That dog on that side of the fence wants nothing more than to be on this side of the fence, for on this side of the fence my dog and I play happily while on that side of the fence that dog watches enviously. That dog has thus begun digging a hole under the fence so that he can come to this side of the fence. Sometimes that dog digs for hours on end, fixated as though on drugs. Other times that dog does not care about the hole he is digging, and so I dig it for him. I hope that dog finishes his hole soon so that he will join my dog and me on this side of the fence. I hope, too, that that dog’s pretty, waify owner will come looking for him.
Monthly Archives: June 2012
Abstract Negativity
In Tokyo, it’s easy to forget about the sky. So she rarely ever looks up at it, preferring instead to keep her head down like everybody else. But last night, when she opened her bedroom window, she glanced up. Her eyes landed on a star that looked like all the others. But she liked it and so she called to it. Come here, she said, I have a task for you.
The star went to her window, whence our heroine whispered something into its ear. Now go, she told it, do as I have asked.
Tonight her star is not up there, for it is delivering a message to somebody very far away.
Her star will be back overhead tomorrow night, and she will see it and she will smile. It will be there the following night, too, and the one after that. But time will prove that her message will have certainly fallen on deaf ears.
And so she will eventually stop looking up, like everybody else.
Then her star, very sad indeed, will jump from its place in the sky. People very far away will be able to see it as it falls.
Shared Deadlock
Having willed the airplane to crash–as he had warned the man who “always [sat] in business class” he was going to do–he was nevertheless distraught to find that while he had failed to meet his own demise, he had inadvertently destroyed everybody else on board. Now stuck, as he was, on an uninhabited island somewhere between where he had been and where he was going (metaphor?), he reasoned that the best thing to do would be to solicit rescue, board an airplane, will it to crash again, and die properly this time.
So he began creating sprawling messages in the sand with his feet–large enough, maybe, to be seen by a low-flying plane. But help failed to come, and he sank into dementia. As his mind turned against itself, his messages in the sand became more complex. Gone were pleas for rescue. Now he wrote drawn out apologies for some misdeed addressed to nobody you know.
Once a plane flew high overhead and he–clearly insane–imagined that the intended recipient of his messages had been a passenger and, even better, had seen his sand-written mea culpa. So he wrote another and waited for the next plane to appear in the sky.
Dark Matter
Have you ever woken up inside your temporal lobe? I have. It’s a scary and lonely place–like the desert during a thunder storm. There are memories that grab at you, hooded and masked figures from your past that whisper frightening things to you, rivers teeming with regret that try to drown you, caverns inhabited by sorrow that scream for you, bottomless valleys of mistakes that want to swallow you. It [your temporal lobe] rumbles and quakes because you are inside it and it does not want you there. So it hides the pleasant things from you because if it gave you access to those things you would never leave. And if you never left what would become of you?
Sage, Clown, Jester
A man was murdered last night. Two people–X and Y–saw what happened, and when the police came to investigate they both came forward.
Here is what X (a convicted felon) told the detective: Two men were arguing and shouting at each other and the one pulled out a knife and stuck the other one in the stomach a bunch of times. Then he ran off.
Here is what Y (a good person) told the detective: I saw a man and woman walking together. They both looked drunk. The man shouted at the woman and slapped her in the face. He looked like he was going to hit her again but she pulled something from her purse and stabbed him several times in the stomach. He fell over and she kicked him in the face. I didn’t see where she went.
The detective was at a loss. That night he went home and read his favorite story by Akutagawa Ryûnôsuke until he fell asleep. When the detective woke up in the morning the murdered man was sitting at the foot of his bed.
Here is what the murdered man told the detective: The details of what really happened are inconsequential now.
Disavowals
He approaches you humbly and you chase him away mockingly. He says he needs money and you reply that everybody needs money. You finish washing your car while other people washing theirs cast him aside as you did. He does not know what to do with his squeegee and hand towel.
But then you encounter him again. And this time you feel bad. You offer him three quarters, saying, It’s all I have. He dries your entire car for those quarters. You feel like you’re at a strip club, making some girl ride your sagging body for half a song before rewarding her with one dollar. So you give him a ten-dollar bill. The Hispanics over there look at you disapprovingly, as though you’re encouraging destitution and freeriderism–Our people don’t beg for money. You pretend not to notice as you wait for the vagrant to finish.
Then you realize that a girl is waiting to offer the vagrant some money so that he will dry her ride, too. And you smile. But you frown when you realize that the money you gave him was money for your yoga class, and because it looks like rain.
More Crocodiles, Please
Asked what I fear most, I responded, People on stilts. Asked why, I responded, Because they do not get stuck in the mud.
Subjective Destitution
I see her when I dream–standing over me, whispering sand into my ear. There are pictures–always the same pictures–in the sand she whispers: a frowny face, a ballerina, a boxer, a wilted flower, torn lingerie, a cup of coffee, a novel, a photograph, tea leaves. They mean something, though I pretend not to know. Then the wind comes in through my window, exsanguinating the pictures and their unacknowledged significance. I wake to find sand in my ear and a ruined castle on my windowsill.
The Other Opera
We sat in Starbucks and stared out the window at it (Starbucks is always across from grand things and grand places). I know what’s wrong with the Japanese, she said. That. She gestured with an icy nod to the menacing fortress outside. That’s the imperial palace, I said, finally satisfied that my PhD in Japanese studies was coming in handy, the emperor lives somewhere inside. She smiled. Exactly. It’s the absent center. I glanced at her Chanel bag, and then at the Gucci one held by a woman sitting nearby who was pretending not be to listening to our conversation. I then nodded deeply in understanding. It started to rain and the imperial palace began to dissolve. She frowned. Can we stay until the rain stops? I don’t want my bag to get wet.
Invoked by Exigetes
K told me over wine and pasta and dim lighting that he no longer met people on the internet for sex because, he said, it was just too easy that way. What he was doing with me, then, was baffling. We ate, drank, made empty eyes at one another before going back to “[his] place” to, I thought, have sex despite his declaration that he no longer did such things. Instead, he sat me down on his couch and told me the difference between rich and poor people. Rich people, he said, and I mean real rich–the people with the word foundation after their names, the people who are not seen–they care only about dynasty. He then led me by the hand out to his garage, where I found one of the royals bound and gagged and naked and cold. I recalled the reporters who solemnly spoke of abduction.
Then K and I had sex.
In a practiced manner I gathered my things and said Thanks and made toward the exit. In a soft voice, he called from his bedroom, You can’t leave.
Mutual Antagonism
The man was confused, more confused than ever, in fact. He had always figured that a question such as this was straightforward–easy, simple, et cetera. But it plagued him. Why he had not until this point given it much–indeed, any–thought was anybody’s guess, and why now, at his refined age, should this question–when there are so many questions of greater import to be answered–demand such prominence was anybody’s guess as well. The question was of such unbearable heaviness that it would drive him to hang himself from the thing in his closet from which one suspends hangers. The people who would later dissect his body for clues would find that the question followed him even in death, scrawled as it would be across his chest in black marker, a final cry for help, perhaps, or a political message of some sort: Is it better to get peanut butter in the jelly, or jelly in the peanut butter? The people who would later dissect his body for clues would not know the answer to this question either, but they would posit that getting peanut butter in the jelly is preferable.
Stalin Appended in Blue
Rolling around the bottom of a box labeled “…or best offer” was a small pencil that could write by itself. People rummaging through other people’s junk passed it by in favor of grander junk like records or playing cards or sewing machines. K bought it for ten cents. He didn’t know that it could write by itself at the time; he bought it because he prefers pencils-which are surprisingly hard to come by-in this age of pens. He found it could write of its own accord when it began dancing atop the pretty wooden table upon which he had placed it after he got home: eat the heart and inner organs of a homeless man. K did as instructed and was later killed by the police in a vicious altercation. There was an article in the newspaper about it, though nothing was mentioned about K’s magic pencil.