Later that morning after a dull meeting I went back to my office. It sent one of those little crumbs tumbling in me, those little far corner memories. "Rise Rise young lions" went a poem we all studied back in college English class. I can't picture the teacher's face anymore, my mind lost the syllables of her short name, the color of the classroom walls, even most of the campus now after 17 years. That poem remains. It used to pump in me at 19, 21... seemed sad and fading when I got closer to 30, started to wipe away. Now it lurks at night clear as light and car alarms.
I worked for another hour or so before lunch and it was smoothly, placidly uneventful. I ate lunch warm in the windowless employee cafeteria in the middle of the building on the 5th floor. I could have done like some others and eaten in my office to keep appearances, that sense of layers and absence that is what management sometimes seems to be veined with. I am tired of that.
I am tired of so many things that it would be like some perverse anti-Christmas list of all the things I don't want, can't stand, hate, fear, feel bile and disgust for etc… I feel like I did in grad school that last semester when I looked around the room and at all the styro-foam coffee cups with cute little ironic doodles and messages, the steel coffee containers so sleek that scream student like italics, the little snacks and notepads and at everyone quoting dead French philosophers like it held up gravity and the planets at 2 in the afternoon on a fucking Wednesday. I should mention that I went to art school. Fancied myself a painter of enough potential to take out student loans. Not every one follows their major after school, in fact some say that 90% don't. I sit in that majority.
I finished lunch and when back in my office. ice. cracking. that man. It hit me again that it even happened, the tedium had so nicely dulled it into something smoothly unreal. The oddest part that I couldn't shake was how he was dressed. It was like he bought the cheap piss colored ancient suit to go to some big dance. It was neat and pressed, a matching antique stale piss colored tie wrapped nicely around his neck. His shoes were polished and shined, an effect almost lost in the slush and ice around his feet.
After lunch I sat at my desk. Time crawled. Even more than usual. I made some calls. One was big with a major buyer back east. Oh , right. I forgot to mention to you what I do exactly. Exactly..that word is so specific..how about fog or oatmeal instead.. I work for a company that ships artwork and sets it up for museums and for private collectors that can't bother with all the trouble. It isn't a career in art but it is....
When I first started it was after a long dull series of jobs stirring lattes, packing boxes and eventually up into managing small businesses in auto parts and whatever else after fudging my resume to get out of the coffee and bookstore loop as 40 loomed. It was exciting at first, inspiring almost in a way. I thought it might stir me to paint, to do some video art again, to make some kind of conceptual leap inspired by art's far proximity like a whiff of poetry in the stench of old musty books yeah, I know….
I talked to the client for 40 minutes about all kinds of tiny details and complaints, shiny specific figures to lure him in, dull ugly concerns. I then emailed some of my staff about a Sunday meeting that would be needed as a result. This was about as enjoyable as kicking your dog or gingerly pressing your lips up to a red hot radiator for 5 minutes at a stretch. I remembered the bundle of papers now surely melting in my back pack. I pulled them out to save some important documents and throw them away. I scanned the top one, red ink on a stained napkin:
He had offered me some gum. I said “yeah, sure" then he fumbled with it absent minded for so long that I forgot I had even asked. Minutes went by and I didn't even want it. He looked more and more lost. It went from a simple bit of conversation then wandered on, mechanical. It was like the conversation had lost its skin, was just bones moving like they do.
Was this a quote from something? Did he carry it with him or was it just in the coat when he bought it used? I didn't know what to do with what I just read. Should I turn it in to the police? Throw it away. I was panicking a little. For a second it felt like I defiled a grave, it was a pang of recognition.
I pulled out another one from the now thawing pile. It was on a piece of a cereal box top:
I sat in roses red light and had a sandwich and coffee. There was a picture on the wall. It looked about twenty years old. It was five people smiling in an open field between two groves of huge shade trees. They all had the same smile. They sat on a blanket. The smiles were like they were all laughing at the same joke, that laugh that just lifts out light and easy like the sunshine in the picture. I almost swore I was in front of a heater That would be a good trick. I swear on mom's grave there was warmth coming out.
Who was he? I thought before that he was insane. I just saw anonymous crowds in white gowns in some huge old building behind barred windows and on its grounds under watch. Now I wasn't sure. Damn. It had been so much easier. Why did he do it? What was it exactly that he did anyway? Why did he have to be there? Why in my path?
I worked the rest of the day feeling off, distracted. I got emails back agreeing to show up at the meeting when the scheduling was nailed, little glowing bundles of terse words professional and carefully servile in regards to surely ruined dinners, family birthdays warm with out of town relatives and whatever else that now to be wiped clean Sunday would have entailed.
I got out of work in a bitter cold Chicago. It wasn't even the same one as that morning. I got out fast. Ran the few blocks whenever there were gaps in snow drifts and got to the train station. The light glowed warm orange against a few flurries beginning their fall from the lamps along the station. I had just missed a train and as it headed off I imagined the ride on it home, how much more time I would have to spend in the cold and how much later I would be home. At least 20 ice needled minutes passed me by until another came.
Once on the train I began to get tired in the plush seat and in the warmth. Places blurred by in colors,lights,the rattle of wheels on tracks a constant against the signs and parking lots. It was gloriously uneventful. I napped briefly into an odd dream about an older train station and its wooden benches and waiting, waiting. The dream was dull and seemed like hours. I snapped awake at some random stop and looked at my watch. Five whopping minutes had passed.
The morning walk took an hour easy. I had a ways to go. I looked in my backpack for a bottle of water and found instead the other rubber banded bundle. forgot all about it. It was not as iced as was almost pristine while the other had massed into a plump moist ball for the most part. I plucked out a random bit written in shaky pencil on one of those coffee hand guard things on the side that wasn't meant to be seen and thus didn't have the picture and phone number of some surely wonderful doofus real estate agent with a head like a pez dispenser and a smile that even smudged radiated dishonestly like the worst posed pictures can.
I saw a bus pull up. I was late. Two minutes. I ran. Caught the one right after it. Sat next to a woman in a dress I swear was made of drapes. I caught a glimpse of the bus ahead . The one on time , on schedule. There was a guy that almost looked like me. He got the schedule. It pulled ahead at the lights just the same every time with a cloud of exhaust. The distance between us was two minutes on a watch long. Those two minutes I had lost forever even though I could see the smoke behind it, almost smell it.
There was no asylum anymore, just that piss colored suit, those shiny shoes, a collection of ice on hairs and the quiet before I kept walking, before Who were you in those pits for eyes and that open mouth? I wanted to shake him. Why? Why the hell did you go ? What is this? A journal? A diary? I was so upset I found myself shaking a little as I held the paper in my hand and the train shuttled along warm on its elevated track above the streets. Then just lights, warm seat, my weight and the rattle of the tracks.
I sat half asleep and thought about random junk drawer things: errands, things to fix in the bathroom, the cat's little bald spots where he licked himself too much and what the hell to do or not do on January 7th, my 45th birthday. It was only November but that day would come soon enough and frankly I didn't want it. I don't feel old, it isn't that.
I just don't get excited about things on calendars or any thing that is supposed to be exciting and all that. Who cares about cakes and balloons at 45 when it was the same pretty much at 44,43,42,41? I mostly just doodled little meaningless swirls and stared at the blurs passing by. Out of boredom I rifled through my backpack. My fingers touched that bundle of papers again. All right, one more. Why not.
I drove with Him one time to see some relatives. We took all the small roads, the back roads, through desert towns and along the spine of what remained of route 66. I slept sometimes just from the heat. I noticed at night that several of the signs had burned out letters, misspellings along the roadside buzzing meekly and blacked out spots. Out of a need to just talk and something different from the radio and naps I mentioned it to him. He told me that he wondered sometimes if you could make sentences out of those missing letters, business notes along back ways, secret love notes in the buzzing broken signs for motels and drug stores along the 5. Or maybe it was just the miles and the quiet and nothing more. Who ever knows anyone anyway? he asked me , his eyes narrowing into a squint as I let go of something that seemed so interesting a few seconds before. We drove on in silence for quite a while, things just moving. I decided a ways down the road to still imagine it, to make it mine, to try anyway to make what he said disappear.
I got off a stop early by mistake. I thought it was my stop. Everything looked about right. Brilliant me didn't catch the sign but saw the door open, recognized the usual clot of groggy people massing out in an easing bulge and the escalators. I shuffled and shrugged on through, accidentally elbowed someone and felt a soft cool strange cheek, got a flash of burning pain from a push from behind me in my back and ribs.
I glared back as far as I could in the crush and saw only the usual cluster of strangers. I wanted to yell, scream, sarcastically thank the jerk that sucker punched me or just was so careless with that sharp elbow. I instead said nothing, just turned back around and pushed ahead toward the door like everyone else in that madness of arms and shoulders that makes a crowd.
We eventually all uncoupled as we spilled out of the doors and I headed for the escalator.. I was a third of the way up when I heard the train pull away and caught the name of the stop, pretty much at the same time. One of the letters of the big plastic new station name looked like it was full of dirt or a rat nest in the warmth underground. I didn't care to stop to see.
I slowly walked toward the shiny escalator and another crumb fell loose, dislodged. It was from an ancient yellowed papyrus of a place and time, more like a stale, brittle little nothing. I recalled the feeling sitting in a room on a Wednesday afternoon years ago in grad school staring at those coffee mugs and hearing yet another discussion of dead French men in relation to other dead French men, of reconsidering and questioning the point of reference through the words of other dead men and it was like being in the wrong body, the wrong eyes. I wanted with every hair, every atom to be working, to be in the real world again, swimming in its details. The talented were few and stood out glaringly as did their actual work ethic. Many people seemed to be just floating through.
It had felt like that this was all there was and like that was the biggest lie ever told. It was a pang of recognition I guess. There was surely far more than this and there surely was far less and it was just stasis, blank, empty spinning in place. I had had enough but had two months to wait to get out, it seemed like forever. A girl made a painting as part of her thesis. It was a painting of two horses, muscles flexing, manes in an impossible glowing light only a kid in college who never saw horses up close would see as real. The horses were facing two different directions, pulling with their tails tied together. The entire crit I wanted to put a plastic knife through it or pour all the coffee from those stupid personal mugs all over the damn thing.
The escalator moved up smoothly and slowly. No elbows, no crush. Everyone was spaced out just so and lifting slowly up in the train station at the same angle of dull ascent. The turnstile was almost entertaining as it banged my arms as I pushed through, my used ticket being swallowed in a little metal mouth and checked off to regurgitate the meaningless stub back in my hand.
As I left the station everything was that weird place between familiar and foreign. I had a little bit of cold drool on my lip from my semi nap. This could freeze I thought as I headed the few blocks home. I used to love the feeling. In undergrad at the University of Chicago we would bundle up into the snow in the middle of the night sometimes just for the novelty of it and to get out of the boredom of dorm life in another snowstorm with the same people all year. In grad school I didn't have time except once to head out like that and we went into curtains of white in the streetlights. One by one we each seemed to disappear at times as we spread out. To be invisible. I was so sick after that I hallucinated a rain forest one night out of all my snot tissues and soup bowls.
I thought of the frozen guy for a second again. Those notes were more interesting than any of the crap I made the first few years after school before I got busy and he had them on burger wrappers. I took two classes alone on how to mount your little treasured crumbs properly and my great works had the equivalent value of a letter of his text on a box top.
It is so hard to assess though. Everything old seems to look like someone else's after a while. So many thing belong to the other guy that used to use these eyes. There is a crowd of them in old photographs of someone, of older pics of me, one of those other tenants. Whatever. He was some dead guy. He died with that stuff in his hand.
There is this other crowd of people, a fog of them , an oatmeal, a yellowing wallpaper pattern in a city. You see them in coffee shops scribbling away or clacking on laptops loudly clinging to the mythology of some big shot chomping a cartoon cigar pausing to glance and being dumbstruck by some random thing they carried at the ready. They are just part of the furniture, a lamp, an overly gaudy red upholstered chair, those curtains, Victorian just so. If cliches were a crayon box they would be its flashy silver or dull white and we know how much the kid will use those. I am not one them. I am not. At least I am not that...
I passed a closed sandwich place and an all night market. My task part of my brain thought of several details of work I almost forgot, little odds and ends but I rotated them dutifully in little loops in my head for several blocks to not forget. The air was stinging cold now but as long as I was preoccupied I almost couldn't feel it quite as intensely. Little lists of things can dull things nicely. Clip things too.
The streets grew comfortably familiar and the distance home felt shorter and shorter. I passed the sign for a movie theater that had recently closed, the letters for the last film still up but with a few missing, fallen off in the last storm or maybe taken by some of the more devoted or spiteful pimply teenagers that had lost their jobs manning glass candy caverns or robotic ticket punching. The word was that it was to become a chain book store and that they would keep the sign and the front the same, keep the feel, but rip out all the screens and old velveteen seats.
I walked dutifully on and had one of those ridiculous little conversations with no answer in my head. What was wrong with you? Were you so excited that you didn't feel the ice? Were you wanting to make some one somewhere else feel lost because of you? Were you the only one actually wanting to disappear? To make that moment linger? I heard no answers back and the odd part is that on some level it was very pleasing even as I really wanted an answer.
After a while I just slowed down a bit. At first it was because I was lost, then it was because I thought I recognized someone, then it just felt right. There was the booted car on 3rd street that had been there all month, the orange metal bear trap on a tire now completely flat, the park where all the dogs would run in the summer now coated in early snow and soon in a few hours, ice. “There sometimes is simply nowhere farther to go" some forgotten professor of mine once said in some lost afternoon in some long wiped away crit. It tumbled out like a little lost orphan. It fell out of somewhere.
