“Screwed up how? Wouldn’t one of us first have to evince the slightest hint that they received that schooling?”
—Americans love el hot dog. I sell them right out of the van.
—¿Y Alana?
“Who the hell’s Vince?”
“Right that some people live underground in the subway?”
—Have another aguardiente. It’s good for you.
Universal accord that these were the greatest empanadas ever ingested.
“Why not put some mustard on the van? I have yellow paint in my garage and I think it would help business.”
“Right that those people don’t have families?”
—¿Otro aguardiente?
“Listen to this. Air Security divides dangerous countries into four risk categories: crime, kidnapping, political violence, and wars or insurgencies. Colombia is the only country to appear in all four categories. Doesn’t it border on the significant that our parents come from this place?”
—¿Americanos love the mustard?
—¿Lawyers in this country make a lot of money right?
—Si. Mostaza.
“Mommy what happens to those people when they die? What happens to their bodies? Do they have funerals?”
“I manage them. Testy Wee Willie Wheeler and the Dissonant Tritones. They’re going to be big.”
“Jeez Barry how am I supposed to know why she called you Fred?”
—No this is merengue. Just swing your hips from side to side to the music.
Fine the kid’s a bit weird but what does happen to these bodies?
“I said she called me Vince. Who’s Fred?”
—Down there the traffic cops give you change when you bribe them. ¡I’m not exaggerating, they’ll go to the store and break a large bill!
—¡Bill’s here! Pobrecito, he works so hard.
—¿Por qué do you represent those people?
“Boxing is the only real sport because you know men engaged in it from the very beginning. Somehow I don’t see cavemen taking time off from battling with dinosaurs to swing a stick at a ball.”
—I had to lie to get him in school early because I heard they were only making the Hispanic kids wait until they were five so they would fall behind the Americans. So I lied. I got him shoes with big heels and said he was five, small but five. Those monjas didn’t care they just wanted the money.
“For every person I get to join I get $500 dollars! Everybody makes out.”
—After he was sentenced to life in prison the Colombian government allowed him to build his own prison. ¡He put a bowling alley and a movie theatre in it!
“I think if you come to this country you should have to speak American.”
—Miren este huevon. (Now this new guy’s the opposite of a hit.)
“Why so quiet cutie? . . . Mary?”
“I heard about that. One day there was a siege during a screening of a digitally restored Wizard of Oz and he just walked out.”
“Whattya mean arithmathematically impossible?”
“Is Alana coming?”
—¿Can I borrow the hot dog to pick up my girlfriend tomorrow? She loves tube-shaped beef.
Wilfred Benitez was born on September 12, 1958 in the Bronx, New York.
“The problem with this country is that we coddle our criminals. Everyone is all concerned with their rights and nobody’s worried about the rights of the victims.”
“That’s a beautiful necklace Mary but what are they supposed to be? . . . Mary?”
—He refused to do the pledge of allegiance. I think second grade. ¡I had to go and talk to the nun principal or they were going to kick him out!
A blue and brown soccer ball with a two hour half-life and a Bic pen’s chewed cap struggling to keep the air in.
—¿Otro?
“How come you’re allowed to lie in court?”
—They killed him because he scored un autogol in the World Cup.
“Where do I find this everyone?”
Can a family be hyper-functional?
“Time’s Alana getting here?”
—Recently Miguel Lora and Rafael Pineda but before that there was of course Pambele. ¡Our país has produced many great fighters!
—I know, down there a red traffic light is more like a suggestion.
Baby Jaren seems either unable or unwilling to hold his head in one place. The lumpy hair-speckled mass has no defined position just a wave of probabilities. Finally his eyes lock on an artifactual thirteen-inch Sony Trinitron, complete with requisite logo of supine red, green, and blue ovals and aluminum foil for an antenna, located about five feet away.
“This Wee Willer, why’s he so testy?”
—¡Ay he’s so esmart look at the way he stares at the TV!
—Drink this one, it’s nice and cold. You won’t even feel it.
—It’s not just sports either. Don’t forget Gabo.
“Any funny stories about representing the scum of the Earth?”
“Oh my God look. He’s reaching for the remote control. How cue!”
And so it went. On and on without even hint of cessation until it somehow abruptly ended. First one or two left because look at the time then many followed suit and soon there was just the guest of honor in an empty living room. I had nodded affirmatively to too many liquid offerings and now the room had come off its moorings. It shook and tried to buck me off as I gingerly made my way to the sofa. I dropped onto it face down, remembering a trick I had learned and so keeping constant if tenuous limbic contact with the floor—like a silver screen couple in the code-of-conduct era—to combat the itinerant enclosure. I did this to find I wasn’t really sleepy, just tired and altered. And very both. Then the room was incandescent.
The coupled beams of light were like the previous snow. They appeared from the bottom of the front windows then rose until they were fully in the room. When a car door opens there’s that slight suction of air you hear which is soon followed by it’s opposite expulsion just before metal and rubber click and fasten as the same door closes. I fell asleep in the seconds following this noise and dreamt that someone was tapping on the window by the sofa and calling my name.
So I looked at this window and saw an apparition. The raindrop stained window created a second hologramic image of Alana. They stared at me as if all patience. I opened the window and dropped back into the sofa. Then I heard a familiar but now disembodied voice.
“So what of this twenty-fourth B-day? Happy or unhappy?”
“Huh?”
“You miss me?”
“Who are you?”
“You didn’t think I’d fail to show my mug on a day like this did you? More fraternal faith than that one hopes.”
“Whose lights?”
“Derek’s.”
“What’s a Derek?”
“I strongly suspect it will soon prove irrelevant so I won’t bother. But at least he was good enough to drop me here.”
“You staying?”
“No, he’s waiting. This is yours but don’t open it until tomorrow.”
“Is that ticking I hear?”
“So how was it?”
“Fine.”
“Fine? Don’t give me fine. C’mon do as if I were there.”
“No way kid I’m barely conscious, too much aguardiente.”
“Water that’s ardent?”
“Right and still coating my esophagus too. Who’s the fucker invented that shit?”
“Nonetheless, as if I were there please,” she cupped her hand to her ear, the picture of foregone conclusion, but I motioned that an invisible key was locking my lips. “Please,” she said, this time jutting her lower lip out when she was done.
As if I were there was a practice nearly as old as we were. Essentially it involved one of us recounting to the other a slice of space-time that person had missed and doing so to the extent that, in the end, the listener would in effect have missed nothing. A simulacrum of corporeal presence. Questions were general
ly held until the end. Now don’t underestimate the level of detail involved here. The raconteur must season the word-for-word account with plainly irrelevant bits of data like people’s position in the room, facial expressions, and vocal inflections in a way that far eclipses even what you’ve heard to this point. So, because of the jutting lip and despite my compromised state, I did this for Alana with decreasing B.A.C. and increasing lucidity and when I was done she said this:
“Wow. But what kind of hot dog did Armando come in? You didn’t say”
“Kind?”
“Sure there are different kinds. You’ve got everything from the watery, brown Sabretts of Midtown to the grilled, sheepskin-encased, red Nathan’s of Coney Island.”
“I don’t think the van had that kind of detail Alana.”
“You barely mentioned little Mary either. What does she have to say for herself?”
“The usual, nothing.”
“Still not yapping?”
“Correct.”
“I can picture the hysteria as we speak. So what? That’s what I say. Maybe she just doesn’t have anything to say at this point. You know when you first walk into a gathering? You don’t let loose with an immediate verbal hemorrhage do you? Of course not, everybody hates those maniacs. First you kind of soak things in. I say Mary’s still in her soaking phase and when she’s done soaking and dries off we’re in for some serious insights. Besides I was a little weird when I was a kid and I—”
“Was?”
“—turned out what passes for all right. On another topic I must admit I’m having trouble wrapping my cerebellum around this 24 thing. By that I mean you turning into this number. I mean if you’re that old then it won’t be that long—”
“Twenty-eight months.”
“—before I’m that old. What do you make of this? Five years ago if you pointed to someone and told me that person was twenty-four I would have kind of felt sorry for them. Soon I’ll be the person I once pitied!” While she was saying this, Alana was sort of climbing through the window and onto the sofa. Except now she looked stuck betwixt in and out with her body undulating like a seesaw and her belly and the windowsill serving as fulcrum. “No I’m actually liking this,” she said when I tried to pull her in and so stayed there teetering noisily with her black Gene Simmons platform shoes flailing all kinetic behind her.
“Less volumen babe,” I said maybe louder than any noise she was making. “You’ll wake the entire house including me.”
“Don’t tempt me, I’ll get this party started up again.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” because she could have.
“But fine I’ll whisper if you insist.”
“I didn’t.”
“I’ll whisper this,” and she did whisper the ensuing but it was a strange whisper with her lips staying ventriloquist still and her eyes transfixed on what? “It’s not a vanity thing you know?” she said.
“What isn’t?”
“Do you?”
“What?”
“Know?”
“No.”
“You do?”
“Know?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“It’s not some lame corporate-feast-on-your-insecurities-fucking-Pepsi-generation-youth-is-better garbage,” Alana said, “that causes me to think about numbers. No, as I see it it’s about intensity. I have to laugh when I hear somebody refer to carefree youth or some such nonsense. Youth is everything but. Six, seven years ago I would stay up all night wondering if some guy liked me or not. More than that really, I could have deliberated that entire time on what a look or phrase had really meant. Now some guy could propose to me and I’d probably tell him to shoot me a follow-up e-mail so I won’t forget to get back to him. I get tired now. When I meet someone they always remind me of a previous someone in a way that makes any further investigation feel unnecessary,” I could tell from Alana’s intake of air that a lot more ramble was coming so I opened my ears a bit more and said nothing, the best course of action in those instances. “I read somewhere that the music I like now is the music I’ll like for the rest of my life. My fucking brain or something like that won’t find new kinds of music pleasurable from about this point on. What the hell is that? Good thing I like this music. C’mon youth wasn’t carefree it was intense and intense is good. It’s like this house. I never want to come here but when I do I end up liking it. Just to see everything through that prism again you know? A happy youth I must have had overall. Or was I miserable but with a poor memory? Oh whatever. Remember that old record player in the lime green case, the one with the detachable knobs? I saw it in the garage the other day. In the garage Casi! I put it on and it worked. I mean I didn’t have any records to really test it but it was spinning and that was amazing enough for me. I remember the oldsters would start in with the endless clave patterns and you and I would reach for that thing in protest. Then up to your room for a little Reader’s Digest Edition of the LVB piano sonatas, remember thinking RD was like good? And remember we would limit ourselves to the pre-Heiligenstadt Testament ones to exclude our runaway favorite, the cataclysmic Appasionata, with you being definitely partial to the Opus 28 Pastorale because it was supposedly after this one that he told Krumholz he would be taking a new path and me arguing that those kinds of ancillary matters were not fairly considerable and that sometimes, just occasionally, overwhelming popularity is warranted and that the second 27, The Moonlight, with its initial melancholia was the greater work? Remember that? Well if you listen to them now I bet you’ll be sent up to that room whether you’re willing or not. And if you listen the right way then you’re forced to actually be that person. Isn’t that just the height of weirdness? That’s what this house is, a giant green record player with detachable knobs, which is usually fine but can sometimes be the opposite. Sometimes it can be the realization that images seem blurrier now, sounds more muffled, and yet somehow we’re inappositely picking up speed. We’re picking up speed and you and I have been thrown out of the kitchen where we used to make ice cream floats, armed solely with ATM cards that have our pictures on them and a little bar graph in the corner that’s somehow linked to our fingerprints but only until they get the DNA coding capability fully functional and maybe your green record player does still technically work but not really and don’t pay it any mind regardless because I have a fifty disc CD player that positively compels neighbors to call the police and LVB sounds twenty times better but not as good so I kill the lights and blast it anyway so that when the opening movement of the C minor Symphony nears its close at allegro con brio tempo I swear Casi that the sky is going to literally open up and forget all of Ludwig’s later Ode to Joy crap because now it’s God—for want of a better word—surveying the broken to regretfully diagnose a violent remedy then reaching down and doing something about this mess, no longer content to just watch, and you were right about Lincoln Center that time because yes it was great and how could it fail to be but it does have to be louder, or more accurately we needed more money to get closer and make it louder, loud enough that the notes come straight from heaven, replace your bone marrow and you start to question yourself as a physical being and I think the more time passes the louder and louder it will have to get in order to be heard above the din . . . hear that? That’s the din.”
“Who uses their car horn at this hour?”
“I didn’t say he was overly bright.”
“Stay over, tell him you’re staying over.”
“Nah, better go, but tell mom I’ll call her tomorrow.” She looked up with just her eyes. “I adore the phone, don’t you?”
“I abhor it.”
More din.
“Love you,” she said through a hurried kiss. “Don’t forget your present,” she added as she swung backward off the window ledge then out of the window’s raindropped mise-en-scène. I debated which interpretation to apply to that statement but now even quasi-sobriety proved fleeting and without Alana as distraction, and my fo
ot incredibly on the sofa arm, a resurgent visual tremolo threatened to overrun me and the room I was in. I realized then that while Alana and I had done our little remembrance of lost time I had overlooked relevant things happening then and there and so forgot to ask if her work was selected for that gallery opening she had bated her breath for. More importantly, I forgot to ask her if she knew what happens to the homeless when they die. Do they have funerals? What happens to their bodies?
I sank further into the sofa, still eschewing contact with the floor. Your ear hurts I thought. The twin lights became one then quickly none, leaving the room in a permeating, haunting black. Then that car door sucking sound again.
chapter 3x2x1
Just think how you’ll feel when even your basest desires are quenched before they’ve even had the chance to fully form.
—Gary Dullen ®
Someone once told me that whatsoever you fear most ardently young man (he was old) you will just as assuredly, in the long run, be forced to confront and in the ensuing years I had found those inchoately prophetic words to be, like most of that antediluvian nut’s declarations, almost wholly without merit. Therefore, walking on the block of my apartment, thirty-six hours after Alana split, I felt confident I would not have to engage in more social interaction and for that I could thank the cold, which had spread so unchecked it was almost visible now. It drove the Sunday afternoon people indoors, this cold did, and made me feel like a sole post-apocalyptic survivor wandering the ruins of a once-proud civilization while bathing in the unmistakable lure of unobserved conduct. It was so alluring, this quiet solitude, that I found myself slowing to a complete stop that I might fully absorb the sensation until I realized that, incredibly, my body was no different than the ones that had obeyed the Fahrenheit and fled indoors.
But before I went inside, as I climbed the steps to my place, I saw that I hadn’t really been alone after all because it was then that this old-timer suddenly materialized from in front of the doorway and walked towards me. I say materialized because even though I know I was looking straight ahead the entire time I climbed the steps, I didn’t see this grim-reaper-looking fuck until he was practically on top of me, close enough that I could see intestinal steam escaping from the top of his bony head while he put me into increasingly sharper focus. Flat, disconcerting eyes this prick had, which I tried my best to avert but couldn’t as he came closer and closer before finally resting inches from my face. I stopped trying to look away and spoke haltingly in what sounded and felt like an extraneous voice.
A Naked Singularity: A Novel Page 16