Nothing to Remember - 1

Sam Walker was in his third day of cornfields when he saw her standing there at the side of the road. 

It was incredible, really, how much of nothing he'd seen in the past week. He'd been warned about it before he'd left, but he'd never really believed it. Each little diner he'd stopped in, he'd had the same conversations. The accent was always the first topic of discussion, quickly followed by the list of acquaintances and friends-of-friends who lived in England, did he know them? (Of course! was always the answer, Insert-name-here! What a joker! But then he'd feel bad when they got all excited and he had to fess up. Sam was quickly learning that different rules of humour applied out here). Then they'd get around to asking him what he was doing out here, and he'd always have to answer truthfully because he honestly couldn't think of any other way to explain it: 

"Oh, I'm just getting away from it all for a bit. I needed a change. I thought I'd try driving around the midwest a bit." 

Then there was always the silence, the grimaces, the attempts at clarification. "You mean, down through to Dallas or Phoenix?" "Or up to Chi-town?"

"Nope. Just... you know. See a bit of the countryside. The great frontier, you know?" 

And they'd shake their heads, chuckle, and mutter something about crazy Brits. It seemed to endear him to them more, though, and once or twice he'd even gotten a free breakfast out of it. If you could call it a breakfast, at least... for the supposed leader of the free world, they seemed to have a distressing baked beans famine. 

They'd told him, you're not going to see nothin'. You want the nature, you want the full amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties, you wanna go out West into the Smokies, or East and down, get into Bayou country or the Appalachians. Hell, even Arizona's got something goin' for it. But the Midwest? Son, don't nobody hang around the middle of this country unless they ain't got a choice. He'd been told - and this was a fact, he'd looked it up - that more Apollo astronauts had come from Ohio than from any other state. By a big margin. And didn't that tell you somethin' about the place, that you don't just wanna leave the state, you wanna clear leave the Earth! 

Sam hadn't really taken it to heart. It came from growing up in a village that was barely big enough to host a good game of tennis, and coming from a country where a 2-hour drive to Margate was considered Going On Holiday. He'd rented the cheapest car he could find from a crooked little dealership in Tulsa and had been driving around since, taking the back roads where he could (despite the alarming protests from the car's suspension, brakes, and Everything), and firmly expecting that he'd be in Minneapolis by teatime.

Five days later, and he was still driving.

Sure, he was taking the back roads, and his route probably looked like a snake with vertigo. But it was incredible! This place was huge, on a scale that he still found it impossible to wrap his head around. And for days now, it had been cornfields - corn and corn and corn and corn with the occasional tired-looking barn or windmill or rusting watertower. He'd come across a town once or twice, and that had felt like downtown London during the Six Nations. But for the most part, it was just mind-numbing. Sam would keep his eyes focused on the middle distance and his mind would just turn to cotton wool. He'd made a game of how many bugs he could squish on his windscreen, and was up to 439 so far. It was all running together because there was absolutely nothing going on. Sometimes it felt like it had been a day. Sometimes a week. God, oh god, it was boring.

Sam couldn't have been happier. 

This, he told himself, was exactly what he needed. What he needed was nothing, and that's exactly what he was getting, and in great quantities. His cup overfloweth'd with nothing. He had nothing coming out of his ears. Just sweet sweet monotony and boredom. No idiot coworkers, no harebrained schemes, no old people, and - best of all - not a frozen chicken to be found for miles. Just him, the road, a rickety old car that smelled like Oxo gravy mix, and all the corn and lack of stimulation a young man could dream of. 

So when he saw her on Corn Day Three, standing there by the side of the road with her thumb out and a dusty backpack slung over her shoulder, his first thought was, '...great. Just great.'

I'm ashamed that I'm barely human / I'm ashamed that I don't have a heart you can break

Duck

This one time, I caught a duck. I’ve no idea why I wanted to catch this duck – I’d certainly never had the urge before. Never in my life had I looked at a duck and thought, ‘yes. This is something that I would like to possess. I must have it.’

And to be honest, that’s not what I was thinking back then, either. It wasn’t a question of have and have-not, of my taking a duck for my own. That wasn’t the point. The point was to catch it, to get the better of it, to lure it from a state of happy idle freedom to a state of being caught. By me. All me. I’d never had such thoughts before, and I never have since, but on that one particular day – the instant I saw that smug little mallard waddling about and waving his arse at me as he ducked under the filthy water of the allotment pond – I was possessed by this all-encompassing, fierce, burning need to catch that fucking duck. It was almost scary it was so intense, let me tell you!

Looking at it objectively, there was nothing special about this duck. No special markings, no outrageous behavior, nothing to distinguish it from any other duck. It could have been any old duck, really; this just happened to be the duck I decided upon. The instant I saw it I just knew that it had to be caught, there was no question about that. Why I fixated on that specific duck is still a mystery to me.

I thought long and hard about how to catch this duck. I immediately discounted the notion of just chasing it. Sure, I was pretty confident that I was faster than a duck, but such an activity would be terribly undignified. Plus, what if it retreated to the water? What if it flew away? I may run faster than a duck waddles, but I don’t have wings. I can’t flap and soar away at a moment’s notice, unlike some creatures. So chasing was out.

Perhaps I could set a trap? I pondered this for a while. I thought about different types of cages and bait and lures. But I have to confess, despite this sudden obsession with this particular duck, I was pretty ignorant about ducks in general. For one thing, I had no real concrete notion of what ducks eat. Fish? Plants? They’re always bobbing under the water to fetch something, but I’ve never even thought about what that something was. I suppose bread was always a popular choice, but I didn’t have any bread on me. Ditto for cages and duck lures. This passion had come over me so suddenly, I’d had no time to prepare. So, for lack of preparation, traps were out.

It was really a conundrum, let me tell you. I sat on the old bench for a good hour, fuming and staring at this fucking duck, trying to figure out how I was going to catch the thing. I sat there so focused, so intent, that everything else ceased to exist. My world narrowed and honed in on that duck. It was just me and that duck alone in our own little universe. I’ve no idea how long I sat there, alone with the duck, but it felt like years.

When you’re alone in the universe with a single other creature for years at a time, you develop a kind of sympathy. A kind of understanding. After a while I felt like I understood that little duck better than I could ever understand anything or anyone else. I could know no lover, no child, no human being as completely and thoroughly as I knew that duck. And I could tell, the reverse was true. I felt that duck examine my very soul. It knew my every secret, my every hope and fear and shame. It terrified and elated me, to be known so utterly.

Centuries later, the world started to come back to me. There was the allotment and the flats and the housing projects. Sky, clouds, sun. Plants and people. And all the other little ducks.

I looked at the duck. It looked back at me, and slowly waddled over. Its fat little body rocked back and forth as it padded over and stopped at my feet. My breath caught in my throat, and tears welled in my eyes. I reached down, taking its feathered form gently in my hands, and picked it up. I cradled it to my chest, tears streaming down my cheeks. It gave a quiet honk and ruffled its tail. I smiled.

“Gotcha.”

***

I’ve never caught a duck since. Never really felt the need. That’s the thing – I don’t even particularly like ducks. I’ll pass them by at the pond and glance over, but to me they’re nothing special. For whatever reason I just had this burning obsession with one duck, but only one! Maybe it wasn’t even about the duck.

Since then my life has been… ordinary. Utterly ordinary. I do the same things I always did, see the same people, eat the same food. My feelings about ducks certainly haven’t changed in any way. My outlook on life is no different. If there’s a lesson to be learned from my experience, I haven’t the foggiest idea what it’s supposed to be. One of these days I’d like to know, and I’ve been keeping my eyes and ears open, trying just a little harder to notice the everyday things. It’d be nice to understand, but I’m not sure that I ever will.

Maybe that’s the point. 

It was crime at the time, but the laws, we changed 'em

Returns and Rushdie

I'm back from a perfectly lovely weekend in DC! It was hotter than the devil's asscrack and more fun than a ride at the fair. It's also the reason for my blogular absence these past few days, and for that I apologise to you, my dear blog. But it's okay, I have come back to you, back into your welcoming arms to hold you close and nuzzle your neck and whisper in your ear that it'll all be all right.

It'll all be all right.


And here I sit in a Brooklyn back yard, slowly broiling in the 73-degree nighttime heat (that's 23 degrees in Real Measurements), sipping a beer - I'll be exact, a Samuel Adams Summer Ale - and breathing in the scents of a suburban evening while Miles Davis rolls through a rendition of Bye Bye Blackbird; and life is pretty sweet.

Whenever I read a really good book - by a really good author with a really good voice - I usually find myself trying to mimic his or her style. Not parroting in any way... more like trying it on to see what fits. While taking a screenwriting class in Junior year I was concurrently working my way through the early seasons of The West Wing, and I found myself trying desperately to capture - however poorly, through however warped a lens! - some of that beautiful run-on style of Aaron Sorkin's, the way his conversations ebb and flow in a way that seems so beautifully crafted and yet so natural. It's certainly something to aspire to.

I mention this because I've literally just finished reading Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie. It's utterly fantastic, like reading long-form poetry, and I highly recommend it. And the style, with its sense of narrative propriety that opens the door to all sorts of questions of reliability and truth and interpretation and objectivity, fits itself well to a blog. I'm trying to capture some sort of sense of that book's exactitude - the fastiduous attention to detail in a desperate attempt to nail down some larger truth that defies conventional explanation. It's really magnificent... reminded me of Murakami, the way Rushdie will not only explain a thing but also weave a gleaming narrative around it, cocooning the unknowable truth in fact and fiction until you can see the shape of it if not the substance.

And also the way he leaves you hanging - blunt explanations one minute, tantalising hints and glimpses and sensations the next. So in the spirit of fictional truth and factual stories, of substance and essence, and - above all - of long-winded brevity, I'll leave here some thoughts on what I want to make my next short story (short, but longer than most I've written lately!), jotted down on my phone during a long bus ride through twilit Delaware fields.

It will be about fish out of water and flannel jackets. It will be about pasts and presents and futures and fireflies. It will be about longing and hoping and the sweetness of disappointment. There will be running and hiding and seeking. There will be footnotes and police chases, and a certain detached, Morpokian, chicken-bashing style of humour. But most of all, it will be about how damnably, horribly easy it is to fall hopelessly in love on a stifling summer's night in America.

It might even be about letting go - about acceptance and peace. But I'm not sure about that quite yet... they say you should write what you know.

I'm not who I was last summer / Not who I was in the spring

An Explanation

There is a truism in New York City that you often hear repeated: city-dwellers are prettier in the summer than in the winter. We've seen the evidence in front of us here. Over the past few weeks, like daffodils springing up from the thawing earth, gorgeous women and hunky men have been appearing everywhere. Tentatively at first, in ones and twos, as if testing the waters... now they're out in droves, and everybody is very appreciative of this beautiful example of nature's bounty. 

The explanation you usually hear is that it's simply a selection bias. Your eye is more drawn to the Pretty People, so of course they're the ones you notice. In the cold winter months these callipygian figures are all bundled up against the cold, hiding their assets from the world; as cherry blossoms come out, so do the booty shorts - oh, the booty shorts! - and tank tops, dragging our eyes and attention to the supple delights contained within. 

This explanation is false. 

What actually happens is far more elegant. You see, New York's population is actually entirely migratory. Overcrowding has been such an issue that six months out of the year, half of us city-dwellers are whisked away and relocated to a small city about an hour outside of Brisbane, Australia. It's a massive undertaking that's performed with the utmost professionalism and discretion by many thousands of volunteers and government workers. The Pretty People are sent off to spend summers in Oz and return to the States in April - in trickles at first, but quickly turning into a flood so intense you can't turn your head on Broadway without some selfish, nubile young thing leaving nothing to the imagination. 

The uggoes get winters. Sorry, homely denizens... you need to keep that shit wrapped up. 

My point, you ask? My point is, it's May, and here I am. Draw your own conclusions. Oi, eyes up here. 

Hello sucker, we like your money just as well as anybody else's here

An Aftermath

"We couldn't have done it without you, Mister Raynes."

The world expanded, the prone figure in front of him no longer filling his vision. There were things - people - swarming around, and someone standing behind him. His hand shook. There was a harsh smell of ozone in the air. The gun was so heavy.

"Mister Raynes?" He turned, and that familiar figure was there again, impossibly crisp and utterly incongruous in his suit. "Are you quite all right, Sir?"

"Not sir..." he muttered. They were swarming everywhere now; chattering, collecting, analyzing. Worker bees in the hive. His head hurt from the sheer volume of activity, it was too much to process.

"Mister Raynes, perhaps you should come with me." A hand on his shoulder now, almost comforting, turning him around and leading him outside, away from the - don't look back don't look back don't look back - and through the low-roofed halls and corridors.  His hand was still shaking - the same hand as before, the same aching vibration shooting through the arm - as he was bundled into the waiting shuttlecar and whisked away through the warrens, back to the City, back to the vaulted spaces. Open air, if you could call if that.

And there was that crisp bastard seated across from him, a look of concern on his face. Oh good, thought Raynes. I've finally flapped the unflappable. He patted his pocket and pulled out a single precious bootleg cig. Somewhere between then and now he'd lost track of the gun.

"I must say, you've really come through for us, Sir." The man across from him suppressed a grimace as Raynes lit up, clearly past caring about air filtration. "We owe you a debt of gratitude."

The shuttlecar dipped into another tunnel, and Raynes took a deep drag. Silence and darkness. For the longest moment there was nothing but the strange natural glow of the butt; nothing but the whisper-hum of the 'car speeding through vacuum-sealed rock. And then, with an explosion of light and sound, they burst back into the City. Raynes exhaled.

"It's not Sir." Eyes locked. "And you owe me a hell of a lot more than that. I want to see your boss."

Ashes to ashes, we all fall down