A Dream Spelled Backwards
This is something I wrote, in part, a while ago. I've decided to extend it and give it a proper narrator. I just finished it this morning, and am thinking about submitting it somewhere.
Give it a read, let me know what you think.
A Dream Spelled Backwards
I hung up the phone with Katie’s voice still buzzing in my ear; she wanted to take some time for herself, away from me. That was fine; I’d been expecting it, really, and in the back recesses of my brain I knew it was coming. Way back there. Really. As I placed the heavy black handset down on the phone’s cradle I could hear her slow mumbling cease, and wondered if she even knew I’d hung up on her. It had happened before, she often said I was “out of it,” ending conversations when I felt they were done, when I’d gotten all I wanted out of them. Nature of the job, I suppose. Journalism is all about angles, it’s all about the slant the reporter puts on the story. Don’t let anyone fool you that a reporter only cares about the integrity of the story. That’s bullshit; they care about how that story represents them. It’s their name going under the slug, if someone hates their piece it’s that name they’re going to be gunning for, or vice versa, that name they’ll want to laud to the editor. Right, as if anyone under eighty ever writes to the editor anyway. I took a drag from my cigarette, stood up and went over to the dirty grey-lit window that overlooked my dirty grey-lit neighborhood and stubbed the cigarette out on the windowsill. Ah, Katie, you’re killing me girl. I know we’ll get back together; she’s jut mad at how much time I spend working. But that’s the business and you don’t get into it unless it’s your first love; everything and everybody else comes second. I’ve never hidden that from anyone and I’m sure everyone thinks I’m a shallow piece of shit. Let ‘em. At the end of the day that rush of copy, ink stained fingers and pockets, and frantic phone calls are mine. That’s life. I’m recording straight into the book of life and years after I’m gone my stories will still be around. The good, the shit, the fluff pieces; they’ll all be there.
I just moved from being on the crime beat to being the top stringer at the paper. I’d been on crime for three years, and I’d seen a lot of shit. Scary shit. Kids ripped apart by dogs, women beaten within an inch of their lives and scared shitless to leave the human trash that did it, men so pumped up on their own ego and self importance that when they self destruct they intend to take the world with them. It ridiculous, how important we all feel. We’re nothing. We’re a dot on the map, and the map is not the territory. Seeing all that blood, all of those bodies, all of those senseless acts really unhinges something inside of you. I thought about God a lot when I was on crime, because god knows I couldn’t sleep. I’m half convinced that there actually is a God, but not the one we’ve come to know and print on t-shirts. I’d heard something interesting once when I was covering a story about a priest who went missing downtown. Not like a Roman-Catholic priest, it was some small Eastern European orthodox religion. Anyway, when I was interviewing the priest’s fellow clergymen I learned something that gave me a lot of perspective. A sallow man dressed in ornate yellow and gold robes told me, in a thick Czechoslovakian accent, that the God that we know and worship is not the true God. It is the shadow of God, cast upon the material plane. It is an idiot god, creating out of a sheer blustering need to create. It tries to do right, but since it is only the shadow of the true creator, and the true creator is all spirit and love and light, it can only do wrong no matter its intentions. He called it the Demi-Urge. I don’t think they ever found that missing priest, and right after that story was filed I quit the crime beat and moved into the strings. I just needed a break; I was becoming desensitized to humanity because all I saw was meat. Meat in varying states of decay. I should call Katie back. As I lifted the phone the base made a short chirrup, a half-ring, and I could hear a voice coming from the handset. It was a man’s voice. We need you to cover an art opening, the voice reported, Bernie is sick, we think, we can’t reach him. The voice was the Arts editor, a short stocky man with a head that looked like an overripe watermelon. I couldn’t remember his name. Bernie was the usual gallery guy, a well dressed and effete man. I liked Bernie; we’d talk at length during the paper’s pot-luck holiday parties. We both liked art and hated television. I always got the sense that I was a bit of a novelty to him, a crime beat reporter who could discuss the finer point of French Expressionism, or the Dutch Still Life movement. The voice gave me a time and an address, and told me that Bernie left a note specifically saying that if he couldn’t make it to the opening; he wanted me to cover it. I tuned the voice out after writing down the address; I didn’t have much time to prepare for an art opening. I did some quick calculations in my head, the gallery was one of those moving storefronts; one day it was bundled among the cobbles of Gramercy, the next it was sitting in a stinking alleyway in the meatpacking district. Tonight it was in NoHo, I had a few hours to shower and shave. I also needed information. I tapped my finger on the cradle, silencing the voice if it was still going and dialed the number of the newsroom. I asked for Doris, the researcher, and when she got on the line I asked her to dig me up whatever she could on the artist. She said she’d get right on it, and I told her to fax it to the usual place, the library on the corner, we both hung up. Why can’t all phone conversations be as direct? I shed my shirt and headed toward the shower to get ready.
When I arrived at the studio in NoHo I wasn’t surprised with what I found. It was a nondescript storefront. White silk curtains had been hung over the large picture window at the front so that the inside was impenetrable. Even the building number had been scratched off the door; I only found it by taking note of the building numbers around it. I’d studied Doris’ poop sheet about the artist on the subway, though standing there in front of that blank door, I couldn’t remember a damned thing. It would come back to me. I often found that I synthesize information quickly. I’ll read something, hear something, and not realize the impact it’s making on me until it’s time to use the information; then it just pops into my head. I entered the storefront and stood in a narrow hall with about a half-dozen other people. Well dressed, mostly Caucasian people who smelled of perfume and cologne. Not harsh, a hint of flowers and astringent. I quickly took in the faces and caught a glimpse of my own face in a mirror set just inside the doorway. We all had the same look on our face; restrained eagerness. Hands clutched and rubbed, men obsessively straightened their ties, women plucked at the hems of their dresses, but no one spoke. No one coughed, or sneezed or cleared their throat. We were all quiet. Waiting, watching. It was the painting we were all there to see. We were half-mad to see it, chomping at the bit. Shifting glances and piercing looks at one another; swearing inside to God that each one of us would be the first to see it. We were packed in a slim corridor and there was a silk curtain covering a doorway. A silk curtain was all that stood between us and the painting. I remembered then, about the previous four paintings, about the woman who cried during number three, the woman who wouldn’t and couldn’t stop crying, the woman who is still crying today. A large man wearing a tight black t-shirt, jeans, and an ivory white mask over his face stepped into the room from behind the curtain. He pointed to a deep wicker basket that sat on a black pedestal right beside the entry to the gallery proper. A woman reached into her pocket, pulled out her cell phone and dropped it into the basket. The man let her in. Immediately everyone followed suit; cell phones, smart phones, cameras, notepads, sketchpads, pens, pencils, scraps of paper, all of it went into the basket and then we went into the main room. We were all artists, and writers ourselves; journalists, novelists, painters, photographers. We were illustrators, graphic designers, poets, a ragged group of humanity starved for meaning. Trying to find ourselves in the mad, quiet, intimacy of that studio. The bleach white floors, the blank ceilings, the bare white walls with no windows and the vague scent of burning wax. We were all invited, of course we were, and we had to be. We wouldn’t be there if we weren’t. I thought about Bernie’s note specifically asking me to cover this. I thought about the photographer who saw painting two; he went home, drew a warm bath and slit his wrists. Dark red spreading like storm clouds in avocado scented bubble bath. I can see it in my mind. I stood next to a woman who smelled dimly of cucumbers and licorice and sweat. She was vibrating with nervous energy. We all were, and for a moment I forgot why we were there. All that mattered was that moment of anticipation. We were no longer meat, we had a purpose. We were luminous beings on the verge of transformation, of transmogrification. I remembered the information Doris had given me about painting one, people said that the entire neighborhood was filled with music, the music of angels, of planets spinning in the void, a cosmic dance. But when the gallery emptied all that stepped out were people, not celestial beings. There were thirty-four reported missing persons that night. We all had no idea what to expect, we all just stared ahead. We stared ahead at that white rectangular cloth, draped over our future, our sanity, our psyche, our love, our pain. The artist appeared and someone gasped audibly, a small sound but in that space it erupted as harsh and coarse as gunfire. The artist stood next to his painting, he was wearing a yellow silk cloth over his head, a mask, a thing of folds and obscurity. All I could see were his eyes, reclusive and brilliant. Like a spider’s eyes. This is number five, he told us. This is the last number. The omega. This is my dream spelled backward. No cameras were allowed in. No pens, no pads no paper of any kind. A cell-phone chirped weakly out in the hall, where we were instructed to surrender them; it was half-heard and forgotten immediately afterward. These are my memories, the artist continued, and now they are yours, and they will live only for as long as you live. The cloth dropped and it was terrible, it was awesome. It was horrifying and beautiful. I have no language to describe that painting. It was vibrant and real and it made us feel like shadows cast by its brilliance. It was the creator and we were all just demi-urge. That’s all we were before it; wrong shadows. I heard a slow sob from my left. A man, a poet, kept looking away; his eyes were wide and wet. A woman behind me whispered a name, softly and mournfully. You could hear our breathing, our heartbeats. Our bodies slowly aging and dying, all in sync, all together. We were not meat; we were a single cosmic organism, living in the moment, basking in the power of this thing. I was lost in the painting, cast among the reds, and the oranges, the hints of green. It was days, it was a lifetime. I smelled the sweet acrid odor of sulfur, and felt the heat brush my cheek like a lover who has ceased to love. I thought of Katie. The artist stood with his back to the painting as it burned. Heat black tarnished the wall and a man stepped forward and touched the flames. He didn’t cry, he didn’t scream, he was in ecstasy. Then it was done. The artist stepped away and disappeared to somewhere within the confines of the studio. Then it was done and we, all of us, couldn’t bear to look at one another. Almost as if we had just saw each other in the nude. And we had, after a fashion. I’d seen these people as they really were, I saw their insides and they saw mine and we were all beautiful. We looked inside of ourselves, and made our way out into the street where the life of the city welcomed us back for however long we would be remembered.
Give it a read, let me know what you think.
A Dream Spelled Backwards
I hung up the phone with Katie’s voice still buzzing in my ear; she wanted to take some time for herself, away from me. That was fine; I’d been expecting it, really, and in the back recesses of my brain I knew it was coming. Way back there. Really. As I placed the heavy black handset down on the phone’s cradle I could hear her slow mumbling cease, and wondered if she even knew I’d hung up on her. It had happened before, she often said I was “out of it,” ending conversations when I felt they were done, when I’d gotten all I wanted out of them. Nature of the job, I suppose. Journalism is all about angles, it’s all about the slant the reporter puts on the story. Don’t let anyone fool you that a reporter only cares about the integrity of the story. That’s bullshit; they care about how that story represents them. It’s their name going under the slug, if someone hates their piece it’s that name they’re going to be gunning for, or vice versa, that name they’ll want to laud to the editor. Right, as if anyone under eighty ever writes to the editor anyway. I took a drag from my cigarette, stood up and went over to the dirty grey-lit window that overlooked my dirty grey-lit neighborhood and stubbed the cigarette out on the windowsill. Ah, Katie, you’re killing me girl. I know we’ll get back together; she’s jut mad at how much time I spend working. But that’s the business and you don’t get into it unless it’s your first love; everything and everybody else comes second. I’ve never hidden that from anyone and I’m sure everyone thinks I’m a shallow piece of shit. Let ‘em. At the end of the day that rush of copy, ink stained fingers and pockets, and frantic phone calls are mine. That’s life. I’m recording straight into the book of life and years after I’m gone my stories will still be around. The good, the shit, the fluff pieces; they’ll all be there.
I just moved from being on the crime beat to being the top stringer at the paper. I’d been on crime for three years, and I’d seen a lot of shit. Scary shit. Kids ripped apart by dogs, women beaten within an inch of their lives and scared shitless to leave the human trash that did it, men so pumped up on their own ego and self importance that when they self destruct they intend to take the world with them. It ridiculous, how important we all feel. We’re nothing. We’re a dot on the map, and the map is not the territory. Seeing all that blood, all of those bodies, all of those senseless acts really unhinges something inside of you. I thought about God a lot when I was on crime, because god knows I couldn’t sleep. I’m half convinced that there actually is a God, but not the one we’ve come to know and print on t-shirts. I’d heard something interesting once when I was covering a story about a priest who went missing downtown. Not like a Roman-Catholic priest, it was some small Eastern European orthodox religion. Anyway, when I was interviewing the priest’s fellow clergymen I learned something that gave me a lot of perspective. A sallow man dressed in ornate yellow and gold robes told me, in a thick Czechoslovakian accent, that the God that we know and worship is not the true God. It is the shadow of God, cast upon the material plane. It is an idiot god, creating out of a sheer blustering need to create. It tries to do right, but since it is only the shadow of the true creator, and the true creator is all spirit and love and light, it can only do wrong no matter its intentions. He called it the Demi-Urge. I don’t think they ever found that missing priest, and right after that story was filed I quit the crime beat and moved into the strings. I just needed a break; I was becoming desensitized to humanity because all I saw was meat. Meat in varying states of decay. I should call Katie back. As I lifted the phone the base made a short chirrup, a half-ring, and I could hear a voice coming from the handset. It was a man’s voice. We need you to cover an art opening, the voice reported, Bernie is sick, we think, we can’t reach him. The voice was the Arts editor, a short stocky man with a head that looked like an overripe watermelon. I couldn’t remember his name. Bernie was the usual gallery guy, a well dressed and effete man. I liked Bernie; we’d talk at length during the paper’s pot-luck holiday parties. We both liked art and hated television. I always got the sense that I was a bit of a novelty to him, a crime beat reporter who could discuss the finer point of French Expressionism, or the Dutch Still Life movement. The voice gave me a time and an address, and told me that Bernie left a note specifically saying that if he couldn’t make it to the opening; he wanted me to cover it. I tuned the voice out after writing down the address; I didn’t have much time to prepare for an art opening. I did some quick calculations in my head, the gallery was one of those moving storefronts; one day it was bundled among the cobbles of Gramercy, the next it was sitting in a stinking alleyway in the meatpacking district. Tonight it was in NoHo, I had a few hours to shower and shave. I also needed information. I tapped my finger on the cradle, silencing the voice if it was still going and dialed the number of the newsroom. I asked for Doris, the researcher, and when she got on the line I asked her to dig me up whatever she could on the artist. She said she’d get right on it, and I told her to fax it to the usual place, the library on the corner, we both hung up. Why can’t all phone conversations be as direct? I shed my shirt and headed toward the shower to get ready.
When I arrived at the studio in NoHo I wasn’t surprised with what I found. It was a nondescript storefront. White silk curtains had been hung over the large picture window at the front so that the inside was impenetrable. Even the building number had been scratched off the door; I only found it by taking note of the building numbers around it. I’d studied Doris’ poop sheet about the artist on the subway, though standing there in front of that blank door, I couldn’t remember a damned thing. It would come back to me. I often found that I synthesize information quickly. I’ll read something, hear something, and not realize the impact it’s making on me until it’s time to use the information; then it just pops into my head. I entered the storefront and stood in a narrow hall with about a half-dozen other people. Well dressed, mostly Caucasian people who smelled of perfume and cologne. Not harsh, a hint of flowers and astringent. I quickly took in the faces and caught a glimpse of my own face in a mirror set just inside the doorway. We all had the same look on our face; restrained eagerness. Hands clutched and rubbed, men obsessively straightened their ties, women plucked at the hems of their dresses, but no one spoke. No one coughed, or sneezed or cleared their throat. We were all quiet. Waiting, watching. It was the painting we were all there to see. We were half-mad to see it, chomping at the bit. Shifting glances and piercing looks at one another; swearing inside to God that each one of us would be the first to see it. We were packed in a slim corridor and there was a silk curtain covering a doorway. A silk curtain was all that stood between us and the painting. I remembered then, about the previous four paintings, about the woman who cried during number three, the woman who wouldn’t and couldn’t stop crying, the woman who is still crying today. A large man wearing a tight black t-shirt, jeans, and an ivory white mask over his face stepped into the room from behind the curtain. He pointed to a deep wicker basket that sat on a black pedestal right beside the entry to the gallery proper. A woman reached into her pocket, pulled out her cell phone and dropped it into the basket. The man let her in. Immediately everyone followed suit; cell phones, smart phones, cameras, notepads, sketchpads, pens, pencils, scraps of paper, all of it went into the basket and then we went into the main room. We were all artists, and writers ourselves; journalists, novelists, painters, photographers. We were illustrators, graphic designers, poets, a ragged group of humanity starved for meaning. Trying to find ourselves in the mad, quiet, intimacy of that studio. The bleach white floors, the blank ceilings, the bare white walls with no windows and the vague scent of burning wax. We were all invited, of course we were, and we had to be. We wouldn’t be there if we weren’t. I thought about Bernie’s note specifically asking me to cover this. I thought about the photographer who saw painting two; he went home, drew a warm bath and slit his wrists. Dark red spreading like storm clouds in avocado scented bubble bath. I can see it in my mind. I stood next to a woman who smelled dimly of cucumbers and licorice and sweat. She was vibrating with nervous energy. We all were, and for a moment I forgot why we were there. All that mattered was that moment of anticipation. We were no longer meat, we had a purpose. We were luminous beings on the verge of transformation, of transmogrification. I remembered the information Doris had given me about painting one, people said that the entire neighborhood was filled with music, the music of angels, of planets spinning in the void, a cosmic dance. But when the gallery emptied all that stepped out were people, not celestial beings. There were thirty-four reported missing persons that night. We all had no idea what to expect, we all just stared ahead. We stared ahead at that white rectangular cloth, draped over our future, our sanity, our psyche, our love, our pain. The artist appeared and someone gasped audibly, a small sound but in that space it erupted as harsh and coarse as gunfire. The artist stood next to his painting, he was wearing a yellow silk cloth over his head, a mask, a thing of folds and obscurity. All I could see were his eyes, reclusive and brilliant. Like a spider’s eyes. This is number five, he told us. This is the last number. The omega. This is my dream spelled backward. No cameras were allowed in. No pens, no pads no paper of any kind. A cell-phone chirped weakly out in the hall, where we were instructed to surrender them; it was half-heard and forgotten immediately afterward. These are my memories, the artist continued, and now they are yours, and they will live only for as long as you live. The cloth dropped and it was terrible, it was awesome. It was horrifying and beautiful. I have no language to describe that painting. It was vibrant and real and it made us feel like shadows cast by its brilliance. It was the creator and we were all just demi-urge. That’s all we were before it; wrong shadows. I heard a slow sob from my left. A man, a poet, kept looking away; his eyes were wide and wet. A woman behind me whispered a name, softly and mournfully. You could hear our breathing, our heartbeats. Our bodies slowly aging and dying, all in sync, all together. We were not meat; we were a single cosmic organism, living in the moment, basking in the power of this thing. I was lost in the painting, cast among the reds, and the oranges, the hints of green. It was days, it was a lifetime. I smelled the sweet acrid odor of sulfur, and felt the heat brush my cheek like a lover who has ceased to love. I thought of Katie. The artist stood with his back to the painting as it burned. Heat black tarnished the wall and a man stepped forward and touched the flames. He didn’t cry, he didn’t scream, he was in ecstasy. Then it was done. The artist stepped away and disappeared to somewhere within the confines of the studio. Then it was done and we, all of us, couldn’t bear to look at one another. Almost as if we had just saw each other in the nude. And we had, after a fashion. I’d seen these people as they really were, I saw their insides and they saw mine and we were all beautiful. We looked inside of ourselves, and made our way out into the street where the life of the city welcomed us back for however long we would be remembered.