A Roadside Portrait

An old man lived across the road from me.  In the spring he would come out every morning to sit there by the roadside, reading his newspaper and waiting for his grandson to come along and pick him up in a battered orange truck.  From my window I could see a kitchen chair set out there by the mailbox, weathered and worn and weak in one leg, and the old man was there to take his post at six o'clock every weekday morning, regular enough to set a pot of coffee brewing at five till and know that it was done by his arrival.  He was as dependable a part of the landscape as the thicket of trees behind him or the road that ran before him waiting to gather the heat of the day.  He just sat there with his paper, never glancing down the bend to see if the truck was coming or fretting impatiently over his watch.  He was the figure to which all the rest of it was ground.

And so I came out early one morning to set up an easel and canvas.  I had my paints and my brushes, and I started in on the grass and the trees and the morning light creeping into the scene from down the road.  I got most of it done, waiting for the old man to come take his place at the center of the composition.  But six o'clock rolled around and he never showed.  The orange truck never came along.  The crooked kitchen chair sat empty.  I was just one day late.    

Lifetimes Ago

Ever since I'd woken up from that dream, I'd felt like years and years had passed.  I dropped by to see people I knew, and it seemed like they were in completely different places in their lives.  My brother's ex-wife even greeted me warmly at her door, old grudges all forgotten.  She cooked breakfast for a houseful of guests.  They all sat around the kitchen laughing over eggs.  Who were these people?  It was the same with everyone else.  Old friends were all doing new things, working new jobs, telling unfamiliar jokes, stressed over different problems.  I felt adrift, disconnected, alienated from the people around me.  I blinked my sleepy eyes.  All of this overnight?

I chalked it all up to the epic span of the dream itself.  It was that sense that a whole lifetime had passed in my sleep.  I'd only dreamt that years had gone by, and that feeling had resonated upon waking.  I tried to explain all this to my family as they sat around on sunken couches in my grandmother's living room on Christmas afternoon, the garland wound around the bannister, the lights strung along the wood paneling.  My brother sat at a table and nodded over a glass of eggnog, but I could see that none of them really understood what I was saying or how strange it all felt.  It was just a dream.  How could a mere dream throw someone so out of sync?

I figured that if they could see it, maybe they'd understand.  I had sold the movie rights to the dream and I wheeled in the old silver TV with the rabbit ears and everyone gathered around on my grandmother's floor to watch.  The dream had told the story of a dog.  It had been a little puppy when we were all kids crouching there in the grass to pet it.  It was white with patches of black, and it grew as we all grew.  It was a frisky little critter.  There was a scene where it squeezed through a wooden fence and started paddling around in an alligator tank, and we stood outside the fence reaching our hands and yelling out the dog's name and hoping and praying that one of the alligators wouldn't bite it.  On the floor in front of the TV everyone laughed at that part and thought it was cute.  Then the dog got older, even as we all got older and we moved out of the house and went our separate ways, and there it was in the winter twilight all mangy and laying at the end of the driveway in the snow, whining, wondering where we'd all gone.  The credits rolled on this somber note.

After the movie, I went home with my wife.  But things were off there as well.  The place was a cramped basement apartment with high windows.  It wasn't the cozy country house out in Perry that I remembered.  I tried to tell my wife, but she wouldn't listen.  She just dragged me from room to room being playful.  "None of this is right," I told her as she pulled me along by my arm.  There were throw pillows and broken coffee makers and dirty dishes and junk everywhere.  I picked up a discarded towel with my free hand.  "I know that you used to keep the house a lot cleaner than this," I shouted over her laughter, showing her the towel.

She led me into the kitchen, which was just as cluttered as the rest of the place.  The cabinets were all crammed full of open cereal boxes.  The walls were bright yellow and there was an old icebox style refrigerator, the kind with the latch you pop out to open the door.  None of this looked right.  And then I noticed a small room off the kitchen.  "What's this?" I asked my wife.  She shook her head.  She didn't seem to know.  She suddenly grew serious.  I thought I had seen all the other bedrooms and rooms of the apartment on my dizzy guided tour.

I crept into the room.  It was actually more of a hallway, as it led to the laundry room down at the other end.  The light shined down from another basement window high on the wall above and my desk was beneath this window, piled with loose papers and folded laundry, leaving no space to work.  Even the chair was piled with laundry.  But as I got closer, I saw that it wasn't laundry.  There was a bundle of people in the chair, or maybe just their heads.  I brushed back the dark hair from one of the faces and the eyes stared back at me, and then I jumped and jolted and screamed and finally found myself back in my own bed.                       

Our Uncanny Valley

Somewhere in the wilderness out west, my daughter and I found the valley that the creator of the video game The Clones was said to have based the layout of his game on.  The story went that while on vacation, and while ruminating on different project deadlines that he was facing back at work, he had climbed to the peak of one of the mountains surrounding the valley.  When he had reached the summit, he turned back and looked out over the green fields below, and in that whipping wind and the panoramic curve of the Earth, the whole idea for a video game simulating people and life hit him just like that.

Staring out from that same summit, I had a similar inspiration.  I stretched my hand out over the land and explained it all to my daughter.  We would buy up the whole area, and we would create a real world community based on the game.  We'd cut some kind of deal with the company that held the license to the game.  We'd set up the roads just as they were in the neighborhoods of the game, and we'd sell off all the individual parcels of land.  People could come and build any kind of crazy houses they wanted to.  The streets would all be named after references to the game.  There could be shops and thoroughfares where people could buy themed merchandise and furnishings for their homes just like those featured in the game.

I stared out, nodding with satisfaction as if I could already see it all under construction below.  But my daughter was still confused about the whole idea.  She wasn't sure why anyone would go for it, why they would want to come live here.  I just shrugged as we turned to head back down the path that had led us to the summit and I told her, "There comes a point with any simulation, if you take it to one extreme or another, that it eventually coincides with reality." 

The Residents

I was a homicide detective.  Two cops from our precinct had been gunned down while responding to a call to an apartment complex in the city.  My partner and I were trying to track down which apartment complex it was.  We drove out to this one place on the outskirts of town.  The parking-lot was piled with the rusted out shells of abandoned vehicles, as though the place were a junkyard.  The weeds grew tall and wild through the cracks in the pavement.  A four-story brick apartment building looked out over this mournful desolation.  Most of the glass was broken out of the windows and I could see countless corpses piled in the unlit apartments within.  One leg in blood spattered jeans dangled out a window on the top floor; a limp arm in a striped sweater hung from another.  In some spots there were streaks of dried blood running down the side of the building.  My partner and I stood beside our cruiser, looking out over the scene.  "You sure this isn't the place?", I asked.

"Nah, this has been like this for years.  Everybody knows about this," he told me, tossing aside his cigarette and getting back into the car.  As we headed back down the road, the call came in over the radio.  Someone else had found the right apartment complex.  My partner called back in to confirm it.  We got the address of the place, and my partner lit up our flashers and cut right through the traffic.  He knocked back the last cold dregs of his coffee and tossed the styrofoam cup out the window.

It seems everyone was looking to get in on the revenge for the two fallen officers.  Every cop in the city converged on this apartment complex.  The SWAT team arrived in a caravan of armored buses.  Looking at all this commotion, I realized that they weren't just there to arrest whoever had shot the officers.  No.  They were planning an all out massacre.  They were going to slaughter everyone who lived here.  They all poured from the buses and the squad cars.  Even more came scaling over the fence that ran the perimeter of the property, all dressed in bullet-proof black.  And with the sudden muzzle flare of a machine gun, they opened fire in all directions.

Bullets and shells and shattered glass rained everywhere.  Smoke rose in thick black clouds.  Confusion on the ground.  A sudden pause punctuated the action, and a door opened and one of the residents came out in their bathrobe to see what was going on.  There was a moment of hesitation, but then someone opened fire, and then everyone opened fire.  The resident was tossed this way and that by the bullets, but he seemed otherwise unperturbed.  He looked more confused than anything.  He just stared back at us as blood dripped from his robe.  And we all realized it all at once.  These people in this apartment complex, they were all already dead.  They couldn't be killed again.  There was going to be a massacre here.  It was going to be us.

Street Level

Somewhere underground, deep down in the dark in these industrial catacombs of damp concrete walls and rusty pipes, I sat on a couch in a waiting area with my wife and daughter.  There was a lamp in the corner and a bunch of old magazines spread out on the table before us.  I got involved in a petty argument with my daughter while we were sitting there.  We kept our voices hushed in accordance with some strange waiting room etiquette.  She accused me of being lazy, and I took offense.  I enumerated all the things I did for her every day.  She mocked every word I said and threw them back in my face.  She sneered at me in disgust and I grew more and more frustrated with her.  Finally, I snapped at her in a suppressed growl, "I'm leaving!"

Just as I said this, these two women that I used to work with at the plastic factory came walking up to retrieve me from the waiting area.  One of them, I knew, was a notorious cynic, and I knew that she had heard me blurt out "I'm leaving!" so spitefully, and I knew that she would think that it was an awful thing to say to my daughter, to throw such a threat of abandonment in her face, and I knew that she would sit in judgment on me for being such an awful father.  So I tried to play it off.  I tried to make it seem as though I had simply meant that I was leaving my daughter to go to work, not leaving our home and our family and her life entirely.  The cynical woman just gave me a look and a wry smirk.

I got up and followed these women to further perpetuate this pretext that I was going to work.  We climbed up a metal stairwell to another level which was still steamy and subterranean, but much warmer and better lit than the catacombs below.  It was a maze of machinery and metal walkways.  We passed my old boss's office and he stood outside the door with his arms folded across his chest.  He grunted as I approached, as though he had been watching and waiting for me.  I had started working back at my old job on my days off from my current job, juggling between the two.  But now both places had me scheduled for the same hours, and I would have to make a choice between them.  I lifted my head and looked at all the pumping, steaming equipment around me.  How did I end up back here?

It was almost time for the shift to begin, and everyone was headed over to the time clock to punch in.  But I noticed another set of metal stairs off to the side where no one was paying attention.  I climbed them and they took me up to the ground floor where the morning light shone through an open bay. There was no one around.  I walked out of the building and off the property.  I went strolling around the residential neighborhood surrounding the shop, admiring all the grand Victorian houses with flower beds and dogwood trees blooming in their yards.  A pretty girl on roller skates waved to me from across the street.  I turned a corner onto a main road.  The morning traffic streamed by.  I felt like I could float away.

And somewhere below, as though coming up from the storm drain along the curb, I could hear my boss grumbling, wondering where I was, wondering why I hadn't punched the time clock, wondering why I wasn't working now that it was twenty minutes past.  I crouched down beside a tree and tilted my head to listen at the drain and I just laughed.  The pretty girl was skating towards me down the sidewalk, looking like she needed to tell me something.  I turned and stood waiting for her to get close enough to tell me what she had to say.

Trick Questions

I was back in school.  The math teacher had given us all a worksheet with a bunch of problems on it.  I stared it at for a long time but something didn't seem right.  I held the paper up and away from my face, and that's when I noticed that each of the equations, when viewed from a slight distance, were arranged in such a way that they each resembled a face.  The square root of zero plus one over one, for instance, was meant to be a person winking, while nine times nine was a person rolling their eyes, and zero minus zero was obviously a person wearing glasses.  I went down the page, answering which face each equation was supposed to be, and then I handed my paper in.  I wondered if anyone else had figured out the trick.

About a Dog

One evening, as the sun was going down, I was driving along a winding country road.  I lived in a house on this road.  It was set back a ways, at the end of a long dirt drive, and there was a row of tall trees that lined the edge of the road along the front of the property.  I drove right past the house without stopping.  I had things on my mind, a decision I was struggling with.  Further down the road, I came into town.  I came to an intersection with a stoplight.  I sat there for a while.  I may have even dozed off.  I seemed lost in another lifetime, full of cares and concerns of its own.  But then someone came up behind me and honked their horn and yelled something at me out their window and shook me out of it.  The light was green and I pulled ahead.

I pulled off into a parking-lot at the far corner of this intersection.  There was a tiny brick building there that sat in the shadow of a larger office building.  I felt compelled to go to this brick building, as though I had been summoned there or advised to go there, as if someone had told that I would find the answers to my problems there.  I found a small empty vestibule inside, like the cramped lobby of a take-out place.  There was a hand-written menu board hanging up.  It covered the window where one would normally place their orders.  I felt that I was speaking to someone on the other side of that board.  I had an uncanny faith that there was someone stirring behind the board that heard me.

I stammered as I began to speak, stumbling over my words.  I wasn't sure how to explain what I was doing there, or how I had come to arrive there, by what steps and inclinations.  I spoke about a dog.  Back at the house, I had a dog, a dog that I had had for many years, a dog that I loved and had grown attached to.  But I had to give this dog up.  I had to find another home for it.  And it seemed that in my conflict over this, I had driven past the house, and I couldn't go back until I had come to terms with what I had to do.  I wasn't sure what I was supposed to find in this dusty little shop.  I wasn't sure what I expected them to do for me or even what I was asking of them.  I didn't know why I was there.  I grew embarrassed trying to put it all into words.  My sentences trailed off, incomplete.  My face went red.  The person behind the menu board said nothing.  It all seemed so pointless.

It was dark when I came back out.  A little foreign woman had come down from the office building and she was crossing the parking-lot to her car.  She had a stumpy, waddling way of walking.  I stopped her and asked her about the proprietors of the brick shop across the way.  She shook her head and spoke in a thick but indiscernible accent, "No, no.  Is been empty for a long time.  Is no one there."  I looked back at the building, sitting there so forlorn and dilapidated, so clearly vacant.  It seemed so obvious now.  A chill went through me.

When I got back to my car, my father and my brother and my step-brother were there.  I climbed into the back seat.  My father was driving, my step-brother was in the passenger seat, and my brother was in the back with me.  We headed back down that same winding country road.  It seemed even the clock was turned back.  The sun was out again, on its way back down.  We zipped right by the house again, going the other way.  The row of trees rolled by on the passenger side this time, and I looked back at the house, wondering who was waiting for me there.

I had a guitar with me.  I pulled it out from its case and began to sing, making up the song off the top of my head.  I sang a ballad about the dog, the perennial source of my troubles.  The words were goofy, inconsequential, but I belted them out, rhymes and passions, verses and chorus, rolling out effortlessly.  I really got into it.  I felt like this was what I needed to do.  I was going to write songs now.  It came so naturally to me.  And so I sang, and so we went, my father driving and my brothers singing along, never knowing where this road would go. 

Derailed

I was working on the set of a movie.  The director wanted a shot of two men on horseback galloping alongside a speeding train.  Unfortunately, the locomotive's engine lay on its side derailed in a clearing about a quarter of a mile down the track.  A bunch of us had to go out there and see if we could get the train upright again.  The mud was thick around the train where it lay, and we had no equipment to hoist it up.  We stared at the daunting task under the broiling sun.  We scowled and spit and a few suggestions were made, but finally it was decided that there was nothing to do but just put our backs into it.

Some of us got under it, and some of us behind it, and we heaved it up with all our strength.  The guy next to me got all red in the face, his cheeks bulging and his jaw tight.  The engine seemed irretrievably fixed in the mud, but with one mighty effort that extended beyond all our limits, we managed to dislodge it.  We all grunted as we felt it begin to give way.  Some of the guys slipped about in the slop as we got the engine up over our heads.  Others tried to brace the side of the engine with wooden posts as the rest of us held it up, but the posts couldn't get a firm hold anywhere in the loose mud.

Finally we had it up and almost back onto the track.  But that's when the accident happened.  One of the guys on the crew was bracing his boot against the steel rail as he put all of his weight into lifting the engine.  He was focused on hefting the engine, watching in case it began to slip from our grasp, rather than being mindful of where he placed his feet.  One of the train's wheels came down right where he had his boot.  The whole weight of the train came right down on his foot and snipped it in half like a twig.  He didn't even cry out, but I could see the look on his face, shocked and sickened and gone completely pale from the pain.

The director came riding up in a white convertible, standing and raising his head up over the windshield and gripping his white panama hat with one hand and shouting questions about what we were doing even before his driver had pulled up and stopped.  Some of the crew stood around and stared at the severed stump of the injured man's foot in disbelief.  Others more mindful of the man's pain, took an arm around each shoulder and helped him up.  The director yelled at the driver to shut off the car so that he wouldn't have to keep shouting over it.  The men bearing the injured man just glared at the director, like they were thinking about killing him.

We all went to see the injured man after he got out of the hospital.  He had a house on the open prairie.  They had given him a cane to walk with, and after he greeted us at the door, he hobbled over to his chair and sat down.  We'd all heard that he wouldn't be able to find work now.  He sat there brooding.  A train let out a whistle far off somewhere, and I saw him wince at the sound.

Like Riding a Bike

I was riding a bike around the block in my neighborhood.  I hadn't ridden a bike in years, and my first frustrated efforts to propel myself forward sent the front tire wobbling all over the place.  The bike itself seemed too small under the thick grip of my hands and the awkward bending of my knees.  But I managed to get myself going, and as I rounded the corner onto Orchard Grove, I saw a bunch of neighborhood kids playing baseball down on the far corner of the street.  The post of the street sign and other prominent landmarks were serving as the bases, and they were playing the game in the road itself.

I knew that my path was going to take me straight through the middle of their game, and I didn't yet have enough control over the bike to avoid it.  I just hunched over and braced myself as I barreled right though the makeshift, asphalt infield.  The kids all turned and yelled at me.  I even felt the hard knot of the baseball bounce off my back.  But I didn't care.  I was riding free, peddling faster.  I hopped the bike sideways over the curb and up onto the sidewalk.  I laughed at my agility as I coasted away, the kids staring after me.

I rode home, and an uncle of mine was there, sitting in a pickup truck parked in the front yard under the shade of a tree.  The yard was mostly worn away to dirt patches from a long habit of such parkings, and I came skidding up in a cloud of dust.  My uncle leaned out the window of the truck and called down, "Hey there kiddo."  And so it was.  I dropped the bike there in the dirt and ran inside and upstairs to my room where the air hung close and humid on the hot summer day.

Natural Resource

My wife and I were scientists on a research expedition in the Arctic.  In our explorations we came across an incredible phenomenon deep in the recesses of a crystalline cave.  A long icy tunnel terminated in a rounded chamber, which housed a sort of natural spring, not of steam or water, but of electricity.  Brilliant blue lightning coiled up from the hole and swam about the circumference of the chamber like crackling fish.  We stood there awe-stricken in the cool blue glow.

More teams came along, and further testing was done, and it was found that this spring was a nearly inexhaustible source of electric power.  Someone dubbed it "The Light of the World", and the media got a hold of the name and ran with it.  A treaty was signed by all nations on Earth to share this spring.  The wars were over.  The guns were put away.  My wife's name and mine were marked down in the history books.

Then, long after we were gone and the ages had passed, the blue lightning flickered.  Just one little flicker for the fraction of a second, that's all it took to get their attention.  They knew the spring was going to run out.  All the world's power plants had long since been abandoned and crumbled into nothing but dust.  And even the knowledge required to build such a plant had been lost over the generations.  No one knew what to do.  They stood around the flickering blue light and scratched their heads.

The Long Way

Some old friends and I were traveling across the country in a school bus filled with passengers. The bus seemed always westward, the setting sun streaming in through the windshield, everyone shading their eyes in the glare. We were told that the driver was trying to make special time. He was trying to reach the coast in ten hours without stops. My friends cheered him on, but I objected to the craziness of it all. I pointed out the wild heedless turns that the driver was making as he barreled along the highway.

I almost got thrown from the bus in one of these turns. We were all leaning from the window, yelling and howling into the rushing wind, when the bus cut a sharp left to follow an interchange on the freeway. I felt myself propelled forward, out into the open with nothing to grab hold of. The guardrail loomed large before me, and I could almost taste the metallic edge of it before the bus settled back on its axles and someone pulled me back inside.

This incident rattled the driver, and he decided that my friends and I were trouble and he didn't want us on his bus. At the next opportunity, he dropped us on a back road in the middle of some crackerbox town in the Midwest. It was a fresh blue Sunday morning and my friends were eager to keep moving. Undeterred by losing our ride, they cut straight across the land. They cut right through people's yards, round their garages and doghouses and hen houses and clotheslines. They scrambled down dirt alleyways. They hopped fences both wood and wire, and romped across the untended fields beyond.

I struggled to keep up with them, but I wasn't as nimble over a fence or as fast on my feet. I fell too far behind and then they were gone. I plodded along the roadside in the drainage ditch, alone now. The days passed just as carelessly as the cars that whizzed by without stopping. My beard grew long and ragged. I grew lean, my eyes haunted. I lived off the fruits and insects of the land. I read a book that I found discarded in the tall weeds. I paused occasionally outside a roundhouse to hear the warm music thumping within. I sampled these small pleasures. I began to forget who I was.

Finally, after years untold, I arrived at my destination. A gleaming steel and glass hotel towered over me, the morning light catching the windows just so. The air was clean and cool. Crowds of people passed briskly on the walk out front with crisp suits and steaming coffee cups, pausing only to check their watches or fold a newspaper under their arm. I stood among them like a bewildered animal. There was a family I was supposed to meet. I had come all this way to see them. I scanned the passing faces, looking for them. But I had been too long traveling, and I had missed them.

And then the crowd parted and I saw a young boy that I thought I knew, standing shorter than the rest and holding his mother's hand. The father was there too, and a mother-in-law and someone's aunt. But as I approached, I saw that it wasn't the family I was looking for. They looked a bit like them, but they were strangers all the same. Still, I had come so far. I drew them back into the hotel, and we all took our seats on some leather couches off the main lobby. They all stared at me, anxious to hear what I had to say, but somehow I couldn't find the words.

Memoirs of a House

In the ruins of a house.  There was all sorts of refuse scattered in the upstairs hallway, soiled clothes, a loose dresser drawer upturned and spilling lost pennies and dead batteries on the floor, all the debris abandoned in a sudden move.  Broken picture frames and their forgotten faces smiling up through shattered glass.  The place still marked in the yellowed pages of a coverless paperback novel.  The silent reclamations of another life telling their fragmented stories.

A thin stream of water trickled across the floor, soaking into the carpet.  I traced the source of the leak to a pipe protruding from the wall in one of the bedrooms.  I could hear my brother creaking around downstairs.   I called down to him to shut off the valve to this pipe.  I could hear the sharp squeak of the valve as he turned it off, but the water just began to flow harder.  I called down again in a panic.  But no matter what, the water spilled profusely from the pipe.  It began to flood the room and the hallway beyond, sweeping up all the debris and carrying it along and spilling over the edge of the stairs.  I knew there would be no stopping it.  The water would rot the house to its foundations and the whole thing would crumble in a heap.

Fast Friends

I had a cozy little house out in the country.  All my relatives came over for a Sunday afternoon get together.  It was a warm July day.  The place had a busy feel about it.  All the windows were open, and the screen door groaned on its hinges as everybody kept going in and out.  There was something going on in every room.  I came across my aunts sitting around the table in the kitchen.  I walked in on the middle of their conversation and got into a small argument about the way one of them had used the saying "apples and oranges" incorrectly.  She seemed to think that it meant to make something look bad by comparing it to something similar but better.  "Well, they're both fruits," she replied, when I tried to explain the mistake. It was one of those kinds of arguments that keep doubling back on themselves and everyone's points become more convoluted and nothing gets resolved but it ends with everyone laughing.

So I walked off shaking my head and went out onto the side porch of the house.  I could see that my neighbors had dug up a shaded patch of ground in their back yard in order to lay a foundation for a swimming pool.  All the kids, the ones from my family and the neighbors' kids as well, all sat around the edge of this pit, fascinated, as though they were going to be able to swim later that same afternoon.  They kicked their dangling legs against the loose dirt, their flip flops hanging by a toe.  A green leaf drifted down into the pit, prematurely fallen from the branches above.  The shadow of a cloud rippled through the grass in the small field between the two houses.

My cousin came along side me and nodded towards the kids across the yard.  "They all became friends as soon as they heard about that pool.  That's all it takes with kids."  I smiled at that and went back inside to the clicking sound of someone stacking washed dishes in the rack beside the sink and all the commotion around the TV in the living room.  It was a nice lazy day, no troubles, life flowing as easy as the breeze.

Little Town Below

I was in a high rise office building over in Eastlake, enjoying the panoramic view afforded by the windows along the far wall.  I could see the whole town spread out on the slope of a hillside.  It looked so small, as though it were just a model of the town, constructed in someone's basement, an artificial light source set up behind the potting soil hill to simulate the glow of the grey sky above.  The woodsy areas just looked like weeds or tufts of wild grass that had sprouted up as a result of the model being long neglected.  A few broken telephone poles looked as though they'd been patched with splintered segments of popsicle sticks. It seemed that the more I looked, the less I was able to shake this illusion.  I peered closer, straining my eyes to reconcile the reality of what I was seeing.  The cars had that toy gleam like they were made from diecast metal.  And yet, I could see the tiny people bustling about in the streets.  I tried to touch one of the cars, hold it in my hand, but my fingers just pressed the cool glass.

Of Poetry & Roaches

I was watching a movie called The Life of Dawn Marquis.  It was apparently the story of the famous poet Don Marquis, but a few Hollywood liberties had been taken and someone had thought it would be clever to recast the poet as a female.  The title character was a squat, rotund woman with dark hair pulled back and knotted into a tight bun at the top of her head.  She had chalky, pale skin and wide, rheumatic eyes all bloodshot and purple, as though she had been in bed recovering from an illness.  She had a pronounced downward hook to her nose and a timid way of quickly snatching at things with her hands, holding them like pinchers hanging down from her wrists. This habit left an odd impression, further augmented by a coat that she often wore which was made from a bundle of wild black feathers.

The story mostly centered around the courtship between this Dawn and her husband, those romantic earlier years spent strolling around Manhattan under a shared umbrella, the neon lights reflected off the wet streets.  The husband wore light colored suits and he had a pointed goatee and he spoke in a slow and stately southern drawl.  He would take Dawn's hand in the crook of his arm, and she would huddle against him, sheltered from the world.  On several occasions, this husband claimed to be blind, but this appeared to be some private joke of his, as he had no trouble reading the menus in restaurants or navigating the city's streets.

The movie took its time getting around to the matter of Dawn's poetry.  It seemed to proceed, as such movies often do, under the assumption that the audience knew the fame of its subject and the success which the story was leading to, and would watch in anticipation of it.  There were hints here and there, scribbled notebooks, early frustrated attempts to write, rainy days of disappointment.  And then came the scene in the cafe.  She sat over lunch with her husband, showing him some of her recent poems and fretting over the fact that whenever she tried to dig down into her deepest feelings something botched and ugly would come out, something unacceptable, something she felt she had no right to say in her own voice.  "It would sound better," she said, "if it came from something that was already considered loathsome, like a louse or a cockroach."

And that's when that look of recognition came across her face, her eyes wide and staring.  The moment passed almost unnoticed.  The husband went on, sorting through the sheaf of typewritten pages in his hand and pausing to flip the lemon in his teacup with his spoon.  But she had seen it, that dusty news room, the morning light shining in broken bands through the blinds, the empty desks and the stillness of the hour, and one tiny tired little cockroach climbing up onto a typewriter to set itself to the arduous task of punching out its message one massive key at a time, so that it might speak to all the world.          

Videotape

It was years ago when I was still a teenager.  A couple of friends of mine and I were hanging out at this middle aged woman's house.  We had been sitting around the living room for hours and no one had bothered to turn a light on after the sun had gone down.  So we all sat around in the dark, clustered somewhat obscenely around this women as though we were attendants of some sort, our long shadows cast as a group by the light shining in from the kitchen in the other room, all our faces obscured from one another in the dismal gloom.

Presumably emboldened by her third or fourth glass of wine, the woman suddenly spoke up and asked us if we wanted to watch a porno tape that she had in her bedroom.  She tried to make this suggestion come off in an innocent sort of way, as though she had only just thought of it at that moment, but it was clear that she had been mulling it over and waiting for the right opportunity to bring it up.  I stared at her with a deadpan look and said, "I'm guessing it's hidden in the wall somewhere."  I could see the glint of light in her wine, the dry papery skin all cracked around her lips as she took another sip.  I could smell her perfume like burnt flowers.

But my friends seemed eager to find this tape.  They were all over the bedroom looking for it.  They peeked behind the pillows and the dresser and a loose fold of the beige wallpaper all decorated with cute cottages and picket fences.  They pulled out the drawer of the night stand table, rifling through the playing cards and cheap jewelry, reaching back into the recesses behind the drawer.  A sweet medicinal smell lingered in the air.  They all stood around, almost too big for the lamplit room, and discussed any other places the tape might be.

I wanted no part of any of it.  I felt like the woman was using this tape to lure us into some sorid seduction scheme that that would lead from the tape to more wine and then possibly to pills and then to who knows what.  So I just sat on the bed.  The woman had a black and white cat that looked much like my own.  It jumped up onto the mattress and I petted it and talked to it and just forgot about everything else as my friends continued to tear the room apart around me.

The Cold Wheels

I was attending a session of an ancient courtroom.  The room was traversed on either side by banks of open stone arches which bore no windows, leaving the room completely exposed to the cold.  It was deep winter and freezing, and the frost and snow dusted into the room.  The gallery of spectators all huddled under woolen blankets as they watched the proceedings.  The advocates, heated by the animation of their arguments, still occasionally wrung their hands to warm them.  They wore grotesque bird masks that made them seem strangely predatory, alien to the affairs of men.  The accused sat recessed in the shadows on the witness stand.  A shrunken creature horrified of the condemnation directed at him, I could just make out the anguished black pools of his eyes and mouth wailing mutely in the darkness.

There was a sense that the case was being rushed along at a clipped pace due to the discomforts raised by the cold.  There was a concern that justice would only be given its most perfunctory due, and that the patience of all parties involved would soon break and the prospect of retreating to warm dens to sit before well fed fires would seem far more appealing than the duty to give this poor man his proper hearing.  A brisk snap of the prosecutor's voice, a number of obligatory bleats of objection and wheedles of outrage from the defense, and a few muffled grumbles from the corpulent judge sitting high atop his bench, appeared to be all the indulgence that the weather would grant to the pursuit of truth that day.

But just as the case was drawing to a close, there was a stirring in the gallery among the spectators.  The judge brought his gavel down to restore order, and just as it hit and the sound of it rang in the grey air, everything else went completely silent.  Startled, I lifted my head and looked around me and I could see that all the figures, the spectators, the advocates, the judge, and the accused alike, they were all figures carved from the coldest stone.  They had been stone all along.  This was a museum piece, a sculpted reproduction of a historical setting.  I had sat here lost in reveries of those long lost days.

I wandered among the stone figures, getting a better look at the scene.  The prosecutor stood defiantly pointing an accusing finger towards the witness stand.  I slid my gloved hand across the smooth contours of the beak of his bird mask.  Ice crystals had settled here and there in the pores of the stone.  I studied that anguished expression on the face of the accused, all those exquisitely rendered wrinkles of pain and worry, all the more impressive because the sculptor had perfectly gauged the effect the figure would produce when viewed from the gallery across the room, all those details subtly suggested from the shadows.

I pulled my hand from my glove and held it to the side of the accused figure's face, almost as much a gesture of compassion as one of appreciation.  The stone was cool and richly lacquered.  The face just stared back with that same expression, the head slightly tilted, as though my touch had only momentarily eased a toothache.  This was the crowning piece of the whole scene.  I turned and considered all of the hostility of the room, all of the hostility of the world, focused on this one figure.  And then I put my hands in my pockets and went out into the snowy fields beyond this exhibit, my footprints trailing through the stone archway behind me.

Witch's Brew

I had invented a game for the Atari 2600.  I was considering either "Cauldron" or "Parabola" for the title.  The game was a top down shooter.  The player would control a small fighter that hovered over the top of a bubbling cauldron which took up most of the bottom of the screen.  All kinds of strange herbs and talismans would rain down from the top of the screen, falling into the cauldron.  The player had to try and dodge these items as well as try to shoot them before they fell into the cauldron.   If enough of these items fell in, the cauldron would start bubbling over, turning from green to red and emitting more and more gaseous, pixilated stars that could come up and hit the player's ship from underneath where they were the most defenseless.  Thus, the player would be constantly be caught between the ingredients raining down from above and the noxious stars bubbling up from beneath.

The major innovation of the game was that, unlike most top down shooters where the player simply glides from side to side, here the player's ship would swing out in a wide parabolic arc above the cauldron.   This would create an interesting maneuvering dynamic since the player would often have to swing off to one side in order to get a good angle to shoot something across to the other.  This would keep the game play fast-paced, fluid, and of course, fun for the whole family.

My Summer Vacation

It was late summer and my family all got together to take a trip, just like we used to do years ago.  We traveled to somewhere east of here, some old unremarkable town, and we stayed at a bed and breakfast just off the main street.  Our cars were all parked about a quarter of a mile away under a grove of trees out behind the football field of the local high school.  In the dim and drowsy evenings we would take long walks down to this school to get things that were still packed away in the back seats and the trunks, swatting at the mosquitoes in the thick air and straying to the sidewalks whenever an approaching vehicle caught us in the beam of their headlights.

There seemed to be some concern over whether our cars would start or how we were getting home or perhaps even where we were.  But the days just passed by in lethargic apathy, the smaller kids having settled in on loose mattresses in a spare room at the back of the house, the scattered socks and picture books and stale air, the adults all sitting around the living room, passing the afternoons amid newspapers and coffee cups as the sun tracked its course across the front windows and that endless paper strip of sky cranked from clouds to stars, another bright day giving way to another humid night, the proprietor's dog curled up under the shadow of an end table, the crickets out there in the dark, no one really feeling the need to talk. 

There was an older couple also staying there at the bed and breakfast, and on one occasion when we were all sitting around considering what to do about our cars, the wife told us, "The only real vacation is the kind where you're not sure how you're going to make it back. And you don't care."  And so it was with them.  The lady passed away the following night, right there in her bed.  They took her out the next morning with the sheet pulled over her head, the ambulance waiting out at the curb. But there were no tears or regrets.  It was just another thing that came and went. 

A Brand New Machine

I went back to visit the old plastic factory where I used to work.  The quality control woman was showing me around the place.  I could see that a good number of the old presses had been removed and quite a few others had been gutted for parts, to the point that I began to wonder how the place could still rightfully call itself a plastic factory.  There were just oily pits left on the floor where the presses had been.

But then she led me back to a spot in the back corner of the shop where a crowd of workers had gathered.  I pushed through to the front and saw what they were all gaping at.  It was a completely new kind of press.  Instead of using the crude method of melting the plastic and injecting it into a mold, this new press assembled the part molecule by molecule from a digital blueprint.  Through the glass I could see a set of metal styluses at work, weaving the part together out of arcs of blue electricity.  After this impressively rapid fabrication, the parts would drop onto a conveyor below the machine.

The woman running this machine sat before a silver bank of levers and dials.  She checked the readings on a display and marked endless figures down a clipboard.  I thought about how it would be to work a shift at this new machine.  I figured it would be easier, most certainly cleaner, but probably as mind-numbing as ever.  I pushed back out of the crowd, and left the shop out through the bay door, and emerged into the bright blue day with a sigh.  

Color Blind Test

Early one Saturday morning when I was still little, my father took me down to the school to have me tested for color blindness.  It was one of those bustling Saturday morning events that schools often have where there are booths set up and people are passing out fliers, and signs made from construction paper are displayed everywhere in the halls.  The classrooms sat dark and the parents sat  in loose groups in the cafeteria, where coffee and donuts were being served.

The color blindness test involved several different puzzles that were set up on a series of different tables.  There were a variety of intriguing puzzles.  There were some where you had to work your way through a maze by following different color paths.  There were others where cards of various colors were laid out in a grid on a table, and you had to add up all the cards of a certain color to arrive at the correct sum.

I moved from station to station, trying my best to solve each puzzle.  For some of them, I even had to get up onto the table and tap the correct answer with the tip of my shoe for some reason.  I was having a blast.  But I sensed that my father was getting irritated with me.  He didn’t see why I should be trying so hard to solve these puzzles when I already knew that I was color blind.  It just seemed like wasted effort to him.  I countered that the point of the tests was to see if I actually had color blindness.  If I already knew the outcome, what was the point of even being there in the first place?

I thought that was a pretty compelling piece of logic.  And so I moved on to the next station, where I had to get back up onto the table and match these pictures on different yellow squares by tapping them with my foot.  Soon I was having a good time again, tapping and shuffling at the cards.  But when I looked out over the crowd of laughing people gathered around the table, I saw that my father was gone.  He had taken off and left me there.           

Old Time's Sake

I ran into an old girlfriend of mine on the walk out in front of a store.  The walk was set up with stalls and wares like a flea market, and we bumped into one another as we were browsing through all the loose odds and ends, pocket size picture frames, novelty key chains, and decorative trinkets.  There was a sunniness about the scene that told me that it was mid-morning and also many, many years from now, the distant future being infused with a light every bit as golden as the distant past.

We decided to have lunch in a cafe inside the store.  As we took our seats, I reflected inwardly on the memories of our turbulent relationship, snapshots of tears by a grey pond, cars taking us every which way, the faces in the rear view with hands reaching out, bewilderment at the roadside, the crazy silent echo of those days.  But it was nice to see her now.  I realized that in this strange new age, we connected with those who disrupted our lives even more than with those who settled them.

The Collaborator

I accompanied the overseer as she made her rounds of the facility.  She was a rather severe woman, dressed in a military uniform of high rank, her blonde hair gathered into a tight knot at the nape of her neck.  I was dressed in a uniform as well, but one more sloppy and tattered, as befitting a lackey.  Some yellow dust clung to my baggy pant leg where I had brushed against a wall.  I tried to brush it off with my hand as I hurried to keep pace with the overseer.

We came upon a room which some workers were painting.  There was newspaper spread out on the floor beneath step ladders spattered with yellow and white paint.  Utility lights set up on the floor cast long shadows up the walls.  These workers had been abducted and forced to work against their will.  They were terrified of the overseer.  Their hands shook visibly when she criticized their work.  Their faces paled with thoughts of whatever abominable punishments they might face for their failures.  Their voices faltered, their eyes flinching involuntarily, betraying an anticipation of blows.

I had been abducted along with the rest of them, and I considered myself to be just as much a victim as they were.  I lingered for a moment after the overseer had left the room.  I went over to a woman who was working with a brush in the corner.  I tried to tell her that I was sorry for all of this.  I tried to explain that I was caught up in it all just like they were, that I had no choice in the matter, that I was just trying to make the best I could of the situation.

The woman took a moment to weigh my words, nodding thoughtfully as she stared off.  Finally she turned to me, staring pointedly into my eyes as she said, "It don't matter.  I got to thinking about it and I figured it out.  When the police come, they'll know who to arrest."  And she turned back to her work and I knew that she was right.  I was dumbstruck with the realization of my own guilt, but I knew things were going to be different.  I made no effort to catch up with the overseer.  I let her go and I just stood there smiling, whatever the cost.

Graveyard of Past Regrets

As a relaxation technique,  I was asked to picture my sins and mistakes in some kind of physical form.  I thought of a little plot of land on the beach where everyone's transgressions were buried.  The places were marked with tall wooden stakes dabbed with a touch of red paint along the top.  Everyone wandered silently, mindless of one another, passing from row to row looking for the stakes which belonged to them.  The tide came in, and the water flowed in between the stakes, each wave broken into separate rivulets of foam before receding back into the sea.  And all the while, a flock of grey birds gathered on a dune across the way to witness our strange human compulsions.  

Running Late

I was running late for guard duty, which rarely ever happens.  As I was rushing around trying to get ready, I could somehow hear the chatter between the other guards at work on the radio.  The guard I was to relieve at my post was moaning about the futility of his existence and going on about what a bastard I was for leaving him stuck there and so on.  Meanwhile, I was having my own problems.  I kept trying to put on my guard uniform, but every time I looked down I found that I had put on my normal jeans and t-shirt, and I had to start the process all over again.

Finally, I thought I had it right so I was off to work.  By that time it was getting light out, and I found myself reporting to a park in the early morning hours.  I headed for the guard shack on the premises, but a supervisor caught me on the dirt path.  He took me over to a shaded area where the management were all waiting around a cluster of picnic tables.  First they reprimanded me for being out of uniform, and it was then that I noticed that I was still just wearing jeans and a flannel shirt.  On top of that, they told me that the shirt was ugly, which seemed unnecessary.  Then they made me watch some kind of training film right there at the bench.  I tried to go, but I knocked over the projector as I was getting up.  They told me that the film stock was very old and fragile, and that in damaging it I had released dangerous chemicals into the air that would probably give us all cancer.  I wasn't exactly having the best morning.