Author: Brad Zellar

I don’t know who these people are, have absolutely no idea what they’re saying. Every day, every day, every day some fresh confusion.

Fog, I guess, a gray shroud I hunch my way under and through. These weird, fuzzed lights emerging, gauzy red and yellow blobs blooming above me. A sinking plane emerges, the underbelly, apparitional and floating through the clouds, coming down.

Equilibrium is never going to be my thing. Every moment I inhabit seems to be a time bomb.

I hear dripping from somewhere, and the sound of a television in a dark room, the loneliest sound on the planet. I remember being wide awake in the middle of the night, holed up in a bedroom and listening to a television on the other side of the house, the voices and canned laughter and applause carrying, sound creeping down the hallway and through walls, an absolutely unique sound pulled from the sky above the house, those voices and images drifting all night in the darkness, looking for entry.

I have no idea how a television works. If I actually try to think about it in any kind of hard and concentrated way I can still convince myself that I’m dreaming this entire life, this room, these books, the additional miraculous puzzle of phonograph records, the wonder of this pen, these ink trails and odd symbols representing some inexplicably agreed upon meaning. All of it –every last thing I can see and hear and touch and remember– nothing more than the confused dream of a fat gob of matter lost in a muddy puddle somewhere.

I wish man had never gone to the moon.

This world has tenderized me. I am a vulnerable adult. We all are. We are up to our ears in fairy dust and horse shit and monkeyshine and moonbeams.

So let me tell you what I’m looking for. Let me tell you what I want: I want to be stunned. I want experiences that leave me howling with pleasure and wonder at the abracadabrant possibilities of this world. I want to feel my heart swelling in my throat until I’m choking with happiness and gratitude, until I’m reduced to hoarse, hysterical stuttering and laughter.

I want magic. I want to see things that make me doubt my eyes. I want to hear voices. I want the life that is left to me to be pure astonishment, to return me to the epistemological ground zero of the confused and awe-struck child.

I want animals to speak, and I want them to tell the truth.

I want an mp3 of the laughter of everyone I have ever loved.

I want to come home late one night to find my parents slow dancing in my living room to a Jo Stafford record.

I want that hawk that’s been watching me for almost a year to lay its cards on the table.

I want to get my knees dirty, to claw at the earth with my fingers, to feel the sun on my teeth.

I want to give it away, all of it.

I want it all to be a dream, a good one. I want to recognize that that’s exactly what it is.

I want what I really want, what I’ve always wanted, and I want it bad. I want it more than I’ve ever wanted it.

I want to give thanks.

I want to say thank you.

My heart of silk

is filled with lights,

with lost bells,

with lilies and bees.

I will go far,

farther than those hills,

farther than the seas,

close to the stars,

to beg Christ the Lord

to give me back the soul I had

of old, when I was a child,

ripened with legends,

with a feathered cap

and a wooden sword.

–Federico Garcia Lorca, from “Ballad of the Little Square”

“There simply aren’t enough letters in the alphabet,” Mr. Lyle Baumgartner announced to his freshmen English class one afternoon. “As presently constructed the language is wholly inadequate to express the depth of my feelings.”

He stared out at the blank or incredulous faces of his students. He then leaned on his desk with his left arm while dramatically and delicately touching his chest near his heart with his right hand. With this visibly trembling hand he made a patting motion and fluttered his fingers.

There was a long moment of silence while Baumgartner surveyed the class and appeared to be rummaging in his skull for additional words with which to furnish his address. A lumpy, rumpled character with a head of greasy and thinning black hair, Mr. Baumgartner was legendary for his dandruff, his indescribable cologne, and for having worn the same pair of scuffed and clunky brown shoes every day for more than a decade. He was also notorious for once having had a hysterical breakdown while reading aloud from A Day No Pigs Would Die.

“I know,” he said, “that many of you are familiar with Miss Yennish, the distinguished business education instructor at this high school. What you may not know, however, is that that comely woman has laid claim to my soul, even as she remains blithely indifferent and even, one might say, blind to not only my affection, but also to my very existence. My every effort to woo the object of my desire having proved entirely ineffectual, I find myself driven to a level of distraction and despair that verges on the maniacal. Given this unhappy set of circumstances I am going to ask that, in lieu of your regular assignment, each of you compose a letter to Miss Yennish on my behalf. This assignment will be graded, and those missives I find to be most heartfelt, ardent, and artfully constructed will receive extra credit. They will also be delivered to Endora Yennish’s home, along with a dozen red roses and a poem of my own composition.”

By the time I pulled into this completely unfamiliar town my radiator was shot to shit and I was so stoned and hungry that I tried to get the woman at the Taco John’s to sell me a sour cream gun.

I was headed for a seminar at a tanning academy, and that notion struck me as more ridiculous by the hour (I’d been dispatched by my very-soon-to- be erstwhile employer, Baked to Perfection, located in the historic Ho-Chunk Shopping Plaza in my hometown). It seemed like I’d been following cement trucks across three states, and I’d been having deep thoughts along these lines: What in the world do we mean when we say ‘What in the world?’?

After I gorged myself at the Taco John’s I went down the street to a bar called Hung Mike’s. I ordered a beer and asked the bartender if he could recommend a “promising motel” in the vicinity. I immediately regretted my word choice, and the bartender looked me over for a moment and shrugged. “This is hardly a town for engaging propositions,” he said. Without turning his head in my direction a guy at an adjacent bar stool chimed in: “Don’t get your hopes up.”

“They ought to just paint that on the watertower,” the bartender said.

This was followed by an awkward silence, made all the more awkward by the fact that it wasn’t truly silence. There was music playing from the jukebox, and the juxtaposition of songs was jarring; Fleetwood’s Mac’s “Landslide,” for example, was followed by a Dixieland version of “Camptown Races.”

Jarring juxtapositions seemed to be a specialty of Hung Mike’s. On the mirror behind the bar was a sign: “Only a fool says there is no God, and fools we are not!” Right next to that, another sign, hand-lettered, read, “What are all you fucking assholes smiling about?”

When he brought me another beer the bartender jerked his head toward the guy on his stool and said, “Why don’t you ask numbnuts over there about the time he tried to eat the air freshener.”

“Fuck you,” the guy said.

There was another prolonged silence, during which the bartender disappeared into a cluttered office next to the bathrooms. I could see him in there hunched over a desk and furiously punching the buttons on an adding machine. This appeared to be an obsessive behavior rather than something actually necessary and productive.

And then what? I don’t really know then what, to be honest with you. The night sort of got away from me. Nights seemed to get away from me a lot in those days. I do, though, have a dim recollection of wandering up and down the Main Street of that town. I no longer remember the name of the place or even what state it was in, but I remember that it was one of those anonymous and dying little towns that are strung out all over the Midwest, places where Dollar Stores and tattoo parlors are the main growth industries and where half the women are licensed cosmetologists.

The main thing I remember, though, is that I woke up the next morning in the backseat of my car, which was parked in the corrugated tin quonset bay of a do-it-yourself car wash on the edge of town.

A morning like this, a morning on which you will not truly wake up, but rather go through the habitual motions of waking up –brush your teeth, shower, change your clothes, walk the dog, and go off in the usual stupor to work– you’re left wrestling with the old, hard-wired reactions to nights like the one now behind you.

All night you heard ridiculous phrases like “the tide of history” and “the winds of change.” You understand, even if you cannot reconcile, the cyclical nature of politics and public opinion. Waves break on the beach and roll back out to sea. Stuff always gets washed up and left behind. The moon works its reliable and spectacular magic and the sun comes up in the east.

Still, you hope and you doubt. A morning like this you like to think your world has been transformed, that things will be somehow different, if only in terms of a heightened sense of solidarity and shared values (which would be no small victory, really); yet you know that whatever actual changes might result from our collective yawp into the void of representative democracy will likely be small, incremental, and subject, as all such changes are, to swift and arbitrary reversal.

Meanwhile, some things seem both inevitable and irreversible, things like enchantment and disenchantment, which somehow manage to eternally coexist in their inevitability and irreversibility. The former a blessing that comes with simply being alive in this world; the latter an affliction that unfortunately also comes with simply –or not so simply– being alive in this world.

If your little red “I Voted” sticker is some acknowledgement of a small and utterly painless investment in faith, what exactly is the nature of your investment? What is the nature of that faith? And what sort of return, if any, do you expect to earn on that investment?

You’re not so sure, really. Maybe it ultimately boils down to little more than a feeling, a hope, a sneaking suspicion that this country might still work, might still be a better, more compassionate, more peaceful place. Or at the very least that it might one day soon make more sense.

Maybe whatever happened last night just means that you, along with millions of other people, are exhausted by a political and cultural climate of virulent dishonesty, a strain of dishonesty so fierce and prevalent that you no longer feel safe in your own skin, and can no longer trust the words that are lobbed in your direction every day, or even the words that tumble around in your own head and roll off your tongue.

This, however, is another day, another pure opportunity to be stunned. The first bruise of sunlight is creeping behind the houses across the alley. Does the world this morning feel like a better or safer place? Maybe you’re one of the lucky ones, and can’t answer that question with any real honesty or perspective.

You know this much: When you drive downtown the hobbled parade of scrap metal entrepreneurs will still be pushing their grocery carts slowly along the streets around your office, and your desk will be exactly as you left it yesterday afternoon.

I’m the guy who walked out of the building and the building fell down.

That’s certainly the sort of experience that’s going to stay with you, but I sure as hell never thought it would come to define me to such an extent.

A close call like that is all it takes anymore to make a man a celebrity in America. I guess it bothers me, though, to think that might be it for me, that an accident, an utter fluke, might represent …what? My legacy? My entire life boiled down to one terrible moment?

Because in that instant I became a career survivor, the most hapless sort of success story, a kind of superstar of random fate, almost, you’d think, a hero.

You’ve probably see the video footage, the tape that was replayed thousands of times on the television news, a tape that was itself an accident, shot by a German tourist who was panning the square outside the building. It was purely happenstance. They had to blow the sequence up, of course, but there I unmistakably am, purportedly the last person to make it out of the building alive.

I’ve just exited the revolving door in the west lobby, my briefcase dangling from one hand and the other arm swinging free of the entrance. I take three steps into the square and then duck instinctively, covering the back of my head with my right hand. And then, almost as if fleeing a crime in which I had some complicity or foreknowledge, I run, ambling like a drunk right into the inescapable arms of what now passes for history.

Whom the gods wish to destroy, they destroy. Euripedes was a nit-picker.

The gods can destroy you on the installment plan, incrementally, step by fucking step. And, yes, madness is in their bag of tricks, but they have bigger, more wicked tricks up their sleeves than mere madness.

Let’s say you’re me.

But, no, let’s don’t say. I wouldn’t wish that on you.

Seriously, though, this man: Me. What did I do to deserve my status as a wretched footnote?

I guess my sad history speaks for itself; those fuckers toyed with me from the very beginning, making me the least distinguished, the only truly undistinguished member of a formidable family.

I struggled early and often to find an identity for myself, dwarfed, hobbled, and self-conscious in the shadows of my brothers, Prometheus and Atlas. Those were big shadows, and my parents compounded my frustrations by yoking me with an insult for a name: Epimetheus, or ‘Afterthought,’ this in deliberate contrast to my brother Prometheus (‘Forethought’).

I learned to live with this indignity, and the diminished expectations that went along with it. I thought I’d finally caught my lucky break when Hermes offered me Pandora’s hand in marriage (only, of course, after Prometheus took a pass).

My bride was the first mortal woman, made to order by Jupiter and blessed with improvident gifts: beauty, elegance, poise, a natural eagerness to please. Sad sack that I was, I can’t deny that Pandora made me wild with happiness.

There was, though, that damned box, which was a torment to my curiosity. Presented to me along with my wife, the box was a thing of beauty in its own right, ornate, delicately crafted, and glittering with jewels. It came with a strict prohibition, of course; I was expressly forbidden from ever opening the box. Day after day and night after night it sat there on our mantel, emitting noises that were alternately disturbing and enticing. Some of the time it rattled and hummed like an old radiator; other times it purred, a steady, almost comforting wash of white noise.

Despite what you might have heard, it was I who opened that box, not Pandora. I don’t suppose I need to tell you that I was roaring drunk on Night Train at the time, and that was, as you would imagine, a terrible moment, chaotic, disturbing, beyond frightful. I don’t like to remember the things that boiled up out of the box, even though I am still confronted by those memories –and their living, enduring presence in the world– every single day. Ceaseless affliction and misery, is how you often hear the contents of the box described, and I can ensure you that there’s nothing in the way of overstatement in that description.

You also may have heard that in the midst of all the chaos my wife had the presence of mind to lunge from the couch and clamp the lid back on the box.

Here is where I’m not sure what to tell you. Pandora obviously did not move quickly enough. Perhaps, however, she moved too swiftly, or shouldn’t have moved at all. Because when we finally collapsed together in the shag carpeting of our living room and surveyed the enormity of the disaster our marriage had made of this world, we were aware of a sound still emanating from within the box, a noise that sounded eerily like a beating heart. It seemed hope –and hope alone– had not managed to escape from Pandora’s box.

And I ask you now: what does that mean? Should we choose to see this bit of information as cause for optimism, or despair? Is hope still present and accessible, or locked away forever?

I’m afraid that I, who have been turned into a monkey by the gods and banished to the island of Pithecusa, am unfortunately in no position to answer such difficult questions.

All right, everybody get in line and listen up. I want you fellas to get some shut-eye so we can all be up and ready to hump it at first light. We’ll be traveling seven miles to the east over rugged terrain. Word has it we might be in for some heavy weather as well, so pack accordingly.

We’ll have six men to a piano, and each of these pianos is worth more than $50,000, so I want to make good and damn sure that everyone in this room understands the importance of taking all the care and precaution necessary to insure the safe delivery of every single piano in our possession.

I don’t need to tell you that nobody has ever carried a piano –let alone nine pianos– over this mountain, and I’m not about to stand here and sugarcoat the serious dangers and risks involved in this operation. Every one of you has endured months of grueling training, and I wouldn’t send you out there if I didn’t have absolute confidence in your ability to bring this difficult mission to a successful conclusion.

Our most recent intelligence suggests that we can expect fierce if sporadic resistance from the local guerrillas. These people resent the incursion of very expensive pianos into their territory; most of them have never seen a piano in their lives, and the value of these instruments is more than most of these folks will make in their lifetimes. We can expect them to give us everything they have. I don’t want anyone going into this with a false sense of security just because these local characters don’t have much more than rocks and sticks and old surplus Daisy rifles to defend themselves with.

I’ll remind you that when the British tried to bring a piano over this mountain back in the 1950s –and this was one piano, mind you– they were badly routed and the piano was destroyed and burned by the natives.

I expect nothing less than one hundred percent success from this mission. I want you to defend these pianos with everything at your disposal, and, well, boys, you know what they say about making an omelet. Be vigilant out there, and expect a tough battle.

And let’s all keep in mind what we’re up to here: these are poor, backwards people, and they’ve been drumming on rocks since the stone ages. They can’t even begin to imagine the gift we’re bringing them. We’re gonna give these miserable savages music, and you can be damn sure that even if we have to shove it down their throats they’re going to thank us for it one day.

Lights out, boys. Tomorrow morning let’s make the folks back home proud.