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| Would it be so hard to trust me on this?
In it I saw everything I've felt since those first soft steps on gentle air-conditioned carpet. The heroes and villains of youth given a second life in unexpected movements on a silver HD screen in my over-priced living room. Beauty with a face and a name and a place, finally. When it ended I felt the damp drops of goodbye in the dry retinas of my eye sockets with pride, without shame. I could feel what its creators meant to say, something I needed in these hours and minutes of cynicism.
Would it be so hard to trust me on this? That it was bought for the twelve out of twenty dollars I could spare? Just a video game. Lets be honest, like I've heard time and time again it's just a game, get over it, play it and leave it like it's nothing because in the long run that's just it, it's just nothing. The collaboration of actors, digital designers, sketch artists, screenplay writers, directors and guys at an all-night bar scribbling ideas on napkins for the morning. Just nothing, something you can buy used for 12 or new for 20, play it and leave it on your shelf tucked between the book you meant to read and the couple of DVDs you'll turn in for store credit at Blockbuster next Tuesday. Someone's life work and legacy is just your entertainment when there's nothing else to do.
I can't do that. It's just a game about a naive boy with spiked hair and unblinking eyes, a unique sword symbolic of everything laughable in these days of water bills and 9 - 5 schedules. A mouse with large white gloves and a history in black-n-white, a couple of odd animal characters who made their last limelight stand in fuzzy cartoons twenty years ago. A story about them and everyone in between coming together to teach us one last lesson and praying we'll listen this time. Mickey taught me the value of a friend, Simba told me about standing up when my knees rocked against the ground and Ariel sang a breathless song in my dreams about crossing the road to see the other side of things. They're cartoons, ink on paper with scripted words that will fade with our generation, replaced by Hannah Montana and every other pre-teen cardboard cut-out robbing our successors.
But it was nice, seeing them stand on stage for an encore and giving us at least one last bow.
But it's just a video game, after all. Why bother.
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| I knew a girl once. She had soft eyes and hard hands and hair that chimed when touched. Everything, she kept it all, picking up problems as she went with feathered fingers and wrapping them with tissues and ribbons to stow in the bottom folds of her jean pockets. Her pink Converse carved the sidewalk with the weight. She asked me once--once only--for an empty hand, a spare pocket. And I said no.
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"Staccato"
It stepped and stopped, tripped. over itself. Difficult to listen. to. broken like busted. glass in the ditch of. a. dirt crusted street. Despite his voice you. listened like you lov.ed. him an.d maybe we. did for that. one after.noon. With uNevEn skin jagge.d. and cracked li.ke the syllable.s. of his tongue he live.ed for us. as a yellow post.it. note with a scrawled . reminder of wha.t. God meant listening to be. It cut our ears and gave us headaches and a warm jolt in the crack between our lungs, like our hearts heard what was really said.
(These are first draft blurbs essentially pointless save as mental sit-ups, just an author's P.S. note here to justify some rusty words)
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Five minutes late, Dr. Robert Kall marched himself down the hallway. The pressure was phenomenal, with stark stucco squeezing the sides of his eyes and fluorescent lights screaming overhead. Medical ward décor, it did nothing for his sanity. It was insistent, harsh. It was overbearing, alive. A place to make someone feel sick, despite their last A+ check up score. The air didn’t help either. The pressure slid from his temples to his guts with every familiar scent Kall failed to avoid. Sick smeared the edge of his nose while pills, pain and shots festered beneath his fingernails. His skin itched. “7 years, a king’s ransom, for what? The chance to walk through this hell with a jacket and clipboard.” A pause to his thoughts. Kall thought of his father. “Liar.” He felt a gear grinding against its rust, grit in his temples. “Failure.” A pebble fell down the empty shaft he’d forgotten to barricade. The echo cracked across his tongue before his teeth could catch it. “Not my fault, not mine.”
Kall adjusted his suit sleeves, dusted his pants, checked his watch, readjusted his sleeves, and toyed with the gold cufflinks on his wrists. He then re-dusted his pants, re-checked the time, and gave up all together. Appearances mattered—always did, always would—but not right then. It was monday, and not just monday but Monday in December, the worst month to give a damn about the mentally unstable. Holidays aren’t any better than white-stucco walls. Five minutes late and counting, but it couldn’t be helped. Doctor’s offices always get packed solid on Mondays. New patients arrive everyday, that’s a given for any medical man in a big city, but psychiatrists always get booked the worst on Mondays—probably because the weekend offers too many reflective hours. Kall chuckled inwardly—as was his custom. It was only a Monday laugh. He checked his watch again, going on six minutes now. The expensive snapping of his shoes increased as the double doors grew larger.
He busted through them, hardly nodding to the startled nurse in her Plexiglas booth, only granting her the customary badge flash as he pummeled by. Like clockwork, like every Monday of his career, Kall knew exactly where to go and what to expect. Room 32B, second door to the left along the fourth hallway to the right after the double doors. It didn’t take long, though Kall’s watch refused to let up on its insistent ticking. He reached the door and performed his routine entrance: knock twice, wait for attendant, receive the wristband and walk through. As he waited he shuffled his tie around, dusted his sleeves, and checked his watch again. Eight minutes late, three worse than usual.
A blue-eyed nurse opened the door with a demented Sunday school smile. His voice, innocent and cherubically insane, would’ve made anyone feel bad for having sex organs. His face made you believe in angels flying side-by-side with commercial airliners. It was tragic.
“G’morning Mr. Kall!”
“Doctor, you half-wit, it’s Doctor Kall. Get it right or get fired.” Somewhere above an angel could be heard screaming inside a jet’s turbine engine. He’d hardly looked at him while ruining the man’s day. It wasn’t much but the nurse took it hard. Kall dared a glance, just to notice how the boy’s eyes looked when upset.
“Sorry sir—I mean Doctor, apologies, I didn’t mean disrespect or anything like that.”
“I’m eight-fucking-minutes late, probably nine now because of you! You waste my time and what’s worse, you smile at me while doing it? I don’t get paid to talk to you, now give me the wristband Sonny, and wipe that watery shit from your eyes before you ruin my Goddam suit.” The nurse did as he was told, clenching tight to avoid ruining the suit. “Now get the hell out and leave me to the patient.” The nurse scurried out and quit the next day, though no one asked why. No one really cared.
Kall moved into the closet-sized room, shutting the steel door with an authoritative click. He moved to the chilled steel table in the center and sat adjacent to the patient who has been, up until now, untold of and unnoticed. The boy wasn’t young, yet any other description wouldn’t fit quite as well. It was difficult to predict his age; it was possible he didn’t have one. The bags under his eyes, bluish tinges to the retina, invasive wrinkles around the temples, and beneath it all, behind the untamed black greasy hair, crouched a human hidden effectively. As if he were cowering beneath his mattress. He gave a weak smile to match the Doctor’s grimace. He never took his hands away from his face.
“Hello Derrick.” Kall said. The ageless child straightened his back a bit, puffing out like some First Year birthday balloon, eventually caving his shoulders in from the effort. It would’ve seemed heroic to anybody else.
“Hello Dad.” He said.
“Are you well today?”
“Was I well yesterday?”
“I don’t know Derrick, I wasn’t here yesterday.”
“You weren’t?”
“No, no I was not. You know, as well as I do, these exciting visits of mine are only on Monday afternoons between three and three-thirty.”
“Oh, right. In that case, I’ll say I wasn’t well yesterday.”
“And why is that?”
“Because I wasn’t well the day before, and if I wasn’t well the day before then, of course, I wasn’t well yesterday, and if I wasn’t well yesterday then I’m definitely not well today, which would also mean I’ll be just as bad tomorrow. Did you bring the ice cream?” He stroked his eyelids with his fingertips, Kall swiped a meaty hand across his forehead, dislodging the perspiration, and adjusted his cuff-links again.
“No.”
“No?”
“No! There is no fuc—,” a pause, two breaths. “No ice-cream today.”
“And none yesterday, which means none tomorrow. I hate circles. Try to bring it next time, will you Dad?”
“We’ll see.”
“If you mean no, say no. Otherwise, say yes, ‘maybe’ is just an excuse for more time.” Derrick spouted. Kall raised his arm to count the minutes.
“I could certainly use more of that these days.”
“You can’t afford it. You can’t buy what’s not for sale. She tried to tell you that. You misuse time like everybody else, use others instead of your own. Mom used to tell me when you’d run late for dinner, because she knew you wouldn’t listen. Time is a gift, not a purchase. Like love, given, not earned. She used to say humans didn’t have the currency to buy something so special. It’s just their status in nature.”
“Your mother certainly was charming to you, wasn’t she?” Derrick kept his hands at eye level.
“Granddad’s?” Derrick pointed to the cufflinks gleaming in the light. Kall dropped his wrist beneath the table.
“Yes.”
“How did you get them?” At this, Kall turned straight to his son, eyes stabbing with all seriousness. Few people could look so grim sitting outside their coffin.
“He died. So now they’re mine.”
“Oh…” Derrick commented. “Can I have them?”
Kall’s brow dropped as he fashioned a response. His eyebrow flinched with an emotive memory, though nothing but the eyebrow seemed to show signs of remembrance. At length he sighed and leaned onto the table, frozen steel forming points of ice on his elbows. In a tone used for misbehaving children in church, Kall said
“My father, your Granfather, never gave them to me just because ‘I wanted them’. He was not that kind of person. I asked him once, only once, and he said what I’m going to say to you now, Derrick. So listen closely and pay attention, though I know that’s hard for someone so…someone in your…state.” Derrick leaned in, like a child ready to hear a secret, taking his hands from his face and placing them flat on the table.
“Earn them.” Kall stated. “Earn them, then wear them.”
“Earn…?” Derrick took his hands back quickly, placing them even closer to his face. “How do I earn the cufflinks, Daddy?”
“You need to decide that, Son. That’s your job, not mine.”
“But…well,” he stopped. “How’d you earn them?”
“…legal action.” Kall said to the air.
“Legal what?”
“Your uncle didn’t deserve them.”
“Deserve what?”
“The cufflinks.”
“Expensive purchase…” Derrick murmured.
Kall didn’t like the conversation. He checked his watch again, it was time to leave at any rate. He rose without a word, left without a wave, and Derrick felt worse than before the visit, somehow. But the medicine they gave him helped with that.
Outside the building and headed for his Porsche, Kall felt a strong urge to take his cufflinks off. So he did, and stuffed them in his deepest pocket, hoping to forget where they were. They clinked together as he fished for his car keys, again as he entered the car, only shutting up when he sat still. Silence, the sound of time being wasted…a viral, insistent emotion polluted him as he sat inside his car. “Strange.” He thought. It felt familiar, though nothing he could pinpoint should’ve drawn this brand of feelings. He hadn’t failed anything lately, nor had he received any rejections. Yet somewhere in that car, nestled between the GPS navigation and the svelte leather seats was Failure. Mocking, bitter, blindsiding Failure. It stank, it hurt, it pierced prodded and punished worse than guilt. It was aggravating in its stealth, demanding thought and inspective action. Kall hated to allow such things into his daily schedule. Successful men have no time for thinking, and psychologists have even less time. Especially for introspection. He threw his car into first and streaked away down the road, cutting off three people and a schoolbus as he went. Five minutes late again.
Four-thirty, well past late. Lance was beginning to reconsider his rendezvous. The downtown Café bustled with commercial vitality all around, lovers and friends at every damned table, sipping down coffee, tea and memories. Not to mention the brutal scent of fresh muffins baking behind the counter. Lance was in no mood, not on this Monday. He’d done nothing all weekend besides blobbing on the couch, rehashing old home movies with his dog—who only put up with him for the food. The last thing anybody wants to do after a weekend like that is go to work, and that’s exactly what the Office made him do. Work. Not just the usual job either, they gave him a real grand slam assignment, a hole-in-one for everybody if he could pull it off. The catch? Deal with the biggest prick God ever ejaculated. Lance felt like lynching whoever the café baker was. He felt the top of his crew-cut out of habit, boredom. His fingers were surprised. Everytime, without fail, his fingers forgot the lack of hair. They were always startled by it. He’d slowly gotten used to the haircut, as he had his new wardrobe consisting of long-sleeved shirts and ties. He hated those types of people, worse than Black Plague he’d once commented, but he was a Yuppie now like it or not.
Kall arrived just as Lance stood to abandon his table. He saw him barge his way inside and briefly considered faking blindness. The bastard shoved his way through the door past some old woman—almost made her spill her coffee too. Again he wondered why he hung around with such a guy. Business. He reminded himself: friends—Associates, pardon the slip—come standard with such professions. Like those damned neckties.
“Punctual as always, you old bag of batshit.” Lance grinned. Kall gripped his hand like a lifeline, pumping the dignity out of him.
“Sorry Lance, previous appointment ran late.”
“Oh? Nothing too important I hope, wouldn’t want to think you skipped out on a crucial patient just for the sake of this measly little meeting.”
“No,” Kall smiled. “Nothing important. Not at all. Still got time for our cup of coffee, Lance?”
“My turn to apologize Doctor, seems I’ve had three our four of those cups in your absence. Although it’s no mind, doesn’t matter, we do need to talk still. You’re investment really is important to our company Dr. Kall.”
“I’ll bet it is. Money like mine, a name like mine, good God you’d be fools to refuse!” Kall laughed. It sounded like cardboard.
“Indeed.” Lance commented, wishing the man a painful death between syllables. “Look, I’ve got something else I need to do in town, but since we still need to talk what say you and I talk and drive, eh?”
“Sounds fine to me, boy, sounds fine to me. Lead the way.”
“Just around the corner.” The two men exited the café, walking briskly in silence out to the curb and into Lance’s expensive car. Expensive, yet still inferior to Kall’s Porsche—at least Kall saw it that way.
As promised they talked and drove, discussing important details and ironing out minor obstacles along the way. Lance left the radio on its lowest volume, pretending to hear Kall as he chatted about this patient or that patient, pretending to give a damn while actually listening to Beautiful People by Marilyn Manson. Lance was rounding the bend of 36 years, but he wasn’t aging if he could help it. Besides…he liked Manson.
They stopped curbside in front of a large farmhouse on a side of town Kall had never noticed before. They both stepped out and Lance started forward up the pathway without a word of explanation to his companion.
“So, ah, Lance, what kind of business goes on here?” Kall asked as he walked behind the man. Lance turned to him, placing his hands inside his pockets. He stared for a minute at Kall, judging something it seemed, until he came up with an answer.
“Visiting an old friend. It’s Monday, weekly thing with me. Don’t worry, not going to take very long. I’ll get you back to your Porsche within thirty minutes, trust me. Now c’mon, no use standing on the gravel driveway discussing these things all day. You’re a busy man.”
“That I am,” Kall responded, bewildered. “That I am…”
The two men walked up the path to the house’s porch. Beautiful house, too, flawless white paintjob with Victorian pillars and floor-to-ceiling windows. It looked like a house out of the antebellum era, porch swing and all. An old woman in a long, fine white dress met them at the steps. Her back was bent forward and slightly left, causing her free hand to rhythmically grab her lower spine now and then. White hair pony-tailed and groomed, her face was hardly marked by wrinkles. The only wrinkles she had were those that couldn’t be avoided, the kind brought on by idle Tuesday problems. Those sudden, devastating ones.
“Well Howdy, Lance. Brought a friend with ya this time?” Her voice cracked with kindness, shoved it in your face to prove your sins. She reminded the doctor of a vague, nameless Nurse somewhere.
“Business associate Marge, allow me. Doctor Kall, this is Margaret Leals, Margaret this is Robert Kall, Psychiatrist and recent Investor.”
“Pleased to meet you, Margaret.” He offered his hand. She laughed, shooing him away.
“Name’s Marge, dear, Marge and nothing else. Come on in boys, tea and cookies as always. Us old women always gotta have tea and cookies on hand. It’s the law, y’know.”
“Actually Marge, I’m here to visit Lily.”
“Oh are you now? Is it Monday already? Good lord how time flies when you’re knitting. I’m kidding about that, by the way, I’ll die before I become one of those old cronies who sit around knitting themselves into their grave. Well, what’re you waiting for Lance? Lily’s out back by her reading tree, same as always.”
“Right, thanks.” Lance rounded the house and Kall entered the doorway behind Marge. The house reeked of baked goods and acrid perfume, like rotting chocolate chip flowers—which is what the furniture looked like. Mismatching plaid couches and diabolical armchairs—armchairs with brown horses on yellow print. Kall made a note never to buy anything with horse prints on it; it’d have to be sixty years out of production by rule. Marge shuffled through the disastrous living room and into the kitchen beyond a Bead skirt, so Kall followed. Once in the kitchen the smell of cookies overtook him, nearly sparking an old childhood emotion. Nearly. He didn’t find Marge bustling about with the oven or pouring milk into a glass as expected. Instead she was leaning on the sink’s edge, staring out into the backyard with an intensity Kall thought women of her age had lost years ago. He walked up beside her unnoticed and, curious, he joined her in observing.
Outside he saw Lance about thirty feet away, standing beneath an immense Oak he assumed was the Reading Tree. There was no woman, no anything to be called Lily, just Lance kneeling down in the shade and staring at the tree.
“Where’s this Lily girl?” Kall asked, slightly annoyed that he’d been drug out to the middle of bumfuck nowhere just so Lance could do some nature watching. Marge didn’t answer straight away, so he asked again before she broke her reverie. Marge turned to him, and from nowhere all her invisible wrinkles appeared. She’d aged forty years in twenty seconds, and Kall realized there was no Lily.
“Ever considered the significance of an epitaph, Robert?”
“It’s…” He was about to correct her on the doctorate but let it slide instead. “No, I have not.”
“Well it’s important, and sometimes it’s more important what the thing’s written on, not what it says. Take that tree. It’s got Lily’s epitaph in its bark, short and sweet, just how she liked her stories. I’ve never met a more perfect woman than Lily. Now, she wasn’t a prize child when it came to looks or even brains for that matter, but I believe it’d be hard as dog-hot hell to find another woman as sweet as that one. Lily was some woman, and Lance, god love his heart, he cared about her more than Jesus himself and I’d bet Jesus would drink to that. Hell, I’d drink to it. We were going to too, everyone in this part of town was. The wedding was going to be enormous, the kind of thing you couldn’t foresee any problems ruining. But, then, there’s the danger of it, right? Something so good as a wedding always has problems, but always makes you believe it’ll be fine. The result is, you ignore some problems, and others you don’t see at all. Like freak rain, family accidents, Grandpa forgetting his inhaler.” She fell silent for a moment. “Or a raping, for example.” Marge looked at Kall, at all of him and his wasted life. “God gives us time, He gives us love, two things granted out of either mercy or stupidity—I just don’t know which. He’ll give, but he’ll take too, and you never know which gift is the loan and which is the keeper…Lily. Hell of a woman.”
“I see…” Kall whispered.
“Hell of a daughter, too.” Marge said. Then, before Kall could press into what she meant, Marge left the room to go upstairs. There she stayed, and that was the last Kall heard of her that day.
Alone in the kitchen, watching Lance kneel beneath the shade, Robert Kall began—for the first time in his adult, professional, successful life—to analyze himself. He didn’t know why, he doubted he ever would, but the sight of that man kneeling, in just that fashion for just that reason, snapped something in Kall. He thought of his father, his family and divorced wife, and Derrick, and Cindy Lou from the tenth grade, and his childhood dog Cardinal, and everything else he hadn’t thought of since achieving his doctorate. Something shifted slightly to the right, something in his mind snapped under pressure and allowed the cogs to rotate as usual. Robert remembered where he’d put his cufflinks, and he brought them out to inspect them. Sitting heavily in his palm with all the weight of gold, Robert realized how much he hated them. Realized just how much they chafed the skin of his wrists, how they were too tight, too restricting. Too unyielding.
Lance arrived in the kitchen, surprising Robert who was still deep in introspection at the moment. Little was said, and for all Lance knew Robert didn’t know why they were there, and he offered no explanation. Not in the kitchen or on the ride back to the Café. They said nothing to each other, and for once they enjoyed the other’s company. Lance even shut off the radio, enjoying the silence while Robert played with his cufflinks.
They arrived within the 30 minutes Lance promised, and the sole word either of them said was Goodnight, then Lance drove off back to his empty apartment somewhere in the bowels of downtown. Robert didn’t enjoy it, but he imagined Lance entering his apartment, meeting the hollow echo of his front door slamming shut, then perhaps making a T.V. dinner and watching the latest prime-time movie while he ate, before falling asleep on one side of a double bed.
He’d thought about it the entire ride home, and finally Robert had come up with an idea concerning his father’s cufflinks. He was going to get rid of them. So he stuffed them into his pocket and drove for an hour in his Porsche, manipulating the cufflinks between his fingers on the steering wheel. At last, near closing hours, he reached the mental ward again. Same routine, same security check, same hallway and same itchy-skin sensations, though he took the third hallway on the right instead of the fourth. The residential hallway, room 5A. It was unlocked, since these patients were considered non-lethal and doubtful to escape—or even desire escape. Robert found Derrick fast asleep in a fetal position, sucking his thumb and clinging to a pillow between his thighs.
Robert left the cufflinks on a bare nightstand, knowing his son would see them in the morning. He approached his sleeping son, and—knowing it the right thing to do, knowing he’d never done it enough, he bent over to kiss Derrick’s sleeping forehead. But he stopped halfway. It just wouldn’t work. Something had snapped earlier, yes, but the cogs of his mind hadn’t started rotating in the opposite direction just yet. It would take time. More than that, it would take learning how to use the time given.
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| So this is how I return. Not with fanfare nor throbbing masses of welcoming parties. Instead, with a liquid ripple of soft entrance. I quit writing for the most idiotic reason any writer could have: nobody read me. Not enough, anyways. Pray God, forgive me for such a sin. How could I ever forget that writing is a solitary adventure, untold and--ironically--unwritten. Until we die, at least.
I'm here to stay, I believe, and if for nothing else than to relieve the demanding and verbose pressure amidst the skin of my skull. Read me or not, I'm writing for myself, posting for myself, and though that statement is a contradiction in definitions, it's the contradiction that keeps me moving.
We write, we post, we publish, we fail, we restart, we draft, we re-draft, and we draft again.
So it goes.
Rest in Peace, Mr. Vonnegut. Apologies I never said it sooner.
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| It's been an interesting road. But I believe we've reached my stop. This world is crisp-dried-dead from only God knows what destroyer. I've seen the great statues, monolothic obelisks of art and genius, topple like toothpick towers on some bored child's kiddie table, and I can't imagine why. Or maybe I was imagining them, hallucinating a horizon when there was none. Why is it my turn...too much spent energy? Too busy maybe. No eyes to watch me? I'm at a loss, but either way, this is my stop, my turn to pull the cord and get off to go...somewhere. Maybe I'll get on elsewhere. Somewhere with more life. Life and eyes. I'll let you know if I do, whoever you are. -- Author Unknown | | |
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