Fast Fiction 03.11.05
LISTEN
1385 words by Stanley Lieber
I lie in bed and switch on the binaural recording taken outside my window last night. On the other side of that window the two security microphones, separated by some thirty feet on the outer wall of my home, listen in on the environmental cacophony so that I can play back the recording tomorrow morning as I'm falling asleep. I time-displace the experience of the yard to allow me to relax (I figure that any strange noises that come wafting along may be safely ignored, since whatever events they document are merely echoes of the past; thus the yard takes on a placid quality, even though we live in the middle of the city and the sounds of police disturbances and lorry crashes are an ever-present click-track). The reality of the out-of-doors is mediated by the equipment, shifted to the impregnable assurance of the next day and a detached review, enjoyment, of any textural irregularities. After a while I hear what sounds like a pane of glass giving way, some words whispered in Russian, the panicked yelping of my dog from the kitchen. For a moment I pause, on the verge of leaping from my bed, but then I recall that the audio is out-of-synch. Yesterday...
I snatch off my earphones and cover my face with a pillow to shield against the aching sunlight. This is disorienting. I am at full charge and I will not sleep any time soon, succumbing to the rising terror that my mind is growing out through my face. I'm not sure I'm lucid.
Listen, can I break writing?
If I write and write and don't stop to place spaces between the words, between the thoughts, does something fall apart? Do I lose coherence? What of the regular daily columns I submit, instructional platitudes providing easy justifications for sale-week splurges; gently flattering the vanity of the consumer designers whose products I must review? Are these not produced just as quickly, just as haphazardly as the thoughts that now fill my mind?
These are the questions I ask myself, ass frozen to the bed at 07:18 in the morning. I spent the better part of the night thinking it was Sunday, rigid with the stultifying certainty that within hours (then minutes), I would lie down to sleep -- haltingly -- before returning to the office. That I would have the hours of the late afternoon and evening to dispose of after I woke up did not help matters. When I realized my mistake, I simply began to fret over how I would systematize the remaining full day and night off. Having gained nothing.
But that's not what distresses me so now -- no. I am presently concerned with torments of quite another character. On this very rhetorical page I am consigned to fret over an abundance of thought -- an abundance! As if a surplus of that evanescent habiliment were a problem that needed working out. The simple fact of it is that I have merely to set pen down on paper (often the pen and paper are unnecessary) and it comes spinning forth like a marble, or, perhaps more appropriately, the hands of a wristwatch in the waning minutes of a Sunday night before work. No, this is not to be shunned or stifled, but welcomed, invited in, accommodated! A pity I have left my notebook downstairs, and don't wish to interrupt my wife's lessons.
I do wonder though what should come of it all, if I were to simply keep going, just not stop writing. I can stumble over paragraphs in this 'paraplegic cakewalk' (apologies, Alan), but what manner of chicanery and subtle grift is this illusion of perpetual motion? Do I really believe that through the constant filtering of this stream into digestible prose that it can be approved upon? Brightened? Ah, the irreducible self-valuation of the intestinal track. And what of humble stasis? Holding still on the verge of spilling over. Perhaps here there is a fence to be straddled. Therein lies the art I seek, I am sure of it.
O equilibrium, where have you gone. How can I sleep.
Monday (tomorrow?) it's back to work and doubtless I'll end up sleeping most of this daylight away (I work at night now) having nightmares in bed. About what? Why, about the people I live with, grow with, watch die -- the ones that never existed in the corporeal, waking world we share but only borrow our faces in time spent asleep, until their lives run out and their stories end. I simply sit, watching. No use in dwelling on their passing once I wake up, but there I'll go anyway, sacrificing a fair portion of the following day to mourning the -- my -- loss. Who are these faces that flit through my dreams like subterranean, occult portraits of myself? Attracting my interest.
Many times they wear the masks of celebrities, many of whom I can't stand to watch on the television or in their vulgar films. Underneath the magazine exterior will lie a dear friend; relative; mate. None of it superficial as you'd expect. I'm sometimes not even myself, in these dreams, but another bit-player in the television drama, invested with the same heavy, inexplicable significance. Real life in 16:9 drag.
I've tried to tell a few people of this, but it never comes across right and I end up sounding like some kind of fame-obsessed fandom freak. God and Goddess forbid I should write down who these faces belong to out here, on the outside of the dream itself. I'm not simply attaching to empty eyes.
So, the faces and their rightful owners. Do they then dream of me? Am I a puzzling presence in their hotel or bedroom, bridging thought and the night? Standing in front of their TV screens, eclipsing the light they dream is still emanating from it? Being asked to move out of the way? Actually, I doubt the faces are really connected to the very public bodies you would associate them with, were you to peek behind my eyelids and observe this sleep narrative for yourself. Likely some internal mechanism of mine just gets lazy when it comes to generating the imagery of my dreams. Which celebrity represents my mother? Always shortcuts, with me. A celebrity face may take less system resources to render.
Though I do wonder from time to time, if I were to happen upon one of them, out here, if a shimmer of recognition might rumple the serene, otherwise photogenic grimace that walls them off from the rest of the world.
I give up on sleep and pull on a shirt. Five (scattered) hours in three days is not the worst I've experienced. I join the wife downstairs, now mentally rearranging the hours before I'll have to shower and leave for the office. I shuffle the books on the coffee table, attempting to divine from their covers which I should take with me tonight, begin reading first. Turns out this is Monday. A knock at the door.
Cookies; the dog; a metal (no-kill) rat trap; a bottle of water; some dizziness; a pair of red- and black-striped socks. I write from the repainted kitchen, sitting in the black chair while my wife bakes up a batch of cookies. The dog investigates the rat trap with the tip of her nose and has to be steered away from it with the tip of my wife's shoe.
For my part this evening I have gathered up the garbage and made it as far as the back porch (dogshit on the lawn precluding any trips to the alley under cover of darkness). Also I had to clear off this chair, in order to sit down. After several hours of reading I am finally prepared to open my journal. Now the wife mixes cookie dough near the side of my head, but I don't look up from my work -- too immersed in finally getting it all down. Evangeline, having completed her circumnavigation of the kitchen, rests at my feet.
I reach out to pinch my wife's ass, just as gently as I handle my other work.
After writing this, I actually do it. Reality lagging the record of the fact. There is a sound of voices whispering.
Russian.
Photo: Вид на г. Златоуст с запада. [1910 год]
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