Short Story
The world is collapsing. Collapsing in on itself I can never be certain but collapsing from great heights it has not. I blankly stare into the mirror, blink twice and am greeted by a pair of sunken in doe shaped eyes. Set wider across a slightly pointed once beautiful face. The bathroom is a pallid yellow color. Not the pale yellow of the sun as it sets just before autumn, nor the sickly color one might imagine pissing out after drinking raw milk but the uninspired default wall coloring of lower income housing that may be confused for public housing by any passer-by. I'm 40 years old and stand 5'10. Extremely attractive for my age is what I've been told but for every tabloid detailing my husband's torrid inclination of body, a Wall Street Journal article is born exposing my incompetence. To escape the monotony of decision making I escape by way of US 95 North to our sister state, Canada.
The psychiatrist's waiting room is bright. A kind older woman, with a pleasant English accent graces my ears from behind a tapped bell. Allowing me to summon her like dog or a child for dinner from wherever she could be hiding. Where could she be hiding? There is a plain white wooden door to my left, indistinguishable from any other wooden door bearing assenting panels, engraved to slope in four obtuse directions from the point at which they enter my vision. I don't stop to remember that shouting for help in a psychiatrist's office may not only disturb the assistant in the restroom, barely out of site to the right of the small counter but my induce a sort of catastrophe that would cause the most beautiful schizophrenic I know to bound out the window, wrists covered in gashes and leap out into the street like the Dachshund in that Todd Solondz movie about the increasingly depressing lives of the privileged. I see her burst through her glass cage, happy as can be. Wild and free from a large chunk of disgusting fibrous mass that I am compelled to help Mr. Psychiatrist wipe up by some force beyond reason.
That soothing feminine, faintly English voice assures me I can excuse myself outside for a smoke while she handles the mess. The cold winter enters through my nose and mouth at the same time the moment the window paned door shuts behind me. There's enough chill to the air that I can see my breath and a basketball sits dimpled in the shade of the surrounding trees. The psychiatrist's office is on the ground floor of a residential home like so many of their offices. They can't possibly live in these houses, so I imagine the tenants who live above. Husband, stethoscope to floor whispering fragments of diagnoses intertwined with the most mundane trivialities of life.
"Honey, the common schizophrenic of the DMT-5 variety builds battle figurines out of animals!" shouts the husband.
She dutifully jots "The animals, C, The DMT, Something about a Schizophrenic Bee."
"I've never even tried 2cb." she thinks.
She remembers an Erowid experiences article about the powerful hallucinogenic that is promised to increase the sex drive of any marriage so broken and begins writhing around on the floor in tears.
Mr. Sweet-pea hops to attention to ask her what he could have possibly done to provoke such a reaction and trips over Johnny's electronic phantasm they purchased just this week. He's bleeding from just above his eye, gouged deep into his eyebrow is a single metal resistor. The blood pools under his left eye running like garden hose of tears to his upturned nose and Mrs. Holland is crawling towards him like a hysterical Lisa Left-eye Lopez singing.
It's about this point I set one well pedicured foot down on each side of the ball. In one sweeping motion I caress the tense orange mass up the bridge of my tanned heal, I carry its inflated weight up the curvature of my slender calf muscle like the dip of a metallic Jersey shore roller coaster. I leap with my stationary foot and allow the branded mass to roll back down to my heal at the perfect moment in which my growth plate knocks into a rainbow motion appearing two feet above my flowing pitch black, shoulder-blade length mane. The regulation NBA sports ball claps my soft right palm. I clutch it and draw it back to me the way a server presents a tray of caviar. My slender left arm bends to perfect 45 degrees and I leap ever so slightly from my right sneaker, emblazoned with a secretive number of stripes and swish, nothing but net. I glance around furtively looking for a witness, someone to share the moment with but there's nobody. Mrs. Holland is engaged in the most passionate sex of her life after simply reading her husband the article. I briefly fumble around with my phone wondering who would even believe such an effortless accomplishment and how to explain how effortless it truly was without offending my tender sensibilities.
Mr. Psychiatrist's office is sterile in a sort of Buddhist kind of way. His diploma sits framed decoratively in the center of a white wall separating the two of us surrounded, on all sides by nothing but legal documents and regulations. The small postcard sized frame in which his family photo hides slides so gently into my brain as I recall he has one beautiful wife. She's holding their infant on a trip to the coast, his son stands proudly next to him. They're all beaming, radiating love in the perfect Hawaii morning sun. It never gets too hot in Hawaii. Before one can even taste the thick air in their lungs or feel a burdened movement the sky violently expels raindrops the size of tiny fists. Doctor Beamingson can barely look at me. He had rushed me into his office and scrolls intently up and down what limited information my experiences have so gracefully afforded us. I cordially ask about his education, and he declines to elaborate, I take a great interest in his grasp of medicine. My attention spotlights the room and travels from his attractive middle-aged visage to a tiny Zen fountain. A store-bought recreation of a practice that to be correctly initialized, that is; brought into this world, requires the observer to choose each individual marble stone and allow themselves to fall into the rhythm of grace. He combatively resists the uncomplicated decision I have already made and provides me a modest concession.
A frostbitten chill slams into my face like a train as I navigate an icy sidewalk holding me upright against my despair. The temperature is well below freezing and the powdered snow has been turned to glaciers by the rain who joins intermittently to mock this drab affair. Even the Douglas squirrels hide from the pitiful conditions of cars blazing by on their perilous escape from the ravaging cold. They sit atop the backs of Golden Retrievers marching defiantly around the garages in which our noble citizens should have stayed. There's not a Husky or Alaskan Malamute in sight. My tightly wound black yoga pants split directly up the curve of my thigh revealing what some may consider insincere intentions. A car horn joins the ocean's whisper through a clogged gutter to sing to me as a Mocking Bird, a Blue Jay guiding me to some other state. I drift silently along sidewalks of black ice, imitating the most graceful of figure skaters and try to remember if Tanya Harding was the hero or if she just ruined the Olympics and the last time I had the opportunity to ice skate, backwards.
I met a man in Florida who in a post-drug induced delirium had some creative solutions to everlasting life. Among other observations about the advancement of technology and troubles getting from one place to another. He rode a bike from his $100 a week recovery house to his part-time minimum wage job at Dollartree. He could not afford a bike lock because he could not even afford to eat and his bike was subsequently stolen from behind the Dollartree. He was, before his most recent troubles a Software Engineer. This part of Florida, just southeast of Naples is hot, humid, and disadvantaged. Its population is made up primarily of Hispanic residents with English speaking blacks and whites followed by French and Creole speaking Haitians. The Hispanic population had mostly immigrated from Cuba. A fact which he always researches online when going anywhere and had verified by speaking with the customers of the most pathetic Dollartree you could imagine. On a nowhere day, with nothing to do and his bunk mate freshly moved out he lay on freshly sheeted mattress atop a broken box spring in an empty hardwood room. Nothing but a single designer backpack containing a cheap Lenovo computer sit dormant by the bedside. He keeps fragmented notes of his thoughts in his phone.
They all look like this:
"On August 31, 2024, I learned how to represent bit nibbles with my fingers. My left fist plays the part of a hexadecimal registers. It allows me to count in hexadecimal while visualizing physical switches. I'm still working on doing this in three languages but I'm sure as hell closer than ever."
0x0
0x9
0xA
0xF
0x10
00000000
0000 1001
0000 1010
0000 1011
0000 1111
0001 0000
0xF - 0xA = 1001
0x11
0001 0010
0xFF
0011 0000
0xFF01
0011 0001
0xFF09
0011 1001
0xFF10
0011 1010
"Explain to me the canyon that separates motivation from intention. It seems to me that there is a factor involved in initiative."
"Structure society in such a way that removes rational motive from any crime thus any person committing a crime needs medical treatment or education."
"a spy for human suffering"
actionable intelligence gathered from
in-person community forums
geolocated grant money in/resources out
federal / state / local government led initiatives
medical data (anonymized statistics)
emergency medicine specific data
policing data
census data (economic, demographic)
voluntarily submitted data for religious organizations (The Church)
quantifiable results through short/medium/long term studies
smart humanist dAtA sCiEnTisT to make sense of the data, raw data-> actionable information
main view displayed intuitively on a Google Earth style map
community "needs" emanating from the verified geographic source
"needs" are weighted time series data
"you will have to deal with The Trolley Problem in all of its variations and do so with authority"
"Facebook style 'social' view for the olds. Intelligently restrictive to maintain intention (collaboratively lessen human suffering?)"
Rather than spend money he did not have or waste more of his life writing computer programs that no one but he uses, I'm fairly certain he just likes the look of them, he was thinking back on his near-death experience. Mining the depths of his darkest experience for inspiration he could somehow turn into a computer program. It doesn't take him long to know the path he is on is not one that can be serialized into bits and bytes. It's an uncomplicated theory with great implications. It goes like this, time can be divided infinitesimally. We, as conscious humans can only experience time as measured. Our experiences diverge in the ways in which we are capable of experiencing the most minute of measured time. These are our capabilities, and a ledger of these capabilities exists in a realm outside of measured time. What he had yet to discover is that this ledger is also balanced outside of measured time. The way he figures it, is that on our deathbeds we start to experience time in slower manner as all our bodily processes slow, most especially our neurological processes. Voices slow, your vision fades and the room seems to swirl around us uncomprehendingly. The slowing of the perception of time can be perfectly tuned to the slowing of our neurological processing abilities. The measurement of our senses is taken by how well our cells integrate information and distribute that information through our bodies and back to the observer. It's common knowledge that body releases DMT just before the moment of death. He whole-heartedly believes that two consenting parties are able to rebuild our realities before this dreaded moment of anticipation. It's paradoxical yet somehow logical to me. Why would our consciousness not instinctively resist death the way our bodies do? I leave Florida well before the next triplet of devastating hurricanes.
The hospital is a futuristic sterile kind of place. The automatic sliding doors framed in silver steel reflect a sharp beam of light into my eye as I hazard my approach. The security cameras hung from the rafters burn the screens of greyscale nondescript display panels. An L shaped reception desk, a taped off rectangular waiting area, a square holding pen and the ever-ominous egg shaped waiting chair stands apart from light blue plastic chairs that seem to wave of one material. When this wasteland’s sole inhabitant, an overly polite seamstress moonlighting as a nurse asks me what I'm in for, I pause. She races through her schedule as I race through experience blogs frantically piecing together some semblance of procedure.
She smiles.
I gasp.
"You can sit wherever you'd like" and she motions towards the stable.
I briefly make a show of surfing the wave chairs. I position one directly in front of the styrofoam colored egg chair. I place one stiletto heal on curvature that frames where the ideal ass must go and the other hooks the back of the chair. I can’t quite fit the chasm between the heel and the steep slippered portion of my ruby red attire around the impossible upper lip and tumble over the back of the chair and into my pod. One vegan leather fashion accessory left dangling on the chair. I glance over at the receptionist in sheer terror and find that her back is turned. I start desperately trying to uncork my heel from this godawful monstrous contraption before she can turn around and catch me in the act. I'm wrenching it by the straps and twisting it in a futile attempt to apply the correct amount of pressure at an angle just subtle enough to match curvature when the receptionist turns. Not all the way around, just enough to make noise but seems to be staring off into the back, towards hallways containing only alphanumeric symbols. I'm not wearing my glasses because they hurt my eyes and I'm content with dull blurring effect this creates on the world around me. There was probably a reason Phil Mickelson was pissed off all the time. It hurts, like physically hurts, often. I get back to work on this fucking object of unearned affection. By this point I'm sweating, glistening like a pig, my mascara is running and notice a tear in my stockings where a stylish run once may have made me smile. A Giant supermarket branded robot with two googly eyes rounds the corner blotting out intense symbolism of 2C and we begin our solitudinal death march to the pod.
The pod is an oblong, black and white sphere like the kind you'd find at a mall were you browsing for something that looks expensive and could match any room. And there are no robots, a team of medical professionals lead by Dr. Carter guide me around the corner. I look like I stumbled out of a dorm room and for a brief moment I prayed that they would gang bang me in this fucking thing. My hair perfectly tousled, one still pristine heel on, makeup like I had gagged the cock of the seamstress who so graciously permitted me entry. The only thing missing was a fucking cigarette. The medical procession must have attuned the same because not a single one of these cowboys seemed hot to trot and as a matter of medical necessity, I seemed inhuman to them. Dr. Carter asked the attending neurologist about his crystal wine glasses and he assured him that it was a chalice. I swear I saw an aluminum tumbleweed roll down the hall the moment they started blabbering about protein synthesis. One asks the other about their experience with whole wheat tortillas and another expounds their triumphs over the virtue of whole grains. Whole entire fucking grains, God please tell me you laced these with seeds about the crust. Let me wear them like rhinestone embroidery while I puke my fucking guts out cutting them off for the children. We navigate the hospital like an M.C. Escher sketch, you know the one? The fucked up impossible paradoxical staircases ascending and descending depending on how hard you squint your eyes. They've another where bats form a sort of positive and negative image, transforming the space where there was once yin and yang. By the time I was deluded enough to not ignore the conversation at hand we had made our way to my room. In it sat a single saltwater isolation tank with a television stapled to the wall. No other furniture, no waiting area, no family fair-thee-wells. The Doctor presses a button on his phone and the pod door slides open like the butterfly doors of Lamborghini. He motions towards the salty black abyss and I'm not sure whether to back myself in or dive in headfirst. I decide I'm going to risk it for the biscuit and back my ass up the stairs making that beep noise you hear when a giant slow moving construction vehicle crawls in reverse, that droning BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP and immediately regret it as this is the moment my ass has never looked so good. I look up for sign of tacit or even loving approval on the faces to those I must remain something of an object and haphazardly slip on porcelain structure of this death contraption.
I fall straight backwards, performing a sort of inverted belly flop and half-expect to be greeted by a lung full of Atlantic salt water. Instead, my skull hits the surface of the Dead fucking Sea. How much salt did they put in this fucking thing? They must have shot it in rocks out of the 12-gauge shotgun designed to keep Stranger Things monsters from finding their way back in. The collision creates the kind of mist you only find outside of the crowded shopping center of a Steven King novel. I think I must have blacked out when I hit my head because the smell is fucking awful and I have filled this body temperature-controlled pit of hell with the worst stench known to man, unattributed diarrhea leaking from an unknowable orifice. The pod ceiling slides open like the window-to-window sunroofs you can find in today’s fully electric vehicles. Vehicles capable of regenerative breaking, which is a creative method of harnessing all a vehicle’s capabilities to avert the worst effects of our impending climate catastrophe. Not only harnessing the carbon emission byproduct free, limitless power of the sun’s ultraviolet rays but mechanically distributing the energy created by the friction of a large mass slowing down back to the battery from whence it came. Six little heads come popping through the ceiling and I can no longer place their accents, they look so far away through the tint.
I'm gasping "I CAN'T BREATHE, I CAN'T BREATHE, I'M GONNA FUCKING PUKE" and one of these shiny head little fuckers cracks an air vent and says, "Hold on, I got you."
They tap the side of the pod, and a cool breeze appears from seemingly nowhere. I hear my last name for the first time and can't tell if he's said Mrs. or Ms.
They take my temperature.
"What brought you in here today?"
"Well Doctor, it would probably take longer than both our lifetimes combined to explain it to you."
Like explaining to the customs official in an airport tunnel the purpose of every assorted item in your bag. "What are you going to do pull me off the plane? If you were going to you already would have and all my shampoo is hotel variety sized."
An even smaller head in a misplaced Irish accent retorts "Have you seen what those Aveda girls can do? The colorists among them."
A larger purple head responds "Oh I modeled for them once."
And I'm like "Oh my god, a fucking human mannequin is giving me pointers about my hair, how did you even get here?!"
To that, which he definitely heard, he replied "8 years of college and a supportive girlfriend. How about yourself?"
And I'm like "8 years of hell after the purgatory my pervert husband drug me through."
Mr. Carter's voice booms through the pod like a hurricane thunderclap.
He asks, "Would you like to tell us about your husband or about the hell?" and I'd rather choke on my own shit than justify this man’s actions one more time.
I shout "You would be far more intrigued by my lovers!" and I think I hear him retch.
I must have because his stupid little head disappeared from my tinted pod roof and another slower voice yells "Sweetie, we've got a live wire." and winks.
As their voices slow the sound is akin to practicing an accent while conveying an emotion you don't or can't entirely feel, because you are reciting the emotions of a fictional character for public consumption, and then immediately switching gears by blasting music in your native tongue. An experience that can be had by all who don't keep their phones entirely on silent and dare to recite an audiobook in an accent only somewhat familiar to them. I'm told you can hear Nicole Kidman's accent if you really try hard enough.
I hear someone say "Aw, she thinks she's in Dogville."
I shout back "The set pieces look like your fucking hospital!"
There's only the low hum of the air conditioner, the swishing sound of a gentle underwater rip current, and the smell of rotting carcasses. Out of sheer boredom I try to recall their outfits. The letters staining the No Parking, Prince Symbol, parking lanes were a sort of deep aubergine color. Was the doctor even wearing a tie? Doctors don't wear ties. It must have been his stethoscope, navy blue and someone's eyes must have been green. I've always wanted to tear off a piece of my catholic skirt and choke a man to climax with it. Is that where Ralph Lauren got the idea for his Christmas themed patterns. Deep blue, hunter green flannel with ripped tassels ornamenting artificially worn ties. Hours start to slow into minutes. I make my 55th call for a donation to my husband's campaign. The incredulous woman on the phone shouts my name to man in the distance. I assume they're a woman because her eggshell tipped French manicure taps pastel pink floral Android case.
"Donations again?!" He shouts. "What have they done this time?"
My husband laughs and I drill him for the number of calories of each container of store-bought sauce in the house.
"The peanut flavored Tahini Paste is 70 calories per tablespoon" he proudly proclaims.
I intimate from his keen observation of physical health that he must be worth another phone call. My heartbeat slowing as a speckled golden mustard starts to surround the bathtub. I hear a vague Polish accent as a man no more than 25 years of age rips by in his Forever 21 adornment. The fading pink of a thrice donated and pitch-black cuff accented getup that matches his fake Givenchy sweat shorts. His long gallops give resonance to the fact that the leg holes have been cut too wide and the perfectly embroidered logo untangles itself into a hypnotized cobra hissing with a soft lisp.
"Reddit slash r slash fashionreps."
A place where perfectly reasonable Chinese citizens provide us with lesser standard of living, we so desperately deserve. They certainly win out over the bondage strapped, pervert pants and Peter Pan slippers with my feet placed curtly, toes pointing at each other. Minutes turn to seconds. A blue and white tie-dyed Bin Laden smiles peacefully over the garbage filled streets as I wind between the parked cars of the willing and the bodies of the required. Seconds to milliseconds and there is a Palestinian Keffiyeh draped around my neck. It took months of research just to figure out how to drape it around my neck in way that would not cause offense the affirmation comes as a Palestinian cab driver is nearly brought to tears by the fact he feels unsafe in his own city to make such a statement. A student had recently been shot in a fit of derangement under the sheltered burden of genocide, a fear that they had become everything that had been done to previous generations of relatives most had never met. An unresolved jealousy in the fact that they could not acknowledge the necessity of their desire to change. An assimilation already gone through by the majority of the living planet. Those of us who understand the scale of the numbers, can imagine unimaginable horrors, and were born with an intuitive sense of power dynamics already have a plan. A plan that would change humanity for the history of forever. Seconds turn to milliseconds. Goddamn, it's boring in this fucking hell hole. I pancake the shit that I'm standing into Naan, feel the warmth squish between my toes and realize I'm standing. How did I get here I mutely ponder and hear what I imagine a mostly deaf individual hears when the bass is maxed out in Dodge Neon with rattling windows. A limousine full of them comes tossing by.
They shout "CVL† SH‡† - ßƟD¥ ßΔGƵ, XXYYXX, GVCCI HVCCI, WHITE ROSE, SALEM, BLVCK CEILING - SHE IS NOT IN HEAVEN." Periodt.
Sophie dips her hand into the pond from her rooftop hideaway singing "Lemonade, le le Lemonade."
She's labored for years to get the pitches and tones to be perfectly original and they are. The planet has never heard anything like it. Charlie XCX or Hannah Diamond accompanies her like diamond enchanted faeries trailing every color of the rainbow. When the entire spectrum of ultraviolet light is combined the name of the color on which we've seemed to confer is white, but this color could be called anything we desire as a common description is unknown to man. Blank, rouge, noir, azur, grigio, call it 666 for all I fucking care but can we somehow leave it out of flowery exposition?
I'm suddenly getting my toad sucked off, knob slobbed before an intimate act of sex having. Excuse me bbgurl "Love in the making." It's the album where a beautifully pockmarked Asian woman sings a beautiful melody of her love being spurned by a boy whose mother would not approve. He doesn't notice her and I'm working out whether or not this woman can climax from vaginal penetration as I've never experienced one in the flesh. She definitely doesn't but at least she has the nerve not to fake it. We lay bask in the afterglow examining each other's bodies. Both giggling as we examine the symmetry. Our bed is in the room which would become the children's room, the children at their father's sleeping peacefully. We're swallowed by Bob's Discount Furniture's bunkbed Charlie's Angel carries me to the storage unit of a food pantry whose main attraction seems to be the most awful fruit gummy chips one without teeth could ever imagine. How long do they expect me to suck on this shit to attain the necessary number of calories to sustain human life. It works as a snack or as a subtle distraction from the death-defying misery that sits just 2 miles north. An easily walkable distance for a gracious privileged bipedal mammal that had once operated the other direction in search of a singular Hawaiian pizza. I remember his notes:
"How do I even explain that I may have saved a man from being executed by the police, a woman from being assaulted by that man, and walked away from an opportunity to use drugs all because I wanted to walk downtown to buy a bacon/pineapple pizza?"
Was that a suggestion, command, or a lesson? A drunken, extremely menacing black man was aggrieved over a slight that I had just missed. A terrified, young blonde Domino's pizza artisan bearing the brunt of his avarice. He was screaming for a free pizza. He had drunkenly wandered into this Domino's pizza on the busiest street of this city at midnight and demanded to know if they could even speak Arabic. Whether or not they knew the traditions in Turkey and had they no soul! No ability to grant a screaming, drunken underprivileged man a free pizza. The kitchen full of male employees sat stunned. They had no idea what to do as the man screamed and bashed the polyurethane separating divider that shields them from life or death. The door sits cracked open and I worry that he is going to crash through at any moment while I stand directly behind him, noticed by every person but him. The girl pleads to me with her eyes to do something, anything to diffuse this situation as no one has a phone in hand or seems keen to make a sudden movement towards anything, really. I announce my presence to this man by slightly ascenting to his assertion that no person in the richest country in the world should ever sleep hungry. I'm acutely aware that it's possible as I have done so many times, with and without the poverty or interdiction of illicit substances. I assure him that I am buying a pizza and that I will share it with him. I'm fucking starving and Domino's Hawaiian Pizza is my favorite cuisine on this Godforsaken planet, and I know that it's something I must soon give up. His violent mannerisms fade as he boisterously condescends that they do not even know the Arabic prayers. "They," I think and want to hug him and say my Lord and Savior please teach me in your infinite wisdom every prayer you know, "Sing them to me in Arabic, my liege."
But the man is piss drunk and can barely remember his own name. We walk back to his house, ignoring the motorcycles outside the bodega in which I greet the young man out front with a parting "Gracias," and the neon glow of the passing crowds while I look for a place to divvy up the slices. All I really want to do is go back home and eat but I'm sure this man must be some kind a Maliki. God's messenger from a cat I had once promised a new home free from neglect. He offers me shorts on his black and mild which I would have fucking loved but he was too busy knocking on car windows and shouting about cocaine to be bothered. By the time I asked the tobacco party was over, I take the plastic filter, strip it of its charred sickly-sweet contents that at one time I would have packed into a pipe and desperately search for a trash bin. There is never a conveniently placed trash bin when I need one. His drunken slurring and aggressive nature tell me it's time to get out of the street before this man gets severely injured. It could come from an aggrieved member of the public, or God-forbid the police but this man is a menace in his current state of intoxication. He believes me to be the white boy from the bar he had most recently attended. I concede that this is surely not the case as he begs me for whiteboy swag.
We have a pleasant walk past the park, just a few blocks to his house. He loses his balance a couple times, and I keep him conscious as our footprints form a trail of figure 8s in our wake. I'm nervous, fucking scared that this man is not going to be able to find his own house and I want to go fucking home but I refuse to leave him there in the street to die, or worse.
He's pawing around a flimsy metal screen door for a key, and it strikes me that someone else might be home that we don't want to wake up, his kids? His Mother? His equally terrifying roommates?
I don't have a fucking clue and I'm thinking that if we could have just sat down and ate some fucking pizza all of this could have been settled out in the open. You tell me the last time you had Hawaiian Pizza while I bite my tongue about being of Hawaii. We don't burn the roof of our mouths on the pizza because you recite your favorite prologue dinner prayer and translate the words into English at which point I try it, catholic cross myself, left side first (a habit I learned from stage direction) and we dig into the pizza. This game sucks I proclaim an he crawls across the stiff grey and blue speckled carpet floor on which he will sleep, to put on music. He fumbles around his 2008 style Toshiba laptop. He puts on hip-hop with lyrics from an artist whose name escapes me, and I ask him if I can show him a remix, that dope whiteboy swag he so desperately craved not even an hour ago. We had each housed one slice of what had once been a miracle substance that allowed me to swallow even under the influence of methamphetamine. A stimulant drug renown for its ability to suppress hunger in every person who used it. The same concept, using stimulant medications to suppress hunger has been mostly popularized by the bored housewives choosing furniture from the Sears catalogues that at one point sold actual heroin.
I wasn't around for all of this, but I can imagine the tinctures sold in the sort of antique bottles you find washed ashore with a note in it that reads: "You are not Haram." I return from the broken-down bathroom, pulling the chain of the tank that sits behind to no avail, I wash my hands, leave my piss in the toilet and return to the couch for another slice of Americanized Italian cuisine. I'm unable to convince the man to navigate to Soundcloud as he starts fading into the ground like those letters from antiquity. I rush through my second slice of pizza looking to get home as soon as humanly possible because in this man's realization that his buzz is wearing off, he pleads for cash for cocaine. I had offered him cash for food to get my foot in the door and because I am compassionate and had just enough to spare but what I did not have was actual cold hard cash. My money could only be transferred through the complex web of money transfer applications to which he could not access. We both walk out the front door and wait for an Uber.
This man is on the front porch begging me to walk to an ATM, but I am not going, the mood sours but somehow, I keep it playful, assuring him I would see him again. I did wholly intend on following through on that assurance but the number of times he called and texted lead me to believe that I would have to spend the rest of my life putting up with this behavior in lieu of actually feeding myself. To the neglect of my work and all of my aspirations. This I deem intolerable. Had this man left my presence, our presence (my extremely tolerant, if not bemused Uber driver) with any semblance of future pleasantries, I would have moved heaven and earth to learn Arabic with him, play something more interesting than chess and woo him away from his darkened path with stories of my yet undiscovered travailles.
I'm in the basement of a recently discovered church, Presbyterian. Presbyterianism follows the reformed tradition that splintered from Catholicism the day John Calvin stamped his grievances on the front door of an English church proclaiming that "we shall not buy our way into heaven!" An ideology that I certainly adhere to though I no longer attribute that malice to the Catholics. The services when observed by sound through giant red doors out front sound Catholic to me but their priest dresses like a Mormon. That halfway point between a non-denominationalist pastor in jeans and a polo and the sullen robed figure you find at the beautiful Jesuit mass. In the air is a sense of nervousness though it is probably just wafting off me since I can't remember anyone but the Pastor's name and the kindly, older black gentleman who delegates responsibilities to all of us volunteers. Not a soul seems nervous around me, mainly just uninterested and quiet. There's not much in the way of conversation.
I'm given my directions. They are to build a nuclear power plant to bridge the gap between faith and malice. The exact purification of mutually assured destruction. A symbiotic relationship containing mutually assured disaster where a more powerful force is subservient to their own growing ambition. A man with a more brutish energy clears the corner in which there stands 3 bins. I am to empty the twice bagged articles of these canvas objects to bag them thrice and replace them in any way I see fit. I'm assured they will be sifted through later at the destination at which they find their homes. As I listen to the way of the Tao, pronounced Dao, or Dow like frontal lobe of Dowery I pray that the speed of my movement is not disturbing anyone. We are volunteers and there is an infinite amount of work to do. Many of us retire here for a brief respite from our busy lives, there are no deadlines, but I would like to complete the task.
Churches are an extremely funny place when you're working in one. The mere mention of a sign from God calls whatever the next statement is into question. The pastor or priest or whatever, John ascends the ramp to the basement displaying the same effeminate qualities I have when I feel truly comfortable with myself. I'm not gay or bisexual, I would probably makeout with a dude to shock you and have had a number of MMF threesomes. These were of the ball slapping fun quality had between three consenting adults and to imagine me and John in that position would make me cry tears of laughter and halt all forward progress, so I refrain. He remarks that that the items donated earlier in the year were of perfect fit for the moment and it might even be a sign from God. Nobody says a word and in the brief time it takes for a star to sparkle I decide that it's my time to shine. I ask him how the summer went. It takes an inordinately long time to muster that it's been great. You see he knows me and everyone else just recognizes me. When I mention the splinter cell that formed in this same basement and that I had spent most of my summer there we move our arms in tandem and cock our hips. As he runs out of interest of who I am as a person and expresses that fact by not shifting his conversation to any outside ambition I hold I slink back to the corner. Not exactly defeated by curious as to the reason why nobody here discusses their lives on the outside, perhaps they have run out of things to say.
A giant young black woman with braided hair is the center piece of an archway between two towering pillars that stretch for miles. A young black with a clean-cut fade, and muscular biceps stands propped up by an angelic creature in a plague mask. His simple blue jeans stretch down to the awaiting crowd below. Above them, where the cherubs fly, four dancing figures sit perched, each standing on one leg, the other knee bent. Their arms frame each other and the figure in the ball gown on the end frames our queen. Her left hand caresses her braids as her right hand keeps her insides obscured. You are able to make out both the shapes of her internal organs but also imagine a child being cradled. Down the face of the pillars run the opposite of salt as both humans and statuesque monuments of the renaissance run down to the dark ages. A young girl of a darker complexion than I support a ballet dancer’s back. It's the exact spot on her back where my dimples reside, the spot at which you can find a tramp stamp or an inordinately stretched whale tale. She's taking lessons from a corseted woman with eyes drawn tight. Squinting either in concentration or lack of, perhaps not squinting at all. Rising to these dancers hips we find ghastly figures. A feminine figure set in stone for that task she is to perform. A parliamentarian wigged congress critter emerges from the vaginal entryway of what appears to be the statue of a servant boy. She's aware of the task that she must perform and the symbols on the scroll. In the locket stands another toned black man in humble modern attire locking hands with a somewhat stockier white man. They are mere boys, but their responsibility frames them as men. They are beset by two women with washboards and soap laden pails. A heavyset black woman that I would gas up as thicc frames the white revolutionary war coded white boy with afro-like curly hair. A gaunt white woman sports a dirty white robe, its plainness offset by a checkered lapel that spans the length of her torso and covers what hair she may have hidden. Wafting behind them a sickly green glow of what was once an enchanted forest as they all stand on pedestals. Climbing up the copper pendant from the empty sidewalk below are copper leaves, splintering the bends like olive branches and turning to grain or twisting in on themselves, compressing to form the curves of a golden tusk.
I'm optimistic about school. At least the Arabic classes are going well. This is mostly due to the fact that the professor is able to deftly navigate the capabilities of his pupils to find a common middle ground that works for us, him included. I knew a woman who preached psychology who could do the same. To be able to understand the multiple meanings a single sentence can have before it is said, and then almost instantly ascertain its reception across a room full of bodies is probably the greatest gift known to man. This gift allows for the education of every person in the presence of which it shines while not entirely making itself known. It was the recognition of this gift that alighted my love of education and it was the misplaced faith in my ability to light my own path that led me astray. I remember when this all started, and I could not wait to get out of this fucking office. An office I have refashioned as a study but not in name only. I had realized the necessity of moving the litter box outside of my bedroom. A robotic contraption that spins along its axis like the earth. The Bluetooth entirely unable to first synchronize in a city dense with radio signals crowding the same frequency. One of these signals is the moan of the Isis, the Egyptian fertility goddess. Her siren wails yet to beckon out her last surviving under the guise of shelter and her curious daughter wishing to rejoin her graveyard of tears. No one can sleep under such conditions so they must be separated. We have tried placing them together in every configuration possible. Outside reaps death and inside they will not eat. If they are not bound together and stay together the length of their entire lives they will not survive. The litterbox bounces off of the study floor and shatters into a million little pieces and I press the globe into its shallow basin, plug the awkwardly built machinery into the wall and take a breath full of candlelight aroma and with a hint of cat shit. The online classes are fulfilling enough but I wish to employ my faculties, full-time on education. My 401k sits at the ready for such a plunge, but I desperately wish to draw on it to purchase a house, my first purchase of such magnitude. The idea haunts me, but it sits so far outside of the life I have built that I'm afraid it would collapse, it seems irrational. It's the accelerated winter semester so a full-time schedule is not on the menu. Coffee is however but it's a soupy black thick substance just barely sweetened enough by Splenda, my sugar substitute of choice. Budgeting, ever a necessity is made easier by adding the almond or oat milk always so plentiful in my refrigerator to the pale green, clay rimmed coffee mug. I take a swig and pray the community college doesn't need me to rewrite this in a fashion that's easier to comprehend. I love nicotine so I take a blast from a bodega shopped electronic vape, but I despise the way my heart races when I inhale to much of the vapor or hold the hit too long. A far too focused attention against all vices I've formed from Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, and the self-examination of my own wasteful tendencies held up to the charitable actions of the fruits sprouted from community organizing. I seek to no longer understand this as a student but participate in the life I would have had, had I taken another path.
You round the corner in your business apparel. A blue cotton jacket and navy-blue trousers, a bit too tight for my tastes but you wear yourself better than I ever could. We used to share the clothes that more closely resembled our lives. Loud obnoxious, and carefree as our insides frayed. As the twine that bound us rolled down each street like a ball of yarn it marked a map across which we have finally rejoined. At least that's how I like to think of it. You're a little more nonchalant than me. We embrace, as always. It's a pleasantly warm spring morning and the air smells of sugar plum pastries. With the sun on my face and cool breeze in my nostrils I desperately hope that the cafe has some kind of apricot filling for both of us to enjoy. A vision of this contained in a dream nearly brought me to my knees in tears.
"Is that Tom Ford?" I chide.
You laugh as we break away.
"Who's that? It's Gucci." you reply shyly.
We enter the cafe in the midst of a newly formed peace. Smiling and jovial families wait pleasantly as we joke about the menu. The entire time I'm trying to figure out which warm caffeinated beverage may be the specialty of this particular cafe. The French do not fuck with oat milk, nor do they fuck with almond milk. A slightly bemused barista greets us.
I stumble out "Have you got any pistachio flavored syrups?"
They amble to the back and I stammer "Wait, is it sugarfree?"
You roll your eyes at the waiter. I can hear them move in your skull.
You reply, "He's new here, obviously."
We split off to admire the decorations on the walls and the passerby’s on the street. Me, ever on the lookout for your new boyfriend and you ever wondering where my girlfriend hasn't joined us yet. I hold the door for you and in enters a mother and her small child and you laugh as they squeeze between us. We round the short corner to an awaiting table. We effortlessly glide into our seats and for the first time in our entire lives the legs lay level on the concrete sidewalk and the table does not budge. I ask about Ava, and you tell me she's the same as she ever was but with more space to roam and noticeably more content without the anxiety of sudden separation.
"You look fucking great, how is this new job going?" I ask.
"You would not believe this place," he tilts his head to the side, looks me directly in the eyes and smiles.
I laugh and turn my head to the right slightly, looking down.
I respond "Wait, what exactly do you do again?"
"Accounting and bookkeeping for Denomination Hotels." he proclaims.
"I really am proud of you. I would have never believed we escaped that miserable fucking church," I meant existence, "and actually got our lives together." I meant going to court for our warrants.
His, a felony fraud charge dealing with stolen credit and mine a misdemeanor drug charge. I had finished my probation a year earlier which was made easier to the fact that I was no longer on methadone and could piss freely. Opiates make it hard to piss. As mentioned, they slow down every bodily process. His charges were downgraded to a misdemeanor owing to his ever-present luck and his sincere belief that the worst of us is over.
He tucks his chin and smiles bashfully.
"Stop," he giggles, "you're going to make me cry."
I take a bite of the flaky golden-brown crust towards the middle of the custard filled pastry. A ball of dough tucked in the lower left quadrant of my mouth.
I start with "I'm serious though."
He pulls the plastic lidded nectar from his lips and sets the container on the table.
"They've got me overseeing the redesign of a chain they're developing!"
"Oh, a subsidiary, now that's fucking dope."
He asks me what I'm doing next, now that I've finally got my associates degree.
"Going to Temple." I assure him.
I'm scared because philosophy seems to be the common enemy of mathematics and thief of time. The biggest misconception I have ever had is that the end result of philosophy is mathematics, math being a truly universal language and that this language could ever be expressed in the writings of a single philosopher.
"I'm majoring in English literature with a minor of Arabic studies,"
I pause.
"If not to atone for the sins of our forefathers, then to express a commonality among modernity."
He winces because we had once plans of being employed together.
"Do you still code?" he asks.
"No, not at all actually. It feels fucking great. I'm free from that constant weight around my neck while everything of any value I had written waits to be completed by anyone who dares pick up the mantel."
Everything I have ever written fits the dual purpose of education or exploitation. That's the way computer programs are.
"How's Huma?" he asks.
"She's great!" I blurt out.
"No longer bounding around the house like a maniac or wailing to go outside. I think I've finally found a schedule that works to benefit our ages."
If no one understands what that means I find it confounding. I have an age, a beginning and a present. She has an age. Her mother has an age and our behaviors are centered around the consideration of these ages and actions displayed by them. When a child is prevented from eating by her own nature, her reticence to join her mother to feed, to detriment of her own health, the two must be separated. When two cats cannot share the same space no matter what configuration the food bowls, water bowls, water fountains, and litterbox they cannot share the same space. When the mother moans at the door only to draw out the child, no matter her woes she will only be fed. As the child bounds for escape she will be lovingly tossed into another room and sealed in until the mother is safe and fed while her fatter compatriots are held at bay. The cats in back yard which once ran me rampant are no longer a problem. Nobody wanted to adopt them and the kittens that were to be adopted have all died. Some of life's more delicate balancing acts are resolved by universality of death.
"When do you think, modernity is going to change?" he ventures.
"I'd wager about another 20 years before we notice a perceptible change."
We both scan the areas behind and next to the other nostalgically. We finish our brunch speaking of old friends and bringing to light new, our current associations and families. Our parting gift another hug and a few pats on the back, me choking back the tears of both pride and regret as we walk away.
The cabin is in the mountains, it's isolated and awake in a darkly lit log encumbered structure to a flickering glow of a lantern. I had once dreamed of studying computer science here. I had planned on bringing a laptop whose source code could be read from bootloader to userland. These delineations now change so rapidly that one would have to become a monk devoted to a single layer to understand the intricacies. It was not fear of my own incompetency or lack of faith in burgeoning abilities that drew me away from computer science. It was my disinterest in the subject when I experienced the way these subjects are treated in practice. The way we collaborate in a critical industry makes me sick to my stomach and I've fasted in sacrifice. Finally, I have a quiet place to discover my new self, free from the bondage of which I had constrained my future paths. Free to act as goofy as I'd like, attempt jerking myself to completion with my left hand, mock God in almost every way with utmost respect. The tips of our dicks touching somewhere in the atmosphere as she scolds "Yeah, that's not where that goes."
The bookshelf laden room is filled with classics of the authors I've read and who's novels I have yet to complete. Also spread out across the floor, in no particular order, are authors I've never dreamed of being attracted to. Intellectually attracted and perhaps sexually as I imagine myself as their protagonist, antagonist or whoever it is they are secretly fucking. Around the bookshelves I see W.E.B Du Bois, a personal mentor of mine, John Steinbeck, Octavia Butler, Sylvia Plath, Salmon Rushdie, C.S. Lewis, Edgar Allen Poe, Tom Robbins, Henry David Thoreau, Thomas Hardy, Friedrich Nietzsche, Amber A'Lee Frost, Arthur Conan Doyle, Irvine Welsh, and Oscar Wilde. I don't know who left the room in such a mess but imagine it was their characters engaged in a passionate act of love making. Mr. Du Bois pulls Esther from the precipice just as Sylvia pulls a fresh apple pie out of the oven. I join Mr. Poe's sweet Annabelle Lee to the chagrin of the seraphs up in heaven as they cast a net into the sea for any demons birthed by a misinterpretation of Mr. Nietzsche's attempts to create a more equitable, educated human race. Switters bubbles to surface dragging behind him stylistically pleasing run-on sentences and disgusting fancies long since abated. John stands East of Eden and Octavia to the west summoning Amber to rain the right to women's bodily autonomy across the world as Dessie emerges from a sea of free contraception cradling Mr. Wilde like a purple egg. Salmon Rushdie is begging Mr. Lewis to give due consideration to the prophet Moses as the Christian philosopher takes note on whimsical imagery. I crack the egg on the cast iron skillet resting on the fireplace grate and find 3 more in my pocket. The rage I felt upon finding misplaced cigarettes around my apartment in a fit of mania is now replaced with the sibilancy. The subtle repressed excitement imposed by trying not to scare a kitten by bounding around the corner to find my phone when inspiration strikes or my new favorite toy I've enhanced for her incomprehensible.
The debt I owe to Mr. Wilde is both immeasurable and utterly incomprehensible. His bravery in a time most unlike ours, and his adeptness in both mockery and skill inform my gender expression. It somehow strengthens my resolve in my sexual preferences in the way it was forecasted to detract. These mannerisms which I have only ever attributed to being the son of a single mother have refracted through sky as a prism and may offer peace to us all. A clean energy power plant in the West Bank being cooperatively maintained it is not, but we all may pray that one day our energy will be directed there. And there, you will find me, shovel in one hand, broken teeth wrapped around a hospital blue glove being torn at the wrist internally screaming "SOMEONE FUCKING HELP ME!"