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writing :: fiction :: Cyril Derzie |
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NEW! A Great Victory for the Proletariat The Morning Lena Discovered Color 'Susie,' An Arguably Scientific Analysis of a Weak Metaphysical Grip, by Dr. Conrad Logic, Ph.D. --- Tobin Cohen reads at red lights. He reads in
public restrooms and in the dentist’s chair. When he finds work boring,
which is more often than not, he reads at the office. Even after several
inquiries from Yvette, his second wife, Tobin never admits to reading
The Times during Saturday prayer services. Several years ago, Yvette
came into the bathroom and found him in the shower reading the paper beneath
a steady stream of water. He reads The New York Times everyday,
struggling to find the two and a half hours necessary to complete it.
He keeps a cache of newspapers in the front seat of his car, in the fireplace,
and under the bed. Tobin is behind; one year, five months, and four days
behind, placing him in January 2002. In Tobin’s universe, Saddam
Hussein confidently rules Iraq, Arnold Schwarzenegger is merely a bad
actor, and the Chinese have not made the journey into space. “I realize I’m not going to catch
up, but I like to believe I will. Twenty six letters and an infinite number
of stories. Sometimes faith in the journey is more relevant than the destination.”
When The Times went on strike in 1978, he was only nine days behind.
By 1998, he was just under two years behind, despite having quit reading
the Sports section years before. “I had to give up something.”
He has since abandoned Escapes and Circuits. Saturday is Tobin’s biggest reading day;
he usually works in about four hours; two before synagogue and two after
a lean pastrami sandwich on rye, light on the mustard. “I make very
slight advances, but they’re - you know - very slight.” He keeps
up with current events by listening to public radio on his commute to
work. If he thinks he may be about to learn the ending to a particular
story he’s interested in, he won’t listen. “What’s
the point of a story if I already know the ending?” Before reading the paper each morning, Tobin
goes for a brisk two km walk. He paces down Pembroke Street, through Cutter
Mill Park - avoiding eye contact with the retired sailor walking his miniature
poodle - around the perimeter of the playground, and back home to begin
a new paper. Tobin lives in Morristown, New Jersey, in the same three-bedroom home he was raised in. At sixty-nine year’s old, he still works most days at his law firm, a few blocks away. In his younger days, he also practiced as an accountant on the side. That’s when time began to bend. Before he met Yvette, he read the Morristown Daily Journal and the Newark Star Ledger. She introduced him to The Times. When tax season came along in March and April, he fell behind. One of Tobin’s favorite New York Times articles “The Time Gap” March 15, 1982, illustrates a parallel sympathy.(1) (1)
“In 1972, the atomic clocks that kept the world’s official time
were paused for precisely a second. The little noticed pause was a crude
solution to a problem that began in 1968, when atomic clocks replaced
the rotation of the Earth as the authoritative instrument of time. Since
atomic clocks are more consistent than the earth (which like Tobin, slows
slightly each month), the Earth has fallen exactly one second behind.”
Yvette, a clinical psychologist with practices
in Manhattan and Morristown, prefers not to diagnose her husband. A few
weeks ago, she got a ticket in the mail issued by a lamppost camera on
82nd and York Avenue. She showed Tobin the ticket. The following weekend,
he happened to read an editorial that included instructions for handling
tickets issued by police cameras and reiterated the information to her
nearly verbatim. Citing recent Supreme Court decisions, she wrote a sprawling
letter that elegantly detailed the injustice of unmanned police cameras
and how her face is clearly not visible in the citation.(2)
Three weeks later Yvette was fully exonerated. (2)The editorial appeared in the December 15th, 2001, The New York Times titled “Red Light Pitfall.” “Courts have ruled that without positive identification of both the license plate and the face of the driver, the ticket is invalid.” The editorial appeared without a byline, only with a subtitle that read Under the Superintendence of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. In the upstairs hallway of their house, two
bookcases are overflowing with yellowing newspapers. The piles are organized
by month, each day’s paper segregated and divided into its sections.
More newspapers line the study and the bedroom. A tall cabinet next to
his bed houses a stack that extends from floor to ceiling. In the entry
hall, a tidy pile on a stool waits to be sorted. The kitchen cupboards
store more newspaper than dry goods. Downstairs, in the living room, his wife’s
library fills a built–in bookshelf that spans the entire wall. “With
a book, you read it and then you have to keep it forever, like a souvenir.
That’s a lot of weight to be carrying around. Very disorganized,”
he often reminded Yvette. “I try to retain information in my mind,
not on a shelf. When I’m done with The Times, I throw it away.
It’s systematic. Without a system, it gets very cluttered.”
Tobin’s first marriage was not a successful
one. He married his high school sweetheart, Phyllis, and they had Ingrid
unexpectedly. She was a sweet child that required more attention than
he was capable of. She once fasted in protest of her bedtime, subsisting
on a strict regime of iced tea and pixie sticks for more than two days.
Ingrid loves her mother, but has always favored Tobin. Since Ingrid was a little girl, Sundays began
at the Seven Seas Diner: After Tobin finished ordering without looking
at the menu, “Two eggs sunny side up, dry wheat toast, well done
home fries, and a coffee,” she would immediately close the tall menu
with a thump, make her most serious face and order “the same.”
Ingrid could perfectly emulate her father, deliberately piercing the egg
yolk with the corner of the triangular toast until it released its yellow
warmth over the soft-white canvas. Diligently, she sopped up the runny
yolk with the remainder of the toast, adding a few pieces of the egg white
to complete the bite. When the eggs were sufficiently erased, Ingrid salt
and peppered the crispy home fries, and poured a healthy circle of ketchup.
Like Tobin, she would separate out the undercooked portions from beneath
the crunchy surface and push them aside. After isolating the favored crunchy
pieces, Ingrid carefully cut and dipped them into the pool of ketchup.
Tobin never flinched as she nearly emptied the sugar dispenser into her
coffee, tore open three containers of half and half, guzzled one, and
poured the remaining two into her mug. They spent the remainder of the
day at Cutter Mill Park, Tobin reading the paper, Ingrid faking injuries
on the swing set to gain his attention. Tobin and Ingrid’s relationship has strained since the divorce. When she turned thirteen, her mother moved them to Park Slope in Brooklyn. She went to public school during the week and on most Sundays, she took the train into Hoboken. Tobin would pick her up from the PATH stop and drive to the Seven Seas Diner for their ritual breakfast. One pale Sunday afternoon after a particularly grueling commute, Ingrid slammed the menu closed and ordered a “cheese omelet, home fries, dry wheat, and a side of bacon.” Tobin peeked from behind his newspaper and interjected,
“No bacon, please.” They maintained a similar relationship throughout her teenage years; Ingrid the self-righteous rebel, Tobin the immutable patriarch. Like a baseball player on a hit streak dreading the day his bat goes cold, Tobin always knew his relationship with the adolescent Ingrid would inevitably decline. “My natural optimism leads me to be skeptical.” He claimed intuitive knowledge that “peaking too early equates to a premature death.”(3) He maintains an odd Darwinian theory that the same urgency which propels overachievers to early success eventually drains them of their long term health. Tobin distilled his past into a series of romantic courtships and painful denouements: His childhood friend Bobby who turned out to be a rat, the death of Ringo who he raised from a puppy, and his first wife. Tobin never loved with the same intensity as he loved his first wife; he has also never despised anyone so viscerally. (3)
Actually, Tobin co-opted the fear from a Times article from February 8th,
1982 titled “Young Success Means Early Death.” The article detailed
Stewart J.H. McCann’s, a Canadian psychologist, research on a theory
he coined the “precocity-longevity hypothesis.” In analyzing
the lives of U.S. governors and presidents, Nobel laureates, and Academy
Award winners he found that those who achieved success in their youth
generally died earlier than their less precocious counterparts. Tobin saw their relationship further unravel
her freshman year in high school. On the ride home from school, Ingrid
walked toward the back of the public bus and found a CD player on her
seat. Without much forethought, she neatly wrapped the cords together
and tucked the device into her bag as if it were her own. An observant
commuter would have noticed the familiarity and ease with which she performed
the maneuver. The next weekend, Ingrid showed up to Sunday brunch listening
to the pop-punk band of the moment. “That’s a nice little toy. A gift
from your mother?” (4)
“In a four-story warehouse on Atlantic Avenue, hundreds of thousands
of lost objects are meticulously catalogued according to the date and
location of discovery. The information is put into a massive filing cabinet
covering the entire second floor. If the original owner is not found after
half a year, the finder can claim the object. Most finders don't bother
making claims, and the objects usually end up going to the city government.”
New York Times, January 2nd, 1987. Tobin knew Ingrid never returned the CD player
and said nothing. When Ingrid went to college in Manhattan, Sunday brunch
quickly transformed into Sunday phone calls. “How is school? Let
me ask you another question, do they have Ivy on the walls off your university
or is that only for the brochures?” Tobin is not prone to dogma and does not prefer
to be rigid; it is a design of necessity. Like with The New York Times,
he prefers to work within the convenience of necessary illusions. After
a few glasses of neat bourbon, Tobin grows wordy and readily admits, “The
Times has its own set of convenient myths. It creates the standard
fat kid whom it relentlessly pummels with hyperbole until his very name
becomes a pejorative, and it plays the role of gadfly gently irking the
powers that be. You know, to create the perception of democracy. But together,
they hinder independent thought and reduce the public to apathy. But if
I read the paper like that, or do anything like that, I’m a cynic,
which is unacceptable. So, I prefer to handle my favorite truths gently.
In synagogue, my friends tell me, ‘Cohen, apathy is a sin like any
other.’ I tell them, ‘What is the harm in reading without your
glasses?’” He used the same system of imposed ignorance
with Judaism that he used with his daughter. Never prodding too hard,
never giving them the opportunity to answer the questions he never asked.
Although tangentially aware of his complacency, Tobin would never concede
to fabricating consent. The inertia of both worlds would force itself
upon him soon enough. Yvette told Tobin what he had implicitly understood
from his last conversation with his daughter, “Ingrid was afraid
to tell you herself. She wants me to tell you that she and Taylor are
engaged.” She often found herself playing the role of intermediary
between Ingrid and Tobin; “An occupational hazard,” she called
it. Tobin was furious. He was unclear of the exact reason he was so angry.
Was it because she defied him, or his religion? He was angry and proud
that Ingrid made such a precise distinction. “She’ll make a
wonderful lawyer one day,” he thought to himself, but his response
to Yvette was, “Why not something ambiguous like David or Adam? Could
she have picked a name more confrontational than Taylor?” “Tobin, she is still your daughter.” “This isn’t a court case Tobin; you
can’t just turn around the question. What about proportionality?
Have you asked yourself if Ingrid marrying a Catholic boy rationally corresponds
to disowning her?” Ingrid and Taylor were married within a few
months, on August 15th, 2003, in a small ceremony in The New York Supreme
Court. The wedding ceremony was followed by a rather elaborate celebration
at the St. Regis Hotel on 5th Avenue funded entirely by the Williams family.
Yvette attended, and under Ingrid’s instruction, did not tell Tobin
about the wedding. Tobin had also made it clear that he would entertain
no talk of their “sacrilegious union” in his house. Aside from
guilt, Yvette thought about the year and few months she had to inform
Tobin before he found out on his own. (5) Her
time turned out to be much shorter. (5)
Ingrid Cohen, a daughter of Tobin Cohen and Phyllis Cohen of Morristown,
New Jersey, now divorced was married yesterday to Taylor Austin Williams,
the son of Robert Dunlap Williams and Barbara Bidwell Williams. The honorable
Russell F. Canan, a magistrate judge, officiated at the New York Supreme
Court of Kings County in Brooklyn. The bride, 20, is keeping her name.
She is a junior at Columbia University and expects her B.A. in English.
Her father is a partner attorney at Cohen Legal Group, a New Jersey firm.
Her mother is a dedicated homemaker. The bridegroom, 21, is a senior at
Columbia University and expects his B.A. in Finance. His father was a
professor of English and linguistics at Rice University in Houston. His
mother is a trustee of Rice University. “That’s out of the question. I don’t want him involved in this, he’s done enough… Besides, I don’t care what he thinks.” As a trained interpreter of the mind, Yvette translated her stepdaughter’s plea as: “Please tell my father everything. This whole thing is quite petty and must be resolved before we cross the threshold of absolution. I very much care what he thinks, and I have too much pride to tell him myself.” Yvette understood what was required of her.
The following Saturday morning, Tobin was reading
The Times on his favorite chair in the study, sipping on a hot tea. He
still had an hour before Shabbat services at Temple B'Nai Bri was to begin,
and he was savoring the sweet spot of the day. Simultaneously, Yvette
had committed to resolving the dilemma with tactics hostile to her usual
values. She decided to abandon her principles of truth at all costs, and
employ the useful tandem of cunning and deceit. Working a pair of heavy,
black handled scissors, she meticulously carved out Ingrid’s wedding
announcement from the newspaper.(6) She found
his personal Torah in his briefcase, and confirmed her long standing suspicions.
Within the fold of nearly every page, Tobin had inserted his reading agenda
for the morning service. After sizing up her work with the other articles
he had already set to fit snuggly into the seam of the book, she whittled
the announcement down a second time to exactly match Tobin’s template.
She opened the Torah to the beginning and removed the second page of an
obtuse article about a literature scholar that compels critics to stop
reading books, and replaced it with his daughter’s wedding announcement.
She was not surprised at the ease in which she executed the scheme, she
always considered herself rather ends-oriented and able to justify nearly
anything; Yvette was startled by her excitement in the subterfuge of the
act. (6) The article “Studying Literature by the Numbers” from the January 22, 2002, The New York Times details Franco Moretti’s, a comparative literature professor at Stanford University, heretical approach to literary study. He claims reading and analyzing novels is an arbitrary affair limited to a few elite texts. In lieu of actually reading books, he advocates graphing and mapping literary genres to understood texts on a more holistic level. Tobin entered the temple, said his “Shabbat Shalom” to the regulars of the bema, and skimmed through the schedule for morning services to see if he recognized the name of the child to be bar-mitzvahed. The name had no meaning, but he thought of a thirteen year old Ingrid, her eyes glassy and tall, eagerly staring at him over the breakfast table. He settled into his reserved seat on the third pew under a plaque etched with his name. He patiently waited for the prayers to conclude and the Rabbi to begin his sermon before opening his prayer book to read The New York Times. After reading the first page of the article Tobin thought, “All the news that’s fit to print, my ass.” He turned the page to find an uncollated excerpt from the Weddings & Celebrations section. He was confused by its placement and then by the sight of his daughter’s name. Scrawled at the bottom of the page in poor penmanship Tobin saw the words, “She’s Pregnant.” (Yvette rationalized that she had not acted deceitfully, but only showed Tobin the entrance to a cellar door he already knew existed.) As the rabbi mumbled something in the background about faith and duty, Tobin walked out mid-sentence, got in his car stacked with newspapers, bought a pair of lean pastrami sandwiches, and drove toward the Upper West Side. ---- A Great Victory for the Proletariat People do the strangest
things out of boredom; Vladimir Veen had the misfortune of accidentally
destroying humanity. He was spending the last few hours of his existence
figuring out what to do with his last few hours of existence. He blamed
his procrastination, as most things, on the residue of his Lunar Affective
Disorder or LAD. A somewhat legitimate psychological disorder typified
by periods of depression during the waxing and waning process, and mania
during the full and new progressions of the moon. During a particularly
manic episode in the Fall of nineteen eighty-three, Vlad assembled a small
cache of celestial charts, lunar maps, and astrological tables and mistakenly
deduced that in space, beyond the grasp of lunar gravity, the erraticism
of his LAD would be neutralized. His faulty, although not entirely incorrect
thesis: The greater the distance from the moon, the more mental stability.
Vladimir was neither a martyr nor suicidal in the classical sense, only
desperate to liberate himself from the cyclical dominion of the moon.
While technically symmetrical (the episodes lasted precisely seven days,)
the intensity of each depressive and manic period varied drastically.
An old Russian proverb states "Two chess matches are not identical
because they begin and end with the same move." On a given week Vlad
could be merely slowed by a mild malaise and stay home watching Ukrainian
daytime television, or he could be convinced of his own blindness and
that his sight was the product of vivid hallucinations. It was not the
severity of the symptoms that he was so desperately trying to tame, only
the torture of waking each morning not knowing what emotions the moon
would bring. After conducting his own research and analysis of Lunar Affective Disorders
(under the narcotic effect of drastic mood swings,) he inaccurately deduced
a positive correlation between: A. The patient’s distance to the
moon and B. The consistency of LAD symptoms. Consequently, Vladimir Veen
volunteered to become a one way Cosmonaut with arguable glory, suspect
utility, and questionable scientific relevance. Ignoring all the possible
physical and emotional tribulations long-term space travel would eventually
inflict upon him, Vlad hoped only for a sound emotional structure. Despite the early disclosure of his LAD, in which the preliminary review
board feigned a great interest, Vladimir Veen was quickly singled out
among the lead candidates. Interkosmos was impressed by his "mild
charisma" (as stated by an unnamed scientist,) and found that his
deliberate manner of unhurried movements would be "a great asset
in zero gravity." They found his stoicism more appropriate for space
travel than the zeal of the patriots or the fatalism of the nihilists.
"It is as if this one is never fully awake." His sturdy physical
build and mental endurance honed during a lifetime of rapid mood shifts
worked to his advantage. He was even artful in selling his assets to the
committee. "With the aid of my disorder, I am accustomed to handling
drastic alterations in my reality." "How will you tolerate the symptoms of your disorder alone and in
space?" asked the curious psychologist. "Do you have any reservations about the conclusion of the mission?" Initially, the elimination training rounds were mild in comparison to
the rigorous regime instituted for Yuri Gagarin and the original Cosmonauts.
Yuri was the first man in space and was named the Executive Director of
the Cosmonaut Election Committee for the Galileo Mission. As the remaining
candidates dwindled, they were subjected to more arduous tasks. Some were
placed in high-G centrifuges designed for scientists to study the physical
limits of motion sickness, while others were forced to endure rectal probes
and intravenous lines as they conducted stress training activities. Vladimir
Veen’s almost supernaturally dense bone mass and unusual levels of
tolerance for gravitational forces placed him ahead of the remaining handful
of mediocre candidates. He spent much of his training spinning inside
sealed chambers of various pressures and sizes, exhibiting only mild signs
of discomfort and nausea. His already poor mental hygiene had desensitized
him to the physical stress and pain. The intense strain of his training
was almost a welcome distraction from the dissonance of his LAD. Vladimir Veen officially won over Comrade Gagarin and the Interkosmos
review board with his relaxed style and complacency during a ninety-one
day stint in the cramped captivity of an immobile isolation chamber, three
days longer than the existing record held by the American, Alan Shepard.
Although the intent of the exercise was to prepare Vladimir for the decade-long
isolation that awaited him in space, he spent his time anxiously hoping
for the sanity that awaited him in space. While many of the other dismal
candidates were self-proclaimed recluses and misanthropes, they were unable
to handle even a month without human interaction, a decent cup of tea,
or the ability to go for a proper walk. One exceptionally feeble candidate
named Ivan Ilyich was pulled out of the tank after only six days of repeatedly
mumbling "wod-ka wod-ka" at barely audible volumes. In contrast,
Vladimir seemed at ease in the chamber, familiar with the emotional turmoil
and the coldness of extreme insularity. As Vlad struggled with the intolerable
pain of depression and mania invading his thoughts and even bleeding into
one another, Interkosmos confused his blank submissiveness for a stoic
resolve. Vladimir had never suffered from an "orbital complex," defined
by the Interkosmos psychologists as a need to rotate around others. An
excerpt of their mental evaluation: Analysis: Comrade Veen finds relationships tiresome and eventually unsatisfying. Subject is unable to grasp that citizens only require social formalities or paper sincerity, and often feels the energy he exerts in human interactions is emotionally disproportionate to the amount he cares. Eventually, subject’s relationships deteriorate and grow labored because he is unable to give attention to the citizens who crave it the most. Subject insists on knowing the guest list of social gatherings in advance, solely in order to know who to avoid. Subject claims symptoms to be a consequence of a fictitious disease coined Lunar Affective Disorder. There exists two basic styles of eccentricity: One is interesting and the other is repulsive, Comrade Veen belongs to
the former. Assessment: Deranged mental state and negligible concern for human contact
ideal for Galileo Mission. The duration of the Galileo mission was unprecedented. Even at launch
time, Yuri and the majority of Interkosmos did not believe that Vladimir
Veen would actually survive to the day he and Galileo were to be destroyed.
Given that Cosmonauts in space flight average 1% - 2% monthly bone loss
and suffer from a drastic decrease in red blood cell production, Interkosmos
had estimated him to make it six and half years or just long enough to
reach Jupiter’s orbit. After twelve years in space, the gamma and X-rays from the sun gradually
increased Vlad’s cell production to malignant levels and formed a
cancerous tumor in his stomach the size of a baseball that he was reminded
of every few hours with distant, blunt pangs. In the small, square lavatory
mirror, Vladimir saw the effect or lack of effect of gravity on his blood.
The fluids of his legs and feet had pooled permanently in his chest and
face, rounding his once strong jaw line and bloating his cheeks a pasty,
alcoholic red. Vladimir died without knowing that his heart has weakened
and slowed to the extent that it would no longer function properly on
Earth (although he has his doubts.) Circling Jupiter for the thirty-sixth time, Vladimir finally took a personal
assessment of the logic that led him to know the exact moment of his demise.
The calculations about the positive correlation between distance from
the moon and the constancy of his LAD symptoms were not entirely inaccurate.
The symptoms did not stabilize, but gradually deteriorated to negligible
once Galileo drifted beyond the atmosphere of Mars. Initially, Vladimir Veen enjoyed both the luxuries and the burdens of
sanity. His thoughts had slowed considerably and by the time he reached
the orbit of Jupiter’s moon Callisto, the battling cacophony of voices
in his mind finally became lucid and coherent. He was unfamiliar with
the quietness that he mistook for the complacency of the sane. For a brief
time, he was able to successfully navigate his mind and discern the logical
from the emotional, the clever from the selfish, and the sensible from
the destructive. He could feel emotions that were once alien to him: nostalgia
for his youth, desire for a smoked sturgeon, and even a longing to play
chess and drink tea from the samovar with his deceased brother. He was grateful, but had underestimated the responsibilities and the
maintenance that a sane mind required. Nothing had prepared him for the
archeology of an unexplored soul. As with his LAD, his thoughts began
to stray beyond his control. "I am so bored with life. How do the
sane suffer through the monotony of existence?" A lifetime of poor
mental hygiene had ill-prepared Vlad for the tediousness of life in space.
At 2:57 P.M. Vlad and Galileo were scheduled to be traveling 200 kilometers
per second toward Jupiter. Galileo was programmed to destruct at 480 kilometers
inside the atmosphere, separating the craft’s eighty-five thousand
components in a blur of liquefying shrapnel. At 2:59 P.M. the temperature
was to reach 650 degrees Celsius, vaporizing all of Galileo’s outdated
aluminum components. By 3:00 P.M., one thousand kilometers into the atmosphere,
the titanium components were to be disintegrated. Somewhere in the three
minute gap Vladimir Veen was scheduled to die. Jupiter is a gaseous planet with a radius of forty-four thousand miles,
big enough to contain all our solar system’s planets and their moons.
Under the Interkosmos itinerary Vladimir Veen should have vanished after
barely breaching Jupiter’s threshold, leaving no clue of his humble
earthly origin. In fact, obliteration is precisely what Interkosmos had
planned for the unlikely team. When the Galileo mission was first introduced by Interkosmos in the early
seventies its purpose was to trace a path between Jupiter’s four
moons, and investigate the possibility of frozen sub-surface salt water
on the moons of Europa and Io, a moon Vlad later discovered was orbiting
an asteroid. The Galileo mission survived into the eighties because Brezhnev
continued funding the mission as a Cold War military strategy, discovering
extraterrestrial life forms before the Americans evolved into a "tactical
defense strategy," or officially for the United Nations an "alternative
water source." By the time Galileo was finally launched on October
18, 1989, the demise of communism was inevitable under Gorbachev and the
mission morphed for the last time into "exploring the frontiers of
the universe in search of an economic benefit for the citizens of the
Soviet Republic." For Vladimir Veen the means were utterly irrelevant, his fate was the
same. Although a craft capable of a return journey was a scientific impossibility,
Interkosmos would not even allow Vlad the dignity of dying naturally in
orbit. Their paramount fear was that if Galileo and its humanoid cargo
were to crash into the fertile moons of Jupiter, it would transfer microbes
from Earth to the oceans of Jupiter’s moons. The danger of contaminating
the waters and creating a species that might one day destroy the Soviet
Union was too much irony for the Polit-buro to bear. None of the monotheistic texts prohibit suicide or look upon it with
express disapproval. He never regarded his election for the Galileo mission
as a form of suicide. Vladimir could only bring himself to refer to his
mission as a "voluntary death." In Moscow, only the old and
the wealthy are concerned about death. He continued to type into his journal,
my life has become exhausting. I can no longer suffer the repetitiveness
of dehydrated meats, starscapes, and vertical naps. Life is not something
so precious that it should be protracted at any cost. "A rationalization?"
He thought aloud. The most logical remedy for a poisoned mind, he typed,
was an opportune death. He never forced himself to answer the archetypal
suicidal dilemma before embarking into outer space: Whether the difficulty
of life outweighed his fear of death? He thought of it as a question that
everyone must eventually answer: what change will my death leave on existence?
A clumsy experiment,t he realized on the eve of his death, one that destroys
the capacity to entertain answers. Vladimir Veen would never learn how
complex his answer was to become. It’s not easy battling the will
to live. It invades me, no matter how illogical. He was no longer comfortable with the "resolution" of his mission.
Why shall I die an actor in someone else’s play? His life support
and his food rations would last at least another year, but that would
merely be a delay, a brief interlude at best. While death was an inevitability,
he resolved to "Fuck the Interkosmos itinerary." I will end
this of my own accord. Everyone knows they are going to die, but it is
downright cruel to know the exact moment. He carefully folded the keyboard
and placed it back into the storage compartment beneath the navigation
system. He leaned back in his captain’s chair that had doubled as
his observation deck, reading lounge, toilet seat, and dining room for
so many years. Vlad disengaged the automatic pilot with the flick of switch,
and was amazed at how easy it was to override Interkosmos. Did they have
that much faith in his loyalty or in his insanity? He altered the coordinates
a mere fifteen degrees, took a deep breath, and set the velocity for maximum
toward the massive ocean of Europa. In the last few moments of his existence he could think only of himself
and his infliction of sanity. He pondered the absurdity of wanting something
so desperately that he was willing to die for it. For an instant he debated
aborting his new course and spending the remainder of his tedious existence
in orbit, playing out mundane and circular routines until his body succumbed
to its alien environment. But once a decision of such principle has been
set into motion it is too difficult to abandon. Regardless, the parachute
had already been deployed. Within seconds of entering Europa’s atmosphere,
Vladimir Veen’s fragile internal organs were crushed by the immense
gravitational pressure and he died a painful and melodramatic death. Half-melted and compacted into a fraction of its original size, Galileo struggled on through layers of atmosphere until it smashed into an ice sheet on the surface of the moon. For nearly a million years nothing happened. On a particularly mild afternoon, Vlad’s defrosted feces began courting the water’s thawing hydrogen molecules and within a millennium a new carbon based life form was spawned. The new species eventually destroyed humanity for no stated reason other than "the full progression of the moon." ----The Morning Lena Discovered Color
Many years later, as she faced the altar
on her wedding day, Lena was to remember that pale morning when her father
took her to discover color. Her father, a clinical man only capable of
reserved affection, led a languid Lena – who had yet to fully awaken
– by the hand to a small creek on the outskirts of town. In his pronounced
and calculated manner, he unsheathed a quartz prism from a tainted handkerchief
and angled it toward the tops of the rigid chestnut trees to capture the
white light for his daughter. As her
husband unsheathed the glimmer of her wedding band, Lena recalled the
penetrating awe that consumed her little body that day upon seeing the
dewy, pallid light pierce the quartz and dissolve into seven distinct
colors ranging from the fantastic to the mundane. She remembered the granular
texture of the tree stump coarsely brushing the underside of her legs,
and the distinct sound of each color humming the tune of its respective
wavelength, from long to short. But it was with the clearest lucidity
that Lena relived the overwhelming frustration and visceral distrust of
her body that enraptured has as her father, an ophthalmologist, explained
in a stoical voice of unassuming gravity (that he usually reserved for
diagnosing his patients), "Lena, our eyes are blind to the full spectrum
of all color possibilities." On the
most basic primordial level of human understanding transcending the limits
of her toddler-hood, her kindergarten consciousness disrobed and compacted
the vast span of the rainbow stretching from red to violet into a mere
fragment of the electromagnetic spectrum of light. Lena wept profoundly.
As the doctor brushed the moist, limp blond hair from her face, she imagined
all of the spectacular colors that she was forbidden to see swirling around
her crown in an eloquent dance of shadows and light. In a futile attempt
to console his sobbing daughter, the father impassively promised "whatever
colors you have in your mind, I will show them to you."
Lena was
comfortably aware that she was born without the human drive for efficiency.
The root of her affliction with colors and reality was an involuntary
adherence to the elementary principles of logic, but she possessed the
remarkable ability to ignore them. She was proud of her "engaged
listlessness" and resented the negative connotations of her "conscious
disinterest." She would try to explain herself at the brief intervals
of silence during dinner. "Even lions are incredibly lazy, lounging
in the sun and laying around the watering hold." It was on her graduation day that the culmination of her family’s expectations and her personal aimlessness were forced to intersect. Just as light simultaneously maintains properties of both particles and waves, Lena was simultaneously aimless and driven, wooden and delicate, immigrant and American. Like light, she was not fickle, but fractured – she embodied both passion and indifference concurrently, alternating freely between the two. As she sat quietly tearing amidst the sea of flat caps, dangling tassels, and starch black gowns attempting to partake in the unfamiliar ceremony of high school graduation, she resolved to submit to neither passion nor aimlessness, but would act with the cohesive inconsistency of light, shifting forms at her whim. At twenty,
on the evening she fell in love, Lena wept. Her courtship with the future
husband started quickly and in accordance with most customary formalities.
The ritual officially began on the campus of the small liberal arts college
they both attended in rural Virginia under the auspices of a series of
fortuitous happenings. Although both medieval literature majors from neighboring
"northern" cities, their paths had never overlapped until well
into the spring semester of Lena’s sophomore year. While there is
no definitive mating season for humans, Lena only began new relationships
in the spring or summer. A practice she was loyal to more out of habit
than because of timing or superstition. They met in the Chaucer section
of the library, under the legitimacy of daylight. A good omen for Lena,
who held a strong presumption of doubt against anyone she met under the
veil of night. A full moon appeared reluctantly on the evening Lena was to fall in love. He walked deliberately slow according to the design of the stone footpath leading toward her dorm, striving to be neither early nor late. He liked to keep his hands in his pockets when he was nervous, fiddling with coins, methodically counting them again and again by feel. He arrived at her all-girls dorm house with one pocketed hand counting coins, the other gripping a slightly wilted red rose he had torn from a carefully pruned bush along the way. He knew that ladies appreciated roses, but was unaware of Lena’s strong affinity of roses due to rather incidental motivations. She was not merely drawn to the rose’s organic seductiveness, but to its technical value. An immaculately crafted rose bud satisfied her childish penchant for geometric patterns, symmetry, and primary colors crafted during an adolescence that was typified by an elaborate collection of mobiles, coloring books, and her father’s ophthalmology journals.
Lena graciously
accepted his hand and then the flower offering, first delicately sniffing
the rose bud then allowing herself to be led across the lobby, out the
foyer and down the entrance hall steps. Before reaching the bottom of
the stairs, she was unexpectedly overwhelmed by the penetrating atmospherics
of the moment. The smell of his shirt, the cut of her dress, the jealously
of her roommate’s gaze, the calm of holding his hand. The gravity
of the moment grew too intense, forcing Lena to abruptly wilt, loosely
let fall the rose, and reluctantly cry. She did not cry because she released
the flower or for the beauty of the wilted rose. She cried only for the
veracity of color. She wept because the rose was not red, but merely light
waves partially reflected off the delicate petals after the rose had already
ingested the remaining six colors. Lena cried in disgust at her constant
struggle with reality. "Beyond the fact of a rainbow’s inherent
inadequacies," she mumbled beneath her sobs, "there are no colors
– only assorted waves of light in varying lengths and amplitudes." "Are you alright Lena?" he awkwardly gasped in confusion as he knelt to speak to her. "I’m sorry, I know I’m being just awful. It’s just that if there are no real colors, then the world is only a playground of illusions." The future husband was not so much confused as he was surprised. He didn’t let go of her hand and spoke in a whisper because it seemed appropriate. "Lee-nah" he softly rolled off his palette and spoke like a child reciting a memorized poem for the first time. "Saying there are no colors is like saying everything is relative to the individual perception. Relativism depends on constants and the stability of universals. Like with color, your perception of red is a subjective experience because the wavelengths referred by us using the same color name will almost always differ. But if you look the biological foundations of color, there’s universality in the use of red across most cultures and languages. Color is subjective, but we all share the same intersubjective tools and touchstones of observations." She knew from that moment on that their marriage was an inevitability.
The ophthalmologist
stood proudly beside his daughter in a contrived regal stance. His body
had grown more rounded since the onset of his blindness. His colleagues
had warned him about attempting to remove his own cataracts, but the consequences
were indelible. A few extraneous slights of the hand caused by a misperception
of the movements of his reflection in the surgical mirror had left the
capsules in both of the ophthalmologist’s eyes completely opaque.
Although nostalgic about the ability to see, he had always been careful
not to succumb to the inherent dangers of nostalgia, and even took a mild
pleasure in the marked improvement of his memory and posture since the
cloudless afternoon he inadvertently blinded himself. He stared
with fervor in the direction of his daughter’s voice, struggling
to imagine the shape and color of her smile. He muted his wife’s
gentle tearing and the sounds of camera bulbs flashing, feeling only the
warmth of the artificial light splashing across his face. It was the sound
of his daughter’s muffled sobs that drew his attention, the sound
of which had always scratched upon his soul. He recalled the morning he
took Lena to Moose Creek and how she cried and cried when he showed her
that only a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum is visible to the
human eye. Ultimately, it was the ophthalmologist’s blindness that
made his daughter’s affliction of color clear. He empathized with
her suspicious about the fidelity of reality and the listless sensation
of unreality that a mistrust of your senses carries. Don’t all positivist
disciples of science find the privileging of thought over the empirical
senses the greatest vice of humanity? Blindness led him to the unnerving
axiom that so much of reality – or other people’s reality –
is so drastically different than his own. It was
many years ago in medical school that for the sake of science, Lena’s
father resolved to stop believing in coincidences or in the tenets of
chaos. "If you believe in a sustained chaos," he professed,
"then you give up on any order in the universe. Even the simplest
of children understand that beauty and knowledge is observing patterns
in a seemingly chaotic world." Lena was one of the few children who
grasped this concept all too well, but her asphyxiating sense of consciousness
forced her to pierce holes in the details of existence and find dissonance
in design. On her wedding day, the ophthalmologist’s blindness finally allowed him to see what his daughter had learned that fateful morning. As he gracefully whirled her across the dance floor beneath the gaze of their family and friends, he realized the paradoxical beauty of the consequences of showing his only daughter the limits of the visible spectrum of light. He grew both pensive and proud. "Dad?" she asked. "What are you thinking about?" His stare was slightly askew. "Everyone sees everything Lena, it is merely a question of whether you decide to pay attention." Curious words of encouragement Lena thought, but she found them poignant nonetheless. ---- In the first moments of the grayish morning, Lolo Lefkowitz knows that
the architecture of his sleep has been gravely altered. He awakes a few
moments before the alarm is set to ring in the new apartment. A detail
that indents profoundly upon him as he realizes through the intersection
of brief and seemingly unrelated dreams that inconsistency is not a flaw,
but an inevitable consequence of reality, a cruel and unforgiving insight
that will force Lolo to reassess whether his condition is an aberration
or a gift. The previous night had been Lolo’s first acquaintance with a normal
eight-hour sleep pattern. It was his only night away from his childhood
bedroom and the distressed yellow pullout sofa-bed he had inherited from
his father’s smoking den. It was that same morning Lolo was obliged
to accept that randomness is not diametrically opposed to order. Lolo has never been able to maintain a respectable grasp of his internal
chronology. His compulsion for logical consistency coupled with a conspicuously
offset circadian rhythm had resulted in severe sleep dysfunctions. Up
until the night before, his anomalous conglomeration of syllogisms and
sleeping disorders had effectively distanced Lolo from the full workings
of reality. From the redundancy of being born on Christmas to missing
an acceptance on the Dartmouth admissions grid by a single question on
the SAT, Lolo has been plagued by lost details. Consequently, his entire
existence has been blemished by a muted shade of unreality and ill-timed
unravelings. His attic bedroom was directly above that of his parents. For the entirety
of his twenty-five years, Lolo had tread lightly with uneasy steps. Despite
three layers of carpeting and other assorted soundproofing measures, he
always felt conscious that his parents could hear the creak of his every
footstep. He was correct, his parents could hear his every footstep. Adolescence
disagreed with him on the whole; it was incomplete and unsatisfying to
the extent that it was unfinished and void of substance. He was bothered
by inconsistencies in personalities, unseasonable weather patterns, even
a plastic bag that refused to dislodge itself from a tree despite the
willful urgings of the wind. Lolo still craved what all children initially
desire -- a comprehensive understanding of the details of their immediate
reality. All normal organisms adjust their internal timing from an instinctual
25-hour schedule to a 24-hour rhythm to match the pace of the solar day.
Lolo’s rigid internal rhythms were unable to make the necessary adjustments
to the 24-hour day. The consequences of the vestigial sixty minutes have
been indelible, staining nearly every crevice of his biology and altering
his most basic homoeostatic processes. The proper movements of sleeping,
waking, and dreaming never made their presence wholly known to Lolo until
this fateful morning his circadian rhythm was jostled into alignment. He strived for a moderate lifestyle, but missed the essence of the concept.
Lolo worked under the premise that moderation was somehow a balance of
existing equally between both polar extremes. After waking each day in
the early afternoon, Lolo would begin his morning routine with yoga sun
salutation asanas. Then, Lolo would dress in a form-fitting chocolate
and tan sweat suit and jog nearly six kilometers along a not particularly
scenic route. He would stop at the Plantation Coffee Shop to purchase
a large latte and smoke a slim joint in the neighboring parking lot. While
his parents did not quite understand the semantics of his routine, they
never wanted to subvert the opportunity to see their son fully dressed
and doing something. The Lefkowitzs had always longed for a normal circadian rhythm for their
son, going as far as to envy other parents for their childrens’ intrinsic
attachment to the shifts and disruptions of temperature and light. "Very late to be waking, no Leon?" His father asked in a husky
Polish cadence. Lolo paused at the front door and adjusted his socks to
fit snugly along the meat of his calves. He tied his laces with a double
knot. Later he would be amazed at his own futility when the sneakers would
unlace near the chain video store built nearly three years ago, but still
registered as ‘new’ to Lolo. He reached for the knob, paused,
and answered in a slow drawl atypical for a Binghamton resident, "It
is rather late, isn’t it Pop?" "Where are you going? Running to that coffee place of yours?"
his mother inquired in a similar accent, only slightly more refined and
reminiscent of the sing-songy tone Europeans use when speaking English
with a level of command. "Yes Mother, just like every morning." "Only my son calls one in afternoon - the morning." Lolo shrugged. "Still smoking cigarettes? A good Polish boy -- eh?" His father
interjected. "Later Pops." The Lefkowitzs had made it clear to Lolo that
they thought he was capable of more than the routine into which his life
had fallen. It was not that Lolo disagreed with his parents’ assessment,
it was that there was nothing he felt accountable for. Parents, Lolo understood,
have an overwhelming genetic claim in their children’s welfare that
is destined to suffer an inevitable series of disappointments. Children,
Lolo reasoned, have no corresponding duty to their parents. Each Wednesday and Friday while he jogged, he anticipated an encounter
with Arlette. She was a forbiddingly cute barista that worked the coffee
machine with an intimacy that puzzled Lolo. He liked Arlette for her malaise
and her superficial frigidness; it was sign of precocious cynicism and
honesty that transcended the vacancy of reflexive niceties. He had never
been able to treat strangers and acquaintances with the presumption of
doubt that they deserved. He was severely attracted when she asked, "Low fat or whole?"
with a slight involuntary sneer as she stared off over his shoulder. He
was not the least bit off put by her giving ‘his’ coffee to
another customer and responding, "Oh, I forgot" without even
the faintest glimmer of sincerity. He did not mind her impractical loyalty
to tank tops in the central New York winter as a thinly-veiled effort
to brandish a tribal tattoo that gripped the thin circumference of her
left tricep before it snaked around her arm to the base of her elbow.
A sigh teamed with an exasperated, "What did you want again?"
was enough to drive him into a fervor. He was content merely watching
her move in her barista grace; to get another showing of Arlette in her
coffee dance was not merely acceptable, it was encouraged. He studied her as she moved: twice, she tapped the coffee dispenser with
the thump of her two longest fingers allowing the grounds to fall into
the metal basket at the end of the espresso holder. With a nimble force
reminiscent of a well executed tennis forehand, she jammed it back into
the entrance station, and curved it hard laterally into a soft arc into
its locked position. She ignited the water pressure to run through the
grounds with the firm push of a button. While most people push buttons
feebly, taking for granted a machine’s sensitivity, Lolo noticed
that Arlette pushed buttons with all her weight and intensity. She triggered
buttons mistrustingly with definitive movement, expecting -- almost daring
the machine not to heed her command. She lifted the half-gallon of milk by the handle with the familiarity
of a woman that has lifted that handle at every conceivable possibility
of weight. She swept the unsuspecting gallon off the counter and into
the squared stainless steel pitcher, filling it with the white glue-like
consistency that milk takes on when poured from a height. It was climactic
for Lolo when Arlette pierced the steam nozzle into the pitcher and circulated
it with a movement so slight as to foam the milk without bruising it.
After the milk was hot enough, she tilted the pitcher sieved by a spoon
that protected the foam from prematurely escaping and filled the recycled
brown coffee cup with steamed milk. Quickly, this was followed by an insistent
dump of espresso. Finally her long, thin fingers would deftly spoon the
remaining foam on top of the spun coffee, only to conceal her labored
creation with a white plastic cap. His only complaint was that she was
often premature with her milk steaming, and would not allow his drink
the opportunity to reach its optimal temperature. He never expected their first encounter to unfold as it did. One afternoon,
she called after him in the parking lot. She saw him smoking his grass.
"I felt weird asking inside, but can I have some of that?" she
asked. "My name is Arlette," she said, still half exhaling the
smoke. "Hey, I’m Lolo." "Why Lolo?" She smiled. "Because Leonard became Leon, then Lolo." As she passed the
joint back from her fingertips to his, he snuck a caress from off the
tops of her fingers and disguised them as customary to the pass. She noticed
the modest impropriety and said nothing. They passed a few moments sharing
the joint in silence and Lolo began to think. She’ll find it odd
if you keep silent. Say something to her, anything. Don’t let her
think she’s got you intimidated. If she’s the least bit cool,
a silence can be profound. It creates a kind of amorous complicity, I
like that. She’s not very talkative either; I always had her pinned
as the rather serious type. Not so much prudish, but reserved. She’s
not the type to laugh at cheap jokes, just for the sake of laughing to
break a silence. It would take something sincerely funny to make her laugh.
"Lolo, that’s a funny name." She said giggling. Say something
ambiguous enough so that it sounds cool, but without really revealing
anything. "Yeah, it has its advantages," he replied. Not
bad, not bad. She was wearing an amber ring of no particular distinction.
Lolo reached in and lifted her hand to get a better look at the ring.
"Is this amber?" he asked. "It’s really nice." "Hey Lolo, thanks for the smoke, but I’ve got to get back to
work." "Yeah – sure - later." Maybe it’s better this
way. His parents never doubted the severity of their child’s unnatural
aberrations from the normal patterns of sleep. Initially, they blamed
themselves. "If you had not insisted on naming the boy something
so bohemian like ‘Lolo,’ he would not be compelled to act as
odd as his name," Jadwiga stated matter of factly. "His name is Leonard." "Stop being silly Tomasz. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Now
the child truly is ‘American.’ Are you proud?" His off-kilter biological rhythms had not merely disrupted his sleep
cycles, they had made it difficult for him to distinguish between his
self-image and the image that his peers had constructed of him. Psychologists
theorize that human intelligence was spawned with the ability to delay
immediate gratification for greater future rewards. Lolo had come to believe
that self-consciousness, or the ability to distinguish your perception
of yourself from others’ perception of you, is what accounts for
the mild genetic differentiation between humans and other mammals. A less
clumsy distinction, Lolo believed, was necessary to maintain the proper
ambiguity when generalizing about the tendencies of humanity. The possibility of his own perceptions conflicting with the perceptions
of others undermined any sense of objectivity for him, and accordingly
the order he so desperately desired. He was unsure if it was the hazy
sense of unreality that somnolence carried with it, or if it was simply
a larger manifestation of his compulsive need to isolate the different
foods on a plate according to preference, but Lolo found the sound of
world’s colliding often louder than their formation. He was forced
to spend the better part of his adolescence on taxonomy, dedicatedly arranging
the spheres of his life in precise, compartmentalized containers. Lolo
was always careful never to blend them. Each one neatly labeled and segregated
appropriately, according to place and consequently time. Family; School
Friends; Girls; Camp Friends; etc. It was not his preference to live in
the dark matter between human interactions, in fact Lolo considered himself
quite affable. His distance was a design of necessity. In the fall of his thirteenth year, the same year his parents had sent
him away to a summer camp for athletic children, Lolo was forced to feel
the impact of his first collision. He was not surprised by the agility
of the other boys who were physically superior, or by his ability to separate
himself from the mediocre boys who suffered from being neither good nor
bad. What awed Lolo was the amplification of weight and gravity that sports
radiated when girls were watching. The Darwinian parallel between chest
pounding male chimpanzees jockeying for status to court females and making
a slick floater in the lane to impress Bunk Six had never touched him
so plainly before. He was not particularly graceful, but skillfully adept
at converting broken plays and missteps into wonderful, circus-like acts
of calculation tainted with an irrefutable awkward grace. Lolo came to
understand that it is not the unfolding of the act that is important,
but how it is remembered. He loved camp, and not merely for its leisurely solace, but for its organized
leisurely solace. He was enamored with the simplicity of the routine,
and the lucidity of being that a schedule offered him: Flag Raising; Breakfast;
Bunk Inspection; Morning Activity; Lunch; Boating or Swimming; Sports;
Free Time; Arts and Crafts; Dinner; Evening Activity; Canteen; After-Hours
Raids. Everyday was fundamentally the same, but the details varied greatly.
Without knowing what every single person within the camp was doing, it
was nevertheless possible for Lolo to know something about how the camp
as a whole behaved. Camp refined and encouraged Lolo’s desire for
order and calibration. Years later Lolo would look at his camp experience
as a time of rehabilitation for sleep dysfunctions, fending off demons
with structure and routine. Everything was permitted to be ritualized within the parameters of amusement
park field trips, camp outs, and even sexual play. To this day Lolo credits
that graceful floater in a crowded lane to the sudden interest of Leyla
Sandusky later that night at evening activity. They had a normal and even
somewhat routine romance that followed the established summer camp practice
of rarely interacting during daylight hours aside from whimsical dining
hall glances, and late night rather precocious sexual play in the bunks.
Sneaking out of his bunk, traversing nearly 2 kilometers to the girls
side, and into the old wood cabins toward the proper bed in a room scattered
with sleeping girls and frilly sheets was both pronounced and elaborated,
but never obstructed by the accommodating counselors who, like disinterested
parents, neither facilitated nor hindered the ritual. The process offered
him the comfort and legitimacy of normalcy that came so easy for the other
children. For the first time he was not reprimanded for his sleeping habits,
but encouraged and even praised (yes, even praised) for torpidly lurking
around after all the campers had fallen asleep and the counselors had
returned sluggish and inebriated from the woods smelling like sex and
cheap beer. During the days, no one questioned his lethargy that could
not clearly distinguish between the dream world and the responsibilities
of waking life. Camp life thoroughly agreed with him. Lolo’s trouble with Sandusky (the campers and staff were exclusively
referred to by nickname or last name) only arose in the denouement of
August when she graciously pronounced, "Binghamton! That’s great
Lo! I live in Endicott. I can’t wait to see your house." He dreaded even the possibility of such a tryst, or worse yet, a formalized
encounter. It was not the instability of her hair color, her tendency
to speak in greeting cards, or even her inability to etch herself into
his memory that offended him. He was repulsed by the prospect of observing
the careful meta-image he had constructed for her of his home life collide
with the actual reality of Sandusky touching and smelling his actual home.
Lolo was not concerned about her opinion of the house or his family’s
dynamic, as much as he restlessly anticipated the interaction between
her and anyone he knew intimately, but who had not known one another.
He did not want either of them invading and dismantling the reality he
laboriously constructed with his own loose sketches, anecdotes, and ambiguities. Lolo suspected that his father suffered from a similar ailment. After
reminiscing on his cold-war childhood in Poland with both affection and
disdain, his father would unfailingly offer a long audible sigh followed
by a well known Polish proverb that served more as a caveat than a life
lesson: "Nostalgia nie jest jak wiele uczucie dla historii jak jest
op_akuj_cy zgub_ okresu dojrzewania." ("Nostalgia is not as
much the romanticizing of history as it is grieving the loss of adolescence.)
Lolo always wondered if his father was alluding to the inherent subjectivity
of history, or if he was again insinuating that Lolo was ‘squandering’
his youth. Either way, Lolo understood this is as nostalgia for a reality
that had never fully introduced itself to him. Lolo began spending three nights a week at the Bartle Library at the
State College on the midnight to 7:00am shift, technically as a Night
Circulation Supervisor although there was no one else to supervise. The
schedule allowed him to sleep from 9am until 1pm, traditionally his strongest
hours of sleep. His nights working primarily consisted of flipping through
periodicals, reading through books and copying out sentences of interest,
searching for the overweight cat Percival, and returning misplaced and
mis-shelved books. After a few months of work, he nurtured a great affinity
for the Dewey Decimal Classification system and its noble goal of imposing
order on chaos. Many nights surrounded by books and numbers Lolo would create parallel
hierarchical systems arranging emotions, moments, and even individuals
from the general to the specific. Arlette was a 523.74: 500 = Women; 520
= Beautiful; 523 = Aloof Sensuality; 523.7 = Mediterranean Features; 523.74:
Presumptive Intimacy. His heretical fascination with mathematical mysticism
was further encouraged by his readings of the Osiris Cults who based the
construction of the Pyramids according to an intuitive understanding of
Pi, the Pythagorean school that was as much a religion as a study of mathematics,
and the Kabbalists that believed they could channel God through numbers.
Lolo had never done better than a C in Math throughout high school and
junior college; an irony, that he would freely acknowledge, that was not
lost upon him. It was the nights when he was not working that troubled him. The average
person spends about 25 years of his life sleeping, at his current rate
Lolo would be lucky to reach 15. He was unsure of how his sleep debt was
accumlating since he began work at the library. He thought the contrary
seemed true. According to his alarm clock Lolo was sleeping for more consistent
hours than he had ever done before. He also noticed that he could no longer
remember the detailed blueprints of his dreams, aside from a faint recurring
one about the mundaneness of writing. His dream recall had been completely lost, ending a practice he had loyally
followed since childhood. He would recount tales of the fantastic to his
parents at meals, assembling an orderly account of his dreams, shading
in the necessary details he could not recount with the proper depth in
the noble Freudian vein of organizing the commotion of dreams. Six months
into his librarian job the integrity of Lolo’s sleep had completely
dissipated into unworkable limits. Since he was a toddler, Lolo was unable to satisfy the requisite twelve
hour sleep cycle required for children his age. Due to his inability to
adapt to set times for sleeping and waking, he would remain awake for
days. manically finger-painting geometric hopscotch patterns and mathematical
sequences on the kitchen tile as his parents slept. Eventually, he would
collapse and over-compensate with a prolonged hibernation period that
once extended to nearly 56 hours, causing him to miss the largest snowstorm
of the decade. As Lolo reached adolescence his difficulties with sleep and order persisted,
but grew more acute and subtle. His circadian rhythm developed into a
less erratic system, yet profoundly more disturbing. Lolo’s desired
sleep time was delayed precisely sixty minutes each evening, which carried
over into a sixty-minute delay of his desired waking time in the morning.
Lolo spent much of his adolescence in a constant search to retrieve his
"missing hour" by running up downward moving escalators, asking
the bus driver to drive to school in reverse, and excitedly changing clocks
throughout the house to the previous hour without telling his parents.
Fifty-three minutes after falling asleep, Lolo would prop himself up
against the back cushion of the sofa part of the bed, pull the blanket
up to his waist, and reach down in the narrow alley between the sofa and
the wall. He would retreive a black leather bound journal with an attached
pen that his Uncle Stefano had bought for him on his trip to The Tatras.
For roughly three hours nightly, Lolo proceeded to draft a sollipsictic,
yet elegantly composed novel in the economic prose of Hemingway. When he awoke, he would have no recollection of the event or the contents
of his novel. Lolo would never remember that the dream world was more
vivid than the waking one or how naturally he was able to navigate it.
In the margins between dreaming and waking Lolo was unhinged by endless
possibilites, dreaming yet able to exert some measure of his own will,
weaving new landscapes and personalities into the fabric of a reality
that he had constructed. Arlette wanted to name the novel "something postmodern like The
Consequences of an American Diaspora or A Casualty of the French
Gaze." Lolo figured that he should at least entertain her
ideas for the title; after all, it was technically Arlette that ‘discovered’
the novel in the Christopher Columbus sense of the word. They had started
dating seriously rather quickly since their encounter in the parking lot;
an inertia that progressed at speeds beyond Lolo’s better judgment.
He did not feel powerless to stop the bodies of force set in motion, but
he was unsure if that was what he wanted. Despite having her own apartment not more than half a mile away with
an absentee roommate, Arlette made herself quite comfortable in Lolo’s
household. She began immediately by referring to his parents by their
first names; a feat of such boldness that Lolo had fully expected his
mother to remove her immediately from the property in a slew of Polish
curses and derogatory idioms that would transcend the language barrier.
To his amazement, his parents were not merely comfortable with Arlette’s
presumptuousness; they seemed to revel in her unapologetic demeanor and
her aura of instantaneous intimacy and entitlement. His mother took an instant liking to Arlette despite her obvious "goyishness,"
and began teaching her to roll potato piroshkis and dessert blintzes on
Wednesday evenings. "Jadwiga, why are you wasting time with the potatoes?
Show her the meat piroshkis." "Tomasz, she is a vegetable-a-tarian." "Well, actually I eat fish and seafood occasionally. Just not red
meat. Mainly for political reasons, but its also just healthier." "Ahh! This is why you are so skinny. I used to wait 4 hours in line
just to buy half a kilogram of meat for my wife. Also for political reasons." "Tomasz -- please." Although he remained skeptical about her
vegetarian tendencies and the confrontational size of her tattoo, within
a few weeks of the expedited romance Tomasz remarked to his son, "Lolo,
do not scare this one away. She is sweet and she has a fire to her."
Arlette was graduating from State College in May, and consequently was
a devout advocate for the vast majority of eastern philosophies and medicines.
Lolo had told her about his sleep disorders on their second date, and
she has been on a quixotic quest to cure his ailments ever since. Her
most recent fascination with feng shui was a method in which Lolo had
little faith. "Okay Lolo, were going to have to do a few things to
the get the energy flowing around your bedroom. We have to clean this
place up, shed some of these carpets, and get rid of all this ungodly
clutter and electronic equipment. Electronics are a no no, they’re
known to disrupt sleep cycles." "Don’t touch the stereo Arlette." "Okay Lo, what about tossing that map? It takes up half the wall." "The map stays too," he said firmly. It was a yellowing wall-sized
map titled The Dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire since 1683 rendered
nearly illegible through a tangle of gratuitous weather charts and illustrated
tide and wind stream patterns. It had been a gift from his grandmother
who had passed in her sleep during the fall of his sixth birthday. Lolo’s
only remaining memories of her are the evenings that he meticulously watched
her bloated, parchment-like fingers as they played hours of rapid-paced
backgammon. If he broke his watch for a moment, without fail she would
sneak pieces over a few extra spaces and would pretend to be deaf when
Lolo would confront her. "Okay we’ll worry about the clutter later. We need more yin
flowing; maybe some more blues and greens can lighten the place up. An
easy thing we can do is move your sofa or futon around, or whatever you
call that thing." "It’s a sofa-bed." "The bed should never be lined up with a door so that your feet
are facing it when you sleep. It symbolizes death." "What?" "Can’t you just grab the other arm and help me move this behemoth?
It’s a lot heavier than it looks," she said, struggling to pull
it from the wall. It disturbed Lolo to watch her struggle with anything. "Lolo!" His father yelled from the living room. "Lolo!
What are you doing, playing musical chairs?" "We’re moving stuff around," he yelled back down the stairs. "It’s heavy because there’s a bed inside, a sofa-bed."
Lolo grabbed the other end to help Arlette, fully intending to move it
back to its original position as soon as she left. As they both lifted
the sofa forward, a black leather journal wedged between the wall and
the bed revealed itself and lay innocently on the floor. "What’s
this Lo -- I didn’t know you kept a diary?" "Neither did I." It was not until the following afternoon that
Lolo realized that Arlette had not only excavated a fully composed novel
from beneath the sofa-bed, but the secret hiding place of his dreams as
well. The most amazing part of the novel was its cohesiveness. There were no
side annotations on theme and tone, character scribblings, or even the
faintest sketch of chronology anywhere in the journal. The dating of the
novel seemed intentionally ambiguous, but could probably be placed somewhere
between the fifties and the seventies in the south of France. It was told
in the first person and was assembled through the overlap of unsolicited
encounters and romanticized landscapes. On the accommodating beaches of the la cote d’azur, about half
way between Marseilles and the Italian border stands a rose-shingled villa,
whose very color accentuated the Mediterranean blue of the water exquisitely.
I cannot escape the pangs of dread knowing that I am going to encounter
someone I know, someone who wants nothing more than to impress or bore
me with the details of their life. I only realize now that this is the
very basis of my love for Marge. She is the only woman I know that is
as charming drunk as when she is sober. As a self proclaimed adversary of anything French, Lolo was scornful
of the French backdrop of much of the narrative. He blamed his parents
for successfully indoctrinating him with flowery Francophile rhetoric. Always there was Marge. I assured the image of my mother that never,
never had I known anyone so proper, so thoroughly stunning as Marge was
in the early morning hours of the masquerade ball. It was same night that
JT Pickering and his surly girlfriend Lillian from Lyons fell asleep on
the deck of his motor yacht, lying placid among the swells of the Nicean
Bay, constantly on a voyage that was not dependant on actual motion. After his initial reading of the novel, Lolo was devastated. The first
thing that grabbed him about his work was the remarkable use of punctuation
and correctly spelled words, a feat he was not capable of in his waking
life. Mainly, he thought it was trash. "Why would anyone be interested
in the rantings of a disgruntled ex-patriot who discovers that the actual
Riviera does not coincide with his idealized vision of it?" He thought
to himself. He resolved to at least find out. Three years earlier, nearly the same girl roomed next to me in a particularly
repugnant villa on a Greek Island whose name I cannot recall, but it smelled
like Ocean Perch. She was a scrunchy-faced girl raised at the poker table.
She walked the circumference of the island each afternoon in sandals too
large for her feet, resonating a grating flip-flopping sound that trailed
her wherever she went. That same summer she drowned from a 40-foot cliff
dive after squarely misinterpreting the tide. Arlette showed the manuscript to an English professor of hers, who thought
of an agent friend of his that may be inclined to work with it, who would
eventually shop it to a few interested publishing houses, creating a bidding
war that would eventually earn Lolo a minor literary status and a relatively
large sum of money in the span of a few months. I had spent most of the afternoon on the beach, drinking tart Cuban
drinks and eating raw shellfish. Marcus had just finished playing tennis
and insisted on making pleasantries and unsolicited monologues despite
my obvious disinterest. He wanted to discuss Judith. Marcus ordered the
garlic and potatoes and a second pitcher of sangria. You cannot resist
despising the unredeemable that persist on dredging the name of the dead
for the sake of formality, satisfying curious whims at the cost of earnestness. His father was dumbfounded by the entire phenomenon. "Only in America,
can a boy do nothing and still earn a living." His mother was unaffected
by the experience, outside of not being able to understand why his sudden
good fortune would prompt her son to move out. It was not the prospect
of an income above minimum wage that induced Lolo to move out of the house
that he was conceived, born, and raised in; it was Arlette’s subtle
coaxing that eventually convinced him that "at some point everyone
has to leave the nest." *** Immediately as he awakes in the new apartment overlooking Binghamton’s
modest-sized red light district, Lolo glances at the alarm clock in disbelief.
Unusually refreshed after sleeping a full eight-hour block, he frantically
rushes to the drawer imbedded into the frame of the bed. He runs his hands
anxiously across its base fondling spare sheets and towels, searching
for the black leather journal and pen he had deliberately inserted the
night before. Checking each page again and again, Lolo searches for anything,
a few notes, even a doodle, only to discover an untouched journal. Arlette had foreseen the possibility that Lolo may not be able to re-create
his sleep-writing behavior in a new environment, but she had decided not
to verbalize it. She reasoned fears only manifest into reality when acknowledged
aloud. Solemnly laying in their new bed, half-naked and half-covered in a flat white sheet, she gazes intently at him grasping his journal. Captivated by his eyes vibrant with a lucidity that she has never seen in him before, Arlette understands that this is the first morning that Lolo has ever been really awake, and that they will never again sleep together in the same apartment. -------- 'Susie,' An Arguably Scientific Analysis of a Weak Metaphysical Grip, by Dr. Conrad Logic, Ph.D. Introduction :: Even as a toddler her father was forced to warn her, "Keep talking
like that young lady and one day you’ll slip right off the Earth’s
axis!" Factual History :: As a result of deviations in her organic geometry, Susie's bodily movements
are linked to the Earth’s surface by the gravitational equivalent
of waxed dental floss. Her style and movement through the world is a manifestation
of her disorganized mental health. She physically plays out her off-key
mental patterns in a dangerous primal dance of cacophonous, yet fluid
spasms.
He pulled their blue hatchback into the convenience store parking lot
and observed that the lot resembled convenience store parking lots on
American soil. This particular smoke shop would turn out to be quite different.
The foundation of the store was built, cemented, and poured over the Oneida
people’s burial ground reserved for ceremonial leaders, aristocracy,
and shamans. More concerned with casino dollars and easily accessible
sewage and power lines, the modern Oneidans agreed to pave over the hallowed
ground without hesitation. Decades later, a cultural revival in the ancestry of the Five Nations
of the Iroquois will occur. The Oneidans will raze the cigarette Sherine stepped out of the car and Bob
impatiently waited with the motor noisily sputtering. As she passed through
a recently installed metal detector used to fend off the local high school
teens toting pocket change, Sherine could feel her baby do philosophical
somersaults. The synergy of the burial ground, uranium field, and electromagnetic
x-rays scrambled Susie's developing neural networks, subtly yet profoundly
re-aligning the neurological map of her synaptic activity. Demographic Data :: The primary purpose of our longitudinal study was to examine a metaphysical disorder’s impact on children in their formative physical and cognitive learning stages. A detailed description of Susie’s symptoms gives us insight into the behavior typical of sufferers of the disorder. I strive to give other doctors a frame to view, recognize, and eventually treat this elusive illness infecting the minds of America’s youth.
Background on Gravity and its Effect on Metaphysical Disorders :: Gravitational forces play a crucial role in most systems and processes
on Earth. Ocean tides are caused by the gravitational attraction of
the Moon and Sun tugging on the Earth and its oceans. It drives weather
patterns through displacement, compelling dense cold air to sink and forcing
lighter warm air to rise. Most importantly, the gravitational pull of
Earth literally grounds humans to the Earth’s surface, creating a
mind-body metaphysical rooting that impregnates all living entities with
an inherent understanding of how to exist and interact with gravity and
the world through the lived body. The mind-body experience is an involuntary
knowledge of gravity, guiding our cerebral interactions with reality through
the kinesthetic bodily experience. Even plants know to face the sun. Although most humans overwhelming sense of self-consciousness prevents
a lucid understanding of universal homeostasis, we are all conceived with
basic instructions of how to interact with reality. The ebb and flow
of primordial organic functions are inscribed in every organism’s
genome. If an individual’s gravitational force with the Earth is
even slightly askew, the strength of the Earth’s spin can leave him
or her physically and psychically misaligned. A rupturing of the frail
gravitational mind-body dynamic can effectively sever an individual from
any metaphysical rooting with other humans and the Earth. Lacking a metaphysical
grip on the world causes a holistic disorder, in which the inflicted individual
experiences a reality vastly different from our shared inter-subjective
experience of the world. Observations: Physical and Mental Symptoms of a Weak Metaphysical Grip :: 1. Susie’s general sense of taxonomy has been gravely disrupted.
She organizes her library of books according to smell; further classifying
similarly smelling books by the emotion elicited from the denouement.
Most people organize toiletries according topriority or chronologically
with respect to habitual morning routines. Susie prefers to organize toiletries
according to color contrast, clustering shampoo and shaving razors in
rows distinguished only by their hues. |
**America’s
magnetism has always attracted rigorously entrepreneurial immigrants and
the uber-motivated willing to leave the familiarity of their native culture
in exchange for the freedoms of America. This self-selective system attracts
not only the firmest believers in rugged individualism embodied by the
nations’ founders. The children of the first generation of immigrants
are injected with the expectations and dreams of their parents seeking
fulfillment in the success of their children. The following generation,
born in the fruits of the first generation’s unwavering work ethic,
is free from the burden of having to watch their parents struggle to earn
a comfortable lifestyle. Although the offspring of an identical genetic
line, without the physical memory of their immigrant roots the subsequent
fourth generations is easily lulled into mediocrity. Lena is a member
of the fourth generation.
At
23, on the day of her wedding, Lena was weeping. Usually, she never felt
alive unless when she was sleeping – distant – creating her
own universe far from the constraints of reality. On the day of her wedding,
she felt that good awake.
Susie
is not a mutant in the Darwinian sense. As a zygote, her genetic makeup
was normal and gravitationally aligned as any normal human girl. Her mutation
was the result of an unfortunate sequence of radioactive and theological
synchronicities. As Susie was nearing the end of her first trimester of
in-utero existence, her parents stopped for cheap cigarettes at the Oneida
Indian Nation thirty miles outside of Syracuse, New York. Robert and Sherine
were on route to visit Bob’s parents’ home in Rochester for
the holidays when they noticed an alluring sign advertising discounted
cigarettes without the burden of federal or state taxes. A chronic smoker
and bargain hunter Sherine pleaded, "Come on Bobby, let’s stock
up on a few cartons of smokes. We still got plenty of time to get to your
folk’s house, sweetie." He was unable to verbalize his discomfort,
but Bob was deeply repulsed by the idea. "Sure baby, why not,"
he responded insincerely after a not very dramatic sigh. 
bodega
in order to exhume the sacred bodies only to discover a sizeable Uranium
bed located only a few feet below the interred bodies. Outside a few run-ins
with the Environmental Protection Agency, the mines will allow for an
even greater profit intake than the lucrative profits of the current Turning
Stone Casino Resort. 
Method
::
conditioning
and a priori knowledge, children are able to interpret basic signs and
symbols in order to decipher a fundamental meaning from their everyday
surroundings. Even the simplest children can be conditioned to learn that
school begins at the sound of a bell and that certain logos on their lunchboxes
bring acceptance among peers. Most curiously, Susie is inept in a small
branch of semiotics, in which she merges disparate meanings of homonyms
into a unified understanding of the term. Normal humans understand that
words like beach and beech, or cell and sell have the same sound as one
another, but differ in meaning. Each word has its time and place.