by Steven Snell
“Everything is right and just when life’s soundtrack is Damien Rice.”
“He’s the apex. Everything else is corners.”
“Let’s go for a wander like … raconteurs.”
“Don’t remind me of Paris right now, Shawn.”
Her voice fades as if passing down Champs-Élysées and it’s raining a spring rain and her umbrella is tucked under her arm. I picture her in the nude as an artist’s muse at the edge of a pool. I smile.
“Life does seem better when destination is eradicated or the pace of life lessened. Let’s lose the plot.”
“Yes,” I say.
“And avoid the purpose of everyday life.”
“I wonder if things were ever just things.”
“Just things?”
“I don’t know. … Things were just useful items.”
“Like my extraordinarily dull cup of drip coffee?”
“Life’s better with good coffee.”
“It is. … And it’s better when I’m being touched and held and spooned and groped and tasted and I’m me but a part of something larger. I miss being held.”
She continues. I listen to her thoughts mixed with the music about my apartment. She tells me love is on a non-myopic spherical thing. But the irony is that it’s more understood or more appreciated from afar, like an orbiting satellite. It can be reached from any point on this globe but we move throughout our lives so quickly that we don’t stop to feel what’s under foot. You just have to accept it … it’s at a distance less than two bodies pushed together or from the shore to the mast of a vessel still peaking above the horizon as it curves beyond it. She tells me it’s like the planetary system. Like Magnesium or Helium. Organic metals. A mass of connections. A thing not reducible to a single entity, not a particular moment in time. It’s something you can strip down. “I like to believe in the existence of it, but it’s not a thing you embody in something. It’s not a picture on your shelf on the teddy bear present you tuck in with at night. You have to let go of it to comprehend it. … And … and I just want to live, live, god damn it!” she says. She says that’s why she fell in love with the Tenor. “He created tangible things for me to fall in love with, and with him. I could hang them on my wall and fall asleep looking at my naked body interpreted by someone else. Paint was real, stories about painting the skies were not. He was the paint. I could touch the painting on my wall and feel his brush down the back of my thigh. He painted me blue one time,” she says. “Love is touching, being touched, touching back. Then letting go and yearning for it again.”
She says that she’s taken chemistry and studied Chromium. It makes alloy steels hard and erosion resistant. But she only sees the lustrous metal. She says that she took art theory and after the first class she went to the campus bookstore and bought acrylic paints and went home and ripped out each page of her used art theory text book and painted each page and tacked them up on her living room wall and when she was done she smiled and went online and dropped the class.
“I prefer immediate experiences,” she says. “Ah … fuck,” she says. “Shawn, my cell phone is dying.”
“Okay.”
“Feel me painting you. Take care, bello.”
“I will, and soon.”
“Soon soon soon. Salute.”
“Bye.”
I push End. I put the phone on the counter and pick up my keys beside it. I walk to my closet and pull a sweater off a hanger and put it on. I step into my shoes and pull the heel cup back from under my heel and open the front door and then I’m outside and it’s cloudy and the fog has lifted just enough to give the sky features.
I walk a block and then another, another and another and through a cool breeze. I button up my sweater to cover my chin and dig my hands into my pockets. I walk and watch traffic and pedestrians and bicycle couriers and a park worker raking leaves and digging, preparing the soil for bulbs for next spring’s growth. I turn the block and fire trucks with lights flashing have corralled a crowd on the street. Cars and vans and trucks are trying to converge into the far curb side lane. An office tower full of employees have congregated clogging the front entrance and firemen are marshalling them away to another meeting point and these men in suits and women clutching themselves, their purses encourage each other to move with subtle gestures and I pass them and smile a glad I don’t have to work today smile and I cross the street and walk and walk to the river and along it and above it a bald eagle. I stop and watch it. Minutes pass. I close my eyes and recollect a time at youth camp and a picture of a bald eagle with its wingspan to scale mounted on the wall and me standing in front of it spreading my arms and me at that moment a bird too. I wanted once to be a cheetah or a bald eagle. It was habitat that ultimately drew me to the sky. The west coast of Canada of great trees and rain forests and the ocean and orca and salty ships and sea lions. Yes, as a bald eagle. I’d soar in the thermals and hunt but my feet are here on asphalt. I follow the river path with this gaze towards my youth and distant walkers towards me. An elder gentleman with his easy stroll and immaculate suit and tie and chapeau and there’s something about his mannerism and for a second I see my grandfather and I see us skating along the river canal in Ottawa and it’s brisk out and I barely reach the bottom buttons of his pea coat. My arm up holding that strong hand of a surgeon and I look up at him, his knowing eyes and warming smile and a feeling in me of safety and protection and completeness. I slow my pace and move to the edge of the path and watch the older gentlemen and he nears and nods and I smile back and look up and that bird above us, this messenger and us just guests under her world. The man stops and meets my gaze and together as if about to be visited by a higher order we stand there motionless, mouths agape.
“That’s something special,” he says.
I nod, “Yes, yes it is.”
32.
I look out my window. That tree in the rear of the gravel parking lot beside my building and I wonder if it might be frozen in fear from the weather I just woke to. No wind. Not one branch moving. Not one yellow leaf. It’s covered in snow. It’s fall or winter and I roll to my back and see a crack in the ceiling in the corner of my room and note to myself that I must move my bedside lamp so the parts of my life that are broken remain hidden in shadows.
This weather, this city, the climate, I refocus my gaze to the window pane and it’s dirty with dust and this city I think is not close enough to the mountains to appreciate the snow and lacks trees to appreciate the colours of fall. It’s either winter or spring, with a week or two of summer and autumn. So I lie here contemplating the flu or wondering if I should have thicker sheets and I’m here beside an open window letting autumn winter in.
A city exists because people came together, to work together, to plan together, to grow together.
I adjust the pillow under my head.
Then came greater geographic connections for access to resources. Movement corridors and crops and the storage of foods and luckily winter to kill diseases then transactions and economy and technology and a boat or a sword or a cannonball and gods to shape a greater purpose, a higher meaning of infallibility and annexed lands and walls and walls and walls and then ceilings in the thousands.
I turn down CBC on my bedside clock radio.
Escalators and cars and cubicles and boardrooms and chat rooms. Pods. On-line social networks. Walls and walls and walls and a greater and greater distance from each other, from the very purposes we came together to construct a city.
I close my eyes.
There’s a scene in my head. She’s dancing on the crack in the left corner of my room. It’s of a girl whose name I can’t recall. It’s just the two of us here. Just the two of us. Then she’s lying on top of me. I slowly move my nose back and forth over hers and I close an eye to focus on her. She touches me. I want to be closer but I can’t break through her skin. She rolls and is under me and I notice a tattoo inked down the base of her spine. In a serif font it reads, STAY HERE WITH ME. I have th
at feeling where I’ve been here before, know it like I’ve read these words before, crawled up and down her spine before. I open my eyes and lift her one leg and she turns on her side. I slide off her body exposing the surface of her to the cool air circulating in my room. I glide my hand over her cheek, down to the nape of her neck and pause atop her breast. She falls back deep against her shoulder blades, falling into my bed. I watch her chest rise up and down where each breath in and out pushes her breast up into my palm and then falls away again. I watch this. In and out. My breathing mirroring hers. I begin to move with it. Up. Down. Up. Down. For a moment her breathing quickens. Then she’s calm. My other hand remains held to her hip as my stomach pushes tighter against her.
I wish you could be the ideal for me, Shawn.
She begins to quiver.
Be ideal for me.
She breathes deeply then settles back again into my bed. I slowly start to kiss her chest and then look up to see her gasping at the sky.
Be ideal.
Building and forming and stacking together thoughts to place stones before a wall allowing me to climb up over the fortification that surrounds me and move ever closer to a chance of seeing what’s on the other side. I picture it. An image in my head of a perfect place, a perfectible place abstracted and cobbled from inexplicable moments, inexact moments.
But I’m here.
I wipe away the sleep formed in the corner of my eyes and refocus and her now looking down at me wanting me to be ideal and wanting me here is this girl and this comfort and this softness in life and this heat on my hand telling me to be here. Here. But I’m not. Only parts of me needing the warmth of a body detached from mind or emotion or place. I’m not here. I’m a head for one, a body for another, a heart, a heart, a heart out there. I’m pieces for what symptoms need remedying.
The girl turns to me, seeking something in this morning city air.
“Talk next week.”
She stands up. Up on the bed and touches the ceiling. Her naked body looking down on me as her fingers push into the stipple. Her vagina above me. I touch her ankle. She steps off the bed and down to the floor and picks up her jeans and underwear and steps into them together and pulls them up, weighting each foot to slide them on. Then she bends over and picks up her sweater and pulls it over her face and black hair over her chest over her stomach and then she pulls her hair out from under her sweater and ties it back with a pencil into a bun at the base of her neck. She air kisses me. I smile, she back as she turns leaving my room my apartment down the hallway down the three flights of stairs and walks out into the city and snow leaving me there floating three inches above cotton sheets and a shadow of trees creeping into my room over my body and not enough material matter in my hands to build the foundations to ascend that wall.
The story ends when the protagonist gets or does not get what he wants. When the protagonist says goodbye to the antagonist. When this girl doesn’t come back anymore.
33.
60 million years ago an organism pushed itself out of the ocean. Once single-celled, then complex. A beast with a wrist lifted itself onto the shore. Sweat glands and shoulders arriving.
Arrived.
Finished.
The end.
… But then land.
An entire world to slug through the muskeg of primordial abyss.
Unfolding until Time. The creation of Time.
The soft watch, a tropism for the ephemeral nature of humankind and our inevitable decay.
Obsessed with Time, succession, getting somewhere, to Some Where.
Wanting everything.
Needing everything.
Destroying anything to get at everything.
This Aristotelian Tragedy advancing in an uncoordinated procession. A march of soldiers in combat boots, body armor, sneakers, stilettos, tasseled loafers, galoshes.
Each new element built on a trajectory of plot points and hope for conflict resolution, the Epilogue. A need to find the natural form in the narrative.
Then character changes.
A new scene.
New sequence.
A new plot.
Change in plot.
Open up boarders for penetration. New resource extraction.
Numberless airline flights.
Trade sanctions.
Bombing democracy through the Middle East.
Another speech from another pulpit.
Forgotten words not delivered on stage, a failed performance.
The routinized and monotonized activities bestowed onto society as pleasure. Treadmills and stationary bicycles and laps in a pool and universal gyms and elliptical machines and heart rate monitors.
My head is down. I’m walking in the rain. My socks are soaked. I’m half-drunk.
The poor decisions I make.
Me.
I am.
I’m a soliloquy cast from weather balloons bursting in the troposphere.
I’m the flogging stone for those on their way up to power and conquest and a life in big-box shopping and credit card points and extra-hot two pump lattes and low fat diets and all-inclusive vacations.
I’m last night’s episode of a disposable relationship, a plastic plant. The deterioration of consciousness raised on nutrition labeling and the hyper-obsession with cleanliness. Destruction and terror filtered through a sanitized medium of smartphones and income generating commercial banks.
But bullets don’t fly over my head. Pandemics don’t rage through my city. The disease is on another continent, at a safe enough distance. I won’t be beheaded by a terrorist’s sword. Here, there’s no water gushing down my throat to choke down, to cough up, to drown in.
I’m privileged.
I have what I need. A surveyor marks out the gopher holes to save my ankles.
But I’m part of a group whose membership I’ve not purchased and wondering what political party to sign up with. Wondering what protest to march in, what flag to rally around.
I push open my front door, take off my jacket and throw it over the back of the chaise. I remove my shoes.
I unplug the stereo, the TV, the computer, the refrigerator, off all the white noise.
I open a bottle of wine and cross the room and close the blinds and pull the cushions off the sofa and create a womb made from The Bay furniture and sit equidistant from the four walls in my apartment.
I take a swig from the bottle. A mouthful of red wine from It Doesn’t Matter. Another swig. Another. My nose over the opening and one long inhale of terra and pepper and another swig. I wipe my mouth. I yawn once, a giant, deep yawn and slip towards the stationary life of solitude and silence and emptiness and despair and hard wood floor under me.
I’m the chronic postmodernist. The absence of systematic notions of orientation. I walk with a map of the wrong city.
I’m the to-go cup of coffee, the bagged lunch. Velcro shoes. Normalized convenience.
I’m second person narration.
I’m you.
We’re drifters, not seekers. We’re stimulation. Masturbation.
We’re the fitted designer jeans one inch too long deteriorating against the concrete we walk along.
We’re the selfish zone of personal music players. Pirated tunes and the expanding influence of musicians. What do you want to be when you grow up? Famous.
We’re consumers. Damned to prescribed choices and alone in choice is sacred. We’re connection in consumption. Simplifying the complexity of our lives: stimulate the economy.
We’re decontextualized heritage housing. Removed from the neighbourhood and trucked to entrance fee theme parks. 10 AM to 6 PM opening hours history.
We’re the one way to find god and that is by making our own.
A half empty bottle of red wine in the other room. Roof collapsed. Walls knocked over. There was a typhoon, what’s left is the aftermath. The Bay cushions all over my apartment.
My shirt off.
My socks on.
I’m lying on my
bed.
It’s 11 PM, dark.
My world spins madly.
34.
Cynthia’s on the other end of my phone. She says, “Where are you?”
“What time is it?”
“Um … hold on … it’s 3:30.”
“Guess where I am.”
“Don’t be a brat.”
“I’m at work changing the world one docket at a time, and have a monster headache.”
“The change in weather?”
“Body chemistry.”
“Wine?”
“Yes.”
“Ouch.”
“Yes yes.”
“Come over for dinner.”
“I would like that. What time?”
“When you finish work.”
“Can I change and shower first.”
“No. I like your after work greasy look. It’s very Tom Cruise Top Gun motorcycling to see Charlie.”
“Take me to bed or lose me forever.”
“Seriously?”
“Nah, no matter what I’m yours.”
“Good, because I’m terrible at sex.”
“And I can’t ride a motorcycle.”
“We’re a match then.”
“Yes yes.”
“Good good. I’ll see you soonish?”
“You will.”
“Salute.”
“Bye Cynthia.”
The next hour takes ten. Work creeps along. Work finishes. I leave work.
I train to my stop and walk to Cynthia’s and buzz her apartment.
Up the elevator and turn the corner and she’s holding her door open.
“Hi,” I say.
“Love it. You didn’t shower.”
We kiss on the cheek. “I thought it goes that I shower here.”
“Right, let me go find my record player.” She steps aside and I take a couple of steps past her saying, “Baby, you’ve lost that love and feeling.”
She laughs and I step out of my shoes and drop my bag and hang my sweater up beside her coats.
The TV is on and mute and there’s music, Amy Winehouse music and the lights are off except for the ones above her kitchen counter that delineates the apartment between cooking area and sitting area, evening light illuminates the other parts just enough to give her apartment shape.