Tales of the Out & the Gone

by Imamu Amiri Baraka

  There were maybe two or three hundred people in the room where LC and the two other men stood. The people were divided into small gatherings of about twenty to thirty. Men and women of varying nationalities, it seemed. Each group hovered around, bending and scooping and placing things in sacks which they had on their shoulders. LC could not understand what they were doing. He moved tentatively forward.

  “Is there something specific you’re interested in, sir?” the man with the thick eyeglasses asked. “Any particular production group?”

  LC shrugged. “I just want to know what they’re doing.” He thought he sounded apologetic, but to the man in the eyeglasses he must have sounded deadly ironic. The man moved quickly forward toward a milling group, who seemed to see nothing but the … It was scraps of paper they were picking up. Scraps of paper being pushed out of … It was difficult for LC to see. He moved a little closer, Scales at his side and slightly behind him.

  “Sir?” Scales asked. But LC said nothing. He took another step.

  The man with glasses had said something to someone and the closest group seemed to open a bit so LC could see more directly into the center of the milling and moving and scooping. There was a machine with a screen of some sort. Numbers flashed up and across the screen as LC came forward still closer. Numbers and names—cities, it seemed. LC could not see it all, but out of the machine’s “mouth” shot a steady stream of papers, scattering in all directions. White papers blown out, it seemed, as the numbers and names registered across the device.

  “The I-90 computer, sir!” the man with the thick glasses said. But their talking did not distract or divert the milling men and women, who scrambled patiently and without expression to pick up the papers, putting them in the bags. LC wanted to see what was on one of the papers. Why were they being shot out and picked up like this? Was this efficient? He wanted to ask this, but as he readied his mouth to speak, a bulky blond man came into view on the other side of the crowd. He, like all of the others, had on a dark suit and tie. But this man wore dark gloves as well and he carried no bag on his shoulder, but in his hand was a long blue tube with what appeared to be red flashing eyes on either side of one tip.

  As LC slowly scanned the room, he could see that at each station, as they were called, near the center or edge of the milling crowds, was a similar figure, wearing dark gloves and carrying the blue tube with the red blinking eyes. LC looked toward the man with the eyeglasses as if for some further explanation, and the man tried to smile with the smile of the employee at your service. Scales stared straight ahead, looking at the groups but somehow not focusing directly on them.

  At one point as LC stared and was about to turn and ask or exit quietly—he could not decide which—one of the people almost directly in front of him stopped scooping and stuffing and froze in his tracks. It was a large man, one who had seemed most energetic in catching and scooping and stuffing. He was frozen stock-still, almost like he wasn’t breathing. Then, almost as suddenly, he started to sag slowly, very slowly, like something melting or having the wind slowing sucked out. Now the man with the blue tube moved forward and touched the big man with it. The thing’s red eyes sputtered furiously and LC thought he heard a brief humming. At once, the big man rose up as if he had never stopped, and resumed his catching and scooping and stuffing. No one seemed to even notice it.

  LC wanted to question, but he knew that was foolish. He had been at the top among the most powerful (and the most informed), he presumed, and they had laughed. I know now it is amnesia. It must be something like that. I don’t know anything about any of this.

  In thinking so deeply about his problems, he inadvertently jerked his head and arms in a manner that suggested to Scales and the man with the eyeglasses that he wanted to leave. They both turned and strode forward to lead him out of the production room.

  “Is there anything else, sir?” the man in the eyeglasses asked. LC shook his head. Scales moved to the door and made it slide open. He stepped out into the corridor and LC followed.

  After a few steps toward the elevator, LC, figuring there must be some way to find out more, asked, “Do you know what goes on in there?” As if he was checking to see Scales’s understanding.

  “Yes, sir” was the chauffeur’s reply. “Information. The production of information.” Scales smiled at his precise answer, but in a non-irritating way. He had the door to the elevator open now. LC entered and said nothing. He was thinking about amnesia. About not knowing anything. About how he would get out of all this blankness.

  “Will you be going to Les Arouilles, sir, or directly to the house?”

  If I go home, LC was thinking, perhaps there will be something recognizable, something that will reconnect me with myself. It is not that I reject anything in this world, but I must reconnect up to it in consciousness. “The house” was what he said, following the chauffeur through the lobby and out into the street, where the rear door of the Bentley was quickly opened. LC got in and turned on the stereo and fixed himself a Scotch and water with one piece of ice.

  As the limousine moved quietly along the streets, through the tunnel and up the turnpike into wooded, peaceful, pastoral New Jersey, LC relaxed, letting his questions maraud inside his head without trying to draw conclusions or resolution. Finally, he drifted off to sleep, a puzzled gray sleep with no dreams and no answers.

  Third Ending

  When LC woke up, the Bentley was cruising up a grass incline, on a narrowing road which quickly reached its top and leveled off. The road was sided by large rocks every five yards or so, natural but whitish. They seemed to get larger and larger, until they got larger than humans as the road pierced straight ahead and entered what seemed like a forest of tall, very straight trees. It was now late afternoon and the sun was cascading through a reddening sky, the tall trees suddenly hiding the light, with gray shadows made to look stranger by the reddening tint abstracting the shapes of everything.

  But the car came out of the forest, which seemed now simply a grand fence around the low, wooden windowless structure that lay just ahead, behind a freeform fence of huge boulders, like those lining the approach road. The windowless house was made of some dark wood, though a thin strip of light-admitting glass ran around near the roof.

  The house was placed in the middle of a formal garden, but the garden seemed not so much a garden as a wild mixture of improbable-looking trees, shrubs twisted like Japanese bonsai, and high bushes with red flowering bulbs—the flora of some specialized collector. LC watched impassively, the images flowing through his eyes and mind, colliding painlessly with his questions. He sat up, and the chauffeur acknowledged this by raising his eyes slightly in the rearview mirror, but said nothing. The Bentley moved forward a few more feet, then veered to the right. The land rose a little but was mainly flat and set out with flashy flora and large stones, the road carrying them around a curve so that they were headed to the side of the house. There was not a gate or place to enter at the front, but one could simply walk through the openings between the stones. At the side, the road turned into an opening, which led behind the stones and dipped down toward the entrance of a garage built right into the house.

  The garage door swung open as the car approached, and the Bentley rolled in quietly, the door closing slowly behind them. In the garage were three more cars, but LC did not know what kind they were. All except for one looked new. There were several doors or panels around the wall of the garage, which was perhaps as large as a couple of tennis courts. And beyond the area where the cars were parked was a glass-en-closed lounge with all the accoutrements of an exclusive club bar.

  Scales had the door open, and LC without a pause got out. LC tried looking at Scales but did not know how to look. He thought perhaps he could look like he wanted something, like he had some need Scales could fill. But he was a closed container, containing blankness, only questions. And what curiosity he had, though whetted by the twists and turns and newness of everything, was like a rope wrapping him tight
er and tighter in its embarrassing absurdity.

  Scales caused one panel in the wall to open and they entered the lounge. Scales moved to an elevator at the far side and pressed a button so that the door slid open. It was all wood and leather inside. LC stepped in, Scales behind him, and the elevator hummed upwards. In a moment it stopped and the door opened. LC hesitated, but walked through into a large, well-lit room that seemed to be made, on all four of its surfaces, of the same dark wood. It was some kind of library, office, drawing room—complete with mostly French and English Impressionist paintings, not prints, with the floors set off exquisitely with Persian and Chinese rugs.

  At each wall, glass and wood cases showed antique books, first editions. There was a low desk, empty of everything except a control panel for lights, doors, windows, and the expensive sound equipment and various kinds of film projectors and television screens recessed in the ceiling. There was, of course, a bar, and LC, who had no recollection of ever drinking, suddenly wanted a drink. That’s what he’d do—he’d speak directly to Scales and ask for a drink. He’d practice what he obviously had been … was. And perhaps with practice, what that was—is—would come back. He wondered momentarily if this man he was had any special skills to be in this position. Suppose, he thought, conjuring further with this panicked train of thought, that because he could not remember what that special skill or information was that provided all this (his eyes swept the room now, almost sensuously), could it be taken away? But there were files, reports, minutes. There were ways to reeducate himself. He felt somewhat restored, though thought and counter-thought had both transpired in the split second of his eyes’ travel over the walls, floors, rugs, drawings, bar, &c. I can learn anything, he thought. I must be this person they all think I am. It’s simply that I have amnesia. But I need a drink.

  Turning sharply to give Scales this order, LC was confronted with an image that was even more shocking than his own reflection in the shop window several hours ago on the street. For the black chauffeur, Scales, now stood just a few feet from him, his legs a little apart, as if planted. His vague accommodating smile was replaced in his dark skin with the mouth of a straight line. LC could no longer see Scales’s eyes. The lids were drawn down so tight that only a slit of eye showed. But strangest of all, in Scales’s right hand, now pointed directly at LC’s stomach, was a modest but nevertheless menacing automatic pistol.

  1985

  (Originally published in Callalloo)

  TALES OF THE OUT & THE GONE

  NORTHERN IOWA

  SHORT STORY & POETRY

  The short story should be a sacred form, since it’s the most common way we tell our lives. That’s why, in my opinion, the most effective kind of story is short indeed, very short & pointed. Short enough & pointed enough to make your teeth curl.

  Check Ousmane Sembène’s Tribal Scars. The flat acrid mystery of it. A world appears, it turns a few times—these turns are called revolutions—and then it disappears. It does not cease to exist. It goes somewhere else. Another dimension is a good explanation. Someone borrowed my book, but the mysterious unwinding remains even when disappeared. In fact, you hear me passing some of this on to you. It reappears inside your head, making revolutions.

  One short story I wrote insisted itself into review years after a friend laid it on me. And when it returned, it was as some kind of self-defining legitimization of myself for my most constant audience—that group behind the eyes.

  It was like this, and dig the dimensions of this whole retelling as another reappearance: I was riding in an airplane going somewhere, logically enough. But in that enforced reverie, perhaps to read poetry or speak, I somehow began to formulate the idea that I could do something different. I guess that was it, something like that.

  I was telling myself, If I want to make money writing, I can do it. My (nonexistent) God, what a sad idea to be stuck with! If is very Dante-esque. Something like a religious concentration camp. I was concentrating on a very campy idea.

  I thought, Hey! (Perhaps there was no Hey!) If I want to make money writing, I can do it. For instance (there was no for instance), if I … no. I thought, If (again?), if I wanted to … I bet.

  I thought I could write a commercial story. (What an idea! What would that be?) In that frame of mind, I knew that if I wanted, I said to myself, I could get a story in Playboy!

  And that is when I made a kind of bet with myself. My lips might have moved. Sometimes my lips move when I read to myself silently.

  So this story an old friend told me many years ago at the Cedar Bar jumped out of the black hole, as needed. I sat there in the plane and wrote the story exactly as I remembered it. Because I felt such a story was just the kind of “thing” that ’boy would like to play with.

  It had everything: mystery, reminiscence, sex (Maronna mia!). A guy walks into a bar, tells me a murderous true tale, and I finally write it out years later, in an airplane going wherever. You see how the tale was carried, in many levels and dimensions.

  And it proved out. Barely ten days after I passed it to the agent, he sold it (you bet) to Playboy. It was called “Norman’s Date.”

  What was it about? Well, the punch line was this guy wakes up with this new love in the middle of the night after frantic lovemaking, and the woman is sitting over him with a pair of scissors in her hand.

  So I know there are levels of that, alright? But it was a story. A short story. I called my 1st book of short stories Tales in the grand literary tradition, but also because that’s what my mother called my excursions away from the truth. They meant reality, which has more troops. But they called such digressions tales, like de Maupassant.

  The dedication to my sister Kimako in Tales read, To Lanie Poo, who’s heard boo-coos (our black French for “a bunch”).

  And that’s the sense of it for me. Tales, or even tails, the last part of the fact.

  At this point is the connection with poetry. Verse is a turn, simply. Like a wheel, it has regular changes. Because they are regular, it is evolution, in a sense. It, that wheel, will disappear eventually, but it is turning in the same place. (But even so, it moves something.)

  That verse is literally a turning. Except what we want is vers libre—free verse. Never having been that, free, we want it badly. For black people, freedom is our aesthetic and our ideology. Free Jazz, Freedom Suite, Tell Freedom, Oh, Freedom! And on!

  So that verse is the same change. Running changes, just running them, over and over.

  Free verse, they say. To mean going through changes and making changes. Syncopation, like they say. Pick up the rhythm. For me, even the real mystery of the story is deep too; I go on, because a story is a place where something is stored. Usually seeds—what you seed is stored. In the story.

  In verse, it will come around regularly. It is the wheel. The Human Will. To go into the future, to go forward. Beyond what you see. From see to see. Seven Sees, but watch out for the eight ball, a double wheel. Wheel over wheel, infinity turned upright!

  But poetry is the what. Like the change—going forward, electrically speaking. (You see, this is funny because I’ve already gone ahead and put you in it. Some of you know it.)

  Not Watts but the What. What is it flowing. Because it does flow. We all are pallets on (or in or as) the flow.

  Tears, for instance, are made of water. Salt water. They flow. From the eyes. What see. Ripped, the drops, like waves. You see?

  So poetry is cries. The poet or griot pours it out, cries out. Like in Europe they had a town crier. They thought the griot just carried news. But the griot carried olds as news for old news, old knews, all knews.

  In Africa, we called ourselves Djali. (Perhaps the vibe that Yeats recalled in Lapis Lazuli: “Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.”) Djali. Not crying, as griot, to cry out. But Djali: laughed so hard tears came to my eyes, or laughed to keep from crying! Ancient glittering eyes. Every one. The eggs, the egos, the for instances. Instant after instant turning, changing, free, the possi
bility in God’s eyes. Possibility is God with 2 left eyes.

  And when we do our thing, make it, we say Djeli Ya. Like Mr. B. (who some confuse w/me) saying, Djeli Ya, Djeli Ya, Djeli Ya! Like that!

  The short story is a breath of life. Both dimension and basic function. Like the lungs expanding, retracting. The circle of transbluesent spirit in and out, connected like a wheel, a circle, how we go, our role.

  The poet is a basic storyteller and these are the shortest stories. (Hey, not necessarily. People like Browning and Dante and Tolson, God knows, could run that telling on and on. But perhaps that is why it was verse, so it could roll on and on.)

  One difference is the dependence on rhythm. The great short story writers use rhythm, of course. I don’t think you can make the most penetrating use of language—as content or form—without it being rhythm-sprung.

  It is the splitting of the one into two. What follows the one going on. Forward. The eye and the being, the ego and the entity, the woman. (All is womb-sent. Everything issues from the womb, the black hole.)

  But the dialectic, the opposites. From woman comes man into woman man comes.

  The manifestation (see?) of the eye that sees. The are that bees. The proof. The conclusion. There is Be & At. Two things or one thing and one not thing is the whole.

  The heart, for instance. It thumps and the silence is part of the not silence—that is what a whole is.

  So the splitting of the endless, which is endless because it does not stop, except its go is only possible because of its not go.

  Like speed on the sea is measured in knots.

  I’m saying that the short story always exists as water dipped for drinking from an unlimited water, a big sea (a Langston Huge …) see (how are I spelling this?)?