Monday, March 22, 2010
Sunday, March 21, 2010
untitled
Sometimes walking, often times stumbling down the wind swept streets of old Chicago he pulls his coat tight around him. Ancient memories of Minneapolis flood his mind and he thinks quietly and aloud “this ain’t so bad, I’ve lived through worse.” The wind has a bitter sting to it as it slices through his threadbare over coat.
Recalling the last four or five hours is a bit of a struggle for him. All he can remember is a few shots of Jameson, blocking some one’s head with his fist, and blood that wasn’t his pooling on the concrete. He shakes his head to regain his composure, not sure if he even had any in the first place. All that does is make the spinning and nausea worse. He tries to keep it in but it’s too late. Through clenched teeth and fingers across his mouth, he ads his own graffiti to the wall tinted with hues of amber, red and brown.
He still had the knife clutched in his hand. “Where did this come from?” he wonders silently. The handle was slippery but he couldn’t remember why. Memories kept flashing by his eyes like headlights on a freeway. Faces and yelling, booze and a girl, nothing would solidify in his minds eye long enough for him to completely recall what had transpired. He kept walking positive that the exercise would help sober him up and he could remember every thing in the morning when he wakes up safe snug in his bed. His right arm was warm despite the cold, and his jacket clung to him, damp, in places. It felt heavy and tired. When he tried to lift it, it hurt just enough to remind him not to try and lift it again.
Where were his friends? He had asked them to keep an eye on him. They had a train to catch. They were all supposed to meet at the LaSalle stop and take the blue line to…somewhere; or, was it the green line. It doesn’t matter now, he’s lost and confused with a knife in his hand and blood soaked coat sleeve. He stops and wonders if they’ll let him in at Cal’s bar any more. He liked that bar. He doesn’t even notice the sudden clarity of where he had been. No time to ponder that now, he continues walking.
Stumbling down the sidewalk, he narrowly misses overturning some old bag ladies cart full of cans and garbage bags holding her various treasures found in the alleyways and gutters. “Watch where yer goin’ assh hole!” she croaks and tries to navigate her cumbersome cart around him.
“This isn’t my knife.” He tries to tell her. He feels the intense urge to be given absolution for having this large and apparently deadly knife. He flashes it at her and the streetlight reflects off of the now dull brown sap that has clung and crusted onto the blade. She knows then that it is time to leave and soaks back into the shadows of the alley.
A flash of memory zips across his whiskey fogged brain like a lightning bolt shattering the darkness of a storm: There was a man in a leather motorcycle jacket and his biker bitch humping in an alley they both saw him, the man grinned while the lady looked disgusted. Weather the disgust was directed at him for accidentally observing the coitus or at her self for letting this guy put his dick in her so she could score some H he could not say. He was distracted from the scene by a bum asking for change. His breath reeked of vodka and his cloths contained that special uric sting that the homeless seem to wear like cheap cologne. Further down the alley he could see some under age kids passing a brown paper bag around their huddled circle. His eyes glanced up at the street sign but it was obscured by a halo of light and leaves. Then the memory is gone.
But who did I stab? He asks him self. Did he stab any of the people from the memory? Or had his depression progressed so far that he had started cutting himself during his increasingly frequent black outs? Could it be that he tried severing his own arm at the shoulder? And for that matter where did he get this knife? Too many questions were prancing around his head as if there were a group of whirling dervishes doing their sword dance in the middle of a sand storm. His head was starting to ache and the pain and heaviness in his arm was getting worse.
Wandering through the twisted alleyways he finds an antique lamppost that had probably been around since Capone ran the city of Chicago. Leaning on the building just on the dark side of the halo of margarine colored light he examines the knife for any clues. Its about six inches long and of a military style, like a miniature Rambo knife. There is a spike on the hilt for cracking skulls, a skull cracker.
He suddenly felt eyes on him. The fight or flight panic was starting to kick in now and the intense urge to hide was flooding through him. Panicked eyes rolled around his eye sockets looking for a place to escape the ever-watchful eye of “them”. There was no telling who could see what he was doing and where those watchers might be watching from.
As panicked induced adrenaline began coursing through his muscles, he sprints blindly in the direction his whiskey-addled brain thinks of as home; north.
His mom will save him he thought. She’ll make every thing okay again. His mom lived In Minneapolis, and he was in Chicago blacked-out drunk. This was one of those classic moments that you stumble across in life; where the only thing that could possibly make it any better was for your mom to shush you and tell you everything was going to be alright while rubbing your back.
With out looking where he was going and knowing only the direction he wanted to go, he dashed into the street confident that he was going home to mother and everything would be fine in the morning.
He never felt the semi smash into him and pulverize his chest and spine. He didn’t feel the eight or nine bounces followed by a long skid that tore off his face and shredded his already tattered clothing to little more that rags. He was already unconscious and dreaming when the brick wall of a building brought him to a knee popping halt which ironically sent his knee caps flying off into the night to be dinner for a family of stray kittens.
The knife had flown from his hand and made its home, buried to the hilt, in the head of the bag lady who had called him an ass hole only minutes before. She died instantly. Such is karma.
And the man dreamed. In those last few moments of life when the human mind is at its most creative and functioning at he highest levels to keep the body alive, he dreams, unaware that his body lies crumpled, in a heap at the foot of the mercantile exchange in Chicago.
He was lost in a fantastic world of his own design and had no idea what the rules were, for he had yet to decree them. Flying through the misty white void he zooms past trees of titanic height, half created angels, various bits of flotsam and jetsam of galaxies waiting to be born, a model t ford, and a three year old wearing a cute little sailors outfit clutching and oversized loli-pop and riding a faded and rusted tricycle. He thinks he has been falling for hours possibly even days, if falling is what he is actually doing. For all he knew he was standing still and this myriad of seemingly random objects is just hurtling past him. The epiphany of relative time and space and motion reveals its self to him in that moment. Watching an antique cash register glide past a pink elephant that was surrounded by bubbles, he wonders if this parade of random nouns will ever stop.
Eventually he mist becomes thinner and field full of flowers materializes around him stretching off towards the horizon and beyond. It’s a veritable sea of shifting colors that answers only to the whims of the wind. Perhaps he had been standing still.
This Elysian field was filled with a multitude of colors. All shades and varieties of reds, blues, oranges, and violets and pinks went on as far as the eye could see. All of them dancing in the wind under the watchful gaze of the random sunflower.
With nothing else to do he starts walking across the field, stepping through patches of petunias the color of seawater on a clam day, feeling the sunshine warmly on his face. Warm, he discards his threadbare trench coat and walks on under the towering sunflowers that create pools of shadow in this sea of sunlight. He crests the small rise in the field that was obstructing his view and sees the tree line. Mighty oaks, and elms, and other hardwoods, keep the flowers corralled in the field. He notices clarity to his vision that he had never had before. From this distance, which he guessed was at lest three hundred yards or more, he could see each and every individual leaf on any tree that he was looking at as if the branch were right in front of his face. The leaves flickered and danced in the wind and sunshine like a school of fish darting through a wave trying to escape a predator. The image is so powerful that he thinks for a moment that he really is seeing fish.
He started walking towards the tree line, noticing that there were a lot more sunflowers on this side of the ridge. There was an animal path for him to walk on. The further down the path he got, the taller and larger the sunflowers got. Where once the heads made only pools of shadow, these were creating entire ponds. He stopped to look at these massive stalks and found more than a few that were thicker than his wrist, and one that was as wide as his hand. Looking up, the sunflowers themselves were the size of umbrellas. Enjoying the shade he continued on his way toward the tree line.
After what felt like fifteen minutes that could have just as easily been fifteen hours, he came out of the sunflowers he was still several hundred yards away from the tree line. The deer path he was on led him from the edge of the sunflowers straight into a very large rose patch. Roses the color of fresh blood bloomed as far as the eye could see. Here the deer path stopped abruptly. He looked around for any sign of a path going around or through the roses but alas there were none.
‘This can’t be any worse than Chicago’ he thinks to himself. Then he tries to remember what was so important about Chicago. He wades carefully into the sea of blood red roses in front of him, not wanting to scratch his legs too badly. After fifty yard or so his legs feel warm and damp. Stooping over and parting the bushes, he finds that his trousers have been completely shredded and snagged on a hundred thousand thorny stems, and that his legs are cris-crossed with hundreds of tiny scratches, each letting out a few drops of crimson. With no other choice he continues on through the field of spiny beauty while the phrase ‘death from a thousand paper cuts’ alternates with a visual image of him walking out of the rose patch with no flesh on his legs between ankle and knee. As he walks through the roses, his blood spills on several flowers each step. The blood dripping from the flowers looks as if all color were draining their own color to quench the thirst of the cracked and dry soil that their roots were sleeping under.
Finally after what seemed like hours but could have been days he emerged from this bloody field and much to his surprise, there was no meat left on his shins, Just the pearly white gleam of the tibia and the fibula. His knees were there and his feet and ankles were there but not anything in between. Finding this odd but still able to walk, he figured that he would just keep going for lack of any thing better to do. Looking ahead at the trees he realized that he was hungry. He sets off into the woods in hopes of finding a scrumptious meal. As soon as he stepped into the woods it was apparent that he was no longer in Kansas any more, or Chicago as this case may be. Looking at the trees he discovers that they are completely two-dimensional, flat as a piece of paper. Shaking his head to clear his vision in an attempt to restore his surroundings to their normal three dimensions, he discovers that it is to no avail. The trees are still flat. Hoping that there might be an apple or some other fruit-bearing tree in this weird forest he sets off again.
“I’ve been walking for hours…” he says out loud to himself half hoping some one else would answer. He looked at his watch. The face had been cracked and the hands had stopped at 11:23. “Well is it morning or night?” he remembers leaving somewhere and it was nighttime, but that seemed so long ago, and besides it was daylight here. Wasn’t it? Come to think of it the light just seemed to be everywhere, he looked up to see if he could peer through the leaves. For the most part the branches blocked his view, but when the wind moved them just right he could see the sky, which from this limited viewpoint yielded glimpses of a whitish overcast tone to the sky. But despite the overcast sky and the fact that he was under a lush canopy of branches that have both length and width but no depth and should be enclosing him in near total blackness, the light just seemed to be there. It was if everything was giving of its own light, just enough to see by. He was starting to tire of this surrealist landscape. He briefly pondered if he had wandered into Salvador Dali’s dreams but discarded the idea after not having come across any pocket watches dripping off of tree limbs.
His belly rumbled. His hunger pains were getting worse. He could feel his stomach eating its self. He had to get food and soon. He started jogging along, then stopped when he felt his lower leg bones flexing uncomfortably under the extra strain of jogging. The sensation sent shivers up his spine. Starving now he decided to eat some leaves just to have something in his belly. He plucked one off an oak tree and bit into it. He chewed for a full thirty seconds before he realized that there was nothing in his mouth. He looked at the leaf and saw that there was no bite taken out of it. Apparently in a two-dimensional forest you cant eat any thing because it is lacking depth. That is to say that there isn’t any thing to bite into. Frustrated, he tossed away the inedible leaf. And continued his trek through this bizarre landscape.
Some time later he came out of the woods behind a gas station. It was an old gas station from the 40’s. The bell line was a serpentine stripe across the driveway. There was a huge oil stain in the middle of the concrete that made it look like there was a bottomless pit leading straight to hell or china or some other place that bottomless pits are supposed to go. The red gas pump looked like a rocket ship preparing to take off as soon as the electrical umbilicus and scaffolding were removed. The wind blew for a moment and pushed the requisite tumbleweed passed the antique building.
He rounds the corner of this soberingly familiar city block and is confronted with a horrifying car accident. There is blood everywhere and at least two dead bodies. One of them looks to have been killed with a knife stuck in its head. People are starting to gather around the scene. A greasy motorcycle couple and a few bums poke their heads around the corner to see what had happened. A group of teenagers had seen the whole thing and were passing around a brown paper bag, each one taking a larger gulp than the previous round wishing to make this seem as un-real as possible.
He never stops to think this was not right, never realizes how familiar the faces in the ever increasing crowd are. He believes that he is still dreaming, or at least on some really good drugs. After a few moments the EMT’s arrive and begin disbursing the crowd. As he moves on to find out what he should do next he glances at the truck driver bending over his crumpled and torn body bursting into tears and weeping bitterly long into the night. Suddenly things begin to loose focus as understanding takes the place of confusion and a great shining light shines down on him. The source seems to be somewhere out on lake Michigan. He shrugs and heads off towards the light.
