It was not a matter of whether or not I had ideas. I did have them, I recall finding a few quite exciting, perhaps one or two even astounding in their potential. But they remained pure ideas, unexpressed, as I permitted myself to be mired down by the mundane circumstances of my life. Normally, even the humdrum everyday would be a source for me to mine and craft, set down into words, but I’ve been unable to pursue my thoughts to their multi-path endings, unable to commit the time and effort to actually create. The very thought of writing immediately drained me before I even started.
“Of course, all the thirteen stories will interconnect and are all true — I researched the police files myself,” Susan was explaining, a little too loudly as usual. “It’s all about the intertextuality of sexuality.” She was telling the group about her book deal and the risks she was undertaking, pushing her personal literary agenda when all that the publisher wanted were short romances in Filipino. “Without risk, we cannot create,” she said, pausing for dramatic effect. “It would just be empty fireworks. I’m setting the themed collection in a school for the blind. The challenge is to articulate what these characters cannot see — the onrush of heartbreak. Imagine these kids groping each other, fucking around while they make their stupid paper no one buys.”
Her words reminded me how my own thoughts came in staccato bursts, like pyrotechnics that rose and flared, abruptly lighting my consciousness before just as quickly fading into the quiet of my mind. The longest piece I had written in recent memory was a fractured poem of three verses in first person with no imagery whatsoever. When I was finished I knew I was guilty of setting monologues as prose poems with no hope of truly creating anything; just wanting to write something, anything, to have something to show the others, to burn away time.
“You know those old ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books,” Andrew asked, gesturing to the group. “You know, you make choices and get different endings and shit? Remember how they could have been so cool? Well, I’m writing one on my blog, hyperlinked and all, so there’s an actual experience of moving away once a choice has been, you know, made. I’m working out linking it to this sad, sad blog I hacked. There’s this woman who’s been abandoned by her husband, and everything she writes is just pathetically exquisite. She exposes everything. She thinks he left her because she’s fat and ugly, and she’s absolutely right. She has a picture and, oh man! One of the links goes directly to her — and she won’t know.” His idea made most of the group laugh and sit up as they contributed memories of the old book series.
“She’s her own tragedy,” Marge giggled.
“That sounds great,” DM said, bestowing a dazzling smile of approval upon Andrew. “Finish it and we’ll think about how to protect it from plagiarists. I like the conceit applied to the web, but I don’t trust the assholes online.”
When it was my turn to speak, I just coughed twice and proceeded to be studiously engrossed with my cell phone, letting the painful moment of anticipated response pass by in bullet-time, before Marge, the purple-haired poet next to me, saved me from further embarrassment.
As I listened to her announce the publication of yet another of her collections of angry-young-woman-who-makes-the-mistake-of-falling-in-love-with-her-mother poetry, I thought about how my own ideas and plans just sat in the still corners of my mind, perfectly transfixed, like the plastic displays of menu items in the Japanese restaurant that DM insisted upon so he could light up and smoke his noxious clove cigarettes.
“So, in the end, my collection says, in a nutshell, ‘I have nothing more to say to you, Mama — go find someone else to go down on you.” Marge sat back, exhausted by her own vitriol.
“I love it,” Susan said, raising her glass of Strong Ice to Marge before turning to look at me. “What about you, Trish? I didn’t hear what you’re up to.”
“This and that,” I muttered. “Nothing much.”
“I’m sure you have something,” DM said with a small frown. “What happened to the novel you’re writing, the one about Spanish friars in Cebu?”
“I have something cooking,” I replied. “I have the words.”
“You’re just being lazy, Trish,” DM said with an exaggerated frown.
“Whatever,” I said. I composed a text message and sent it to myself.
Get out get out get out
When the message arrived, triggering the beep of my cell phone seconds later, I stood up, excused myself and drove back to my house.
I headed directly to the fridge. I ignored the giant candy-shaped aluminum foil that contained the remains of last year’s aborted writing and instead took one of the baby blue tupperwares, peeled open the cover and looked at all the words I’d been cutting out from various books, newspapers and magazines for past several months.
In a clean skillet, I tossed the words in, added a little water and soy sauce, twisted the heat to low, waited for the text to simmer and hoped for the best.
The Housing Projects
I WAKE UP from a troubling dream and realize my wife has left again without telling me. She’s dealing with the anxiety of our inability to have a child in her own way — there, I’ve said it, it’s out in the open. Seven years of trying nearly everything wears anyone down. I check near the window and see she’ll be back before the sun rises. She’s never completely gone.
Unable to return to sleep, I decide to go out for a drink and a massage, leaving at just past midnight. I lock up, walk a bit in the gentle drizzle, and wait for a cab.
Once in a while, I do this: find a friendly bar, have a couple of beers and just vegetate. It’s important that I’m alone. I do not want or need conversation and I certainly don’t want to think. On occasion someone comes over to talk. I don’t respond. I am not in the mood for someone else’s story, whether it is as banal as a prostitute with a heart of gold, as artless as a philandering man, or as half-flattering as some guy who thinks I’m cruising the bar for some action. I wear a mask of stupidity, of being unable to comprehend complicated sentences, and radiate a zone of general antipathy in the blue cloud of my cigarette smoke.
After I pay for my drinks, I take another cab. The dark streets offer no traffic, glistening with the dull sheen left behind by the superficial rain. At the Korean bathhouse I frequent, I check in, strip and take a bath while sitting on a small wooden stool. Then I immerse myself in the hot waters of the main pool, oblivious to the amiable argy-bargy of the other men around me, Filipinos and foreigners, simultaneously exposed and cloaked by steaming water. I soak until I feel the alcohol in my system flushing out via sweat. Then I go for my massage, hoping that the lady I like is present. She is, and soon her iron fingers wedge themselves into the knots of my aching back, shaking my body’s dalliance with sadness with redemptive pain.
Afterwards, I go up to the bar in my robe and have a glass of Shiraz, mellow and with a hint of tartness, and look beyond the glass walls and out into the street below. I think of nothing, not work or children. For a while I pretend to be consumed by nothing, no cares, no worries. Just for a while.
Before 5AM, I ride a third cab home to the condo. I check to see if my wife is back but she isn’t. The lower half of her body is still standing where she left it, next to the window, wearing only the floral patterned panties I don’t like very much. I look out the window of our 33rd floor unit and see the grey skies slowly changing hues.
I know she’ll fly back. She’s on her way home.
I realize that I am desperately hungry, that everything in my system since midnight has been smoke and alcohol. I make scrambled eggs the way I like them (heat the pan with a little oil, dump the eggs, whisk briskly to separate the mass, then on to a plate — the entire process takes only a few seconds) plus a couple of links of sticky longganisa.
My wife arrives in a rustle of wings. I look up from my early breakfast and she is there, framed by the bedroom doorway, flushed and glowing with perspiration.
“You’ve been out,” she says, kicking out the kinks in her legs which h
ad gone asleep while she was out.
I nod. “A couple of beers and a massage.”
“Good, good,” she says, moving to the kitchen counter for a glass.
“Hungry?” I ask, pointing to my half-eaten meal.
“No, thanks,” she says, filling her glass with water from the dispenser. “I just ate.”
Later in bed, after she showers, I lean over and kiss her.
“You want to try again?” I ask, tracing the contours of her face with my fingers.
In the light of dawn, she turns away to hide her tears.
For Ian Casocot
Four-Letter Words
Time = Tile
ANTON CLOCKS IN at quarter to seven, his regulation blue long sleeves still bearing the phantom heat of his wife’s iron (she’s always up earlier, tracing the invisible trail of routine: up from bed, morning piss, face scrub and toothbrush, down to the kitchen to make the egg of the day, covering it with an upended plate before going back up to iron her husband’s clothes, waiting for him to bolt out of bed two minutes before the alarm clock). He waits for the Bundy clock to acknowledge his dedication and sets his timecard on the adjacent filing shelf.
The cards look like tiles to him: on the left, eight columns of names, organized like neat teeth with a single cavity that mars their perfection. On the right, an emptiness broken only by his timecard, an anomaly made unique only by virtue of his earliness.
He is always first to arrive. His timecard proves it.
Tile = File
ANTON WORKS HARD in the filing department. He likes the feel of the folders, some thick, some thin, all outwardly the same except for the vertical titles on their right-hand sides. Like everyone else, he’s heard that Management intends to computerize everything soon, and like everyone else, he tries not to think about what that means. When others talk about how things will inevitably change and ask his opinion, he retreats into a vacuous smile until the conversation dies. Unless Sheila from Accounts is present.
It’s Sheila from Accounts who presses on, waiting patiently for him to fill into void while others surrender to his empty grin willingly pulled away by the lure of other dialogues. It’s Sheila from Accounts with her dull brown hair and dull brown eyes who stands there, like a statue, like a disinterested deer caught in eternal headlights (she’s never failed, not once: you can tell from her stance, from the way her feet are spread, from the way her head is angled, by the way she ignores the cooling cup of coffee in her left hand, she’s there to listen).
When Anton does speak, he mumbles. When she hears what he says, Sheila from Accounts chuckles politely.
File = Fine
ANTON WRITES ON a sheet on lined paper:
When Sheila from Accounts returns to her desk after the sanctioned coffee break, she first sits down, then takes a compact from her purse and reapplies her lipstick. Then she thinks about how much she wants to fuck Anton.
She paints her lips red so it suggests her vagina, pressing her lips together, then smacking them apart. She traces the outline of her mouth with a finger imagining that it’s Anton’s cock, teasing mercilessly at the edges of her desire.
One day, Sheila from Accounts will get her wish.
Anton reads his words impassively, his heart keeping its regular rhythm. Then he initials the bottom of the piece of paper, dates it in the prescribed manner, opens the filing cabinet closest to his left knees, and files it in a folder appropriate to the calendar month.
Ignoring his erection, Anton goes back to work.
Fine = Find
THIRTY YEARS LATER, a company archivist named Ronald Bueno finds Anton’s file in storage. With branches all over the world, work on the database is very slow, with prioritizations and reprioritizations and re-reprioritizations.
Ronald Bueno finds a total of seventeen thousand six hundred and forty lined sheets, each describing the trajectory of Anton’s desire over the course of nine years (the dramatic arc is clear: a meaningful exchange of glances, coy subversions of the company dress code, frantic blowjobs in the fire escapes, kama sutra in the board room, the alternative uses of sundry office supplies, her animated gyrations, him filling up every hole in her body until she pleads escape from the crash of her orgasms).
Momentarily torn between duty and prurience, Ronald Bueno masturbates violently, twice. When he’s done, he trembles then cries, suddenly guilty about the mingled smell of chlorine and old paper. Later, he packages the files and couriers it to the last known address of the pornographer who reaches through time and moves him to tears.
Find = Mind
ANTON STARES AT the files revealed by the Fedex box. His first reaction is shock, followed by the slow flow of blood into his penis. He picks up several of the disarranged folders and fails to prevent the rain of paper that scatters like leaves from a trembling tree. On his knees, he reads a page, scanning his elegant handwriting, his memory racing back in hops, skips, and jumps to the timestamped date.
Anton breathes in the aroma of the past, the heady scent of his forbidden fictions, before finally sitting down on the floor. He begins to sort out the mess of papers by date (first, by year, then by month, making rows and columns on the tiled floor of his kitchen, pleased by the disciplined action, the panacea of methodology).
Mind = Mine
WHEN ANTON IS finished, he leaves the files on the kitchen table and walks to his den where his cell phone is. He carefully presses a number and waits for the auto-dial to complete its task.
Over the connection, the phone rings thrice before its answered.
“Hello?” The voice is old but still vibrant. It makes Anton smile.
“Hello? It’s me,” Anton speaks into the phone. “How’re the kids?”
“Missing their grandpa,” the voice replies. “Wishing you’d come with me?”
“No,” Anton says, walking back to the kitchen. “You know how fussy it gets; the dialysis machine is just a pain to lug around.”
“I miss you, sweetie,” the voice says. “Wait, is there anything wrong?”
“No, no,” Anton says, sitting down at the table, looking at his arranged files. “Just wanted to tell you something.”
“What’s that?” the old woman asks.
“I got something in the mail today,” Anton says.
“What is it?”
“Love letters I never sent you.”
“Really?” The woman laughs.
“Really.”
“Where did it come from?”
“The company we worked for. Somebody found them, I guess.”
The woman laughs again. “Read me one.”
“I thought I’d save them for Christmas, when you get back.”
“Read me one.”
Anton reads to the sound of Sheila from Accounts’ raucous laughter.
(push)
standing at the balcony with michael
i watch the people at the garden below plates in hand plates filled with food threatening to topple don’t know why everybody pigs out on the birthdays as if they never knew what food was before as if they knew they’d never have food again just pile pile piling up up up towers of this and that and this and that with some more of that please yes thank you and not just birthdays but all the holidays people people please what am i doing here can’t believe i let myself be talked into coming as if i wouldn’t as if i could stay away from
michael holds a small bottle one of those very expensive drinks that everyone who’s anyone simply must have in one hand while the other holds a cigarette reds of course what else is there to smoke (push) which reminds me of those tv ads that actually try to make you believe that you can simply ask someone to put out snuff out their ciggie yeah just try it with me fuckers
he thinks he look so cool with his fitted tee and levis and docs and kick-ass drink and supersmall cell yeah yeah yeah seen it all before buddy if you think branding makes you a better person(push) fine fine fine but me I’d never buy into that crap of wearing names I’m fine fine f
ine with my own
leaning over the balcony i see her moving in the crowd greeting friends family driver caterer so perfect it makes me want to spit poetry and yes yes of course it hurts seeing her but i can’t stop must stop can’t stop myself she’s just perfect and what kills me is that i once upon a time in a land far far away cue john williams held her in my thin arms and told her i loved her more than anything anyone anywhere together forever and never to part isn’t it ironic stupid rick astley stupid alanis go away i’m in the middle of my memories here thank you very much i just want (push) to
“Hey, Rich’s still coming, but he’s picking up Adie, so they’ll be late. See?”
michael is holding out his supersmall cell to me as if i give a fuck if or when rich is coming or not and who the hell’s adie anyway but some flavor of the month courtesy of your friendly neighborhood blind date pimp duh duh duh all these people pretending(push) they care about strangers acquaintances friend of a friend’s cousin of my armpit’s nephew’s ex-lover’s officemate’s blockmate’s sister’s pokemon for all i care
“Great.”
great can’t believe i said great but then again anything just so i don’t have to (push) talk to you directly nothing more than a single word in case your brain blows up from overload you faker you fucker you liar you scum of the earth judas traitor ass(push)hole think you’re so cool so smart and she’s still below us and whatshisname poet the one who sounds like a fag is in my head feeding me words she walks in beauty like the night something or other but it’s just perfect for her she’s so beautiful she’s
The Kite of Stars and Other Stories Page 12
