henry Beckman as
Clancy and somebody or other as Birdie.
And there it is. If I had lived in Seattle even for a
few years, I could have seen it on rerun, if it was, even
though it was quite old. Cities do that with series set in
their area, even if the show was about a time over a
hundred years ago. It didn't matter how long ago the
series had been on the air originally, because they are
perfect for the Chamber of Commerce to use as local
pride and tourist fodder. But if I lived in another part of
the country, odds would diminish greatly that I had seen
the show that old on rerun. Maybe Nick at Nite perhaps,
but when you work at legit jobs and then you hustle on
the side or full time you don't have much room for TV.
This part of a newspaper with the obit was the
first paper I have seen since I got to this place that first
night. There are no books, there is no TV or radio in this
apartment. For he wanted it to be pure. Wanted me to
come to the realization in my own time. We talked
seldom. We talked about Joel to an extent but brief, just
enough to plant the idea, for I had much time to think
during the day when he locked me in as he went to work.
Mostly he used me at night and that was the extent of it
save for these little chemical word spills so they were like
Hansel and Grettle bread crumbs that I followed,
however unwillingly--at first--because I was intrigued in
spite of myself, and because my restless brain had to
make a puzzle and then solve it.
He let me drink all the booze he could afford. Smoke all
the weed. That got me through the day. And scrounging
my skin from him at night gave me a puzzle all its own to
figure out--with the clues thrown in, gradually, subtly,
. So I wouldn't be contaminated in the experiment. So I
could prove him right.
Even when drunk and stoned and satiated from
sex, he kept his tongue. He said very little even then.
Control he had. Control he does not have now. The lab
in him, the great experiment performed finally, has been
shut down. The lab has melted to a pulp and the man in
whom it was became melted before my eyes. His glasses
removed and pushed from the table. His head in his
hands. His hands trembling.
His body shaking more and more as though he had come
down with some palsy. His almost bald head shook and
his words became more daggers than ice shards and he
sang in a defeated voice bits and pieces of songs from his
and Joel's days, I find it impossible to make fun of Joel
and of joining Joel's ghost who is now me in laughing
about this man.
And the man is cracking up and he draws
fingernails down his face, and blood issues in the cracks
of his cheeks. He has me. He has Joel back. Why is he
doing this?
Am I not good enough? All this time, he has been
laughing at me as I fell into his trap more and more, a
little more evidence, tantalizing bread crumbs as time
went on, and he laughing at me with the ghost of Joel
beside him. And me not Joel at all? But I HAVE TO BE.
I HAVE TO BE. And I pushed back the lawn chair and I
walked over to the lit oven with the enamel scratched
door open because it was the only heat we have for
winter--but is it really summer and the girlies in their
pretty summer dresses? somewhere out there, out of
time, out of luck, out of mind. And out of me.
]
I stood and looked at this babbling, broken, very
ill man who had such pain sticks going up him and into
his fingernails and into his ears and eyes and I imagined
him a witch at Salem being tortured by Cotten Mather
and the ilk with branding irons and fire lit sticks from the
bon fires and his screaming and calling me down through
the hundreds of years of history. And I will not grow
mad with him. I will not be knocked asunder anymore.
Displaced by someone who maybe wasn't real to begin
with. A one page joke turned into an interminable novel.
And I ran the hell out of there. I ran to the tiny living
room and out the tiny hall door and ran down the
corridor of filthy moth eaten carpeting and dingy
punched in kicked in scuff marked doors, past the path
sound of life in poverty that becomes the sleeve that I
knew so well, the sleeve that requires constant sewing up
so the poverty lives with you every day. Because you
would miss it were it gone from you or you from it.
It's the only thing one knows after a time. It is a
friend of inestimable want and need. We all have to have
something to believe in and that will believe in us. I ran
out of the apartment house, into the cleansing snow that
was made red by the neon red sign at the top of the tall
spindly place where tiny rooms were the world away
from everything of value that tricked you, me, into not
believing so. The world seemed so huge out there, so
unbelievably panoramic, it fairly took my breath away.
More even than the cold clutch that hit me center chest. I
didn't know which way to go. I felt guilty. Then I took
one arbitrary step. Then another. And I fled.
I came to a diner. My legs had gone rubbery, and
I sat over coffee for a time, thinking it out, skirting round
it, wanting to forget. All of it. I might escape it this way.
Putting it behind me, but I can't. How could I ever do
something like that? I was free now and I felt in prison. I
had run for blocks and blocks in the snow, coming heavy
down, like a curtain, and me with no place to go, no
place to be, only away from him, and just shivering in the
firm wall of the push back Arctic blast. My blood huffing.
My nostrils grasping huge sacks of air and tossing them
down. My neck and spine in hives and boils of fear as I
thought I heard the shadow of the man pounding behind
me.
I didn't walk into the diner as much as I collapsed
against the glass door, and into the hot room. So
wonderfully hot it took the breath out of me some more
and was like a bright warm glove was suddenly around
me. Holding me. Protecting me. Creasing the dirty
streaks on me. Making me safe. It was an almost sexual
release.
Bright white glare of light inside. I held onto the
side of a booth back that was next to me. Then floored it
as best I could to a counter stool, across the linoleum
which seemed a lot like the kind in that apartment, where
I just about did collapse. Till I got my breath back and
the world was less dizzy round me. The waitress was like
from a fifties film noir-- in color that was black and white
still and all--henna haired scrawny bodied woman, beaten
down shoulders, pink dress, white apron, name tag, and
her just shoot me expression, defeated even more than
me. I managed to ask for a cup of coffee. I could have
sprouted three heads and she wouldn't have cared. Just
leaning on the counter watching me. Hi ho. Cup of
coffee. Robbery rape or murder.
What's your pleasure, young man? Forget your troubles.
Come on. Get out of here so I can go home, her one
remaining hope that she still might have put some faith
in.
I could have asked her if this was Seattle and
what year by the way was this and when was I born and
do you remember seeing me before and if you used to
know me did I once have a name, for I've just
remembered that I used to have one, but I can't seem to
get a handle on that either. And maybe I could find a
mirror somewhere, the wash room or something, and
look at my face. For I've forgotten what that looks like
too. I try, but can't. I remember Joel's face, but how?
I've never seen a photo of him in that apartment. Maybe
its hoo doo and voodoo and hypnosis when I slept that
he filled my brain with this stuff. Possible. Who knows.
But I don't want to know where I am. I don't
want to know my name or what I look like. I don't
remember how I looked like before the kidnapping--for
that was what it was, hustlers have their rights too--what
if I look like I used to and don't recognize me? What if I
look like Joel whom I've never seen and recognize him
immediately? There is a newspaper on the counter. I will
not go look at it.
The obit of Mr. Como had been at the top of the page
but the top had been turned down to hide the name of the
paper. Eventually I will have to find out and how much
can I find out about who I am or was or was not or am
now and where I live or do not and just how old I really
am, young or old?, or why I should miss this man who
raped me of my identity and never knew the real person
was there in front of him already. The real Joel? And he
went mad just when he had won.
I drank my coffee. It was hot and acrid and
scalded my tongue. I drank it fast. It hurt and burned my
mouth and all the way down my throat, to my stomach.
All those weeks, months, of cold or lukewarm cocoa and
cold or lukewarm oatmeal, made this great too soon
gone coffee a magnificent treat.
I paid with some money--he always let me keep a dollar
or two in my jeans pockets--taunting me without saying
it that when I realized who I really was I could, as Whit
Bissell told the Teenage Frankenstein, in answer to the
monster's constant muffled (because of the appliances
and monster make up) question--when can I go out
among people?--in time my boy, in time. Another movie
I've never seen, but know intimately because of that very
fact.
I left the diner, though I didn't, god, I didn't want
to. I would have stayed in there forever but there was no
time and I hit the cold mountain and the snow thick and
white and everything pushing against me again. I walked
fast and, hopefully, alone in the dark morning before
sunrise and I figured out why the man had gone mad.
Not because I was so small and insignificant to his
memories, i.e., fantasies and dreams about Joel, but
because I was that once golden boy, or even surpassed
him, and I was odds and ends to the man at that point.
I guess you take the dreams and the pain and the
wildness and wanting to go back to something and
someone in whom you once believed with all your heart
and it breaks apart on you. And the dream even in the
guise of whatever reality you happen to believe in, the
dream haunts you and shafts you and makes impossible
with mere human bones and body and flesh and heart and
soul, makes all of it unobtainable. Taking all the
emptiness of all these years for him, and living with them,
bringing out little perfect cameos of Joel and holding
them for a moment then releasing them back to the ozone
again.
And the emptiness feels good after a time. Feels
as though penance for one fine day Joel will return to you
just as he left you. The man had taken the fear and the
loneliness and the desert of his every moment and had
thrown them into the future, for a time that future was
me and, like I've read in a book of literary criticisms, if
all that nothing you've been plowing through can be
tossed to the future, you expect it to make a wonderland,
a nirvana, like Joyce Carol Oates wrote, (I read all the
time--it's just I can't remember what most of the books
are I remember these things from. Or the covers or where
I read them.
There is nothing mystical or supernatural about that.
Books do not imprint on me from others' minds. That
would be dumb for me or anyone to believe.) Though,
this brings me to another ledge of the nightmare I hadn't
considered before. The fear--was this the first time this
happened to me with a trick? This disappearing act I did
into myself. If I'm not me, I'm anyone. Don't think that.
Just this thought from what I read--I!--this man
had needed to take the so called reality of now, the so
called orderliness and destroy it like a madman, toss it
and hurt it and tear it and everyone in it up, this nihilistic
place where he lived and always will live, that he wanted
to use to create Joel, to create love that had been or
might have been or impossible to have been, thus to
make that golden bridge one day one day come true up
there. But when you get there, all the stuff of the world
and himself thrown away hoping some greater god will
rearrange it, reorder it so it is heart's desire. But it's still
the same old torn life and torn hopes and lying torn
memories. And you don't even get to die for a long time
of that. You have to live with it.
I walked faster. Ran. I've been running all my life.
Me. I have legs. I have arms and a torso and the
sun is beginning to make the sky in front of me a little
less dark, a little glow of red. I start running. I will run to
what I am. What I have been since the first day of my
birth. I will not become that sad old man. I will not let
the past strangle me almost to death but not allow me to
check out altogether, still hoping hopeless hopes, each
minute of each day a deep laceration. I run faster and
faster until there is a stitch in my side. My body is frozen
in the snow cold and the rush of Northern wind blowing
right at me. But it feels though painful, good. It feels
free. And I am free to run to me, run into me again.
I hope he remembers me when I find him. I hope
he doesn't run away from me. Or that I chase him for so
many years I grow old and have to pick up tricks that I
can pretend are me, were me, then and not now, and that
I am Joel and not Joel at the same time, and that I am of
the sixties hippie generation and the me decade at the
same time, and that I am not complex and I do not need
to analyze every feeling and thought. Let this man leave
me alone. Let him not haunt me.
Let me not pick up an older man and pretend he is my
captor. Let me not go back to that apartment and that
obsessive idol worship, long may He be praised. There
should have been a Laura painting of Joel above a mantle
place and roses on either side. Save there is there no
mantle piece.
Run into the sun and let me not melt away and let
me live to find out who that actress was who played
Biddy (not Birdy, dummy me, but Biddy) on "Here
Come the Brides." If I can find that out and remember
more clearly what she looked like then, as I can
remember all the other actors so well, then I think I'll be
okay. I think I'll have turned the corner and will be safe.
As safe as hustlers these days ever are or ever were.
You meet screwy people in this racket. The trick
is, as Jim Thompson (I've read a lot of his books, too,
yes) was told once, observe them, but don't be like them.
But it's difficult with this particular Passing Parade.
Now, why does the phrase, Passing Parade, seem so
familiar to me, on the tip of my memory? Am I to be
implanted with someone else's lost love? God, no no no.
And I run. Fast as hell I run. And I don't look
behind because there is no doubt in my mind someone or
something's gaining on me. Wherever the hell you are,
Joel, in me or out there, god, would I love to make you
pay.
And what the hell kind of name was Biddy
anyway?
As in the back of my mind, as I run through the
shadows of barely awake morning with sun dim red
smudge making. As I run through the shadows, fearful,
more and more so every moment fearful, that one
shadow in particular, or worse, two or more, will
separate from the sides of buildings or the sidewalk I run
down. Shadow (s) that will become fluid and slide and
slip and cocoon slither out and breathe inside me and will
have red eyes to stare into me as though I am nothing.
Clinging, desperate shadows. That will part from their
brethren and climb down the side of the sky or the walls I
run past. That they, rustling, will climb down without
limits or form, and void, as though they are Nosferatu,
upside down, skulking down the side of his dark
midnight horror movie castle. Shadows. That will have
lives, so to speak, of their own.
And I will run into them. Not into me. And they
will remember me. And I will too. No matter how I fight
it, I will. And I will be i again. I want to stop. To stop
and scream. But I can't. I can't stop to fill my lungs for a
scream. I've no time for that. No time at all. I have to run
down the concrete strands of this spider web till my heart
bursts. Black furred spiders, huge, following me. Waiting
up ahead for me. Ready to pounce on me at any second.
I have to lengthen and lengthen my own shadow.
Far in front of me. Giving egress. Till I fall into the rising
sun. Help me! Somebody! No. Please. Don't help me.
Not anyone.
That would mean more memories. Haven't I lived
enough lives for you people already? Maybe, though, I'm
addicted to it. This scares me most of all. I could be a
million people all at the same time. An entire city of
facets of all those memories. And then I wouldn't be
lonely anymore. It might be worth it, if I look at it from
that angle. If such a thing does extend my powers into
infinity and beyond. And that would bring up some whole
new questions if I could go on doing it indefinitely.
I could be, well, God even. Then--payback time.
But for whom? Can someone who doesn't exist go insane?
Timothy Stillman (comewinter@earthlink.net)