Tag: Yo Ivanhoe

Last of all arose the age of hard iron: immediately, in this period which took its name from a baser ore, all manner of crime broke out; modesty, truth, and loyalty fled. Treachery and trickery took their place, deceit and violence and criminal greed…The land, which had previously been common to all, like the sunlight and the breezes, was now divided up far and wide by boundaries, set by cautious surveyors. Nor was it only corn and their due nourishment that men demanded of the rich earth: they explored its very bowels, and dug out the wealth which it had hidden away, close to the Stygian shades, and this wealth was a further incitement to wickedness. By this time iron had been discovered, to the hurt of mankind, and gold, more hurtful still than iron. War made its appearance, using both these metals in its conflict, and shaking clashing weapons in bloodstained hands…All proper affection lay vanquished and, last of the mortals, the maiden Justice left the blood-soaked earth.

–Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book One, “The Crimes of Men and Giants”

Her, she could make an angel out of any ghost.

He didn’t have that gift, unfortunately.

He wished to somehow praise the light, but his night vision was so much keener, the details and sharp fragments of truth emerging from the darkness with perfect clarity.

The smallest breathing thing will take but an instant to understand captivity from every angle. This he understood. Even so, he felt like he was trying to run up an escalator while balancing a tray full of drinks, his mind one of those sloshing glasses. Acceptance would make a bed in him, but wouldn’t stay in it, and would be up and down all night long, wandering from room to room, asking questions.

You might be surprised; people do get up in the middle of the night and call their banks.

In the morning he would walk the streets of the city, looking for anyone with some approximation of his blood running like bulls through their heart. And still, and always, he was left with his one true and hopeless ambition: to discover an entirely new country.

I had plenty of occasion, believe me, to wonder what the hell I was doing with my life. How was is that I found myself living in a garbage scow of an apartment building (crammed with shitheels) that had the nerve to call itself Christ Is Risen Estates? How had I acquired so much confusion?

I, who abhorred complication more than anything, had nonetheless allowed complication and chaos to overrun the quiet, orderly routines that I’d always believed would keep me sane. I was being ruled almost entirely by irrationality, and I could no longer sort out what I wanted or trust my urges. One minute I would believe anything was possible, the next it would all seem utterly impossible.

I more or less forgot how to feed myself, and would go days without eating. I routinely got lost in my own neighborhood, and any attempt to venture out into the city was an unpleasant and unpredictable adventure in disorientation. In the middle of the afternoon on a gorgeous summer day I would find myself looking at revolvers in a gun shop in someplace called Coon Rapids.

I don’t know. My mind was always elsewhere. It always is. Don’t ask me where, specifically, or even generally, it is, but it’s decidedly elsewhere. I’d say I was having a breakdown –that I was, in fact, brokedown– if the whole thing didn’t strike me as such a fascinating adventure, if I wasn’t so keenly aware of the oddness of it all.

Sometimes it almost struck me as magical, as if I’d slipped free of the material world. Some nights I would laugh myself hoarse at the absolute wonder of it all.

I don’t suppose you’ll get this letter before I shove off, Phil, but I wanted to leave you with a few words all the same.

You’ve probably known me longer than just about anyone, and you know that I’ve always been a dreamer. You probably recall that I used to dream about being an astronaut. I had that plastic helmet, the shiny silver spacesuit, and the bright green moon boots –the whole nine yards– and I think I spent one entire summer going around the neighborhood in that get-up.

My old man sent me that outfit from Florida, where he was living with his new wife. I kept the card he sent along with the spacesuit for a long time, but somewhere it got lost in the shuffle. I’d long since memorized the words he wrote on that postcard of a spaceship, though: “They’re shooting rockets at the moon. Soon you’ll be free to go.”

Those words puzzled and thrilled me for many years, and I suppose many of my frustrations and disappointments in life have been directly related to that card and its message. I never wanted anything so bad as I wanted to be free to go, and that fierce desire made it awful difficult for me to live any kind of normal life.

Imagine working at the Woolworth’s when you’ve had your heart set on outer space ever since you were a little boy.

It was impossible, to be honest with you, but I muddled along the best I could.

I finally decided it’s time, though, Phil. It just occurred to me the other morning that there’s really not a thing in this world stopping me.

I’m free to go, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

I used to sit around late at night, mulling and wondering, and watching dark things scuttling through the long shadows on the floor. I would try, try, try to get the story straight, my story, but the thing was no longer capable of running anything but crooked, and it ran through some thick patches of brush and fog. I would lose it for months at a time.

I more than once saw that story disappear into a cold, black river in the moonlight, and watched as it climbed right back out on the other side and rambled off into the darkness.

One time I surprised that son of a bitch as it was sitting in front of a campfire, but the instant I sprung out of the woods it dove directly into the flames and disappeared in a shower of sparks and smoke.

It was months before I managed to catch up to my story again. I’d received a tip that it was holed up in a trailer on the Orange Blossom Trail in Orlando, but by the time I could get there aboard a Greyhound bus it had already pulled up stakes. I did, though, find an address for a motel in East Memphis, scrawled on a grocery receipt on the kitchen table.

In Memphis, I barged in on the damn thing while it was asleep in bed. After a strenuous wrestling match I was able to climb back inside the story and inhabit it for eight months before it once again slipped away from me.

I guess folks would say I’ve been lost ever since.

As a child he had been hesitant, self-conscious, and frightened of everything, all products of a certain persuasive calamity of the blood, an inbred insecurity that even the constant certainty that he was loved could not entirely vanquish.

His response to this crippling insecurity was to act up, and in time, as he grew into a late and awkward adolescence, this acting up became a sort of method acting, which in turn morphed into real fearlessness, an indifferent and heedless brand of fearlessness that was often truly wreckless and dangerous in its manifestations.

What was initially a public persona designed to attract attention, eventually became a fierce and private quest for oblivion, almost a desire to transcend his old childhood terrors and insecurities by pushing himself time and again to the brink of senselessness and extinction.

Whenever he stopped moving or pumping chemicals into his body he was bored out of his mind.

Somehow he managed to settle down, and allowed himself to be almost tamed. He learned how to be almost normal, or at least how to conduct himself as an almost normal human being, at which point he recognized the old hesitation, fear, and self-consciousness creeping back into his bored and exhausted brain.

And that, of course, was when he once again became truly dangerous.

Since he lost his job as an aviation mechanic in the late 1980s, Riggs has been a clerk at the International Repository of Regrets. He hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in almost ten years.

The Repository, housed in a World War Two-era train depot, is a vast place of bad light and spooky, institutional acoustics. Even in the middle of the night –especially in the middle of the night– it is always crowded, and the mood there is generally sour and joyless. The crowd is polyglottal, often dizzyingly so.

Some of the people who stand in the long lines are dead, shuffling in place in stepped-down shoes, often clutching photographs to their breasts. Many of the waiting have grown hoarse from a lifetime of rehearsing and fine tuning their regrets. For the most part, they throw their cigarette butts and the wrappers from the vending machines on the scarred concrete floor.

The International Repository of Regrets is now little but a purely bureaucratic facility, and offers nothing in the way of dispensation, absolution, or second chances. Even as a repository it has long since surrendered any claims of utility.

These days, whatever regrets are unburdened there are merely scribbled haphazardly in the margins of ancient, crowded ledgers, wherever there is room. All attempts at maintaining accurate chronological records have been abandoned.

They will soon enough run out of room entirely, at which point the clerks in their teller’s cages will be forced to simply sit and listen, reduced to the role of secular priests, mostly disinterested and concerned not at all with salvation.

By now, Riggs had heard it all before. All of it, from the truly criminal to the almost unpardonably banal.

Even so, these latter confessions were the things that continued to haunt him, revealing as they did the cumulative, lingering damage that could result from even the smallest childhood disappointments. For instance, there was, in the wee hours of one long night, the old woman who had stood in line for days to tell Riggs of the heartbreak she had suffered owing to the fact that allergies had made it impossible for her to ever hug a dog. Or the younger man, now dead, who was grief stricken over his lifelong inability to throw a baseball to his father’s satisfaction.

Riggs had also encountered individuals –there had been several– whose chief regret in life was one particularly bad haircut.

And so, so, so many people had stood before Riggs and poured out their regret over elaborately planned surprise parties that had been disastrous or poorly attended.

Most distressingly and unsurprisingly, though, love –love lost and faithless love and love gone wrong– continued to be the reason the overwhelming majority of the broken and beleaguered clientele made the difficult pilgrimage to the International Repository of Regrets.

When he came up through the tunnel, the darkness had not yet lifted and the cicada were still in full damp rattle.

The heat had broken in the night, and the coolness was stirring up an apparational moving fog, heavy, moist. The street lights were dropping fuzzed cones of grainy and ineffectual light straight down into the fog.

Across the street he could see the smeared neon in the windows of the slaughterhouse bars and diners. A laugh broke like a whip and set off a dog somewhere out in the neighborhood beyond. From the stockyards he could hear the sleepy and pleasant idling of freight trains, readying to move out across the plains and into the mountains.

At the mouth of the tunnel there were two children huddled in rain slickers, shaking little UNICEF cans. There was nothing in his pockets but blood. His pants and socks and boots felt sodden.

He couldn’t stand to change and shower in that filthy locker room with all those bellowing and exhausted men. Every morning he liked to be the first one up the tunnel, the first one home in bed next to his wife as daylight made its appearance at the windows.

He would be drifting off to sleep as his wife dressed quietly for mass and kissed him goodbye.

This is mine.

This. This word. These words. They are mine. They belong to me.

Increasingly they may be the only things I can claim with any certainty. They come from me, from the mysteries of my blood, from the contents of my brain, welded together by the sparks traveling in my nerves and up and down my spine.

They are things that happen to me, and more and more now they move unbidden from my lips and fingers. I don’t know anymore what I’m thinking until I see what I say or write.

I need to breath to keep producing words, need to keep getting up and sitting up, need to keep taking a pen in my cramped fingers and confronting blank pages.

The words serve no real purpose other than to remind me that life is still happening in my head, that my brain is still seeing something that it accepts as the world, and that it is still wobbling through that world along the margins of consciousness.

It is helpless to do otherwise.

This, and only this, is all mine. That sliver of moon belongs to the thing my brain accepts as the world, as do those branches moving in the breeze and those planes dropping from the sky. And all of these other things with which I am surrounded –the books, records, photographs, and clothing– will someday belong to someone else.

But these words, they will always be mine. Only mine.

Please. Thank you. Preceding or preceded by a transaction with some anonymous servant of convenience, and occasionally involving as well a few other words in the form of a request.

For days, sometimes weeks, little more in the way of human conversation. His voice was disppearing further down his throat by the day. He would find himself reading out loud, if only to convince himself –or try to– that the authors of the books he lived surrounded by were actively communicating with him, that there was a real relationship of sorts involved in the act of reading, that these mostly dead people and their mostly fictional creations were true companions and friends, and not merely the babysitters of his disappearing self.

His nose was running; he needed a tissue.

There were places he might go, but he was not entirely convinced of this possibility, was not, in fact, convinced of any sort of possibility at all. Still, there was a great deal of water out there, somewhere close by, that he might look at if he ever felt so inclined.

He kept waiting to hear from you, ‘you’ meaning the ever more distant constellation of his old friends and acquaintances. He had somehow slipped from his orbit, and felt himself hurtling toward some ultimate collision. There was a chance, he supposed, that he would burn up and fall apart before gravity finally laid him out for good.

Meanwhile, he would order things, to give himself something to look forward to, the occasional package in the mail that would provide some important acknowledgment that he was still, however ambivalently, among the living.

He had become one of those people who wrote things above urinals in public restrooms, and who had taken to carrying a Sharpie in his pocket for exactly this purpose. He was not, however, prepared to disclose the sorts of things he felt compelled to scribble in moments of terrible rage and weakness.

Every night, in the dead hours, he would be startled awake, terrified.