ongoing burst an endless explosion that created in unnerving delicacy a destructive creation that formed ever new delights to feed its fathomless appetite. But the ugliness of humanity affronted him in the tangles of the city light a light saturated with darkness. The adjuration to seek god in the heart did little good for in his heart was only a narrow spiteful and self-pitying anger. That at times almost suffocated him. He hammered in tearful wrath at the closing walls of his cell. The past was a blinding happiness the future a blank blackness the present a shaft of dirty sunlight. He woke from dream to dream fearing he would never escape into day. They cased him in like a Russian doll. Winked closed clicking like an egg.
Yet at him inwardly they smiled.
There was an element of the ridiculous in all this gadding about. Floundering. Like the fish flapping about on the sand by the fisherman’s boot. Of the fishermen no longer near.
He grew despite everything. No matter how hard he clamped himself down the shackles periodically burst and he had added bulk to his biomass and a ring of experience to what he was hardly old enough to call his past. He was growing. Alarmingly. He looked emphatically backwards because back then he had been happy so he thought. No good. He kept moving forward anyway. There was nothing he could do about it. Except hold on.
The family was starting to tear light began to appear through the seams. He held his hand rigidly across his eyes. No good either. When life wants to have a nervous breakdown it has one whenever it damn well feels like it. The winds began to gather at the four corners of the map and eyeing him began to slink inwards. Poor fellow. And he had just started to date.
Annie. Geri. Karin. Caren. Siggy. Lorraine. Barbara. Paula. Leslie. Lesly. Leslee. Ann. Roberta. Nancy. Nancy. Teresa. Kathy. Judy. Meg. Claudia. Mary. Nancy. Margie. Cindy. Linda. Maria. Anne. And more but he couldn’t remember their names. The goal of the date was the kiss. The end of the date was good night. At that time. Sometimes the goal was attained. Miraculous. Interest was however difficult to sustain. Usually an hour in he was looking at the thin Swiss watch with numerous jewels his father had given him without a thought of harm in the world. Then shortly after he walked home unkissed with a sigh of disappointment and relief. Later he would learn there was more than kissing involved. I resisted the idea at the time. But it didn’t help. Later still pride and resentment turned you into something like a monk. Without faith. You learned to extinguish the first spark of tenderness and to be pitilessly polite. This was the beginning of your success with women. On the verge of the end. You smiled at the end beyond the ends of their fingers. It hid for the longest time the unbearable loneliness. From you. So solitary revenge.
(You’re getting ahead of yourself. You must first sink a fathom at a time into the labyrinth. And try not to get lost.)
What the maze saw. At the crooked ends of the turnoff. Toward a downtown pillaged by pain. Its eyes round with amazement.
The ubiquitousness of frustration and unhappiness everywhere parading as contented satisfaction with life’s unendurable awfulness the militant aggressive stupidity of this peculiar form of denial impressed him repeatedly. The dismaying insistence on cheerfulness at all costs at the very least teeth gritted in smiles. A frank weary fatigue and sadness seemed preferable certainly more appealing and easier to sit across in the ill-lit cafe. Even angry harping bitterness was better than relentless good cheer the unfurling of the vast banners of. Triumph. Over the corpse-strewn battleground.
The rat-eaten heart of the city had this merit that of an obscene yet stimulating honesty. One could not grin it out of countenance.
But it took you a long time to discover this.
In the meantime the history of his innocence left him deaf and blind to the moral lessons hanging from every corner of the prison yard he was stuck in.
He pushed his way through the filth with a sense he had been betrayed.
As you have been.
He was hanging by the neck until he was dead. It was a highly elastic noose made of crepitantly asphyxiating bungee and could afford to take its time. Quite a bounce.
Adolescence. Etc.
The greater fool.
Partook of the ingredients on jar labels and cereal boxes. The romance copy sent him out of his mind for minutes at a time.
You were always being tripped up by your knack for believing. Skepticism was a lesson that never quite held. Till it held all. Becoming for a time a personal brand. Furious-flavored fanaticism. The torch he bore to justify his misery. And infiltrate the sty happiness of everybody else. The twerp!
He was not going to not believe again. In anything.
(This came later but its roots were as those of the weed in the rended mat of grass near his sneakers. If you did not kill the last fibre of that innocent-looking yellow-headed coin of vulgar flower it would grab and twist and grasp and throttle the entire acre. Bobbing dead white heads in a week. Choking anything that is not they. Seeding unrelenting downwind.)
As it did.
Cynical with devotion.
Meanwhile he carried his solitude with him like a badge ready to flash it at certain officious and suspiciously interested females. It was a white star on his flannel jacket.
They never did get the message.
It was a form of happiness not vouchsafed to all they must keep him at the edge of their eyes but go no further. This way his solitude became peopled without collapsing into desperate loneliness for long. Desperation being the tone of the hour a foregone conclusion between futile experiments. Stabs at being. Oneself again.
And dwelled uneasily on the image in the mirror the one he followed for decades the purest contemplation from end to end of the spectrum of his life. Odd. Not that it was a pretty face but it was yours. You were stuck to the back of it and dangled like a hidden photographer under the black cloth of an antique camera shouting at the top of your lungs “Don’t move!” at the hapless model relentlessly blurring.
Funny. She remained nameless behind the whirring fan of names. Such a smile granted to few. A luxury long longed for the taste a crumb of dazzlement.
One carried it away and hoarded it and gazed at the memory for days watching it fade into a hard small crystal of promise. Perhaps today the small morning light twittered. Or tomorrow. Anything could happen. And would. And shall. Defend hope from every foe. Family. And friend.
The family swirled with false laughter around the quiet one the solitary one the child. Who missed many cues that way. Waiting far too hard.
He could only open his eyes to objects in half darkness and alone. They did not rebuff him. Yet. Or only his contemplation. The handling with its barbs would come later.
There was you see too much anger in the laughter that surrounded him. It hurt his eyes like too bright a light. The eyes winced tingling. As if from photophobia. It made him feel naked and jeered at. Ashamed of being still there.
Yet you must fight back not let your own happiness be plowed into the soil of their. For them to. Flourish.
So he inched the ice into his face. Gave nothing. Watched as their fingers slipped down the wall their eyes bewildered with frustration. Eye to eye with cold blankness. Saved the fire for the anxious core. Foolishly oh foolishly but helpless.
You had
