THE WALLS

by Jay Fox

  “Why are you suddenly so concerned with my life? When you were with Melissa, you didn't give a shit about what I did or didn't do.”

  “Don't try to change the subject.”

  “Seriously, though, I want to know why you care. What gives you the right to tell me what to do?”

  “Will you listen to yourself? You sound like a petulant teenager.” I light the cigarette again, take a drag, and then put it out. “Look, you've become self-destructive. Perhaps it's to avoid feelings of failure, perhaps it's because you equate freedom with hedonism. I don't know. What I do know is that you've taken on an impossible task—finding Coprolalia—because you know there's virtually no likelihood for success. You need to start going on interviews. You'll thank me in the long run.” I attempt to interject, but he raises his hand. “Look, you are not going to find Coprolalia. You knew you weren't going to, and you know you're not going to. Just listen to me. I was afraid when I was in your position, but I got over it. You have to get over it, too, because you can't continue like this.”

  “Is the coffee ready yet?” I ask dispassionately.

  “Look, I don't want to pick apart your motivations and all of the other shit you've managed to rationalize. I can tell you, however, that this is a textbook defense mechanism. Not only that, it's an unhealthy lifestyle. When was the last time you went a whole day without a drink?”

  “That's irrelevant.” I walk to the kitchen and pour myself a cup of coffee. When was the last time I did the dishes? This clearly doesn't help my case. The remnants of a massive scrapple project are everywhere you look: a faint dusting of cornmeal coats much of the counter, two pots are still on the stove, a measuring cup stained by homemade pork stock (made from neck bones) is next to the refrigerator. This looks like a site of desperation, but, in all honestly, I've never been one to spend much money on food. Previous budget meals include: chicken soup, lentil soup, Purple Soup (pork shoulder, beets, and shredded cabbage in a broth not too dissimilar to red borscht), rice and beans, franks and beans, hot dogs, the three sister medley (squash, corn, beans), and condiment sandwiches.

  Being that most of my eating habits are without frills and lack intensive labor, I have always been one to keep my kitchen tidy. This apartment has reinforced such a preference. We do not live in a nice building. (This has been established already, but it should be reiterated here.) Though the apartment came with a fresh coat of a paint and new appliances when Jeff moved in, there are signs of decay just about everywhere you look: the soiled tiles in the hallway made to resemble some arabesque mosaic in tawdry teal, pale maroon, and smoker-teeth white. The walls are thick with that type of oil-based paint that looks as though it's almost dripping—the paint that doesn't chip, but peals off like the skin of a potato; the paint that seems to become viscous in the heat, to sweat and sheen like some alopecic Russian baking on the Brighton boardwalk in an article of swim-wear that leaves nothing to the imagination, but does exercises the brain, as you inevitably attempt to come up with the best simile to describe the gelatinous bulge of flesh that's been shrink-wrapped in a pastel package of synthetic fibers; the paint that is gray like watery gravy, like cigarette ash, like an Oregonian day, like the dust that accumulates behind and beneath couches with the hide-a-beds that mercilessly dredge hardwood floors when moved without the aid of a dolly or a forklift. And then there are the pinecone-sized roaches—explosions of appendages, feelers, and, when struck with a shoe or broad object, bile-colored goo. They're truly gruesome customers even if the grue [yes, this word is actually featured in the O.E.D.] that they evoke is difficult to explain. They have neither venom nor fangs nor stingers; in fact, the only real threat they pose concern the allergens contained in their pheromones and their feces. Still, they are terrifying creeping things, especially since they are the only organisms with heads that can continue to move around for more than a few moments when they lose them. Maybe Energizer had it wrong. They may sell fewer batteries, but they would certainly convey a more accurate rendition of life and tenacity if they switched their mascot from a pink bunny to a roach (though, to avoid bankruptcy, it may be wise to have marketing alter the image of the new mascot so as to not have a dried date gone self-ambulatory peddling batteries). Our roaches are not only driven; they're fearless, too. They have been known to raid the kitchen even during the day. Their bravery, however, has sometimes come at a high cost. Perhaps the worst incident concerned Jeff's craving for toast one still-dark morning and an overly zealous connoisseur of crumbs. The lingering smell proved to be one of those indelible memories like the losing of one's virginity. Hence the reason we don't lament the toaster's absence.

  The rest of the apartment is not messy. All of the dirty dishes and empties are confined to the kitchen with the exception of the twenty-two on the coffee table. I swept about three days ago. I mopped last Sunday. The trash is not overflowing, but it should be taken out soon. Still, those dishes do not help my case.

  “Can you pour me a cup?” he asks from the other room.

  “Is this Tripping Daisy?” I ask.

  “You know them? Yeah. I’ve never considered them a one-hit wonder. ‘Piranha’ is a great song.”

  “Here you go,” I say as I come back to the table. “Look, I'm sorry about the dishes. I was going to do them yesterday, but I got caught up…”

  “With an alcoholic named Midas?”

  “…With the search Coprolalia,” somewhat deflated. “My bad.”

  “Look, just say, 'Yes, I'm sorry I've been associating with a bunch of street urchins and derelicts as opposed to properly managing my responsibilities. I'm sorry I've been avoiding the real world by searching for an artist who clearly doesn't want to be found. I'm sorry I've been so inconsiderate, Jeff; it will never happen again.'” He smiles with a nauseating tint of smugness. “You need to get your shit together, my friend.”

  “Like I said, I'm going to do this for another two weeks. After that, I'm going to start on the job hunt,” I say as I get up to check my email.

  He sighs, stands, and then walks to his room. I resent him for a time, but know that his frustration is actually directed at his parents. This was their first time visiting the apartment even though he's lived here for almost a year, and they live about an hour and change away. They stayed for all of twenty minutes.

  I open my email account. There are three new messages: one offering me natural male enhancement—a great little euphemism that implies that insecure people will buy just about anything. Another contains a Nabokov reference. The third is actually addressed to me. It is from patrick.y.shaheen@gmail.com, and reads as follows:

  I came across your post on Craigslist. While I do not know Coprolalia personally, I may be able to provide you with some information that will lead you to Willis Faxo, a previous friend of his. My contact information is below.

  Cheers,

  Patrick Shaheen

  (The remainder of the transcript has been redacted to assure the privacy of Mr. Shaheen)

  10

  Patrick Shaheen stands at five feet six inches. His hair color is a most ordinary brown with timid portions of gray and white. While his facial features are neither minatory nor particularly inviting, there is that potential serial killer allure in his eyes. There is an ease about him that seems disingenuous. His outfit is certainly different—a type of fashion statement that invites ostracism even here in Williamsburg, the Mecca of a hipster movement that has so far heeded a lot of bad music and a lot of fashion statements that future generations will witness with the same horror a man may feel upon waking up with a tequila hangover and seeing a four am call to an ex-girlfriend logged in his phone. Patrick wears a black, mesh tank top and green running shorts, which reveal the majority of his relatively pale thighs. Tomas asks if he is just coming from the gym. He receives a negative response.

  Patrick is not mysterious by any means; at least he does not try to be. Open and more than willing to impart any information requested of him (not always with either much d
etail or the omission of some irrelevant tangent), he embodies whatever the antithesis of social awkwardness is called, though his candor clearly elicits awkwardness from others. His tenor is reserved, but he trollops through conversation topics like an elephant on eggshells. He utilizes the conjunctive “not to go too far off topic here, but…”, which seems to indicate that he has yet to discover the function of the left parenthesis.

  Perhaps the most bizarre thing about him is his taste in music. His jukebox choices are ironic—if that adjective applies—and cause for concern among me and Tomas, who presume the bar's inhabitants are ready to take the interruption of Sinatra, hair metal, and rock standards (Hendrix, Cream, the Stones, Zeppelin, BOC, early Aerosmith, AC/DC, the Black Crowes, Metallica, or any grunge band with the possible exception of Collective Soul) personally. He puts on Maria Mulder's “Midnight at the Oasis,” King Harvest's “Dancing in the Moonlight,” Bread's “Guitar Man.” and Captain and Tennille's “Love Will Keep Us Together.” The last song generates a relatively serious amount of disgust from most of the patrons. This arouses a thief's grin from Shaheen.

  He informs us that he is three-quarters Irish and one-quarter Lebanese. By the look of him, one would think he is either Greek or Italian, though this assumption would be quickly abandoned upon hearing an impression of his mother's broach. He claims that he has lived in either Ireland or Wales for the majority of his life, but he is without accent. He tells us that he is thirty-one, but, for whatever reason, I don't believe him.

  Patrick dodges straight questions with the agility of a pugilist, provoking chronic sighs of exhaustion from both Tomas and I. When we ask about Coprolalia and Willis Faxo, he presents a coy grin. “I have never met the washroom fellow, and I have only met his friend twice. Not to go too far off topic here, but something Mr. Faxo once said to me reminds me of a Graham Greene novel. Do you know the work of Greene?”

  “Never heard of him,” Tomas respond.

  “Ah, he's one of the best authors of the twentieth century. Not that you'd know that,” as condescending as it appears on the page. “I rarely meet well-read Americans. I met a woman the other day who thought Dickens was the author of Gulliver's Travels,” he says with a laugh. “And guess what? The Yahoo had never even heard of Swift. Regardless, I'd assume that it's due to the education system here. You do know that it's absolutely horrendous and terribly backward. The No Child Left Behind Act is perhaps one of the most foolish policies the world has ever known. Then again, what do you expect from the same administration that started a war to dethrone a tyrant incapable of threatening his immediate region, Europe, or anyone in this hemisphere? Neither of you voted for the latest paragon of American Pylism, Mr. Bush, I presume?”

  “No,” I respond. Was that a The Quiet American reference?

  “I voted for Nader,” Tomas says as he begins towards the bar. “You guys need anything?”

  “No,” I respond. “Pat, are you okay?”

  “Marvelous.” Exeunt Tomas. “As I was saying…”

  Two hours pass. Subject matter is addressed and quickly cast by the wayside. Topics include, in chronological order: Locke's treatise on education, Voltaire, Diderot, de Gouges, d'Alembert, Descartes, Bacon, Spinoza, Maimonides, Aquinas, Scotus, Origen, Piso, Colet, St. Jerome, Erasmus, Rabelais, More, Milton, Lord Byron's Cain, the war between Caesar and Pompey, which Patrick calls the first real Roman Civil War, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, the cobbler in the first act of the aforementioned play, Plato's Meno, the allegory of Jesus and Melchizedek, Lazarus, Faust, the meaning of the term “hero” to the Stoics and the Cynics (someone virtuous enough to survive the death of their body), the fact that most of the Cynic philosophers evidently committed suicide by self-imposed starvation or asphyxiation, the benefits of taking a Vitamin B Complex every day, Dvorák's “New World Symphony,” “Sir Duke,” Sir Duke, Schubert, Mauro Giuliani, Boccherini, Chopin, Debussy, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Manet, Monet, Cezanne, Zola, Matisse, Mondrian, Satie, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Bartok, Hungary's struggle for freedom in the fifties, Prague in sixty-eight, Kundera, Woody Allen, Coltrane's “Central Park West,” Freud, Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, B. F. Skinner, Seymour Skinner, Itchy and Scratchy, Crumb, Ginsburg, Cage, Dine, Ono, Lennon, Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus, Nietzsche, Wagner, Bakunin, ants, the existence or non-existence of super-organisms, Darwinism, Neural Darwinism, the perplexities of quantum mechanics, “the universe's rate of expansion is increasing; how fucked up is that!,” M Theory, Egyptian mythology, Jenna Haze, Lolita, bestiality, Humbolt's Gift, Underworld, the Mets, bestiality again, the Yankees, Gehrig, A-Rod, David Beckham, Ichiro, Ricky Williams, John Muir, Mormonism, Mead, Dickinson, Ibsen, the best book of the nineteenth century (Balzac's Lost Illusions is my pick; Patrick praises Gogol's Dead Souls, but ends up picking Dostoevsky's The Possessed; Tomas votes for Through the Looking Glass; the argument ends in stalemate), the Decemberists, the Decemberists, Death Cab for Cutie, favorite album of the aforementioned band (Patrick: “I don't really know them well enough to make an informed decision”; Tomas: Transatlanticism; Me: Photo Album), Magical Mystery Tour, worst movie ever (the aforementioned, we all agree), favorite Beatles album (Patrick: Abbey Road; Tomas: Sgt. Pepper; Me: Revolver), Doctor Robert, Leary, Comte, Tocqueville, Cole, the reasons for the Revolutionary War (because a certain group of wealthy and famous Virginians had their rights to vast acres of Ohio Valley property abrogated as a consequence of the Proclamation Line of 1763; Patrick recommends Forced Founders for further information), that the legends of Roland and Thanksgiving are both epics born from historical footnotes, Zinn, Chomsky, Goebbels, St. Helen, Bush, Commodus (Herculi Romano Augusto), Nero, Seneca, Booth, Oswald, Kennedy, Castro, Paine, Michael Collins, and what Ireland is like (boring and “verdant”).

  Patrick throws in his two cents on everything between and beyond, while Tomas and repeatly fail to scrounge up more than a half penny between us. Patrick’s anger is aroused by the unfortunate fact that most people think the title of the song “Brand New Key” is “The Roller-Skate Song.” He's in favor of the death penalty, especially when it comes to people who commit insider trading. (“So you have a system that's based on speculation. Some people speculate on a stock price going up; some speculate on the price going down. I don't know how the latter is still legal, especially now that it is so easy to disseminate false information. People will admit that this is terrible for small companies, true, but the relative ease by which one can deceive the public is considered a topic for conspiracy theorists. Why? All the short-seller has to do is pay off someone who works for a small, web-based financial journal. Even the rather minor ones are reviewed by tens of thousands of investors. It doesn't matter if they have virtually no credibility to begin with—the investors want as much information as possible, and they are persuaded rather easily on account of their being so skittish. It's so simple: the site posts whatever the short-seller wants, the short-seller is called an unnamed source, and suddenly all of those predictions the short-seller made about a stock price going down come true. By the time the lie is exposed, all of the money has already been exchanged. Done deal: The short-seller makes a profit, the writer counts his bribe money, and the website, suddenly known for its ability to obtain unique information, even if it is false, gets more web traffic. Sure it destroys companies who have done no real wrong, but why the hell should the Social Darwinists care about justice, truth, or the lives that they destroy? To them, these are just nebulous obstacles in the way of success, utility, and, most importantly, money.”) There’s something wrong with Third Avenue in sunlight. I don't really understand why. The word gestalt comes up a lot. He calls Tilden the poor man's Kierkegaard; Browning the most underrated poet of the nineteenth century; Abbagnano the greatest philosopher that no one has ever heard of; Averroes the most influential man of the twelfth century; Lucan the seventh-most eloquent man Rome ever produced, even if he wasn't really from Rome. He does not provide the names of the six who top his list, though he does tell us that
Suetonius is his second-favorite Latin historian. Marx is frequently cited. Lenin is, too. Castro and Mao are regarded with an almost haughty indifference. He applauds the premises behind Julius Nyerere's Ujamaa movement, but says that the system was never properly implemented. Proudhon, he muses, should be more popular among American liberals. After talking about Ireland, he goes back to politics, and complains that too many American conservatives equate his beliefs with the Stalinist brand of totalitarianism, which, he notes, is different than Fascism for predominately economic reasons. As a footnote, he adds that the term “Islamo-Fascist” only makes sense if one is ignorant of the fact that Fascism is a distinct branch of totalitarianism, and that one could make the argument that Fascism is sufficient for atheism.

  Tomas is reticent when in the presence of an extroverted character with whom he is not well acquainted. I realized this when I was introduced to Keen Buddy, but Patrick seems to exacerbate the phenomena. For the majority of the initial hours we spend together, Tomas simply looks to Patrick with quiet derision in the manner a judge may look at a career criminal. It's a stern expression, one that Tomas denies conveying even after his second or third trip to the toilet. He eventually justifies it as a form of simple skepticism as opposed to misanthropy, or, worse, elitism. Even this he admits reluctantly.

  By the time the hours turn to double digits, Tomas has become somewhat inured to the rantings and the divergent method of conversation favored by Patrick. They begin to joke with one another, even finding common ground in their mutual respect for James Lovelock and Lynn Margolis. When I admit that I have no idea who these people are, Patrick takes the opportunity to explain the rudiments of Gaia theory to me. Tomas, meanwhile, leaves to order his sixth gin and tonic. I'm still on my fourth thirty-two ounce beer—probably about half way down. Pat appears as sober as when we entered even if he's taken down seven or eight double-pints. He has begun to quote British poetry at random, but I admittedly don't know how accurate he is. There is a harangue against the IMF and the Chicago Boys. He tells me all I need to know is that Milton Friedman is the devil, that the freer a market is, the more volatile it will be, and that the cycle of boom and bust will prove to enrich the super-wealthy at the expense of the working class, who will never see their wages substantially increased “Because of the ever-present specter of recession.” He calls me Maecenas at one point, and asks why I envy the lives of other men. He laughs when I look to him with confusion, and announces that I shall henceforth be known as Maecenas.