Jeremy Hight at Unlikely 2.0

A Few Lost Pages
Part 3

With no more streets to drift through and the time before freezing not too far off I turned the corner of my street toward home.

My wife had dinner on the table as I was late. My keys thudded dull and heavy in the basket by the door as I took off my coat. She had the heat on high to keep out the cold. As I walked to the kitchen table the light illuminated the tile we put in last year anew and pinpointed each of the cracks growing from the bad job I did with the adhesive. Dinner smelled wonderful, even I noticed that. She was sipping a glass of wine with that look in her eye that has grown to be part of the family lately, something between warm and cold like the house and so much else.

We sat to dinner and she asked about work. . I said fine. What would I tell her? I saw a frozen man dressed in a piss yellow suit ready for a dance in the Chicago winter cold... I just wandered around in the near freezing air on purpose... I calmly over dinner described the details of my day, my train ride home when I slept awkwardly against the rattling window, my lunch , the meeting and something I read in the paper recently.

She passed me the bread in the neat little basket we got as a wedding present, the wood a little scuffed on the corner. The butter substitute was actually pretty tasty and melted off the steel of my knife onto the warm bread softly. I felt relaxed as she told me about her day teaching elementary school and the pipes wheezed a bit. After dinner we sat watching tv for a few hours then went to bed as a few isolated flurries blew in off the lake, the little flakes almost impossible to detect if not for the streetlights.

I waited until she had gone to sleep and got up and went to the bathroom. I then went to the kitchen and pulled some of those odd little stained and partially smeared papers from his hand mixed in accidentally with a pile of old ketchup and beer stained sketches from school from the bottom of the junk drawer where I tossed them, odd musty smells coming from somewhere in the pile. I laid them out on the table and started sorting through them at first, then rifling through then just trying to piece something together then just shifting them around as it got late.

The pieces of paper and cardboard were scattered everywhere. I spent a couple of hours trying to place them in some kind of order….chronological…..in some storyline…..by the type of ink or pencil…..It was impossible. It was impossible to tell.

I dumped out all the scraps from that man on the floor. A dead sea scroll of another's life... what was I expecting to find... can anyone find? A diary perhaps.... maybe a way to actually at least kind of figure that frozen man out. I shuffled the pile for at least an hour and…. nothing.

I threw the little wrappers and scraps unceremoniously away in the soggy coffee rinds and dinner remnants in the kitchen trash like some anonymous burial at sea during war time.

I tried not to think about anything the next day. I went on the train like always, focused on tasks at hand, got it done, sucked it up. Enough walks and enough surprises. Enough faces and facing. At work the next day I selected the date for the meeting. It was to surely form curses under the polite replies all over again. There was one little scrap among my papers. Threw it away.

The last hard-to-read scrap, somehow fused in some corner of my briefcase, was this:

well planned trips away with the young bride to the sunlit beaches of Florida for the weekend, Beer and pizza with the guys at a warm favorite bar to watch the game, dinners out with a new date in a candle lit restaurant with framed photos of nature scenes of mountains and groves of shade trees then dancing. distant flashes ...some one else’s lightning..just confetti..enough..going....tonight....hope to see... (the last part after this was smeary and illegible)

The employees under me would surely reply in tersely written emails leaking politics and reeking of something more hidden away, maybe even clustered curse word and vitriolic poison phrases pointed my way before fingers discreetly hit erase.

Sunday, January 7^th. The letters glowed incandescent like little ugly lamps as my fingers guided the little pointer toward “send”. Meetings. No celebrations, no sun, nothing but the dull blizzard of white of a meeting room, dry erase boards, no windows to look at and see those bits of something far, far away.

Coffee, chairs and stasis for all.

It was my job,my choice.

choice, yes ….like breaking off something iced over. like running past the lake and not stopping...

I thought of a frozen man, At least he disappeared himself, he kept going... did that whatever it was... I deleted the message instead. Gone. Each word a face lost in the snow. At least someone would find something, some afternoon , some moment from what I could erase, could create, at least for some one else, at least for once an action amidst this dull fog of days.

Jeremy Hight is a new media artist/writer and locative media artist/writer. He invented spatial locative narrative in the first locative narrative project "34 north 118 west". He has a project shortlisted by the European Space Agency to trigger text and image works as the astronauts pass above key cities on the earth. He has lectured about his work at conferences at MIT and overseas. A look at his career to this point and reading landscape spaces is in Leonardo and he is co-editing an upcoming edition on 3d immersive visualization. He has shown many text and image works including "Carrizo Parkfield Diaries" (with Sindee Nakatani and Christy Macphee) in the Whitney Artport archive. His sound art is currently showing in several museums internationally and he is editing the first definitive book on locative media.