Category: Blog Post

I’ve had one too many fucking nickels pulled out of my ear, the younger of the two men said.

He was sitting on the floor, wearing a hooded sweatshirt, pajama bottoms, and badly worn bedroom slippers. He had declined the offer of a seat on the sofa, choosing instead to slump down against the wall and cross one leg over the other at the knee. He was nervously jostling the slipper on his left foot, slipping it on and off and tapping along to some beat in his head or blood.

Butterflies walk, he said.

They fly, the older man said.

But they must also sometimes walk. Some of them probably spend a good deal of time walking.

The older man shrugged, removed his glasses, and placed them upside down on his desk.

This shit wears you out, the younger man said.

What shit is that?

This query was followed by a prolonged silence. The older man eventually repeated the question. What shit is that? he asked.

Oh, the younger man said, I think you know what shit I’m talking about.

Why don’t we make an attempt to narrow it down, the older man said. Perhaps we could isolate some specific things that are wearing you out.

Shit, the younger man said. The shit. This shit. We’ve been over this before.

Well, the older man said, the problem as I see it is that we never seem to get beyond this same general complaint. I think you need to dig a bit deeper into things.

Into the shit? the younger man asked.

If that’s how you choose to think about it, yes.

What is this music? the younger man asked.

It’s Chopin. The Nocturnes.

Please turn it the fuck up, the younger man said.

The way you throw your head

back and show your broken

teeth to the stars.

How you laugh laugh laugh,

nodding, your eyes pinned

back to your perfect ears.

I love that.

The places you take me

and the way you allow

yourself to be taken,

wherever you might be,

so suddenly by sleep–

I love that.

Especially that.

Early Berleson had long since grown accustomed to the static routine of his middle years. He would sleepwalk through the day at work, make his way home in a sort of empirical blackout, and then, eventually, the night would just fall out from under him and leave him floating in murky space, listening to the strains of Mahler from someplace far off. It sounded almost like a transmission from a ghost satellite.

The planet felt frozen in his skull like a starfish paralyzed in amber. He could sometimes convince himself that his bones were locked up in his skin, and he supposed he would never again shimmy to an ecstatic piece of music.

As a younger man, life had rolled through his veins like a carnival ride, and he had found great and simple pleasure in those moments alone in his bachelor apartment, lunging around –often enough naked– to his old records. It frequently depressed him to recognize that he would in all likelihood die from shame if he were ever subjected to a videotape of himself in the midst of his happiest moments.

Now, outside his windows in the night there was a humid scrim crouched on the neighborhood and he could hear the dense rattle of bugs and the sound of idling air conditioners and sprinklers shaking their sand maracas up and down the block. Beyond that, the city, a wash of white noise interupted by the occasional burst of something sleepless.

It would likely be fair to say that people who wrote about concrete for a living couldn’t write for squat, and Early had made his peace with the fact that it wouldn’t do him any good to try to sprinkle a little fairy dust on the copy. Who really gave a rat’s ass?

Even after editing the damn magazine for almost ten years he still didn’t have the foggiest idea who read the thing, but assumed increasingly that no one did or could. It was clearly just one of those things that people in the trade received and threw on the coffee table at the office.

The journal had a peer review process that essentially made Berleson’s job unnecessary; he was supposed to edit the thing for grammar and style. If he was feeling particularly bored or ambitious he might go through the copy and clean up obvious messes, but lately it took more gumption than he could muster to read through most of the stuff even once.

Every once in a great while he’d receive a letter from someone complaining about the virtually unreadable nature of the journal, and these letters gave him immense pleasure. Berleson relished one letter in particular, so much so that it was hanging in a frame above his desk. “I realize it’s only a concrete magazine,” this person had written, “but, Jesus Christ, I’d think you could at least find some better writers.”