Here Is My Only Elsewhere
Jamie Quinn Black
The color of your eyes is a complete surprise to me. I’ve never considered it.
You’re sitting across from me and you’re brooding, bellicose. I have no right to be shocked, but your attitude is not the one I expected. When I spoke to you Tuesday you insisted, even sounded enthusiastic. But settling on your stool, you move like Claymation, like a tangled marionette: all fits and starts and jerks and gasps. You’re no use to me like this.
The story surrounding you seems to have shrunk like a sweater in the wash. It has become a discomforting wardrobe—reading revisions feels like wearing wool with no undershirt. My fourth novel: It’s been so tempting to abandon the project. I doubt I could actually do it, though, and so it’s come to this. Lately, you’ve confounded and frustrated me at every turn; you’ve made every obstacle an absolute impasse. Some kind of rapport is essential for either one of us to survive, but still, though you must know this, you sit stoically. Beaming with intensity, even: veins flooded with the liquid sunshine of righteous victimhood.
The bar is poorly lit for the early evening. Everything is a uniform shade of forty-watt and oak veneer: the walls, tables, and chairs are the color of cork (and almost as insubstantial). Every surface, even the air, is skin. The patrons are earnest and browbeaten, scattered surrounding us in a seemingly happenstance disarray. Their collective dejection informs you that they come here too often: this bar has myriad stories that run from start to finish without ever involving you. They are decorative, you realize, chattel: their lives inchoate. This maybe alarms you, maybe puts you at ease. That I don’t know unnerves me.
You remove a bag of sour apple Dum-Dums from a jacket pocket—you’ve quit smoking—and unwrap one. Popping it into your mouth, you turn to size me up. From you, I read only contempt, no contemplation.
AGE 33
Character’s life was a little one. He set an alarm for waking up and when he did he went to work; he kept a coat rack and key hook to the left of the front door in his apartment; his ass fit flush with a groove in the far cushion of his seafoam green sofa; he watched reruns of ’sixties sitcoms on TV. Character ran errands on Saturday mornings with the same irritated haste as everyone. This is my time, he’d think, I shouldn’t have to waste it on trivialities.
Once, standing in line to cash his paycheck, Character found himself stationed behind two people of an age he wished he still found unfathomable. Fifty to sixty-five, the pair had identically simple squat physiques and matching untamed silver hair. They both wore royal blue shirts and off-white shorts. Dirty hiking boots hinted at time spent enjoying the day together: an eighty-degree anomaly in the midst of February.
Character tried to insert himself within their periphery. He laughed when they laughed; smiled when they smiled; he moved close at an angle matching theirs. He felt buoyed by their complacency and laughed louder when they laughed again. Character watched their exchange: practiced wit passing back and forth in a lazy patter, truncations and half-phrases, the outcome of years together. A conversation in code: allusions impenetrable to outsiders; jokes not jokes to anyone but the gigglers. The two were called to a teller and Character saw them step past the cordon and away from him without a second glance.
Later at a bar, Character played out possibilities. A dinner invitation and compliments over the wine he’d brought. Thirty minutes under the afternoon sun, eating fast-food ice cream on a park bench. The trio enjoying a hazy sunset and a vague sense of victory over something. I should have said “hello,” he thought. Regretting his cowardice, he paid the tab and returned home to watch the conclusion of a two-part Perry Mason.
We’re both nervous. We end up plowing through a first round of drinks and shots speechlessly, too fast. Somewhat lubricated, I notice your movements humanize. You shift on your stool with the grace of a skipping CD. I feel your scorn less acutely, so I turn and square my shoulders to face you. “I remember your first words,” I say. “They really did write themselves.” You remain fixated on your pint glass, reading your beer like the tarot.
Helpless, I begin to quote you. “‘For the first time in ten years, I got sick. It lasted two days, then I went back to work.’ Remember?” Without moving your head, you tilt your surprising eyes in my direction: unforgiving, severe. “So what is this?” I ask. “You’re dissatisfied? On strike?” Your life is a teeter-totter counterbalancing tragedy and ennui; it rests on the fulcrum of my will. I look into you and consider this. That’s no way to live, I think, ashamed. Then: That’s the only way to live; that’s how we all live. Indignant.
“My wife,” I say, “my ex-wife, she once told me that the goal of her life was to become Living Fiction. All the woman did was read, read, read. All she wanted was to be just like you.” When I say this, it sounds like a straining arm stretching out over a gap. It sounds like fingertips struggling to touch. The jukebox rattles its way through the cacophony of some neo-punk anthem that I barely know, but sincerely loathe.
Finally, you speak. “That,” you say, “is the most naïve thing I’ve ever heard.” You remove the sucker from your mouth and point it at me—a chiding extra index finger. “It’s just offensive.”
Everything has changed as the barroom shifts into its evening ambiance. Orange track lighting overhead lends the space an internal, medicinal feel. All that was oak appears pine and, as we sit inhaling the darkening air, you show me a knife blade smile. “If there is one thing I’ve learned in my miserable little life, it’s that this shit is only romantic when it happens on the page. When it happens to someone else.”
AGE 25
Character hadn’t announced his birthday to anyone—he had no real friends in the office—but he assumed that it was the sort of information an HR underling pulled off a W4 and filed in some shitty rolodex. He arrived at work to find his cubicle decorated. Dollar store crepe paper streamers. His desktop draped in a patterned tablecloth with a stock car border (obviously intended for children). Half a dozen balloons were stuck to the carpeted divider walls by way of static electricity.
Each coworker passing his cubby on his or her first trip to the coffee maker offered a clipped and obligatory, ‘happy birthday.’ Subsequent trips were silent, awkward. Conical party hat atop his computer, Character couldn’t help feeling made fun of.
By ten, the streamers had separated from the rolled tape supporting them. The tablecloth was ripped in two places and stained in one; the balloons, having lost their charge, lolled on the floor lamely, dancing in small concentric circles with the recirculated air. At lunch hour, a blank-faced store-bought cake lay unceremoniously on the break room table. “Chocolate,” a woman said, hands clasped in mock prayer. “Please let it be chocolate this time.” “Angel Food,” answered another. “But we’ve got Dennis from Receivable next week, and somehow he’s allergic to everything but fudge.” While Character sat by the sink, eating slowly with a white plastic fork, the employees divvied up dessert without making eye contact, without ever verbally acknowledging the occasion.
At six, Character arrived home. He ran his fingers repeatedly around the edges of his metal mailbox, not wanting to trust the disappointing sensory data they sent back to his brain. Sometimes, a single sheet could end up stuck in such a place. A coupon for an oil change, a flier for missing children. A long overdue postcard, maybe, from Celebration, Florida or Last Chance, Colorado.
“And I remember when you were born too,” I say. A Zeppelin pan flute works quiet magic in the background. You protest, insisting I remember nothing of the sort. It seems like a challenge, so I tell you the story.
I tell you how your mother was a beautiful woman, enthusiastic about her shallow brand of Catholicism. I tell you how she was a sad and lonely parochial school graduate (no boys in the real world had much use for an eighteen-year-old virgin). Because of shame and a lack of imagination, she fucked her way through a generous portion of the freshman class at her community college. I tell you about her ensuing and persistent guilt, a sort of full-body heartburn only assuaged through more and more of the same, until she had a nickname (“The Loaner”). And for a while, overkill silenced, nailed shut, the spiritual casket for her soul: a parody of a parody.
“You have a real talent for this,” you say. “What is it? Whimsy? Vengeance?”
I drive on with the story of your twin sister. “Your mother collapsed inwards. One baby was punishment and penance. Two was a complete impossibility.” I talk in some detail about the labor. “You came out fully formed: ten fingers, ten toes. Your sister wasn’t so lucky.
“It wasn’t stillbirth because there was no body. It wasn’t miscarriage either. It was a mystery—somehow it seemed the child had never existed. Still, your mother couldn’t help feeling like a murderer. Nobody could explain it. The poor woman ever really got over that. The loss became a conspicuous absence informing everything in her life.”
By the end of the story, Zeppelin’s classic is nothing but obvious, biting irony. The bar has become a cave; bowels in which Plant’s wailing seems even more anguished. Shortly, Tom Waits takes over (something from Bone Machine), and the tune chugs along like the arrhythmic handle-cranking of some infernal Jack-In-the-Box. The extinguished sunset has left the room completely under control of the tinted lights. Everything pine seems a bloody shade of cherry. I blow the smoke of a cigarette in your face when you ask me what was the point of that. “I just bet you didn’t know,” I say.
“That’s because it isn’t true.” Your eyes glint like gunmetal in the gloom, piercing the cloud around me. Monster, they say.
“It is if I say it is,” I remind you and, having said it, I feel tyrannical, despotic. Desperate.
AGE 21
Once he was able to, Character went through a Drinking Phase. A Drinking Phase: he called it such, even while pretending it was something other than affectation. After work he would drop by the liquor store and buy airline-size bottles of the flavor du jour.
Monday: whiskey. Tuesday: rum. Wednesday: vodka.
Character was conscious of the fact that all his habits held a maximum shelf life of six months. After that time, they faded into a lingering black shadow of remorse over the broken promises they’d become. Still, he found it worth the effort to try on different lives.
Character worried that women saw him and got the impression that he ‘had it all together.’ He felt he understood the Fashionably Messy Haircut: Women want rumpled. They want to insinuate themselves into a life with room for them. So he worked to develop a drinking problem. He left his top button undone beneath his tie. He shaved only every other day.
Thursday: gin. Friday: cognac. Saturday: wine.
Character allowed his studio apartment to deteriorate until it began to smell and then he tried to maintain it in this controlled chaotic state. He washed dishes only once a week. He took up smoking, left ashtrays brimming. He ate dinners in front of the TV and out of the pan, the box, the can.
Sundays were for beer.
That spring, Character forgot to buy drinks for an entire week. Sick, he literally forgot. Despite all his efforts, he had developed no need. When he remembered, he contemplated driving out. A Wednesday: Character could feel the isopropyl taste of vodka on his tongue, in his throat, and he recoiled instinctively. He was tired of marshaling the urge. I’m no alcoholic, he relented. So, Character entered into a dining out phase. Every night of the week he ate somewhere. Monday: Denny’s. Tuesday: Shoney’s. Wednesday: someplace independent. At the latter, he read calculated (albeit clichéd) books as a lure (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Reviving Ophelia, The Vagina Monologues). The habit lasted four months, until he left town. And he tried internet chatrooms, then phone sex, too.
Half in the bag and onto a fourth round, both your movements and complaints start to flow like pixelatedpixilated sap in a video game on a Commodore 64. With the drink, I’ve regained a feel for you. The way you breathe. The way you inhabit a story, expanding to fill all of its pockmarks and pimples. Your rage is a fireplace stoked by the bellows of booze.
“You never let me do anything I want to do,” you say. Your complaints sound patently adolescent. You accuse me of intervention and interference. Your speech is planned: rehearsed rhetoric pointedly avoiding words like yearning and longing, even though they more accurately convey your tone. “I’m constantly frustrated and confounded,” you shout. “Blocked at every single turn because of you.”
It’s imbecilic, perhaps. But it sounds somehow familiar.
“That’s not true. That’s not how it works.” On the defensive, I struggle for words you will hear, words you will understand. “You’ve created yourself: once a thing is conceived, it unfurls itself after that first kick in the pants.”
“Yeah, well you kicked me hard enough to leave a bruise.”
I try matching disgust as my tactic. “Look, kiddo: Nobody’s happy. Everyone suffers just the same and ends up doing something other than what they want to do. I wanted to play guitar. Instead, I do this. But that’s just how it goes. That’s the real world.”
“And I’d have a chance there if you typed one in.” You breathe deep and crunch on a sucked-down Dum-Dum. The sugary apple reek of your breath is simultaneously alluring and acrid. “Instead, I can’t do what I want to do because you’re too busy having me do what you’ve already done.”
The statement is sudden and smacks hard like the first gunshot in the Zapruder film. “I’m what?” you continue, “the experience of some aspect of yourself?” My head feels like a collapsing lung, expelling a deep draw of mentholated smoke into an Alaskan Saturday afternoon. “You’ve got me running around and rewriting you—it’s plain as fucking day.”
“Rearranging,” I mutter, but I don’t repeat the word when you ask me to. Meanwhile, the jukebox has forgotten to play; the bar staff has forgotten to breathe; the chattel have forgotten to be. As if the spacetime of the whole room hiccups and, for a moment, it’s just the two of us, black scribbled stick figures in empty white space. Something Hawking or Derrida could maybe explain. I wasn’t prepared for this. “What you have to understand,” I explain, “is that there’s an emotional palette but I’m a Synthesis Engine—I work in recombinants.”
You sever my speech like an umbilical cord. “I don’t expect perpetual bliss, I’m not a fool. I want a life you could call freewheeling, or unhinged, or maybe even blackly comedic. What I’ve got is this remaindered existence, an understated half-life where everything means something else and I’m just a literary device.
“Right or wrong?” you ask, and leave me no time to answer.
“Am I just a conversation between concepts? An unanswered question meandering in the hope of solving itself? Am I your fifty-minute hour? Your personal incarnation, your avatar?”
Neck bent like the long stem of something drying, I think of all my favorite fiction and wonder whether I have succeeded or failed with you. Are all characters equally indignant, impudent, insightful? Was Godot supposed to end well until Beckett’s lead flipped him the bird? I know you’re waiting for answers but I let the silence stand. The quiet feels like someone dropped a hair dryer in the tub.
AGE 18
Character stood at the den’s entrance and watched the water blasting forth from it. The stream was torrential, biblical. The concrete- and steel-framed maw is a sick mouth vomiting the detritus of Character’s life like half-digested food.
Plastic sheath containing a hard-won Ron Guidry rookie card. Threadbare, once loved wind-up teddy that used to sing “This Old Man.” One-thousand grey Lego bits from a moonscape playset, purchased on layaway.
The water was knee-high and Character, ill-prepared, stood in the middle of the eruption, waterlogged feet chilled to the bone. A high-volume main, the caretaker explained, burst wide open right underneath the space, shattering the concrete flooring. “Only thing keeping it from freezing right now is how much goddamn water’s still coming,” said the man. “You can save anything, do it now, cause tomorrow you’re gonna be the proud owner of a goddamn glacier.”
Tiny shoes. Christening outfit. An empty bottle of Mr. Bubble with a cap shaped like Darth Vader. An empty black leatherette folio, gold-embossed with script letters spelling Precious Memories.
Character watched without moving. Behind him and down a steep hill, the storage lot merged with the grated reservoir of a sewage treatment plant. Convenient, thought Character when he saw, and he cursed under his breath. Everything on its way past him soon found oblivion. Character had kept this space for the six months since his mother left. He thought of it as the anchor mooring him. Character: constantly claiming a desperate need to get out, to get away. The chosen lot, his storage unit, sat one mile from the apartment in which he was raised.
“They got insurance for this—don’t you worry,” said the caretaker, sidled up to Character in the midst of the mess. “I remember you dropping shit off. The look on your face, Ida figured you for one of those that’d just up and go. Take off the hell away from here.”
“Me too,” Character replied, averting his gaze, dropping his head to watch the water gushing between his legs. “Kinda feels like something was keeping me here.” The cardboard boxes soaked through, swelled at the sides and burst. They expelled their contents out into eddies created by the current.
A vinyl bath book called A Child’s Garden of Prayers. A star-shaped plastic box containing a near-complete set of milk teeth. A top-heavy yellow duck floating on its side. Character turned to run after that last.
The rush of the high water was more than a match for him, he had to dive after the duck as it neared the edge of the slope. He failed, floated on his belly down the hill, onto the outer edge of the treatment plant’s grate. The duck dropped through. Character offered a halfhearted ‘No,’ and when he sat up, he saw spectators. People had gathered to watch the exhibition, the exposition, the shit parade of his little life. Teenagers—old classmates, probably—drank Coors Light, smoked cigarettes, and laughed loudly, staring in his direction.
I had always supposed that we would be friends. Quiet, yet communicative. Loyal, if occasionally argumentative. Familiar—maybe sometimes too much so—but because of it, possessed of the potential for those spontaneously transcendent moments unique to pairs of combat veterans, fraternal twins, fathers and sons. I was wrong.
“How could you do this to me?” you ask. Again, I let the question hang. I remember the way you were in the opening chapters, so shy. A wobbly colt, unsure of both hoofs and the ground beneath them. I remember the way you grew, the way you grew on me. Now pride or greed has made you uncooperative. I don’t want to write this novel without you—I’m unsure it could be done.
“I know you heard me,” you say, working the stiffness from your neck and knuckles. “What gives you the right?”
“You’d rather be catching your dinner in the Big Two-Hearted River?”
“I hate you. I honestly believe I hate you.” And when you smile at the bartender refilling your glass, it’s sincere, and it stings because you have yet to smile like that for me.
I remind you that I created you; ask if maybe that doesn’t count for something. You tell me no, it doesn’t; life is not necessarily a gift. “I mean, do you even remember the things you’ve done to me? The things you’ve put me through?”
I have to restrain myself from slapping you—from actually, literally slapping you. Reminding you that your novel—my novel—could just as easily have been a Holocaust story, the tale of some South African pogrom. I have to suck down an entire cigarette before I begin a proper response just to avoid reminding you that you don’t have any real problems.
“You could have been crippled. The father of a dead son. Black in Macon, 1860. Seminole anywhere, in 1835.”
You sit twirling the gnawed stem of your last lollipop over and between your fingers. All happy families are alike, says Tolstoy. This, I think, justifies all my fiction’s grotesqueries. I number the days of your life, think back on all of your sadness, but see only beauty. I can’t communicate this. No character ever truly understands Authorship. All Author can do is offer condolences.
“I’m sorry,” I say, “but—”
“See that’s the problem: I want the apology and not the ‘but.’ Whatever your motives, you are not excused. Do you understand that? You can never be excused.”
AGE 21
There are things, Character discovered, that will reverberate in the mind forever, with no degeneration. I am going to see if broken hearts can be fixed by a smithy. In three years, Character had not acclimated to the negative space left behind. In a hidden fifth chamber of his heart, her last words were the perpetual ricochet of an everlasting echo.
Randall, her blacksmith boyfriend, owed money all over town and so questions asked went unanswered. The letter left behind was terse, cryptic. Pitseleh, it’s time to return to my life. I was your age when I gave birth to you: imagine that. If we meet again someday, tip your hat and I’ll curtsey. The effect of the text was the emotional equivalent of tearing butterflies in two.
Character still speculated, still thought on a daily basis of trying to find her. So, when a coworker asked him to help out on his band’s first national tour, Character couldn’t help agreeing even though it seemed unlike him. “Just stay out of the way—you’re quiet, that’s why I asked. I like you fine, but don’t embarrass me. And don’t cock block. But you can help yourself to strays.”
The band called itself Profanity of the Truth. They had nothing to say to Character for the most part, and he had nothing to say to them. Staying out of the way was easy and preferable. At the first stop, Character scooted away from the group after loading the van and found a diner with a copy of the local white pages. He looked his mother’s name up, found a match and dialed. He did this in every city.
Most of the respondents were polite. Some were tiny geysers erupting with pity. Two panicked, hearing the desperation in his trembling treble-heavy voice and thinking him a pre-teen in trouble. Character tried to calm them, before panicking himself and hanging up before the call could be traced (too much TV). But usually, Character would just be turned away with “Wrong number, honey. Good luck finding mom.”
In Solitude, Indiana, he drank too much and called a woman who confessed. “Oh, I knew this day would come. You know they wouldn’t tell me where you were, baby, don’t you?” The woman cried into the receiver, muffling her voice, and explained about the adoption. “I didn’t have a choice,” she said. Character had plenty of opportunities to correct her, but instead he cried too, said “momma,” and fed the payphone with quarters until his orange paper roll went flat.
When he returned home four months later, Character discovered a series of postcards in his mailbox. Each had arrived from some exotically named place: What Cheer, Iowa; Dead Horse, Alaska. Each was inscribed with a hackneyed line from Wordsworth or Dickenson. Each was signed by his mother—both first and last name present, as if to clarify. The last card in the sequence contained an entire original paragraph.
I followed the road signs and found happiness! On the way there, I saw this postcard and thought of you. Honey, my work is done: I consider my debt to you Paid In Full and I hope you remember me fondly. Good luck, pitseleh, the world is wide.
The photo on the front featured a desert scene. A vacant road perforated by a dotted white crosswalk, itself obediently traversed by four sequentially smaller tumbleweeds. In big block letters it said “Why, Arizona” and Character soon used it to scrape mucus from the hallway floor, having cried until he threw up.
“You’ve taken everything,” you tell me. “Shut my existence in a closet and starved it.” I think about calling Reader and asking her to join us—to clarify and obfuscate—but I realize that Reader will have been seduced by her memory of you. That is, her memory of your memories, as I penned them (it is, after all, a first-person novel). By this point, Reader will surely share your righteousness and rage without ever considering that she is the true catalyst for them.
“You’ve marooned me. You’ve left me completely alone.”
“Your life is not entirely my fault. Think about Reader: I couldn’t possibly control everything. I’m not Flaubert. I’ve read Jauss and Iser. I’m a postmodernist: even the thought of trying for that control is inconceivable to me.”
I can tell by your face as you stir your whiskey with another apple sucker, that you’re trying to consider this Reader. But you can’t get far—the very idea bows the edges of your consciousness. I think of Abbot’s Flatland and do my best to move on.
“The best prose is a coloring book and an author provides the lines. But Reader is the one filling things in. Half the time she ignores the lines provided—sometimes overwrites them entirely. Usually, she superimposes her own life on you. Eradicates your will and experience.”
“Whereas you would never dream of doing that,” you say.
The smoke in the room has become intolerable, sulfuric. What of the jukebox? If Reader has remembered it, it might be plugging away through the tenser sections of Skynyrd's Freebird. The track lights probably resemble heat lamps now and all the furniture—countertops, chair legs and high backs—have darkened to mahogany. Though now that she has hold of it, there’s always that chance Reader has tinted the setting far beyond any prediction or recognition of mine.
“Your eyes,” I say. “Reader gave you those. She knows the color and I’ve never once mentioned it. Your whole physique—the same goes for so much of your life.” I consider my statement. It is a compelling misrepresentation of truth, a clarifying obfuscation. It’s an exonerating, enthralling myth.
I add, “more or less,” in a half-whisper.
You suck your sour apple. “Fine,” you say. “You’re just some jerk creating a coloring book and there’s this Reader with a box of crayons.” I nod my head frantically, thinking we’ve made a breakthrough. I’m excited for my own impending absolution. “And so this Reader whom you’ve indicated as the source and sponsor for all evil in my life: you expect me to believe that you’re not responsible for her doings, too?”
And perhaps here Reader will allow the song blaring from the speakers to explode into its coda movement: the unbridled, frenetic guitar noise serving as a clumsy symbol of something. I look around the bar. I see you, Character. What do I see? I see whatever Reader imagines, whatever jibes with the established mood. Which, I suppose, makes me her slave. So be it. But, if so, then I am her servant chauffeur, her carriage driver. And, the reins having never left my lap, I drive the piece on.
AGE 25
Rembrandt Gold would be a gregarious and brilliant womanizer. Character knew he would have to grow a beard. He checked the mirror. He tilted his face, chin in hand, scrutinizing hypothetical results. Patchy, probably.
Character’s springtime obsession was identity and he was convinced that he needed to change his name. Establish ownership of Self, he thought, and he was determined to do it before the project lost its luster.
“My last name is my father’s,” he said at every given chance, “and his involvement stopped after the orgasm.” Character told the story at every related stop: the county clerk’s office, the local newspaper, the social security administration. Even at the grocery store, where he collected forms to correct his bonus card and keytag.
Character spent six weeks with spread open telephone directories and yearbooks salvaged from estate sales. He compiled lengthy lists; he matched first to last names in three syllable couplets. He purchased baby name books and broke each potential individual down to ethnic roots and etymology. He bought books on numerology and Kabbalah in order to decode the covert messages that might lurk within any given moniker. He brought home applications for everything, for jobs he didn’t want, just for the thrill in allowing each letter of his new name to be spelled, spilled into those perfect rectangular boxes.
Simon Grey would be a people watcher. Possessed of a certain acerbic wit that went largely unappreciated. Character explored the name, decided that he would need to read more often and perhaps lighten his hair. Neither were efforts to which he was sure he could commit.
By the end of the season the mood had passed. Realistically, Character knew, I can’t ask anyone to call me something else. Not with a straight face. He gave the idea up out of embarrassment. Like everything else, it faded into a heart stain visible only under the ultraviolet rays of his inner vision.
Afterwards, when Character closed his eyes he still saw the soul of his final choice: the right and proper name of his secret self. Lids drawn, he no longer saw the slow parabola of his nose. He no longer saw the damp, effeminate gestures of a single mother’s only son, the mongrel shade of his hair. Instead, he saw a perfect body, like dark Grecian marble. He saw himself the way Christ might have looked: snake thick dreadlocks, heart-shaped face, skin the color of apple butter (maybe marked somewhere with a tattoo).
Phoenix White, thought Character. Tempered by struggle instead of enfeebled. My name is Phoenix White. He would think this thought over and over, think it out into the fading noise of the city night, but every morning when he woke, it still wasn’t true. He was always still himself.
“Just tell me this much,” you ask. “Tell me why I’m here.” And I know that I can’t deny you this answer, but I can’t satisfy you either. The harsh crimson overheads wash out your features; they turn the setting ebony, intestinal, chthonian. I wince in the glow, trying to invent an explanation within your idiom.
“You’re here because I need you,” I say. “You’re here because I love you.” As soon as I’ve said it, I regret it and your grimace reflects my mistake, reflects my utter failure to transcend epistemologies. You shake your head at me—disappointed—and I know what you’re thinking before you can say it. “I’m not going to get the chance to do this again and you’re going to make me keep on existing until you’ve finished with me. So tell me: what’s the purpose of my life?”
I breathe in and out deliberately, slowly. I answer you honestly. “The purpose of life is to be a single beautiful thing.” You flutter fingers at me asking for more. “Am I here to learn something? To teach? Is my life teleological? Allegorical?” Questions come rapid fire until I silence you.
“You can’t worry about that. Just stay beautiful.”
You look at me with those eyes and I hold your glance, return the stare. I’d like to think of this as a moment of communion, but I know better. It isn’t. “That’s it?” you ask. “That’s all?” Poor Character, you can’t understand.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “There’s not much more to it. It’s a short novel.”
AGE 33
Character had been on the road for the better part of three days when he saw it. Bribed with gas money and the price of the rental truck which a coworker couldn’t secure, he took an impromptu week of vacation from work to drive this coworker and his cargo out to Colorado. The man wanted to watch his daughter give birth. After twenty-six straight hours of driving, Character dropped the man off at his daughter’s apartment and drove to a Motel 6 for five hours of nervous sleep.
The whole trip out, Character remained surprised he’d accepted the offer.
When he woke, Character felt frantic and ran to the car immediately, starting the trip back in a fugue state that ended only sometime around hour three of the journey. Becoming aware that he existed, that he was driving east, that was when he noticed the monstrosity crowning on the horizon. Having crossed this stretch at nighttime, he reasoned, he had missed it on the way out: the single remarkable thing between Colorado and Missouri.
The sign was colossal, maybe forty feet from base to top edge, and each letter had to be at least a man’s height. It stood in stark contrast to the typical plains landscape. Elsewhere, Kansas: a place where cardinal points of the compass seemed absurd because the earth bends visibly at every periphery. The sky was a turned-off television screen bent to form a dome above the uniformly marigold earth. But aside from these broad swaths of undifferentiated color, Character could see nothing else at all, because there was nothing to see.
Character allowed his car to roll gradually into a stop. He exited the vehicle, found the air thick with ozone, and he climbed atop the warm hood. Maybe it was the dangling suggestion of the sign. He felt peculiar. No. No, as he stared up reading, he felt unpeculiar. Anonymous. Maybe it was exhaustion. Highway hypnosis.
Happiness is a, the sign instructed.
The sign remained without its closing word(s) thanks to teenagers or tornadoes and no clue was left to either its original content or intent. Or maybe it had never been written, never finished to begin with. Nevertheless, Character smiled as he stared at it. He lit a cigarette and swallowed this—his most perfect moment—with his memory, with his mind. The distance, the space, whatever: Character was complacent. Reliving it later, the same words always occur to him: left alone.
With the ozone odor, he expected it to rain, Character. But it didn’t.
Flicking the butt of his cigarette into the road, another car blasted past. The spell broken, Character climbed down and into his automobile. His head already cluttered and hopelessly anchored back there, he keyed the ignition and drove straight through the twenty remaining hours back to his hometown: the tiny place he’d been taught to navigate, everything he had ever known, and what life he was given to remember.
