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.