The indestructible chaos of timeless things
Bruce Gatenby
No Hope Press, 2010
Published by No Hope Press at Smashwords
Second Edition August 2010
Copyright 2010 Bruce Gatenby
Discover other titles by Bruce Gatenby at Smashwords.com
ISBN-10:1448640210
ISBN-13:9781448640218
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This is the beginning. I’m writing about the beginning, but it’s not really the beginning, it’s the beginning of the end. I’m at the end, but I’m saying you’re at the beginning and so you’re at the beginning with me, but I’m also at the end without you. There’s distance between us. A gulf, a gap. This is the beginning. Or isn’t. Or is it?
The lights are on. Outside, the street is dark. It’s a street, or rue, or via, it could be in Rome, or Paris, or Washington DC, or even Dubai, or details from each of these places forming a street wherever I want it to be. I’ll take you there. Let’s go. Call it Boulevard de Clichy in Paris, or 18th Street in DC, or Sheik Zayed Road in Dubai, or how about Via dei Serpenti in Rome. Roma. La città eterna. L’urbe. La più bella città del mondo. The faded and streaked grime of the San Martino di Monti church, the cobblestone streets still wet with rain, turn right past the fountain and walk toward the Piazza degli Zingari to a brown stone building with an illegal brothel on the ground floor, broken Roman columns in the basement, and above it, on the fourth floor, an apartment looking down on the casino and rumeroso of day to day Italian life.
Up the stairs in the dark, because the patron has not replaced the single burnt out light bulb. Through the brown door to the right. You’ve found me. Or I’ve brought you here, even though I’m no longer here, now. You’re not here, either, except in this empty space, not empty space, a book page, a manuscript, a computer screen, a voice, not empty, no nothing, but words, not life, not living flesh and thoughts, or a living place, no, only words that allow you to imagine a here, a now, a me. Perhaps a you as well. Actually, I’m not writing this in Rome, but I was in Rome and now I’m somewhere else, although when you read this I’ll probably be somewhere else again. Look down through the open windows. There’s a Slavic prostitute, her right cheek slashed and bleeding, stumbling across the piazza toward the brothel, pushing thin, cheap napkins from a pizzeria against the blood flow. Behind the green dumpster filled with trash, rotting food, and feeding rats, a man in a yellow polo shirt squats down and shits. Motorini buzz through the streets and vicoli like mechanized wasps. A group of friends stand in front of a caffé, talking loudly, smoking, drinking, gesticulating wildly, having turned to tobacco, alcohol, and each other for solace, one of them holds a half full bottle of Est! Est!! Est!!! in his hand, another holds a wine opener, il cavatappi,, ignoring both the prostitute and the peristalsis of the squatter. I’ve seen this scene—now it’s in my head—and now it’s in yours. My inner space invading yours, although you’ll never actually see it.
Why are you here?
I don’t mean the grand philosophical question, although you’re free to ponder that one as we all do, some more than others, others less than some, along with the attending questions of meaning and purpose, I mean why are you here? What are you expecting? What do you want? You want stories. You want adventure without risk, no longer to be a slave to routine without actually breaking free of routine, to discover truth in the made up, the not real, the never happened, the fabricated, or perhaps might have happened or actually did happen but embellished or transformed into not quite lies but polished with the verisimilitude of real people, places, and events, although not exactly real because transformed or embellished, but you can’t know for sure, can you, what was real and true and what was made up and false, or made up and true, which describes our hope for what the words that fill the empty space, not empty space, but words, are doing. It’s that tension between knowing and not knowing, beyond any desire for entertainment, that draws you here, the hope that by the end you will discover some great, grand truth, some insight, wisdom, revelation, epiphany, flash of lightning, that will fill your life with light, meaning, and purpose. Because even here at the beginning you know I’m at the end, supposedly rewarded with wisdom, hard fought and hard won from hardscrabble experience, which I’m obligated to pass on to you.
You want a shakeup, but this might just be a shakedown.
The story starts with a woman, say the prostitute, the one with the slashed and bleeding cheek, her name is Tatjana, she’s 19, and before coming to the illegal brothel on Piazza degli Zingari she spent her nights standing outside the Sky TV building on Via Salaria in a black miniskirt, red lace bra, and thigh-high black boots. She’s tall and thin and has stringy blonde hair and gray eyes. Her parents in Chisinau sold her to Russian traffickers who first brought her to Naples, where she was locked in a room with six other frightened young girls and beaten and raped nightly. After two months of physical and emotional abuse she was moved to Rome, where she was expected to bring in at least €1,000 a night or face further beatings from her scary and scarred Accattone.
Standing on the side of the road in the late November cold, she had nothing but contempt for the Italian mariti in their Alfas, BMWs and Mercedes, who pulled over to the side of via Salaria and paid her €20 for oral sex before going home to their wives, families and warm apartments. After being sold to the brothel owner, she was allowed to visit the cinema once a week with the other girls. One Saturday afternoon they saw the Italian- dubbed version of Under the Tuscan Sun (Sotto il Sole Tuscano) at the Metropolitan on Via del Corso, the three of them laughing so hard that the audience screamed back at them in a torrent of angry words and hand gestures, che cazzo! puttana, mignotta, Santaccia! until they stumbled back out into the light.
So, what did you learn? Perhaps the cinema reminds you of Plato’s allegory of the cave from a required Humanities class, wretches chained to the wall, seeing only the reflected puppet shadows and never the light of the real world. The real world. Okay, the prostitute is real but her name isn’t Tatjana, or it could be Tatjana, but that would be a coincidence, wouldn’t it? The cut on her cheek is real, although whether it was a knife, or il cavatappi, or some other sharp object that caused it, I don’t know. The rest of the story might have happened to someone, but it didn’t happen to her. Or it might have happened to her, but then that really would be a coincidence.
So did you learn something about yourself, or about your world, or about the world, or something about me? Who am I? What am I doing here, and what is my role in all of this? Did I create the meaning or did you? Who are you? Perhaps you don’t like stories about prostitutes. Perhaps you are a prostitute; chances are, probably not, or at least not in the conventional definition of the word. Okay then, let’s make her a student. Forty percent of Americans are pursuing higher education, so chances are you might be a student and can identify more with her if she’s one, too. That is, if you are even American. If you’re not, you can pretend to be while you’re here. So, let’s call her Chelsea, because I once stayed at the Chelsea Hotel on 23rd Street in New York, New York, USA. Actually I didn’t but I need an explanation for why I’m calling her Chelsea and that will do as well as any. Call her Chelsea and the story would go something like this...
Chelsea walked past the Forno just outside Campo dei Fiori, the one with the holiday pastries displayed in twin windows, as well as the little penis-shaped pasta, cazzatelli, that always made her smile. She was a student at one of the two American-style universities in Rome, the one that wasn’t accredited, which meant that her degree wouldn’t count in the States, but since she was on a scholarship and soaking up Italian culture she didn’t care.
It was unseasonably warm for December and so she wore a short plaid skirt, black boots, and a red leather jacket. She turned right onto Vittorio Emmanuele II and walked toward the 8 tram, which crossed the Tiber and skirted the tourist shithole of Trastevere, which she called Trashtevere. At the stoplight, she paused next to an Italian raggazzo dressed in a blue suit, pink shirt and a silver tie. He was clean-shaven except for a little shadow of chin stubble and wore large fly-eye sunglasses. Sempre la bella figura, she thought, gotta look good.
Chelsea stared at him for a moment, then turned away and looked left at the worn-down Roman columns in Largo Argentina, fenced in with plexiglass and steel rails, the ones Mussolini had excavated in order to connect his fascist movement with the glory that was Rome. Then she felt a hand slide up her skirt and cup the right cheek of her ass. Fingers rested lightly under the soft mound of her panties. As the light changed he squeezed hard and walked away. She stood stunned, numb, unable to respond in Italian or English.
Later that day, angry with herself for not having said something, or slapped his clean-shaven cheek, or socked his stubbled chin, she told everyone she knew about the incident. When she told her boyfriend, a 28 year-old Italian who lived with his mother like nearly all celibe did, he screamed “che cazzo!” and slapped her for not doing anything. After the fight they had sex in her room, and a week later he broke up with her by text message.
Poor Chelsea. I suppose I could have made her boyfriend a little more sympathetic and understanding, but violence, as you no doubt noticed, or should have noticed, along with sex, which I’m sure you did notice, are common themes of these two stories. At least that got your attention. Or not. If you’re still here. Poor Chelsea, though. Let’s just hope she’ll forget that slap, although how someone who never existed, at least as Chelsea, could forget something that never happened, or might have happened, but not in that exact context, how she could forget what never happened to someone who never existed is something I can’t imagine. Actually, I can imagine it, or these words wouldn’t be here.
But if you’re not a student or a prostitute, then perhaps I’ve risked alienating you by focusing on a character with whom you can’t relate. Perhaps you’re older, divorced, doubtful of what little promise of happiness the world has left to offer. I won’t say you’re bitter, but perhaps disappointed by how things have turned out for you. What possible interest could you have in the travails of those two? How do their experiences relate to and illuminate yours? So let’s call her Cynthia because, well, does there really have to be a reason for everything...
Cynthia worked at FAO, the United Nations food program, where she specialized in African relief efforts that frustrated her because they did little to relieve the hunger or poverty rampant on the AIDs and war-ravaged continent. She was 35, an American academic on sabbatical leave from NYU, and lived in an expensive studio apartment on the Aventino, one of the seven hills of Rome, with a view of the Roman Forum and the Colesseum, which the United Nations paid nearly twice the market rate for rent. She had an Italian boyfriend, Roberto, who was divorced and lived with his young son. The three of them spent weekends together in a cramped 30 square meter apartment in a shabby and crowded concrete building on the periphery beyond Nomentana, just outside the main hub of the city, near the GRA. She was far beyond finding this situation romantic.
Still, she liked walking home from work in the early twilight, as shadows obscured the dirt and grime of the city. One night she met Roberto and some of his old school friends for dinner at a trattoria in Testaccio, and full of pasta cacio pepe and far too much cheap Montepulciano d’Abruzzo house wine, she walked unsteadily up the Aventino after midnight. As she made her way through the large bushes that crowned the pathway, she heard grunting and heavy breathing and pretended she didn’t see them half-hidden in the dark, performing oral sex on each other. She knew that unlike her boyfriend, most single Italian men, since they lived with their parents, didn’t have a place to do it and so they used their cars or motorini or park benches or other public places to have sex with their girlfriends or prostitutes—or each other.
Later, she was uncomfortable to learn from her colleagues that Italian men didn’t consider getting a blowjob from a finocchio to be sex, that there was also a cult of worship centered on transvestites and their oral skills, and she wondered if her boyfriend ever wandered up the Aventino after midnight, since she didn’t like to do that.
Three women, or one woman with three different names, or three names with no woman, three stories, one setting, at least two major themes as your high school English teacher would try to explain it, and me. Here I sit in a room, in Rome, free to spin out these stories. Somewhere someone somehow somewhat some way. Actually, I’m not in Rome at the moment, I’m writing this in Dubai, although I might have spun those stories out earlier when I was in Rome a little over two years ago. Who knows where I’ll be when you’re reading this? And am I really free? Are you? Or are you a slave to your repertoire of repeated routines? Am I? Freedom of, or freedom from what? Shall we discuss? Perhaps these thoughts are a bit too much this time of the day. What time of the day is it? I can tell you it’s 8.18 in the morning (which it is, as I’m writing this), or I can tell you it’s afternoon (which it isn’t), or closing time (which it isn’t either, although it’s always closing time somewhere), but time difference isn’t merely a matter of time zones, GMT + whatever, which brings into sharper focus the point I’ve been trying to make up until now (and now), that there is an unbridgeable difference between the writer’s zone and the reader’s zone. We can never really be on the same page at the same time, even though it appears that we are. And it is in this unbridgeable gulf, this gap, this abyss, that you’re seeking truth. Or perhaps you’re just thinking, what about that guy squatting down and shitting behind the cestino verde? What’s his story? Sorry, he doesn’t have anything to do with this.
Dubai, located in the United Arab Emirates, across the Persian Gulf—or Arabian Gulf, as they call it here—from Iran and to the east of Saudi Arabia, is a male-dominated society in the most male-dominated, conflict-prone region of the world, so if you’re reading this in the Middle East you might not have much interest in our three women, although interest in prostitutes runs pretty high in the region, especially in Dubai, where an estimated 10,000 women work the bars, nightclubs, hotels and streets of Bur Dubai and Karama.
By now, you might be thinking, who is this guy? Well, you know that I used to live in Rome, that I’m writing this in Dubai, or wrote this while I was in Dubai, and now, now, do you really know anything about me or am I merely an imagined narrator aping me, the real me, if there is a real me, in an act of literary identity theft? Sorry, but did you even consider the possibility of a ghostwriter? Of course not. This would have been credited “as told to.” As told to whom? Aren’t I merely telling this to myself? Or for all I know, you’re telling this to yourself. But if you’re telling this to yourself, how would I know you’re telling it to yourself, unless I’m you, which means we’re back at square one with me telling this to myself. And why am I telling this in the present tense, when it’s so obviously about the past? Lends an air of immediacy, wouldn’t you agree? But it’s an immediacy that’s fake, a lie, like intimacy with a stranger. What about me? Say my name is Richard, say I’m British, say I grew up in Croyden, became an architect, moved to Dubai after a couple of years in golden handcuffs in Saudi Arabia...
Richard moved to Dubai after two years in golden handcuffs as a British expat in Saudi. No women, no alcohol, no sex, but money, lots of money and almost nothing and no one to spend it on. His bank accounted inflated, his financial safety net secure, life was difficult in a protected species in a wild animal park kind of way; after all, a golden prison was still a prison. One of the few Saudi women he’d managed to have a conversation with, a periodontist, told him, “it’s freeing to know exactly what you can and cannot do, when the law is set, not loose and opaque. To know exactly, without choice or chance.” He couldn’t have disagreed more, but only shook his head and smiled politely.
So after two years of designing expat villas for oil company compounds, he took an offer from a South Korean architectural firm in Dubai, where life looked to be less than difficult. There were bars and movie theaters, and beaches and shopping malls where men and women could mingle freely without the mutawaa, the Saudi religious police, arresting unrelated men and women for socializing. There were no black-curtained booths or segregation of families from singles at the Starbucks. Women were not required to wear the abaya and boshiya that blacked out their bodies and faces from view; instead, British, Russian and Lebanese girls strutted through the malls in tight jeans or shorts with cropped belly-shirts, bare legs and exposed navels, oblivious to Islamic traditions. Emiratis in dishdashas drank beer in the pubs and an estimated 10,000 prostitutes prowled the streets and hotels. Supermarkets sold pork products in side rooms marked NON MUSLIM ONLY; Koran displays were marked NON MUSLIMS FORBIDDEN TO TOUCH.
The firm rented a two-bedroom apartment for him in Al Wasl, three blocks from Jumeirah Beach Park. The short commute down Sheik Zayed Road to the 9th floor office in Emirates Towers was hellish both morning and evening as expats from the UK, the US, India, Pakistan, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt jammed the roads in oversized gas-guzzling SUVs and labor buses to compete for space with seemingly endless lines of trucks. The entire city was a construction zone with the skeletons of half-finished buildings, overhead metro tracks, and red and white concrete road barriers everywhere. Road maps were useless as the course of the roads changed every few weeks to accommodate some new construction project. One bridge opened and another bridge closed, and the traffic grew even more congested. The city was chaos, with little planning and less design, but for Richard chaos equaled freedom from the regulations, routines, and prohibitions he’d quickly grown tired of in Jeddah.
He could see the gleaming skyline reflecting the hot desert sun and watch the progress as the Burj Dubai rose up in the sky taller than any building on the planet out his office window. The architecture was modern, all angles and black and silver glass, impressive but aesthetically sterile. He dreamed of designing something like a Geary, Piano, or Nouvel building, something that would stand out as an architectural gem; instead, he worked on CAD designs for labor housing, four and five story beehives crammed with studio apartments meant to house six or eight Indians or Pakistanis or Nepali laborers to a room, out in the desert, out of sight of the rising postmodern city.
He bought a silver Porsche Boxster S and a sweeping gold Rolex Oyster, as well as a half dozen suits from the Harvey Nichols shop in the Mall of the Emirates. He dined out five nights a week, started dating a young Lebanese woman from Beirut who worked as a secretary in the firm, and embraced the freedom not to follow fixed standards of conduct, not to lounge safely through life, the way he had in England and Saudi.
One night after a couple of glasses of wine at Vintage with a Syrian colleague, he took the escalator down to the bottom floor of Wafi Center to browse through the bank of jewelry stores located within the glass walls of the underground parking garage. He heard the squeal of tires and looked up just in time to see two black Audi A8s come crashing through the glass and slide to a stop in front of him. Two men in black hoods, Kevlar vests, black combat boots and carrying automatic weapons jumped out of each car. The man on his far left raised his rifle and fired it into the escalator. Then he yelled, “Get down! Get down!” and everyone around him quickly fell to the ground. Richard stood a moment longer, his gaze lingering briefly on the bullet holes, then thought he could see murderous intent in the eyes of the gunman, so he dropped down, too.
The sound of glass smashing and grunted orders in some Slavic language. No one dared move. Richard was afraid to look up, terrified that any motion would be his last. After what seemed a week of slow motion time, he heard car doors slam, engines race, and the squeal of tires on parking garage concrete as the two cars left the mall and raced out into the clear Dubai night. Richard finally looked up, his only thought this wouldn’t have happened to me in Saudi.
Over the next few days, he inflated the danger he’d been in to colleagues, family, and friends. Instead of hugging the ground like a coward, he’d stood up to the masked gunman, who jammed his AK-47 into Richard’s chest, presenting him with the sudden choice between life and death, before knocking him roughly to the ground. Life after that took on new purpose and meaning. His near death experience showed him life could be far more difficult for others around him. Yes, he was thankful he’d made the choice not to be gunned down, and whenever he thought of the poor bastards from the cleaning staff, crammed together eight to a room in buildings he designed, earning 150 dollars a month for 72 hour weeks of hard labor, without the chance or choice for any change, he felt lucky to be Richard and not Rajit or Randeep.
That clears up little, since obviously my name isn’t Richard (although it could be and I’m using a nom de plume), I’m not British, and I probably couldn’t design a building (although perhaps I could with computer software). I can tell you that robbery really did occur. You can look it up in the 2007 archives of the Gulf News. And it did actually happen to a friend of mine who’s name is Richard, well, Rick actually, and although he isn’t British he is an architect, or was an architect, since he’s in medical school now, or told me he was enrolling in medical school last time we spoke, although he might have been lying. Now I’ve ruined everything, like the actor who winks and turns to the camera and says, folks, this is all an illusion, although maybe it’s just his character saying it’s all an illusion, and even though we really know it’s an illusion we don’t want to be told it’s an illusion because we want to believe the illusion is real, even if only for a little while, to distract us from the reality of the life we probably wish was an illusion. Perhaps you want to know more about that Lebanese secretary Richard’s dating. Let’s call her Aimée, say she’s from Beirut, and say she has a sister named Sabine...
Aimée and Sabine were sisters, Maronite Christians from the north Beirut suburb of Jounieh. After a few days of taking the téléphérique up to Harissa and watching Israeli jets scream across the Bay of Jounieh on their way to bomb the southern Beirut positions of Hezbollah, they decided to decamp to Dubai, to escape the difficult life of undeclared war and near-constant conflict that defined their stalemated lives in Lebanon.
They rented an apartment near the industrial zone of Sharjah, 14 km east of Dubai, where the rents were cheaper and the surroundings poorer. Stretches of the roads looked like a National Geographic documentary about the run down villages of India or Pakistan, rather than the postmodern Disneyland of Dubai. Small bakeries, cafeterias, repair garages and dry cleaners occupied the dirty ground floor of most of the apartment buildings. There were almost no women on the streets, and most of the men stood around outside the empty shops, sipping tea, smoking, and idly watching the traffic go by.
Fluent in both English and Arabic, Aimée was hired for a secretarial position at a South Korean architectural firm in Dubai, while Sabine, who had grown up in Toronto and didn’t speak Arabic, picked up temporary work as a teacher’s aide at a Canadian elementary school. Since salaries for support staff were low, they bought a used car to get to work, rather than the washing machine they needed as well. They both took their laundry down the block to the Naeem dry cleaners. One Saturday afternoon, after picking up their clothes, Sabine noticed that their underwear was missing. They were both too embarrassed to go back down and confront the men who worked in the shop, so Aimée called her friend Richard, who came over and listened to the sisters complain and wonder why the nice Pakistani dry cleaners had stolen their thongs, bikinis and bras.
Richard, who had recently had his own confrontation with crime, took the elevator down and marched through the dust- and sand-dusted street to the shop at the end of the block. He banged open the door and immediately accused the desk clerk of the theft. The clerk bowed his head, touched his right hand to his heart, and repeated, “so sorry, lost, sir, lost!” over and over as Richard raised his voice louder and louder. Some of the men outside the other shops started to gather around the open doorway, and so Richard pulled his mobile from his pocket and threatened to call the police. Finally, the clerk admitted he had stolen the underwear and sold them to the construction crews living in the labor camps for 20 dirhams a piece. The clerk reached into the till and pulled out a handful of 10 dirham notes and thrust them over the counter. Richard slapped the man’s hand away and stormed out, pushing his way past the small crowd outside.
When the sisters asked him what had happened, he couldn’t bring himself to tell them the truth, that laborers were masturbating in their bunk beds with the girls’ stolen undergarments. Instead, he repeated what the desk clerk had said, “so sorry, lost,” then he took them both shopping at the La Perla store in the Festival City mall. He also bought them a washing machine.
There’s a sandstorm today, casting a curtain, or a veil, over the sky. I can see the rough outlines of white buildings and bent palm fronds, yellow sacks of dates swinging in the wind. Details bring this scene to life for you, whoever you are, but also question can I really see myself with any clarity, can you, or is self-knowledge hidden behind the symbolic veil of sand? Perhaps I’m writing this to find out who I am, just as you’re reading this to find out who I am, or perhaps to find out who you are.
Chances are you’re probably well off, well fed, and literate, or you wouldn’t be on this journey. Why speak of reading as a journey, when most likely you’re stretched out on the couch, or in bed, or slumped in an easy chair, although it is possible you’re sitting on a bus, a train, or a plane, and that you really are on a journey as well. Now just imagine, for a moment, that you’re poor, hungry, and illiterate—where would you go for insight, guidance, and enlightenment? Would that impulse for self-knowledge even exist inside you? Imagine you traveled here (by here, I mean Dubai, where we are at the moment, although not at the moment you’re reading this, but in the mythological present moment called now) all the way from the slums of Karachi or Katmandu to escape a life of poverty and penury. What would your life be like then? Would you even think about your unhappiness and the search for a meaningful, purpose-filled life? Let’s take Richard and make him into a Nepali day laborer named Ajeet and see what happens...
Bahaar, Malik, and Salim worked as laborers on a warehouse construction site in Jebel Ali. It was an hour’s commute each day in a non air conditioned bus crammed with other laborers in blue jumpsuits from the labor camps in Oud al Mateena to the dusty site near the almost complete international airport, six days a week with only Fridays off. Life was difficult, but not as difficult as the life they’d left behind struggling as fishermen in the trash-strewn, polluted coastal slums of Karachi.
On their day off, they would pile into Bahaar’s cousin’s beat up Nissan Sunny and drive east to Umm Al Quwain, where they would buy alcohol at the Barracuda Beach Resort to resell to other Pakistani, Indian and Nepali laborers. They would then wire the extra money home to family members left behind, waiting for them to return with enough cash to buy a small house in a rural village away from the hard, grinding poverty of slum life.
One Friday night they sat on the floor of their room sharing a bottle of vodka mixed with mango juice with Ajeet, a Neapli who worked with them. Ajeet was short and slender with coal black hair and eyes and a full mouth. After the second drink he began to feel dizzy and lay down on one of the bottom bunk beds. The other three men laughed at him, then Bahaar reached over into a hypermarket plastic bag and pulled out a woman’s red bra and panties. He nodded to Malik and Salim, who stood up and then knelt down over Ajeet. Malik grabbed his arms and Salim took hold of his feet. Ajeet struggled briefly, then started to scream before Bahaar slapped him hard across the face.
“Shut up!” Bahaar said. He held up the bra and panties, then let them drop on to Ajeet’s chest. “You will put these on and dance for us.”
“No!” Ajeet shook with anger and fear as the three men laughed at him again.
“Little Ajeet will dance for us!” Salim said, tugging on his legs, making him move like a marionette.
“Hold him down while I undress him,” Bahaar said.
Ajeet tried to struggle, so Bahaar simply tore his clothing off. When Malik tried to slide the bra over his arms, Ajeet broke free and stumbled to the door, nearly naked. The others fell on him like jackals.
Later, The Gulf News reported that the Dubai Court of First Instance found the three men guilty of tranquillizing the fruit juice with alcohol and having sex with the victim. Bahaar, Malik, and Salim were immediately deported from the country. Ajeet’s claim of rape was rejected by the Public Prosecutor for lack of witnesses and he was convicted of dressing up in women’s clothing and engaging in consensual sex; he was given seven years in prison, followed by deportation after serving out the sentence. At night all he could hear was the whining of the air conditioning unit and the snores of the four other inmates in his cell, and during the day in the exercise yard all he could see surrounding him through the chain-link fence was sand, miles of sand.
So who am I really, and why the need to transform myself into these other characters who you assume have some connection to my real life? What am I avoiding, or has all this been merely an attempt to postpone the inevitable, the creation of a character whose experiences are similar to my own, but not exactly similar, so I can deny any resemblance to real life. Up until now, and even now, at this moment, now, I can say my life has been entertaining, a life worth the telling, so why don’t I just simply tell it? What is this gulf between the real and the imagined, and is it even possible to bridge it, or will the gap between the two always be one filled with sand, ready to obscure at any moment any distinction between them, boundless and bare? Is there a truth in reality that fiction obscures, or a truth in fiction that reality obscures? Weltering, we flounder forward.
Why not a memoir? Memoir is the most manipulative and least truthful of literary forms because it’s not just the ego performing but the ego justifying, the ego as both presenter and award winner. Since it’s truth that we’re after here, naked confession won’t serve our purpose, if naked confession is at all even possible outside the inescapable purpose of self-justification. Is it? As an Irishman once said, saying is inventing. So perhaps it isn’t. Perhaps only stories allow us to escape, if only for a moment, the truth that we can never escape our own dominating consciousness, that somehow, some way, we can be someone else. Perhaps imagination offers us the one opportunity we cannot get from real life: the opportunity to get outside our own heads and into the heads of other people, and convince us that by doing so we can understand not only other people, but also ourselves. This is not a dream, however, it’s a con job.
Perhaps you’ve wondered, how do I look to others? You can ask them, of course, but there’s always the possibility that they’re telling you what you want to hear, or projecting their perception of themselves onto you, or actually telling you the truth, but how can you really know for sure? Since I don’t know you, I can’t tell you how you appear to me, but I can create a character in order to attempt to understand how others see me. You can do the same, if you’d like. Of course, there’s also the possibility that the character I create is also just another version of myself, so I’m looking at myself through the funhouse mirror of myself, and not through the eyes of someone else. Can we ever really see ourselves as others see us? Let’s accept, for the moment, the possibility that we can see ourselves as others see us, even if we can’t. Or can we? Call me Chandler. Call me I. Or call me both...
Chandler had knocked around Europe for nearly eight years. With a Ph.D. in English and a couple of visiting assistant professorships at backwater state universities under his belt, he’d been able to scrape by teaching English and doing various odd consulting jobs in advertising and corporate management. He’d taught in companies across the continent, at a Swiss Hotel school, a university on the Gianicolo in Rome, even at a German medical school for a couple of years. Munich, Paris, Marseilles, Venice, Rome, Montreaux, Madrid, a winter’s downtime skiing in the Dolomites, a summer sunning on the red-tiled coast of Croatia, his itinerary read like the stickers plastered haphazardly on a 1920s Bright Young Things travel trunk. He’d found academia too divorced from experience, too snug and safe, too cowardly to confront real life—most academics, he said, had as much personality as fetuses floating in formaldehyde—and so he walked away to wed himself to an uncertain future of border crossings and experiments in living. I want to become a chanter of personality, he once said.
After all those years of walking the tightrope, he’d returned to where he started from.
I never understood or agreed with why he left, and now I wanted to understand why he’d come back to our little stubble-plain, high desert town. Although Chandler saw himself as an outsider, the ironic truth is being an outsider is just one more route to becoming an insider. Assume the radical stance, criticize the American Dream well enough, and eventually you’ll be rewarded with the American Dream. In my view, why bother with all that posturing and party line rebellion, when in the end the destination is always the same?
A little after four, he walked through the blue-framed doorway of Poverty and Tatters, our local independent bookstore-cum-café, bald as a light bulb except for two dagger-like sideburns pointing to a graying pharonic goatee projecting two inches below his chin like a salt and pepper stalactite. He wore a knee-length black coat, black sweater, faded jeans, and scuffed black high top Chucks, the uniform of a 20-something trust-fund boho. Snow dusted the shoulders of his coat like a doorman’s epaulettes. His eyes seemed to search the room for something, meaning perhaps, and when they finally settled on me they widened momentarily, as if they’d found what they were looking for. He nodded as I stood up, then smiled. We hugged and I said, “what the hell are you doing back in Pocatello?”
He pulled back, gripped me tightly by the triceps, then shook his head. “What are you still doing in Pocatello?”
We both laughed. “Sense of security, the comfort of the familiar. Marriage, kids, mortgage, tenure, all the usual excuses.”
“A life more ordinary.”
“That’s not quite true.”
“Right. So, how many?”
“Marriages? Still Anne.”
“No, kids.”
“One. A boy.” I shook my head. “Six months since I’ve slept. I’ve been parading up and down the living room, three, four in the morning, this wailing little alien succubus stuck to my shoulder.”
“It’s obvious you’re enjoying fatherhood.”
“No, really, it’s great. I caught Wagner’s entire Ring on PBS late night reruns this last week.”
“The power of gold,” he said as we both sat down at the same time.
“When did this place open?”
“Three years ago. We’re still chain free here in the valley. No Starbucks, no Barnes and Noble, no Borders. So tell me, what’s happened to you all these years? I haven’t heard from you in what, five, six years?”
“Father Walt once said, ‘the weft of first purposes and speculations mixed with the warp of that experience afterwards, always brings strange developments.’”
“I take it there’ve been strange developments.”
He nodded. “Too many to number, my friend, far too many.”
“Meaning what?”
“Do you remember in Beckett’s Murphy there’s a character named Neary, who has the ability to stop his heart? Let’s just say that whenever developments got strange, I developed the Neary heart.”
He’d written his dissertation on Beckett and the narcissism of despair. I’d written mine on the Frankfurt school, specifically Adorno’s philosophy of materialism, the need to let suffering speak as the condition of truth, the application of negative dialectics to the English elegy, a sure path to academic stardom I’d thought, but instead I wound up teaching composition to the sons and daughters of Mormon bishops, ward leaders, and businessmen. There were rumors of polygamy, incest, and the sexual exploitation of minors throughout the valley. Lots of the students were in counseling, but for the most part remained silent about their traumas and suffering. They were poor students and bad writers, and the teaching had quickly become routine.
“So there were women.”
“French femmes, Italian ragazzi, Swiss misses, German fraus, yes, there were women.”
“Anyone special?”
He stared into my eyes for moment. “They were all special.”
“So I take it you’re not married.”
“Far from it.”
We ordered cappuccinos from the student waitress. The café was crowded with other students, mostly shabby trendies from the MFA program prattling on about how they were going to revolutionize the novel, recontinentalize film, or make poetry relevant to life once more. I looked out at the sunset pulsing above the bare, brown hills and felt a sudden unmooring, a feeling of inconstancy, a floating free of tethers and restraints. In a word, panic.
The wound closed as the sun dropped below the horizon, but the moment of panic remained. “I’m surprised you’re back,” I managed to say. “Why is that?”
“Why are you surprised, or why am I back?” He smiled. “I guess the question really is, why did I ever leave?”
I could still feel my heartbeat quickening. “Yes. Romantic quests, tilting at windmills, searching for self, on the road, further, does anybody take that stuff seriously any more?”
“Obviously, I did. Look, I just knew I couldn’t stay. The whole academic system of footnoted reality, the comfort of glancing down to the bottom of the page to find the reassuring citation of a knowing authority, telling you what to think and how to live. That just seemed wrong to me.”
“Hey, I like the reassurance of a knowing authority. You know, taking off like that wasn’t exactly a rational decision.”
“Being rational wasn’t the point. Criticism is rational, artificial and lifeless, soul killing. I couldn’t take it.”
“So, did you find your soul?”
“Away from here,” he replied, “away from all this, there’s this sense of tunneling through toward experience, digging deeper and deeper toward the center of being.”
“The center cannot hold, there is no center, just interpretations masquerading as absolute truth, or at least that’s what we teach in theory class to students too brainwashed by the Book of Mormon to have any individual thoughts.”
“You don’t know what it’s like to be standing in the Alps, looking up at the receding stars and sky and wishing you could soar above it all.”
“No, but I know metaphysics when I see it. You can’t soar. There is no soaring. Sorry to say it, Icarus, but look where you’ve fallen.”
After the sunset, the lights in the café dimmed and music started playing through the speakers mounted in the corners. I closed my eyes as Mick sang:
The sunshine bores the daylights out of me.
Chasing shadows moonlight mystery.
Headed for the overload,
Splattered on the dirty road,
Kick me like you’ve kicked before,
I can’t even feel the pain no more.
I refocused on Chandler, who just sat staring down at foam peaks of his cappuccino.
“She died,” he simply said, then stood up and walked away.
I never found out who she was. Chandler had reappeared and then disappeared from Pocatello in less than one orbit of the earth. I haven’t heard from him since, and I really don’t expect to.
When I got home that night, Anne was upset because I forgot to bring home a pound of her favorite French Roast beans from Poverty and Tatters. She said some things she didn’t mean, and I said some that I probably didn’t, and after an hour of gazing at the TV and suffering in silence, we went to bed. About 2 am, the child woke up and started crying, and since Anne had to work in the morning, I got out of bed, picked him up out of the crib in the room that doubled as my study and his nursery, and marched into the living room.
After twenty minutes or so, he fell back asleep, drooling down my shoulder. I placed him back in the crib, carefully, then just before shutting off the light, looked over at the dissertation manuscript on my desk. A small academic press in North Carolina had expressed some interest in possibly publishing it as a book, but during the school year it’s difficult to find the time to get much work done, other than grading papers. I didn’t feel like going back to bed, so I sat down at the desk and started rereading what I had written all those years ago. Eventually, I picked up a pencil and started jotting down some notes. Suddenly, the child woke up and started crying again. I jammed the pencil point into the manuscript, shattering the carbon tip.
“Stop it!”
The child went silent, then started screaming at the full volume that defined his personality. I turned around in my chair just as Anne stormed into the room.
“What did you do?” she yelled, fastening the tie of her robe. “Damnit, Tom, you know I have to go to work in a couple of hours!”
“I didn’t do anything,” I replied. “Why is it always my goddamn fault?”
She sighed deeply, then turned her back on me and picked up the child. “There, there, my little man,” she chanted, “there, there, my little love, there, there...”
I walked out of the room and went back to bed.
Nabokov wrote in Strong Opinions, “mediocrity thrives on ideas.” But isn’t this statement, in itself, an idea? Does this mean that Nabokov, by his own measure, is mediocre? I am a strong believer in the power of ideas, so I can’t understand how someone so obviously not mediocre as the author of Lolita and Pale Fire could consider a believer in ideas ordinary, less than ordinary. My Mormon students have their idea, their firm belief in physical resurrection of the body into Jehovah’s heaven, and I have my ideas, ideas described and developed in my dissertation on suffering as truth.
Late at night, marching back and forth across the living room like a dutiful soldier on the battlefield of family life, the little child crying on my shoulder, hour after hour, night after night, I can only give thanks for the security, the comfort, the sense of the familiar that avoiding the overload, the splattered dirty road, has given me. It’ll be summer soon, and I hope to get a large amount of work done rewriting my dissertation into the book I so desperately need to get tenure.
A chanter of personality, but whose personality? I’m someone, or no one, writing about Idaho, or I wrote about Idaho, but not really Idaho, not here, not now, in Dubai, or not. When I say I’m here, I’m not here, there are only words here. A book page, a manuscript, a computer screen, a voice, not nothing, no nothing, but words, not life, not living flesh and thoughts, or a living place, no, only words that allow you to imagine a here, a now, an Idaho, a me. Perhaps a you as well. When I say I’m there, I’m not there, I’m not in Idaho because that’s not me, Chandler or I, isn’t really me, or part of me, perhaps, or isn’t really Idaho, only words saying Idaho, I say Idaho and you think Idaho, but not Idaho, not here, not there, not even Dubai, or Rome behind the words. A chanter of place as well as personality, but what place and whose personality?
What lies behind the words? If our thoughts are the source of all, then are they also the source of our thoughts? Behind the words are thoughts, words form out of thoughts, here forms out of words, but thoughts, thoughts form out of thoughts, self-creating and self-referential? Where do the thoughts come from? What is their source if thoughts are not the source of all? To truly understand truth, to truly understand stories, we have to go there, but we cannot go there, to the source of all, we cannot go beyond the borders of thought, back to the origin of thought, here no there, no there here. Thought is, or isn’t. Is it? Or isn’t it? To say is to missay, mislead. The way forward is not the way back. The way back is illusion, fiction, not here, not now. There, but not there. Or here. Now. Present already past, even as you read those three words, or these words. Not here, not now, not there, this is truth, or a truth, the indestructible chaos of timeless things. Or not. The made up, not real, never happened, or perhaps might have happened, or actually did, you can never know for sure, can you, can only know for sure I’m telling you you’re at the end, you think you’re at the end with me, but I’m already gone, on to another beginning without you, or not. This is the end, or actually isn’t the end, not yet. In the end, this is both dream and con job, shakeup and shakedown. This is the end. Or isn’t. Or is it?
A Higher Swindle
"She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth." —Henry James, What Maisie Knew
1.
You hear my voice in your head, these words, as if they are your own, your voice, or perhaps you’re reading them out loud or hearing them read to you, they are not your words but you have internalized them so that they’ve become, momentarily, or perhaps more, part of you; it’s the only way that I can really get inside your head, although I’m not actually listening to what’s inside your head, I have no idea what you’re thinking, no, it’s more like I’ve infiltrated you, displaced your thoughts, your words, and replaced them with my own. This is the power of language, not to accurately describe the world in words but to take you over, momentarily, or perhaps more, with my description in words of a world, but not necessarily the world. After all, the imagination is real, even if the imaginary is not.
2.
All self-expression is the product of the imagination, so how can we speak of an objective reflection of the real in words? Or an accurate rendering of the past—speak, memory—as if our memories are the thing in itself and can be reconstructed in words. Fiction or fact? How can you spot the difference, how can you really be sure, when the game seems to be hiding the truth by telling you this is the truth? You can’t for sure, unless another voice, a voice of so-called authority, confirms that this really happened, this is true. So in order to trust this voice, you need another voice, not so much displacing the voice that has displaced your own but supplementing that voice with the imprimatur of truth. You know, the way the Catholic Church tells you the Bible is true, the literal word of God, or the way a subtitle informs you that this is A True Story, or a critic confirms that the events are real and really happened. But how do you know that their voices are an objective reflection of the real in words?
3.
In order to lend my voice authority, I’ve quoted Henry James, The Master, in the epigraph above, from his novel What Maisie Knew. And what did Maisie know? After all, the voice of Maisie, the voice of a little girl, is really just the voice of the middle aged James, who certainly has no memory or experience of being a little girl, or of even having children, since he was celibate, or supposedly celibate, his entire life. "She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth." Indeed? The firm ground of fiction is a fiction, the imagination of a middle-aged man masquerading as the so-called perceptions of a little girl, so how can a blue river truth flow through the quicksand of the imaginary, rather than the concrete of the real? The Master as confidence man, trickster, shakedown artist, liar.
4.
I was five when I first pistol-whipped a girl. I was dressed in dungarees, white hat, black vest with silver sheriff’s star and a brown holster with two plastic Colt six-shooters sitting low on my bony hips. Her name was Amber Lynne and she said I looked funny, cute but funny, so I drew the right-hand pistol, twirled it a couple of times around my index finger and then smacked her across the face. She cried, I walked away. After that, I was no longer considered cute or funny, although I did take a belt beating leaning over the tub for that little indiscretion.
5.
Fiction or fact?
6.
Writing is supposed to be a clear windowpane on the world, but at best it’s a clear windowpane on the writer. His world, her world, not the world. Suppose a man—married, two children, bad behavior as a teen, jail time, recovers to attend Harvard, becomes a lawyer fighting injustice, writes a novel about a man, married, two children, bad behavior as a teen, jail time, recover to attends Harvard, becomes a lawyer fighting injustice—why is this fiction? Because he makes the lead character shorter, or taller, or changes his hair color, or gender, any other of the myriad details of description? Does the fiction, the made up, the not-real, the didn’t happen, the changed details, contain a truth the real does not? That the world is meaningless, that life has no meaning unless we change it, alter it, lie about it so that it does contain a truth?
7.
What is the difference between an artificial flower and a real flower? Real flowers fade, wilt, collapse, decay and die. What truth about the world do artificial flowers contain that real flowers don’t? Nothing natural lasts forever but the beauty of artifice is the false hope that something can.
8.
Walter Benjamin, in Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter Seiner Technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, theorizes an “aura” to an original work of art. The aura is tradition, alive and changeable, which imparts uniqueness to the original work of art. What “aura” does an artificial flower have—for that matter, what “aura” does a real flower have? The “aura” of God, the Creator? This is another version of the Platonic theory of Forms, metaphysical and idealistic, instead of physical and realistic. Working backwards from what does exist to what doesn’t exist and claiming truth lies in the “higher” form or aura that nobody has ever seen. Truth in fiction. A higher swindle.
9.
Writing is an attempt to keep the world alive—but it is not the world and it is not alive. Cuneiform marks on wet clay tablets are no more life than digital letters on a computer screen. The idea that the imagination contains truths that life does not, that words are richer than experience, is the “truth” of fiction. Looking in a mirror with your eyes closed and expecting to see something more real than real.
10.
For most of us, life is a conveyor belt on a 24-hour return cycle, routine and repetition, the signa of structured time. Some variation of work, eat, sleep, work, eat, sleep, work, eat, sleep, until the conveyor belt stops. What truth does this statement contain and is it a richer truth than a conveyor belt existence reveals?
11.
What is the difference between a description of the world and the world? Is something lost—or gained—in translation? Art is another metaphysical system of belief, adding a layer of meaning to life where there is arguably none. The sense of the sleight-of-hand man in action, the artist doing card tricks to the feigned amazement of the audience.
12.
This is a story about story. If you were expecting narrative, look elsewhere.
13.
If you say that everything external is but a projection of the mind, then even the idea that everything external is but a projection of the mind is a projection of the mind.
14.
This is the beginning and the end of everything.
Or isn’t.
Or is it?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bruce Gatenby is the author of The Kingdom of Absurdities. He grew up in California, has a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona, and has lived in France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and the Middle East.