by J.W. Carey
* * *
I should have been terrified and, believe me, under normal circumstances I have no doubt I would have been. I cannot, if I am at least pretending to maintain a sense of respectful honesty, offer the pretence that I am particularly brave, or confident, or in fact, a great example of humanity, some weak, shallow step in the same vague direction of evolutionary design. But then again, can’t I? After all, I am the author and, in this world at least, I could be the perfect man. I could be a mixture of Stephen Hawking, Conan the Barbarian and Tom Cruise, or any triadic creature you, yourself, would prefer.
But then, should this thing attacking your senses offer you such a sense of interactivity? Do I leave blank pages, for you to fill in the narrative? A parody of the emptiness of my own thoughts, a criticism of some visual theory or a simple desire to add more pages to a text that I, myself, struggle to hide a lack of confidence in? Do I become who you want me to be, who I want me to be, or who the person across the way would desire me to be, were they holding this thin sheaf of paper, electrical or not, and not you?
Jesus, look at me, asking the questions I am supposed to answer for you. That IS why you’re here right? Some obscure piece of nonsense, disguised as literature, promising you answers to either an existence of your own, or some widely applicable, wholly generic platitude, designed to make you aware of the facts that you knew all along, that most people in this abused world have it worse than you, than me? That we live in a time of plenty, whether we can afford it or not? That the coloured child with the distended stomach staring out at you from the depths of a silvered screen, deserves more sympathy than you can hope to garner for your self-inflicted headache, and the sheer exhaustion of the working life compares as nothing to the old man, his strength long failed, holding his pale wife’s hand in a soulless room filled with reflections of themselves.
Ah well, just do exactly the same as the rest of us do. Turn your head away and think of something else, change the channel, lift a different book, play with a button on your coat, twist the ring on your finger. What scares me most is that I don’t need to do that anymore. I’m little more than a child still, but I can stare at a starving boy, into the recorded eyes of its begging mother, and not feel a fucking thing.
That IS the next level, you realise? This world we live in now, it doesn’t create the depressed, it doesn’t form the angry young men that spit in society’s eyes, with a fast song containing an even faster narrative, plucked with slow fingers incapable of conveying true meaning; it doesn’t create outraged authors and artists with legitimate opinions. It forges people like I, the Walking Dead, the Zombie, the people who come alive only for the briefest of moments, and cannot understand the feeling. I may as well simply be another side character in a John Braine novel, for all this idealised humanity I have left in me.
* * *
The three of them laughed as if they had achieved some great victory when I placed the drinks before them. Their carefully, carelessly jelled hair standing above them like pricked hedgehogs, an intruder in the territory they saw as theirs raising their hackles. I smiled at them tightly, swaying back to the bar with the same peacock-assurance of my new ‘friends’. I rolled my shoulders, swinging my elbows widely in the same swagger they employed.
As I imitated my way towards the solitary glass sitting atop the small, bronzed grate set into the notched wood, the jukebox cut out, whatever asinine tune it had been playing cutting off before I could even consider a suitable comparison. I had been thinking of going with ‘The screeching of a spavined weasel, one with his balls caught in a weed thresher’, but decided that may well be too ‘high-brow’ for the collected examples of humanity I was amongst. The silence stretched out as my hand extended towards the surface, twitching as though in the throes of some terrific war’s aftermath, or the first sign of a premature stroke. I closed shaking fingers about the warmth, savouring the feeling of its texture, or lack thereof, in my hand.
Not a standardised glass, it had been blown with grooves moving from the middle of the walls down to the base. It was circular at the tip, running in a perfect ring as though fashioned from a Da Vinci doodle, but the base was squared, the corners cutting against my fingertips. I lifted it to my eyes, swirling the golden liquid within at a simple twitch of my wrist, one which had become a habit of mine even with an empty hand, the cracking of my joint a regular sound in the all too common silences. With pupils darting, following the wave as it rode upon itself, curving against the confines of its cage, I fancied some being huger than comprehension, swirling a glass and watching our universe turn, its eyes following the curves, as mine did, tracing an outline of the whiteness against the interminable grey of existence, as mine did. It closed its eyes, drew its lips back in a feral snarl, of animosity and depression and apathy and need, and downed the glass in one, an existence tumbling into the shadowy recesses of its throat, trashed against the walls of muscles and splitting, twisting and turning further down into the depths of that canal.
I became of aware of the silence again, and the eyes on me. My supplier, his hands moving stereotypical around a dirty glass, the grey rag in his hands achieving little more than to even out the filth, stared at me with an expression that even I, with all my descriptive genius, could not hope to comprehend the meaning behind. He looked like Napoleon, short and portly and dressed plainly, one hand invisible beneath the twisting rag, his eyes small and reminiscent of the pig heads Dad used to bring back from work. As the simile struck me, no doubt the very sight of that liquid evoking the talent of Hemmingway in me, I smiled, genuinely and honestly, raising the glass to an imagined personal history, though my hand was lifted towards the bartender. He nodded at me, no longer concerned at my odd behaviour, now convinced of the inebriation I had only shortly since tired of hiding, but lacking knowledge of my excuse for a thought process.
I turned away, fixing my gaze in the direction of the jukebox, the glass trembling weakly in my tightened grasp. In a few short steps, not all of them in exactly the right direction, I was there. The light was broken in one half of the frame, shattered, though the first bulb remained, the other swept away to some unknowable locale. The half that remained shone; intermittently yellow and red, and the colours were as familiar to me as home. I made to lay the drink down on the high table beside it though my fingers refused to unclasp themselves, as though Dracula attempting to pry the stake from his heart.
My other hand, ignoring the shame its twin brought upon me, clicked at the solitary button, sliding page after page of names and artwork, titles and legends chained to their own generations past me. And then it stopped dead. There. A name I recognised, followed by an army of more. I hid a genuine smile beneath a false grin and dug my hand into a pocket, searching for that small circle formed of I know not what combination of copper and zinc and silver, that meant nothing but joy for a few brief minutes, nothing but satisfaction for a few brief seconds.
Frank Turner
I sang softly albeit out of tune, another man’s words quietly directed to the room at large. I let my fingers flicker across the machine some more, eyes reduced to slights from a shameful sense of over-dramatised emotionality. On a more practical level, it reduced the blurring of my eyes to a simple haze thereby allowing me to pick exactly what was going to fill the stagnant air for the next few minutes, allowing me to neatly sidestep the incompetence of a drunk’s eyesight.
I breathed around my stolen utterance, stepping back in satisfaction. I turned away, weaving back to the table on which my three new acquaintances sat, watching me with the surprised gazes of particularly aggressive, albeit surprised, pigeons. I sipped at the glass, feeling my imagined wit return in that warmth. Like the blurring in my eyes, causality straightened, and my ability to run my fingers over the thread of this narrative, smoothing out the kinks, flattening it against the pitted table, returned with an absence of fanfare.
‘Any Narrative,’ I began, pulling out the fourth and final seat of the small table, joinin
g them like a druid late for a sacrifice, like a monarch late for an orgy, ‘can be read out like a road map, every overly-expositional scene and fresh character built like a bypass around difficult terrain.’ There was a moment of all but silence, save for the solitary voice murmuring in the corner, barely reaching to where I sat, though I had repeated the conversation many times before.
‘I knew a writer a few years ago,’ I continued, careful to avoid any hint of disgust at the title, one she deserved no more than I did, ‘and she had a stratagem for delivering advice which had gone beyond the border marking obsession. First, she would pounce upon any lack of a narrative structure, divided into five parts, apparently believing that unless the contents of any plot could be firmly positioned above another, it did not constitute an entire story. I can’t remember them anymore, no doubt a triumphant result of my refusal of her every word; but they were all given the most ignorant of de noms, A Call to Arms and Things Go Well, an’ shit like that.’
I clenched my left hand tightly, keenly aware of the brief slip in my accent, hoping against hope that the three hadn’t noticed. They seemed interested in what I was saying; eyeing me as though I had been provided simply for their own entertainment, each mirroring a grin of simple humour, as though everything I said was a joke, part of some overly-long set up.
‘But throughout history people who think themselves experts on the matter, exactly the same as that over-indulgent cow, have struggled to drive a nail through the idea of what makes a narrative a narrative, and what denies any tale that title. Even Aristotle,’ I paused for the briefest of moments, searching hopelessly for some sense of recognition in their shining expressions, ‘even Aristotle had decided that a narrative had to have three sections.’ The lad to the left seemed about to speak, as though inspiration had torn through the ages, straight from the mouth of that small, bearded man dressed in cloth, stained with democracy. I gave him plenty of time, enough for me to take another sip from my glass at any rate, but he seemed unable to organise that sudden burst of wisdom into any kind of understandable utterance.
‘Of course, these are the beginning, the middle, and the end, and we all know that every narrative possesses these three, whether they abide by a sense of linearity, or the author finds himself desiring to forge a literary aroma of a more chaotic inclination. He had other suggestions of course, he was never one to leave things so simple, was our Aristotle; reversals, complications, discoveries and catastrophes, but resolution is the one believed to be the most important.’ I grinned at myself, shaking my head gently. ‘They,’ my grin twisted in on itself, as though simply the thought of an author was a bitter taste, ‘mustn’t disappoint their fanbase must they, by leaving a narrative unfinished? There are few things worse than an unfinished story.’
I heard the scent of the image of their silent mockery, taking it in with something approaching pride, even as I raised my glass to block it out. The song, quiet and unheard throughout my equally muted, meaningless monologue, finally petered out. I shamelessly plagiarised a modern-day poet and muttered along with his last sorrowful statement.
‘The next round’s on me.’
* * *
How’s that? Am I yet managing to ‘tickle your fancy’, ‘get your goat’, ‘lure you in’, or ‘create an image in your mind’? Have I engaged you as though I squatted before you on bended knee, some symbol of a capitalist’s love weighing heavy in my hand? Do you feel that if you can just follow through all this bullshit, all this realistically dramatised exposition, I will have some answer to provide you with? That some semblance of morality will emerge from such twisted ramblings as mine?
No, that is something you would expect from a writer, and I have already sworn to you that I am not any reasonable example of such. So, why are you still here? Is it from some simple desire to ‘power through’ something you have already sunk minutes of your time into? Self-abuse, perhaps, wrapped in I know not what petty justifications? A compulsive need to explain, even unto yourself, that you are so terribly Indie, that the Counter-Culture is where your allegiances lie like a hound at the hearth? Or is this a product of education for you? Is there some silhouetted figure who doesn’t understand you, who was never young themselves, stood over you with the ghost of a cane, the spectre of a folded belt in hand?
Don’t get me wrong, especially after that particularly aggressive line of questioning; I am extremely grateful that your eyes are still following these movements of my fingertips, that your conscience is still moderately engaged with what little intellect I possess, an intellect which appears to decrease with the break of every page, but I cannot pretend to understand why they are, why it is.
* * *
I staggered out of the archway, obscuring the light with my personality, gagging in the fresh air, sickly to my tongue. My right hand gestured vaguely behind me in a mixture of farewell and rejection, the past few minutes, since having turned into hours, failing to take root in the barren earth of my memory. It’s incredible how little control I have over my own body, that long night a reflection of my own frailties, my own inconsistence in physicality and morality and any other ‘-ality’ I can conjure, from the depths of an unheard mind against the scream of instantaneous desire.
The pavement looked different in the yellow light of the street, each crack and broken slab squatting on a layer of weeds and dirt. Before the road came, a slice formed by the cemented influence of some industry-obsessed God, there was a concession to nature. A plinth ran the length of the road, running perpendicular to the smoothed asphalt. Too long and thin to be designed with anything more than decoration in mind, its stones crowded loosely together, as though a crowd gathering for a sermon, some worthless collection of platitudes along the slopes of some Galilean Mount. Buried amongst this cacophony of stone, sat three patches of dirt, almost black in the half-light.
Wilting beneath that heavy, man-made light, I saw a pair of flowers, alone in each of their squares.
The first, its leaves spread in a plea for respite, forced open for what little natural brightness reflected from the incomprehensibly close surface of the moon. Its stem was thick, though it was clear that its resilience to the biting cold was starting to falter, the green tissue sagging and paling from the hue it must once have enjoyed. Whether it be the fragmented design of nature, the brief hobby of some religious vandal with a flair for the dramatic, or the hand of our industrialist God himself, it had been crucified. Behind it, dug deeply into the dirt, was a wooden cross with thin sections of wire wrapped tightly around the protrusion, holding the flower to it like a lover, or a rapist. The shadow of the crucifix stretched out across the filth, possessing a twisted lack of proportion to the object itself.
The second flower appeared as little more than a haze in comparison to that brutish, albeit fading, solidity. There was a hint of translucence about its ethereal whiteness. Its stem thin beneath a heavy, intellectual head. Despite this, it stretched taller and prouder than its tortured brethren, as though it remained unstained by the dirt in which it stood, by the chilling air of this Northern Hell or the crushing pressure of the humanity I assume planted that angelic flora in such an obviously unappealing place.
I found myself filled with a sudden desire to rescue the thing. To wrap my hands around it and carry it away from here, from this place, this prison of dirt and stone beside a grey streak of flashing darkness and spitting water, away from the purveyors of poison behind me. I stalked towards it, my breathing quickening at the thought of such a good deed, at the hardening of such an unfamiliar desire.
It was only when I neared my target that I decided to look towards the third flower, set in the final patch of earth, as though the sudden shift of my gaze was the ethereal plant’s first defence against such a well-meaning aggressor as I.
It was empty.
My pace slowed and stopped until I was barely a foot away from that pedestal, staring with open-mouthed shame at the small hill of disturbed earth, which acted as my tentative evi
dence that, at some point in recent past, an organism had stood there. Someone like me, perhaps with motives similar, had stomped here like a leviathan and torn something from its resting place. I could imagine some great, Herculean hand enwrapping the delicate flower, a twin to the ethereal, crushing it beneath humanity’s good intentions. Leaves crumpled beneath coarse flesh, petals tumbled to the earth, curving around unfeelingly generous fingertips, thorns pricked as hard as they could, resolutely ignored in the midst of righteousness.
I backed away, the movement swiftly turning into a fully realised retreat. Without desire, my eyes twisting between the three, disgusted by the physical, amazed by the ethereal, and horrified by the absence of what should be.
* * *
Here, caught between two phrases of nothing, I would ask you to leave. Put the book down and walk away. Ignore the pages your eyes tell you are still in place, trailing after this like increasingly lost children behind a rat catcher cheated of his prize, like the throng behind a union leader or a swarm of businessmen behind the prospect of pointlessness. Leave on this half-realised metaphor, this quasi-imagery with uncomfortable overtones as though the very numeric itself is owned by some religious sect simple in its mystery and blatant in its lack of morality. Walk away, dear reader, walk away and live this life you would call your own without this approaching disappointment, without this encroaching absence of satisfaction, without me.
* * *
‘Of course,’ I continued, settling back into my seat, interrupting the brief, no doubt pointless trialogue, ‘narratives are also often designed as a shallowly disguised reflection of a journey that we, ourselves, as real people, must undergo in order to live what the Author would like to believe to be a full life. Typically, this takes the form of some kind of unexplainable love interest, often with a character that there is no reason why he or she should feel so strongly about them. But then, perhaps, that is part of it? Love is not there to be explained by a narrator, it is something to be tasted, discovered, touched upon and, ultimately, lost, forgotten, replaced with bitterness.’ I shrugged, the lack of a drink weighing heavily in my hand. ‘Narratives are not positioned to describe love to us, but rather to explain the destructive or increasingly rare creationist aspects of that supposed enigma.’
