92
Stanley Sits on a Cot in a Cell in the Dark
The space at the center of myself that wasn’t me that had become me wasn’t me anymore. I felt around for it, to make sure.
I was sure.
93
Stanley Sits on a Cot in a Cell in the Dark and Considers to What Degree His Having Been Wrong About Reading Faces Has Affected His Relationships with Family, Friends, and T
I took off my shoes. I took off my socks.
94
Stanley Sits on a Cot in a Cell in the Dark and Considers to What Degree His Decision to Knowingly but Unwillingly Agree to Involvement in a Personalized Performance Art Project in a Foreign Country Has Changed His Self-Conception
Pipes trickled and drained, clogged.
Springs in the mattress crunched.
An exit sign buzzed.
95
Stanley Sits on a Cot in a Cell in the Dark and Considers Whether or Not His Decision to Knowingly but Unwillingly Agree to Involvement in a Personalized Performance Art Project in a Foreign Country Has Accelerated Changes in His Self-Conception That He Would Have Come to Anyway, on His Own, Alone
I scooted, to sit cross-legged.
96
Stanley Sits on a Cot in a Cell in the Dark and Tries to Remember When He’s Felt This Way Before
The air was close and old.
97
Stanley Sits on a Cot in a Cell in the Dark and Remembers the Time in High School After Class in the Parking Lot When He Was Walking Around Looking for Torrentelli or Barton or Torrentelli’s Car, and at the End of the Lot He Found Marcus Svachma and Ronan O’Kelly Up in Torrentelli’s Face, Calling Him a Fag and a Freak, and Stanley Approached, and They Called Stanley a Fag and a Freak and a Fuckup, and Stanley Called Them Fascists, and as They Moved Step-by-Step into the Fight That None of Them Had It in Them at That Time in Their Lives to Avoid, Part of Stanley Realized That Through These Exchanges Marcus Svachma and Ronan O’Kelly Were Co-creating a Woefully Reductive Misconception of Stanley, a Misconception That Stanley Perhaps Encouraged (or at the Very Least Failed to Discourage) Through How He Acted (Misanthropic Anger, Existential Apathy, Pessimism, Privilege) and What He Wore (Trench Coats, Explicit T-Shirts That Teachers Made Him Turn Inside Out, Baggy Jeans, Dog Collars, Black Lipstick, Red Contact Lenses), and Although This Was True, at the Same Time, Stanley and Torrentelli Were Co-creating Woefully Reductive Misconceptions of Marcus Svachma and Ronan O’Kelly, Misconceptions That Marcus Svachma and Ronan O’Kelly Without a Doubt Encouraged Through How They Acted (Antagonistic Anger, Academic Apathy, Pessimism, Privilege) and What They Wore (Designer Casual, Designer Sportswear), and This Realization of His Accountability in a System of Two-Way Misrepresentation Was What Stanley Struggled with but Didn’t Mention During His Three-Day Hospital Stay and Three-Week School Suspension When He Argued with His Dad, Mom, and Brother About Who He Was and Wasn’t, with His Dad Saying That If It Walks Like a Freak and Talks Like a Freak It’s a Freak, with His Mom Saying That Yes, She Agreed That He Knew Who He Was, It Was Just That He Had to Figure Out How to Be Himself About It, and with His Brother Saying That Although It Might Not Seem Possible Now, Before He Knew It He Wouldn’t Be Able to Equate the Way He Dressed and Acted with Who He Was, Even If He Wanted to, Ever Again
I was closing my eyes.
Then I was opening them: I was lying on the cot.
I sat up. I was sitting on the cot. I was sitting on the edge of the cot.
I was closing my eyes again.
I was dragging myself through dreams or dreams were dragging me through myself.
Then I was opening my eyes again: I opened my eyes again:
98
Stanley Is Released
A lawyer from the embassy who looked like a lawyer from the embassy met me in a room outside the cell in the police station in the morning. I didn’t know how to read her face.
“Do you understand what I’m saying to you?” she was saying.
We were sitting at a table.
She was saying that the man I’d assaulted, a Polish citizen, had declined to press charges.
I was filling out forms. There was hot coffee.
Then we were sitting at a different table in a different room with two different police officers who looked like two different police officers.
I was signing forms, I was paying a fine.
Then I was saying, “Where can I make a call.”
The lawyer was saying that she had just said where.
“You did,” I said.
I remembered that she’d told me but I didn’t remember what she’d said.
I said this to her.
“No,” I said to her suggestions.
I was jammed in a doorway in myself. I couldn’t enter, I couldn’t exit. No one was getting through, not family, not friends, not strangers.
The lawyer gave me her card.
Phones blooped.
I was in a hallway, at a bank of pay phones.
I called my brother. My father answered.
“What,” he said. “Who is this?”
I hadn’t dialed my brother’s number: I’d dialed my father’s number.
“Stanley?” said my father.
He sounded afraid but I couldn’t be sure.
“Get out of there,” he said.
I was outside. Rain was falling. Rain was falling out of itself and into itself, falling in shining blades, falling in a slashing and a toppling, falling in a sparkling-edged tumbling. I stood in it. It didn’t make sense. I continued to miss things—impressions, connections, instructions, conclusions. I couldn’t read faces. In the time when I’d thought I could read faces, I couldn’t. I couldn’t think straight and I didn’t feel solid. Things happened slow and then things happened fast. My shirt and jeans tightened, soaked. What I wanted was to wreck the performance art project, to destroy my uncle’s cameras and cell phones and computers, to incapacitate my uncle and the artists with painful bodily injuries. What I knew, however, was that any actions I took to attempt to achieve these goals would provide my uncle and the artists with more material. They’d already accumulated enough to produce a collage-like installation of images and artifacts, as they’d done with Country-Western Country and the pissing politicians project, an installation that could present me as any sort of person, that could open at a Chicago art gallery, that could begin with the surprise photo taken of me by my uncle in his bathroom on my aunt’s birthday, that could peak with video of my reactions to yesterday’s reenacted proposal in Old Town Square, and that could conclude with an image yet to be captured of me walking out of my uncle’s apartment with my bag.
On the phone I’d told my father I was coming home.
“Good,” he said.
“Is T okay?” he said.
T doesn’t need your help, I said to myself.
Rain pinged and plunked and splashed.
Near a tram station I stopped at a tourist information booth. Behind its foggy glass sat a tourist agent who looked like a tourist agent. She took off her tourist agent glasses. She lowered the book she was reading. On its cover was an image of a spooky egg.
I said, “How do I get to Old Town Square.”
She waited. I couldn’t read her face.
I opened my mouth to repeat myself, and she interrupted me to say, “Good afternoon.”
I looked around at the afternoon: gray, wet, gleaming.
Then she said, “Excuse me. Pardon me.”
I said that she hadn’t done anything wrong yet.
“Please exercise basic courtesies before imposing your information requests on public servants, or anyone else, especially when you are imposing these requests in a foreign language.”
I asked if there was somebody in the booth I could talk to who wasn’t her.
She picked up her book.
The rain intensified, falling all over itself.
People shuffled umbrellas up and down in passing.
I stood under an
awning and listened to the rain, and I stood under an alley archway and smelled the rain, and I stood in the open on a corner and felt the rain.
The rain changed its mind: it fell casually.
I stumbled, tripped, and slid on crushed cobblestones, on loose and missing cobblestones, on perfect cobblestones.
Trams whooshed by.
Men and women ran to cars.
On a coned-off street, under tents, in two kinds of light, a film crew worked. The lights that were there to light the scene and the lights that were there to light the set carved separate colors and shapes, one blue and broad, for the actors, one white and narrow, for the crew. In the first light, a woman who looked like a director went over a clipboard with a woman who looked like a cinematographer about what they were to do now that the rain had changed its mind. In the other light, two women who looked like actors stood under the same umbrella and shared the same cigarette, passing it back and forth, not speaking. One of the smoking women was T.
A woman in a reflective poncho stopped me from getting close.
I said that I knew one of the actors.
She shook her head.
I said that I was an actor.
“No English,” she said.
I sidestepped her—I went past the cones and up to a sawhorse, near the lights.
“T,” I said.
She yawned.
I shouted and waved.
T turned into a woman who looked like T.
“No,” said the woman in the poncho, in front of me again. She gestured me away: “Goodbye, goodbye.”
The woman who looked like T turned into a woman who didn’t look like T.
Stay away, I said to myself.
I turned a corner and collided with a man. We fell. He rushed to his feet, flailing and hollering, and I rushed to mine, fists balled, and as he scrambled, he whipped his umbrella in front of him in such a way that when I rose I stepped right into it with my face. A tine touched my eye, then untouched it. I clapped my hand to my face and screamed. The man froze. I snatched his umbrella and broke it over my knee.
He kept still, hands up.
I was running in an alley and shouting.
The alley was shouting back—shouting echoes, shouting shadows.
A hot coil of pain uncurled in my eye.
I was in another alley.
I was on a corner, bent, huffing.
Then I was at the door to a bar. I was in the bar, waiting. There were two long communal tables loaded up with men. All of the men drank, some of the men ate. Many flipped through newspapers or scrolled through phones. The men were my age, middle-aged, and old. They took turns talking. I stared at them, one by one: they all looked like themselves, like they could never not be themselves, here or in any other place, with each other or alone. I didn’t need to know how to read their faces to know that they belonged to where they were. Where they were was with themselves.
A server sat me between two men who looked like brothers.
My beard dripped. Puddles sponged out of me, onto the table, the bench, the floor. I hadn’t let go of the busted umbrella.
The man to my left, wearing a suit but no tie, scooted away. He made a face.
If I didn’t blink my hurt eye it didn’t hurt.
A beer and a ticket appeared.
I closed my good eye and looked through the hurt one: a killing haze.
“American?” said the man to my right, who also wore a suit but no tie.
I said I was from Chicago.
The man to my left got up with a grunt. He closed his newspaper, tossed it to a man across the table, and left.
“America,” said the man to my right. “One time I go. No more.”
I finished my beer, put it down, and touched at my face.
“You are good?” said the man to my right, motioning at his own eye.
My empty glass had been replaced by a full glass.
“You have family?” said the man to my right. “Czech Republic? You look.”
“Poland,” I said. “Polish. Polack.”
He chuckled. “Yes, Polack is illegal.”
“Kraków is best,” said a man on his way out.
A new man sat to my left, wearing a blazer and sweater. He looked at me, and then at the jar of food in front of him, and then at me. He said something.
Men across the table looked up from conversations and newspapers and phones.
The new man to my left repeated himself.
Everyone laughed.
The man to my right pointed at the new man’s jar. “Utopenci. You understand utopenci?”
He tried to translate.
A man across the table tried to help him.
A different man, one I couldn’t see, said, “Drown.”
“Drowned!” said the man across the table, clapping once.
The man across the table was the made-up man.
“Drowned man!” he said, smiling.
I was on my feet—my chair crashed to the floor.
“Drowned men,” said the man to my right, picking up my chair, touching my elbow. “Utopenci is drowned men.” He mimed water dripping from his body, he mimed a dead face. “You are utopenci!”
“Joke,” said the made-up man.
The made-up man turned into a man who looked like the made-up man.
I sat. A jar of utopenci appeared in front of me: fat pickled sausages packed in a brine with onions, sauerkraut, spices.
“Good?” said the man who looked like the made-up man.
Another beer.
The man to my left examined my umbrella, flexing it.
I blinked my hurt eye: a jagged heat.
A beer.
“You are visit?” said the man to my right.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
I said that I wanted to be the kind of man who would go to a place for a woman.
He didn’t understand.
“I am here to see a woman,” I said.
The man who looked like the made-up man tried to translate.
“A woman!” said the man to my right. “Yes. Good.”
He clacked glasses with me.
“Where is a woman?” he said.
I was weeping.
None of the men were talking and then all of the men were talking.
I was saying, “What time is it.”
I was saying, “Thank you.”
I was saying, “No thanks.”
I was outside and walking, and no rain was falling, and the sky was jumping with sideways lightning, with crooked bolts branching and breaking and burning and dying, and black clouds were flashing blue, and no thunder was following the lightning, and at every intersection I was seeing where I was.
The men had drawn me a map on a napkin.
“You,” they’d said, marking an X.
“Call me,” the lawyer from the embassy had said.
“There is nothing,” Information had said, leaving.
“You’re afraid,” I’d said to my father.
He said he was.
He said, “He can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do.”
A street I hadn’t been on shunted me into an Old Town Square I didn’t recognize. It’d been unpacked of people. A man leaned on the green monument, staring straight up at the sky, and two women hovered at the clock tower, taking pictures of it from different distances. Pitted dips in the cobblestones pooled water and streetlight.
More lightning opened.
No thunder closed.
I unlocked the door to the apartment building. On the lobby wall was a chalk drawing of a man punching another man. Both of the men were me. I wiped them into blurs with the broken umbrella. On the staircase wall was another chalk drawing, this one of me behind bars, only every bar was also me, a sequence of me’s, bar-shaped and -sized. I couldn’t read my faces. I smudged them, caking the umbrella’s canopy in chalk paste. On the door to the apartment I’d been staying in was one more drawing: an over-the-should
er perspective of me pushing open a door. Through the opening in the depicted door a woman in a dress waited with her back turned. Most of her was in view, but only a third of what should have been visible had been drawn—the lines of the woman’s side broke off unfinished, her figure abandoned. Enough of her was there to see that she was T. I didn’t erase her. I opened the door.
The man who was meant to be me, the one I’d right-hooked in Old Town Square, sat at the table, his face battered. With one hand he read Sacred Centers. With the other he pointed a revolver at Manny.
Manny sat at the other end of the table, his hands on his roller bag. One of the lenses of his glasses was cracked. A welt rose from his forehead, where I’d smacked him with the shoe.
It took him a moment to speak.
“There is blood in your eye,” he said.
The man who was meant to be me said, “What do I want to know.”
His voice growled out in a gritty imitation of mine.
“Would you please, please, please instruct this man to put his firearm away?” said Manny.
I walked past them to the bathroom, where I peeled off my shirt, underwear, jeans, and socks. I changed into clean, dry clothes: slacks and a dress shirt. My hurt eye was blood-sodden, the bottom quarter red-brown. Its blinking lagged. I touched my beard, its knots and tangles, its crusted puke. Everything stank. I uncapped my electric razor. I buzzed off my beard, layer by layer, cutting close. Hair piled in the sink.
I washed my bare face.
I brushed my teeth.
I applied deodorant.
I wrung out my wet clothes and wrapped them in a towel.
I repacked my bag.
At the couch I opened my laptop. The webcam winked on, live.
“Stanley?” said Manny.
“What do I want to know about what else is planned,” said the man who was meant to be me.
I opened my browser. There were emails from Torrentelli and Barton and my brother and my mother, all of them in response to emails they’d received from my account, emails I hadn’t written or sent myself, and there were three emails from myself to myself, titled “DAY ONE PLOT” through “DAY THREE PLOT,” each with an attachment, and there were two emails from T, sent on their own, not in response to anything. I deleted every one of them unread. I closed my bad eye and focused on the screen and wrote to my brother: I went to Kutná Hora, thank you; I didn’t see a shadow puppet sex show; I ate a fried cheese sandwich and then another fried cheese sandwich and at the time it was what I wanted, thank you; I didn’t contact Mom and I won’t; T and I are through; I can no longer pretend to know people’s feelings and thoughts and motivations based on what I see in their faces; I want to go back to the beginning of myself; you can’t go back to the beginning of yourself.
The Made-Up Man Page 19
