I take a roll of duct tape and begin sealing the cracks around the door that leads to my house, carefully smoothing the black adhesive along the floor and the walls. Since I don’t want to asphyxiate immediately, I leave the hole near the floor alone. If I stand in a certain spot near the opening, I can feel the slightest breeze whisper in from the outside world. Otherwise I feel nothing, except for the pain in my chest, and the smoke.
I pull off my wedding ring and place it under my pillow. I want to feel smoke all over my body, want it to love and caress my indentations and hollows, my hairs and folds. I want it to tickle, to lick, to burn. I take off my clothes, fold them neatly at the foot of my bed. Smoking is good for me.
I feel as though I were still reeling from my first kiss, giddy with the news that love could visit and forgive my awkwardness. Cigarettes! Cigarettes! I pull out a handful from a carton, let them fall through my fingers. What are they? Just thin rolls of paper binding crushed plants, mingled with preservatives to maintain the freshness and bind the substance, though I suspect there are other elements at work (as every new love is more than lips and eyes and hair, a bag of guts). I pull the chain and feeble yellow light illuminates the concrete floor. Shadowy boxes, a tool bench, a bicycle, a lawn mower. Rakes stand menacingly, a short row of gleaming teeth. Beyond the shadows and the gloom, the sound of traffic flows through the crack in the wall, a muffled hush that becomes a blanket in the dark.
I strike a match, watch the tiny flame surge and recede, flicker in the stillness of the garage. I lift the match to the tip of my cigarette, puffing while the flame licks and ignites the paper and leaves. The stream of smoke curls and dances, surrounds my fingers and trails around my arm. As the fire traces the cigarette, the smoke changes, becomes belligerent in its variation and delight. I watch it turn and shudder and I feel humble, in awe. I remember a one-night stand I had with a woman in Montreal – how we blew Marlboro smoke toward the hotel ceiling after sex, both of us marvelling at the beauty. I remember the first time my childhood friend could manage the nostril exhale in the dusky twilight of Christie Pits – how I burned with envy and awe at his mastery of the craft. I feel a great honour to be able to hold such beauty and chaos within my body. I feel like a mother, holding the swell of her womb. I blow out the drag and feel a loss, a loneliness. I grind the cigarette out on the ground, mashing the ashes and smearing the sooty tar. Within a month the cigarette will be on the path to decomposition, returning to the earth. I feel proud to follow, burnt and scattered.
Pipes, like writing in general, are illusions of immortality. One preserves and polishes a pipe, buys cleaners, keeps the thing itself in a small velvet bag. As meticulous and fussy as any careful editor, or publisher, wanting words preserved in glorious binding. As ridiculous as an urn, engraved with a dead name, when the body should be mingled with tulips and bluebells, the soil in which it dug. One doesn’t share a pipe, like one would a democratic cigarette – much like a fresh idea in the world of fiction, held and guarded jealously, protected by laws of copyright and possession. A pipe is an extension of the self, and will often outlive its owner, as does any book pushed into publication past the death of its author. But a cigarette! Ah, a cigarette is a life unto itself, a life burning before you, a constant reminder of mortality, like poems written on clouds and forgotten the moment they’re uttered.
In high school I wrote sonnets to cigarettes. I was the lover, the Petrarchan courtier, and my object of affection, my Laura or Beatrice, was the slim, ivory shaft that perched between my fingers. I experimented with sound poetry, tried to say smoke with as much meaning as the word would allow. I think I developed a dementia and stopped breathing oxygen.
While I consider the cigarette, the urge to write fades, no doubt jealous of my preferential treatment. I dwell on the almost certain failure of any attempt at art in order to truly banish it, and to my love. Be gone, fiction. Leave me alone, I whisper; damn the weighing and balancing of every crippling word, the sound and rhythm of lines. Damn the point at which writing becomes work, when reading and rereading become a monotonous chime of frustration, a litany of error. Damn tso haphe doubt and the inadequacy, the time away from loved ones, the time away from sun and experience, from dancing. And damn all the ghoulish figures of the past, the dead writers who sparkled with greatness and made all my broken riffing seem silly and imitative and lame.
I dream of exhaust, a belching pipe, an iron-grey sky and a procession of souls. Sighs, short and infrequent, and a bell to toll the hours. I’m following someone, someone receding from view, swallowed by the press of bodies. When I wake up it is often night, and the sound of footfalls returns: what I know now to be pure hallucination, fantasy. Someone walking very close to the door between the house and the garage, pausing at the boundary between oxygen and smoke, sanity and its opposite. The steps recede as waking sense returns, and I close my eyes, trying to imagine the years I will miss.
Time has passed. My supplies are still plentiful. My chest hurts each time I take a breath. I am coughing up great clumps of dark blood and I believe I am starting to die.
I miss those conversations with Katherine. I want to tell her I love her, tell her I never meant to hurt her with my smoking, tell her goodbye. I want to meet with old friends, visit the park where I first smoked. I want to stride down the street in the spring, a student, with a cigarette clutched between my fingers, electric guitars wailing from patio bars around me and the forgiving wind rippling my hair. I want to pore over photos of my wife, our life together, smell the blue blouse I’ve kept in our closet, read the first letters we wrote. Life is so full, so long, but our crooked little cells are all we know. I want books, but I know I wouldn’t be able to concentrate; I would fidget in anticipation of my death. The only thing I can do is wait, and smoke.
Before long there is a soft knocking on the garage door. I lie perfectly still. This was inevitable, surely, but I want to keep quiet. The knocking lasts only a few seconds, but it leaves me shivering, afraid. Someone wants me; someone knows of my escape into the garage. I am dreaming, maybe, but I have the sure sense that although the knocker wants me to return to the world, I know that he (or she) belongs to the land of the dead.
This goes on for days – every now and then the soft knocking, the echo, the tentative blows. The bulb burns out, leaving me in perfect darkness. I have to wrench my body around to stare at the tiny crack to the outdoors to see if it is day or night. The process of watching becomes too difficult, and I give myself up to blackness, to my eyes’ widening sense of shadow and smoke, adjusting to the constant night. Those knocking inquiries, my terrified shivers. The sludge of time, unchanging dark, and now a man standing in the corner of the garage for a second – I see him outlined by match-strike. A lightning flash of evil. I hear him smoking. I moan now, petrified. Some nights later (or minutes, or worlds) he’s standing above me, darker than the black around him, watching me. He lights a smoke and it’s Italo Svevo, bald, moustached, dead, smiling from a photograph. I scream in pain and push my face into the mattress. He’s speaking in a shadow whisper, in a language that makes no sense.
To drown out his pleas – and they’re pleas, I’m certain, nonsense or untranslated or maybe perfectly clear if I listen closely enough – I sing softly to myself. Eventually I jam a cigarette in each ear, burying my head under the pillow.
I know what he wants, then, in the sudden bite of a dream. He wants me to finish the book. He says only I can write the last chapter, the last sentence, the last words. He’s kept my desk for me, clear of clutter or distraction, with a new electric typewriter, a notepad, a pen and a fresh pack of Persian cigarettes. He’s scrapped all my pages of inventory; it’s time to get back to the story, he says. He promises that my wife is not gone but merely sleeping upstairs, her lips parted, her skin oily and warm, a tiny life growing inside her. That this could be the night I finish my life’s work, the work I’ve been dreaming of since my first smoke. How good it will be to finish, he teases. To wri
te the last words. To give up and let the work live. To walk up the stairs of our home and slip into bed, into an embrace, knowing the struggle to be over and done. I’m so happy that you’ve quit, my wife says, whispering across the pillow before we fall to sleep.
I consider it. I moan on the mattress, reaching for a handhold, trying to stand. Maybe I should. Maybe this was a mistake; maybe struggling and failing was the point. Maybe the end is nearer and easier than I could ever imagine. All it will take, he suggests, is that I try.
The pain surges. I lie on my side, refusing to rise, curled like something wilted, wet. Remembering.
One night, one day, one moment, Italo begins to fade. He limps around the garage. He is waiting for me to emerge and finish the work so that he can go on living. Italo cries pitifully, no longer fearsome but pathetic. Death is not a strange land. Death is when the garage door opens and I return to life. I call out, asking if I can smoke in heaven, and try to laugh, thinking that’s all Heaven is. I catch a whiff of smoke and start thinking I’m going somewhere else, but there is no fire, no waiting pit for the damned.
Then all of a sudden he’s quiet. No sound of Italo, no presence, just the dirt and grime and darkness of the garage.
A minute. An hour. A day.
And I lie still, rigid, straining to hear.
TRANSCRIPT:
APPEAL OF THE SENTENCE
… the sentence itself is a man-made object, not the one we wanted of course, but still a construction of man, a structure to be treasured for its weakness, as opposed to the strength of stones’
– from ‘The Sentence,’ Donald Barthelme
With regard to my appeal of the sentence: yes, I am well aware of our ‘relationship’ being, in plain language, non-existent; and yes, I can admit to accusations of infatuation and obsession, even though such allegations have been framed in a largely provocative and erroneous manner, laden with dangerous, predatorial connotations, suggesting that I possess some sort of skewed psychosexual mania (or worse, the likelihood of pedophilic desires); and yes, I admit to such accusations in full awareness and acknowledgment of the grave fact that we are indeed ‘unacquainted’ (in a rather delimiting interpretation of the word, I must note), despite my numerous letters and telephone calls and emails to her agency, Cunningham Escott Slevin Doherty (CESD), and to her publicist, the inestimable Meghan Prophet, and to her music label (Hollywood Records) and to the Disney Corporation (to wit I have not yet received any written or oral response but soldier on in the hope of expressing my deepest gratitude and my sincerest congratulations on her innumerable successes and innovations, even though [thinking rationally] I knew these efforts might be futile due to her immense responsibilities and extremely busy schedule, regarding which I could testify at length if only brevity were not a factor, if only you weren’t already so weary with listening), so for the sake of such direly required and oft-requested succinctness, I shall plead with the court on this day that my interest in Ms. Cyrus is purely scholarly, and in good will, and that I have been cruelly maligned by certain lawyers, Cyrus family representatives and members of the immediate and amalgamated Cyrus family at large (read: William Ray, Leticia, Brandi, Trace, Christopher, Braison and little Noah, though he could not form the terrible accusations but is known to live, in a childish sort of way, ‘in fear’ of my return), as a ‘delinquent,’ ‘stalker’ and ‘predator,’ and, though the precise words were not spoken, as some sort of ‘sexual deviant’ – for I insist that my sexual preferences abide by the straight American medium (even, one might say, particularly puritan, given my noted reluctance to engage in auto-erotic acts of any kind after the recorded period in Tennessee), that my study of Ms. Cyrus’s life and work and charitable contributions has indeed been both consuming and ‘enflaming’ but only in the strictest intellectual sense, for surely I would not bother to know the petty details of her birth and education, her conceptual circumstances and humble origins, if not for strictly intellectual fulfillment, for surely if these were outré masturbatory phantasms I could have simply downloaded some leaked cellular photograph, leered at an innocuous patch of film in grisly slow motion (made obscene by such slow motion), and had my way with myself, so to speak, forgetting the details of Ms. Cyrus’s birth: that she was born on November 23, 1992, the same day that the last deadly tornado was seen in northeastern North Carolina as part of that cold, late-season outbreak that affected much of the southeastern part of the United States, ranging from Houston, Texas, to portions of the Gulf Coast states, from the Ohio Valley to the Carolinas – a deadly maelstrom of end-of-days leanings that narrowly skirted the edges of southern Tennessee in late November as if fated, destined, preternaturally aware of Miley Cyrus’s imminent arrival into the world, allowing Leticia ‘Tish’ Cyrus (née Finley), most worthy mother and vessel, to deliver through the harrowing pains of labour in peace, granting her that small but significant respite from worry or fret over natural disasters, Oz-ferrying cyclones, flying cows or cold-cellar emergency deliveries, in that place and time so very different from my own (notwithstanding all possible action on my behalf to violate the sequential workings of the world, bound by laws of immutable, inhuman physics), as I was (as the court has duly recorded) ‘beginning a new life on the west coast in full accordance with the law away from the forbidden person[s] and property,’ leading to my recorded confessions of anguish and pained sobbing over my missed opportunity to cradle Leticia’s hand, kiss her wrist (strong, slim, adroit) or wipe the beads of sweat from her forehead (lined, now, by another three symmetrical creases since that long-gone November day, or since our initial encounters in high school, where she ruled the narrow halls with a sort of haughty, southern authority, now bearing the lines of motherly latitude that I have often watched, slightly sheepish at my fear of their integrity, timid of their magisterial power over my daily musings and nightly terrors, in photograph and in glossy tabloid over state-appointed distance, obeying the court’s order to stay away and sow ‘wilder’ oats), missing my chance to watch the wailing, mewling Miley emerge from the womb and into the light; and these are issues that have, as stated, embroiled me in irresolvable frustration, leaving me to feebly imagine that I was there to witness, oh lucky witness, her headfirst slide into the charged, electric air of that great city (my city, my air), home of the Grand Ole Opry at the legendary Ryman Auditorium, the ‘Mother Church of Country Music’ where I watched my first rhinestone-studded cowboy band, its state home to the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Belcourt Theatre, canonized television shows like Hee Haw and Pop! Goes the Country, and, of course, legendary country singer William Ray Cyrus and Leticia Finley, who married secretly in Nashville on December 28, 1992 – obviously over a month after Miley was born, a fact telling of the nature of their marital commitment, revelatory of their appropriate interpretation of the sanctity of marriage, portent of William Ray’s understanding of paternal obligations, for the young family lived on a 500-acre farm in Thompson’s Station, a bucolic Elysium, just a short drive outside of Nashville where the grass is really green and the willow trees do catch the sunlight red and yellow and dappled and holy and all things make music and imbue the simplest sentiments, the most casual words, with the soul-buoying charge of choir-based anthems: words such as Destiny Hope Cyrus, written in indelible ink on a Tennessee birth certificate, now stored in a locked drawer in a sprawling mansion in Los Angeles forever removed from my fond gaze, spelling out its secret message to anyone perceptive enough to read it: Destiny the inevitable fulfillment of a family’s dream, Hope the means by which the dream would be achieved, and Destiny and Hope thus together representing a portentously American knot of dreams – knotted and entwined like the veins and tendons mapping Miley’s country-rough hands beneath the Tennessee star-scape; Destiny being, of course, the softer sister of Fate (fate implying the cruel predetermination of Calvinist dogma, the Oedipal tear at the incestuous iris, the natural fall of dying leaves blown from cold autumnal branches: souls of the dead eager to line circle
s of a just and appropriate Hell); softer still in its insistence and encouragement of active participation on behalf of the subject, saying life is what you make it, saying reach for the stars, saying Destiny is my vague green light beyond the storm, always in the becoming, the manifesting, our boats borne ceaselessly back on waves of Hope – and so, charged by the harmony of the farmstead, the serendipity of the marriage and the ineluctable bond between her parents, I declare that Destiny Hope Cyrus is answered hope, the answered hope of a modern America: a nation of willing, striving and gaining, of proud immigrants running millions of blunt needles through department-store linens, raking through the sodden shit of dog parks, scrubbing bleach against porcelain urinals stained in the daily rub of living, or driving up and down the apocalyptic California coast between blurring redwoods and whitecaps trying to dream their way back into the homeland nectar of the south; and who amongst them, these proud brown-bodied working people, these people sentenced to punishments beyond the scope of their crimes, who amongst them would not gain or profit from the weight of such a name, a name so pregnant with purpose, a name like a tiny pilot light of great expectations, ensuring that destiny and hope were forever entangled and inextricable in Miley’s memory, forever a part of who she is, was and will become, her past, present and future, bound in one time, one memory (two memories, if you count mine, which cannot forget), without even mentioning her public moniker, Miley, merely one of many milestones on a winding highway of public support and love from William Ray, who comments, in interview after smiling interview, that ‘[Miley] was always smiling, she was always letting you know she was happy – such a happy, smiling, laughing baby’ (and who can’t help but smile, who can’t help but picture the tiny limbs and giggling, cherubic face of the dancing, playing child, innocent of all woe and sadness, loving with a sort of unrestrained golden-retriever sincerity that crushes the heart and makes one moan and beg for William to get to the point and relate how they called her Smiley, smiling himself as he says this, saying ‘Smiley’ was her nickname around the house, but she had problems with the word – it just didn’t come out right, ’cause of the lisp and all – so she could only say ’Miley, right, and so this name sort of stuck – and though this may sound silly (the remnant of an affectionate nickname adorably debased by a toddler’s lisp), it tied Destiny Hope in a sort of electric, unspoken current to Ms. Cyrus’s first creative distortion, her first calculated move toward self-actualization and identification, her first mumbled gesture of authenticity: somehow more American than Destiny or Hope; somehow more attuned to the shifting, sliding ideals of the end of the century, as if such a small baby could already ascertain that the ideal of personal authenticity was inexorably obliterating any ethical or moral insistence on the True, or the Good, or the Just, ascertained like one of Pound’s cultural antennae – invisible lightning rods of anticipatory wisdom who walk among us – our artists, our visionaries, our prophets, those who speak for and to us (us, of course, being the gibbering, howling masses who have not the radar for such subtle vibrations of change, present company included); and again, to make myself perfectly clear, this praise is made not to exclude William Ray from this conversation of prophets (and please cogitate on the careful and fair way in which I speak of him, considering the accusations at hand), not to ignore his own contributions to culture by becoming the successful singer-songwriter and actor he is, recently promoting songs like ‘Runway Lights’ and ‘Nineteen’ on his twelfth and latest and ravishingly patriotic studio album I’m American despite how many of his peers failed along the way, dragged down by drugs or misplaced ideation or a destructive desire for fame or wealth or the adoration of an asinine fan, or, most commonly, through a simple lack of natural talent, or talent squandered through a lack of repetitive labour and the sacrifice of all other comforts, through work, through an intense study of the history of pop music, which in truth is littered with these marginal, forgotten, tragic fossils, who burnt up too fast, or too soon, or who never had a break, who now play (if they play at all) in obscure cover bands or in the shadowed corner of a university or college bar, crying into their pints of lager, memory mingled with false projections from a foggy, denuded prime in which William Ray was always the better man, the better musician, the more successful singer-songwriter who never crashed and burned, who found God and Family, who made wise investments with his millions and fathered a child who would eventually eclipse his own tremendous fame – even though, let us not forget, he penned a cultural zeitgeist, lyrics and melody so indelible upon the contemporary psyche that I don’t have to repeat the refrain; you’re probably humming along now, remembering where you were when that all-too-human heart tore across America and made line-dancing a feverish act of rebellion – not to again insinuate in any way that Miley’s home life was dissolute or depraved, but rather evidence of her household’s musical surroundings – Miley’s first intimations of childhood being performative and lyrical, surrounded by the tenor twang of William Ray’s incredible ear for the melodious hook, of Leticia’s graceful additions at harmony, their first hound dog, Butch, baying and barking in the late haze of marshmallow campfires, the chaos of bullfrog and cricket chirping a chorus through the rural, moonlit nights, the sweet smell of cornbread and fried chicken and ribs wafting heavy from the truck-stop restaurant on the blacktop that bisects the highway (close, you might note, to my one-time residence, so very close to Thompson’s Station), the large matronly server humming to her young, acne-ridden employees, don’t cheat ’em on the sauce, give ’em what you’d want yo’self, and all the guitar towns dotting the roads and highways of Tennessee dripping with gospel and country, blues and bluegrass: American music, miserable grace of working pain and lost love, salvation always out of reach, Faulknerian abnegations of time coruscating the worker’s cheek, oh Jesus oh Jesus give me rest, it been so long, such a long time now Jesus, and John Steinbeck a million miles west singing about the plucked guitar and the keening fiddle and the mournful, forlorn harmonica, a reminder to forget divisions of skin colour and class because according to the dream we all labour in the fields in the morning with the promise of the sun and then descend willing or not into the sorrowful vicissitudes of night (and how cruel the nights are on the west coast, how sea-blown and breezy, saline and flat), with Guthrie a dying dream in the Grand Canyon and Dylan a wisp of a ghost on the road and Miley’s musical inheritance thus mingled with AM Gold and Casey Kasem, porch-lit jam sessions with William Ray’s drier friends who didn’t end up snorting everything on mid-nineties bar tops and who still enjoyed the night air and the way a guitar met a voice, the way the first and third fingers of William’s left hand could spread confidently across the fretboard of his trusty and worn acoustic, his right hand balled to a fist around a pick, a two-year-old Miley sitting at his feet playing with the reflected light of beer bottles and tuning pegs and the amber halo of a single bulb where perhaps her first high-pitched song was sung, the first formative springboard, perhaps, leading to her choir practice and solo work at the Thompson’s Station’s Baptist Church, her acting debut at age nine, her later acting classes at Armstrong Acting Studio in the wintry grey depressions of Toronto, Canada, her minor stumbling roles on William Ray’s incredible television series known as Doc (2001–2004) and the Oscar-nominated, Columbia Pictures blockbuster Big Fish (2003), and all her persistence in pursuing the Disney character who would change our lives – convincing through dogged insistence those hard-hearted corporate executives and casting agents (who have treated me with august indifference or open hostility, it should again be noted) that she was the one, the true pubescent morning star, the future flagship of the company, the deal-maker of their top-secret series later named Hannah Montana to be released in early 2006 about a young girl bearing the unfortunate burden of being an immensely popular singer and entertainer with legions of fans and incredible wealth (though wealth tied intelligently to her wise and mature father, played in the sweetest of turns by Miley’s own father, William Ray, who wa
s auditioned at Miley’s behest only after she was granted the role) but also determined to live a normal teenaged existence with typical experiences (like studying for exams in tiny denim short shorts, flirting with young male specimens with contemptible hair and gossiping with her loyal friends over the pink telephone), and to try to balance these two divergent and utterly conflicting lifestyles, and, most importantly, keep her pop-star celebrity identity secret and safe so as not to endanger her normal adolescent existence – a show that connected with millions of young children not because of its intricate and unique plot lines or biting dialogue, but because of Miley, that zestful whirlwind of ambition and national pride and bodily health, who was characterized by Disney Channel president Gary Marsh as possessing a ‘natural ebullience,’ and the ‘everyday relatability of Hilary Duff and the stage presence of Shania Twain,’ and I could go on in praise, the breath is full and moving, but these heads are nodding and shaking, and time has evaporated and made your faces turn sour, brought forth more beads of sweat to spread beneath your arms, has made your asses uncomfortable, and time is playing its game on me, and though brevity is the soul of wit I cannot in any eventuality be discerning, and so for Miley this means everything there is to know about her, every footprint and signature of that rare and robust and developing flower, the great surging abundance of a singular person in defiance of information reduced to partial rounds, the unfair impatience of quarters and divisions, of only the bottom line, of making some information the best information when there is no end to it, no end to its fullness, its baffling richness and generosity, no end to each storied detail, to what I can say before I’m dragged perhaps kicking and biting from the premises, leaving the sentence to remain on account of a half-strangled, half-finished appeal, dismissed and aborted in the eyes of the law like so many twisted, discarded, abandoned children, the children of my life and my land, though I in no way have ever acknowledged or agreed to a single word of my sentence – a sentence that from the standpoint of reason cannot make sense (not that any substitution can make it sensible, sentences do not make sentences make sense, I was taught; it’s our punishment and a just one, living in a sad and decadent place that can wilfully and systematically ignore that incorruptible beauty, that brief parting of clouds in a low and grey unrolling regiment, a girl who will never breathe or grow or cry those big crystal tears again in quite the same fashion, so here I am to receive them, proud to receive those tears and that recorded laughter, receive those one-in-a-million emotions, be witness to this once-in-a-lifetime unfolding rose the way all tween and teenaged girls are momentary parting petals leaving us lonely and rocking to the radio’s ambient whispers, knowing ourselves to be uncomfortable and sad and obscene, shaking in the hours of our starving nights, waiting for our sentence, hoping against formidable despair for the return of our shared horizon, the note and pitch met perfectly, all the jumbled naïveté and fragility of youth transfigured into sense and communion by one song, one note that forgives and heals the guilty chaos of our days, making sense of our loneliness, our perjured feelings, our sickness and our poverty, how we shall never be beautiful, how our heads will run over with unbearable secrets and how we are sentenced to this, serving us right – when the song should end, be cut down, finished, and the singer not go on singing).
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