THE WALLS

by Jay Fox

  “You're rambling,” she laughs. “I get what you mean, though. You don't know your context—in the world or in relation to either your past or your future. The past is always going to be defined by the present, as opposed to what it really was. The future is…not based, but…”

  “Contingent?”

  “…Contingent!” with an emphatic finger in my direction. “It is contingent on a present you know you don't understand. The wine-dark sea,” she says absently.

  “The what?”

  “The present: The wine-dark sea.”

  We are both quiet for a while. She lights another cigarette.

  “Didn't you say you were a bass player?”

  “Yeah, but I don't think you can make a living playing old jazz standards anymore.” Caesura. “There are exceptions, of course. But actually making it as a musician—I mean, that's just so rare. I don't want to be that guy at fifty who still wants to show you his demo.”

  “You haven't gone to many open-mics, have you?”

  “I have. That's why I have this fear.”

  “Okay.”

  “Look, it's not that I'm afraid of being a starving artist; it's just that I don't see how anyone can afford to be a starving artist in this city—unless they’re squatting up in the Bronx.” I pause. “Maybe it's the bourgeois mentality that I grew up with, but I don't see any glamour in poverty.”

  “You're a quick one.”

  “What's that supposed to mean?”

  “As Gandhi said,”

  In unison: “Poverty is the worst form of violence.”

  She smiles. “You know that one, too?”

  “I never miss a Kingsley film, I guess.”

  “Look, kiddo, I don't want to act like I'm an authority on poverty here, but I'll let you in on a little secret. While I haven't gone through the poverty of a kid on the streets of Calcutta, I have suffered a lot as a consequence of being poor. The only positive is that there is a sense of having no place to go besides up. So you are constantly optimistic. You can't afford not to be, even if you are constantly cut down. I don't want to bore you with my history, and I certainly don't want to put myself on the cross, but as a musician who has dedicated her life to an instrument, I can tell you that there were times when I had to choose between having gas for the month and having a meal for the night. That's luckily behind me. I may not make a lot of money, but I'm happy and secure enough to know that I'm not a paycheck away from being homeless.” She drags from her cigarette. “So here’s what I want to impart to you: The belief that there is any kind of beauty in suffering, in-itself, is bourgeois bullshit.”

  “I always thought it to be Eastern.”

  “You're misunderstanding me. What I mean to say is that the beauty of struggle and sacrifice relies on the reason why one struggles.” She takes another drag. “If one undergoes all of this simply to be authentic, then the art will not be authentic. If it is for justice or for integrity…well, that's a different story. To suffer for integrity—this is from where that sense of authenticity derives.”

  “You sound like Mordecai's dad.”

  “What?”

  “No, it's not an insult. It's just…you sound different…different than how I remembered you.”

  “But the point is valid, right?”

  I nod. “I just don't think I could go through living in complete squalor for the sake of art.”

  “Where do you live now?”

  “Bushwick.”

  She laughs. “You En Why You kids and your Bushwick. Which stop off the L are you?”

  “I'm actually off the M train.” I name the stop.

  Her brows go up. “So the bushy part of Bushwick.” She takes another drag. “I'm sorry for presuming…”

  “It's okay. I mean, I would think the same thing if I were in your shoes.”

  “It's not like it's a terrible spot. I used to live there a few years ago.”

  “Yeah, it's okay. I don't know how long I plan on staying. The lease is up in September, and I don't think Jeff, my roommate, plans to renew. The good news, of course, is that the Coprolalia article will be published soon. Money shouldn't be a concern after that.” I laugh to myself. “I keep forgetting about that. I still feel like I'm about to be up shit's creek.”

  “So you're going into journalism, I take it?”

  “That seems to be the plan. I figure I should be able to freelance without too much of a problem. I don't mean to sound too conceited, but I have a feeling that this article's going to open up a lot of doors for me.”

  She's quiet for a moment. She then smiles. “We should call you Wanderlust.”

  “That's a fitting cognomen.”

  “Again with your ten-dollar words,” she laughs.

  Besides the references to Faye Dunaway, there is a certain energy that resides within her, the type of afflatus that I had imagined I would see surrounding Mordecai Adelstein, even in photographs. It is there, in her eyes, a silent 'yes' to some force that dwells within her.

  “You're an eidolon,” I say to her.

  “I am an acolyte, Wanderlust. That's the whole point.”

  “What about the JOKE?”

  “The JOKE is that we're still human.”

  Yes, she speaks in riddles, contrivances perhaps.

  “Crisis,” Patrick says with a fist on the table. This exterminates all other conversations. “Yes, I speak of crisis. I speak of yet another crisis, a great Gordian Knot that will prove to be a noose if it is not addressed soon. Now, I do not speak only of economic crisis; I speak, more importantly, of social crisis.”

  “What? Are you a fucking LaRouche canvasser?”

  “Tomas, that is another conversation for another evening.” The bottle in his hand becomes empty. “No, I speak of something far different. We exist in a state of vita minima, without direction, without knowledge of where we are going or where we've even been—what has been has become relativized, fabricated, fabulated, corrupted. We simply drift in a state of inertia. The absence of terra firma has become terra firma; the abolition of morality has become a morality; the generation who sought to destroy now seeks to uphold. Yes, I speak of crisis. Our generation has produced a liturgy of banalities, which has lead so many of us to the steps of the Cynosarges.

  “But this is not my primary concern.”

  There is a long pause.

  “What is your…primary concern?”

  “The reactionaries are winning, people. The Dark Ages are coming. As you fight the Sarmatians to increase your influence and your power, your very lifelines are decaying in front of your eyes. The wealthy are no longer building for the sake of themselves and the nation—they are pilfering the wealth of this country, indulging in the grossest of decadences. Whatever they cannot spend, they move to an offshore account, just like the Russian oligarchs of the nineties. If the American people continue on this route for much longer, they will find that they have surrendered all of their ideals for the sake of the rich, who have squandered the boon of empire in so hedonistic a manner that it would be appalling even to Theodora.”

  “Who?”

  “Theodora? The wife of Justinian? You have never heard of her?” Shrugs. “She is probably the most lascivious woman in history. She once said that she lamented the fact that she only had three orifices.”

  “Wow.”

  “It's right there in Procopius.”

  “Who?”

  “Really? You've never heard of Procopius?” with a deflated sigh. “What about Salvian?” Nothing. “See, Daphne, while you mock my admittedly over-zealous interest in history because you think it doesn't apply to very much in life, you fail to note that the most basic thing one gains from the study of history is the knowledge of what not to do. As Horace said,

  …Insuevit pater optimus hoc me,

  utfugerem exemplis vitiorum quaeque notando.

  Sic transit gloria mundi—via ignorance, my friends.”

  “What the fuck does that all mean?”

  “It
means that Horace's father taught him how to live via the bad examples set by others.”

  “I see.”

  “Empires crumble under the weight of their own ignorance, their own arrogance, their own narcissism. Men suffer no different.” He looks to Daphne. “Women, too. We had the opportunity to become history's greatest generation—we, of course, meaning in the industrialized world, not just Americans. Our choice was very simple: continue with our lethargy, our sense that everything will work out because it has always worked out in the past, or realize that Postmodernism is the espousal of a world without proper legitimacy, and that, in the absence of legitimacy, most will consign themselves to the most traditional means of authority. They will latch onto jingoism, to patriarchy, to the most mystical forms of spiritualism. In the end, they will reject the material world; they will perceive world events as prophecy and miracle. This is how the Dark Ages began. Fuck the barbarians, inflation, taxation—the downfall of Rome was due to lethargy, Christian masochism, and the collapse of public institutions. My friends, we are approaching the event horizon here.

  “We have abolished all legitimacy: our economy is based on a confidence that can be decimated by the utterance of truth. Our physics is based on theories that can be justified by the addition of theoretical dimensions that are said to exist because they justify said theories. Our metaphysics is based on social constructions that are both subjective and objective, that become objective once the community unconsciously validates them. Our epistemology is digital, subject to neither matter nor spirit. High art is nepotism. Low art is deception, at best nothing more than a satire of itself.

  “We can accept it. We, here, can deal with the lack of legitimacy. Most men, most women, cannot. And this lack of legitimacy bothers them. So they look for legitimacy, and they realize that it was not even available in the Modern Era. So even this, they reason, must be fully cast aside. Do you understand me? Do you understand that the reaction we are about to face, the reaction to our world—this world without the concrete and easily discernible constructs and structures of Positivism and its allies—does not embrace the institutions of the eighteenth century; they abandon even this, and they consign themselves to God, and to God alone. So we are not confronted with people who will battle our claims with empiricism. To them, any errancy in our theories confirms the inerrancy of the Bible. Yes, I know, it doesn't make any sense. But it's getting worse. One well-intentioned scientist proves that there's an inaccuracy in a putative belief, and the fanatics say it's proof in the infallibility of the Bible. We tell them that this is not the case; the two components of their proposition are not conditionally linked. What does this lead to? A character assassination campaign. And so we lose. We lose in the eyes of the public. They provide unsound premises to counteract our arguments, and people believe them. Because they sit and believe everything these men, these fat white men, tell them when it comes to the miracles of Jesus. You see. They are operating on faith as opposed to reason, and these pastors exploit it. Reason, critical thought, is suspended in order to accommodate the Gospel, but the pastors are not just giving them the Good News; they are filling them with right-wing ideology, conspiracy theories, schizophrenia, xenophobia. And the language is getting more violent, more reactionary, more Manichean, nationalistic, jingoistic. The Evangelicals are giving Paulist arguments for the sanction of torture and unilateralism. My friends, Rome has ceased to be Babylon: The Sermon on the Mount now comes from atop the Tarpeian Rock.

  “This is the problem advanced during our generation, but, more importantly, it will become the primary problem of your generation,” he says as he looks to me. “You do understand that we've failed, right? We did not seek to usurp the generation prior to us, and for reasons I cannot fully understand we now face a backlash that for decades, if not centuries, has been waiting to materialize.

  “You do understand that our greatest minds decided to embrace cynicism as opposed to action, and that we have now become the generation of self-pity; of bubble economies because we have neither the foresight nor the hindsight to understand the virtue of moderation; of art that says nothing because we know nothing; of politicians who demand more power but refuse to accept any responsibility. We are the generation that fails so completely so that you may succeed.”

  “This is all on our shoulders?” I ask.

  “Another generation such as ours will forfeit the world to superstition, demagoguery, chaos.”

  “Patrick, you're just drunk,” Andreas says in a light German accent I had not previously noticed.

  “Am I?” he asks himself. “Yes, I undoubtedly am. But what did Generation X do? It has sought nothing but personal gratification and petty rebellion. And what's left? What's left of our rebellion? Corpses and fucking Fundamentalists. The former are dead because they did not have the will power to control their addictions; the latter have returned to Christianity because they fear responsibility. They cannot deal with it. They blame society, they blame their parents, they blame everything that they fucking can, and only find what they are looking for, the one thing that they need, in Christ—the innocent lamb they believe themselves to be. They are always victims, underdogs. Rich, white men complaining that they are the victims! It's fucking preposterous. But it points to the deeper problem that I see everywhere in this country. The most sacred virtue of the new America—surrender, forfeiture. That is the great goal of our generation: retirement.”

  “What about us?” Tomas asks.

  “Maybe the two of you can change. Maybe the two of you are younger at heart than you appear.” He shakes his head. “But it's that one that I place my hope in.”

  “Are you now going to ask Mr. Baggins to return the ring of power to the fires of Mordor?”

  “Willis Bloody Faxo!” Patrick announces.

  “Is this one of his tirades about our generation?” he asks Daphne. She nods. “Is this the beginning or am I catching the tail end of it?”

  “You got here a bit late,” Daphne laughs as she pulls the bottle away from her lips. Patrick stands to go to the bathroom.

  Faxo looks to me as he sits. “So how goes the search?”

  “Well…I found him. That's why I'm celebrating tonight.”

  Poot Moint (minus Daphne), Patrick and Faxo gasp.

  “Oh my, I'd completely forgotten all of that. We never asked, did we?” Patrick begins. “What's he like? How did the interview go?”

  “Is he completely bald yet?” Faxo laughs as he lights a cigarette.

  “I wouldn't know,” I respond.

  “Why not?”

  Faxo takes a languid drag. Andreas notices something in the sky, ignores it, and then looks back to me. Patrick is dancing a bit. Aaron grins absently. Sam fidgets, probably because he, like Patrick, has to urinate. Lucas looks to Tomas. Tomas doesn't notice the look. Aberdeen, like Tomas, fixates his attention on me with an expression that could be called guilty. Daphne places the bottle on the table, one side at a time. I swallow with difficulty.

  “He's dead.”

  19.1

  What began as a celebration became something of a belated funeral party, one filled with dirges, requiems, and threnodies—depending whom you asked. Faxo became quiet and pensive. Just about everyone else, however, simply became less boisterous and more reflective—not plagued by the end of a life, but grateful for the continuation of their own. Miss Barnabas politely ordered us inside shortly after Faxo's arrival.

  We quickly came to dominate the bar, as there were only three or four others in there, including the bartender. Daphne eyed the piano for only a few minutes before the bartender told her that, while it looked as though it had been kept around either as decoration or to collect dust, it was actually in tune. She implored Daphne to play, and after only one refusal, Daphne launched the band into a version of “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” arranged for piano, two kazoos, wine bottle percussion, and cigarette break. Once Sam returned from his smoke, the band wrapped up the elegy.

  The band was
about to call it quits, but the bartender pressed them for another tune. As the five deliberated on the subject, Patrick began lecturing a lesbian couple sitting by the front window on the subject of Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity. Tomas and Aberdeen, meanwhile, chatted with the bartender and her husband. Faxo sat next to me quietly taking down a double Jameson on ice.

  After about five minutes, Daphne decided that she had to make a quick announcement before performing the next number. “Okay…so I know that it's really rude to try out new stuff on small, captive audiences, but we're kind of lacking on instrumentation tonight. All we have are kazoos and the piano over there.”

  “Don't forget the bottles,” Andreas chimed in.

  “And wine bottles. Sorry about that.” Caesura. “I guess I have a melodica, too, but that's neither here nor there. Anyway, we're going to do something that we haven't quite perfected, but we all think it could be the most entertaining composition we've ever worked on.” A meager applause was awarded to the band. “Here we go.”

  What followed was a version of Ravel's “Boléro” that consisted only of kazoos.

  “So a car accident?” Faxo says once the applause has died down. He raises his glass to his mouth.

  “Any requests?” Daphne asks as the rest of the band approaches the bar.

  “Popcorn!” Patrick yells from the other side of the bar.

  “Popcorn?”

  “What do you do?” I overhear one of the women ask Patrick.

  “In my leisure time I play with paper.”

  Daphne is looking at the piano as if it is a chessboard.

  “Yeah. A car accident.”

  Faxo stares to the whiskey in front of him. One of the cubes pops. “He was just waiting for a light, just minding his own business, and some drunk asshole just rammed into him.”

  “Yeah.”

  Daphne begins to tool around with the piano in an attempt to remember Patrick's request. Her frustration is discernible even as a familiar melody begins to form. A counterpoint soon follows. It is slow, methodical, perhaps even cerebral. The rest of the band, meanwhile, has taken another five bottles of wine back to a table next to the piano. They begin to slide them back and forth as if they are air-hockey pucks.