In the unlikely event of actually entering the room, you would find him sitting in rather large leather manager’s chair, typing away at a laptop while wearing very tight, but nonetheless quite attractive, black boxer shorts adorned in white stars, and smoking a cigarette. You would find him typing the very lines you are now reading. And as you stare at the words forming on the screen - horrified at the rate of which your thoughts are molested into long, wordy sentences - the music, a disconsolate constant you seem to just now notice, suddenly changes into a terribly jovial piece, and he winces and stops typing. A few moments later, the words “Suicide Scherzo” appear on the screen and the music continues, as violent as it had been before. And he continues typing, faster and faster, erring and repairing, hammering at the fabric of your reality.
You’ve been taught to run, but you do not. You know better. You cannot escape the inevitability of nonsense. He favors his creation with a brief glance and nod, and lights another cigarette.
“I may talk shit,” he tells you, “but I do it with irrefutable confidence.”
It had somehow gotten into the apartment, and lay dying on the kitchen floor. It was still breathing, and every few seconds it would attempt to twist around, to somehow get up, as its tail slapped the tiles like a miniature bullwhip.
He stood there for at least five minutes, just gaping at the ending rat on the floor, until realizing he should probably put it out of its misery.
He was surprised at how fleshy the rat’s body felt as he drove the broom handle down
like hitting a small child
and was suddenly gripped with nausea, preventing him from landing a powerful enough blow. He cried a little after the fourth swing, when the hitherto silent rat actually squealed in despair.
He held the broom above his head, panting, crying, staring at the dead rat on the floor - a small puddle of blood slowly forming around its mouth - and took comfort in knowing that he could never be a killer. Not really. He could intellectually accept killing, maybe even understand it at some level. But he will never truly feel it.
He sat at home, awating the inevitable dinner. “We’ll be reading from the Legend this year,” they tell him. “Be nice.”
And he will. He’ll stifle himself when they start chanting. he’ll hold back when they sing. He’ll pretend to know who these people are. He’ll smile at the utterly senile bicentennial woman sitting next to him, as she hands him a piece of Mazzah with a trembling, twiglike hand.
In the meantime, however, he sits and enjoys late-night television. These are the movies that go straight to TV. These are the movies that made him feel sorry that there are only so many words for “awful”. He’d sometimes think about the directors and writers of these movies. He’d wonder if they’d been happy with the final result, smiled at each other, or even patted themselves on the back in a really pathetic “good job!” way, like one would say about a retarded monkey’s finger-painting.
“Are you a fighter?”
“Who wants to know?”
Actual lines from the jail yard scene, in which the new inmate - wrongfully accused, one can assume - finds himself hasseled by the resident prick.
He cried after that scene. He cried for demented old women with shaky hands. And for the directors and writers. He even cried for the retarded monkey. But not for the Israelites in the desert. He didn’t cry for them at all.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Giraffes
Did you ever wake up in the middle of the night, fur soaked in sweat, galloping through a white desert in a herd of giraffes, an equal among equals? Did you ever look up to see a blue sky, and cried because your neck isn’t long enough to actually touch it? Did you ever ask the giraffe next to you, what death really is, and she answered in an aging giraffe’s panting voice, did you ever wake up in the middle of the night?
Did you ever fall with all of the giraffes, into a deep abyss you saw from afar, but you couldn’t stop, becasue you galloped, slicing the air, and you just didn’t want to stop? Did you ever wake up into a huge pile of dying giraffes, kicking each other, screaming with cracked necks, climbing, climbing on top of each other, figthing for breath. Did you? Did you ever?
(original lyrics by Gilad Kahana and Yair Kez)
(This audio file was played 14 times)
He somehow found a job. I’m saying somehow, because this guy wasn’t the sort of guy who gets a job. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t even the sort of guy who goes looking for a job. This guy hated the very concept of “
work” with a passion usually reserved for child molesters or
Crocs. He knew what follows getting a job. He could almost taste the bitterness in his mouth, feel his perfectly-assembled, gloriously monotonous world crumbling around him, pounding inside the back of his head, his mind suffocating in a cloud of freakish unfamiliarity.
He was haunted by trees. Collosal
Baobabs and
Ents incessantly tearing at him with twining limbs, their branches and boughs eviscerating, interlocking around his throat, gauging his eyes. An afternoon strole in a shaded avenue had become a horrific ritual of escape and evasion, as they ceaselessly attempt to drain him of any coherent thought. “There is logic in the formation of our branches,” they tell him, but their words are sawed apart by his screaming. He will not hear of such things. He will not learn the structure of his demise from a psychotic, perennial shrub.
The nameless wife then proceeds to drone on and on about the things she wants, mostly immaterial or easy to acquire things, which signifies her lack of ability to change her own life: “If I can’t have long hair or any fun, I can have a
cat.” George is quite relaxed and unmoved through this episode, to the point of shutting her up and telling her to get something to read, as though he’s experienced something similar before, as if he’s used to his wife’s ways. The use of his name, and the omitting of hers while keeping her in the spotlight, is significant and exemplary of the entire text’s narrative style: it shows us the complete package - their marriage, but this time through George’s point of view.
During the weekend he came to the conclusion that unlike the meaty automatons that occupy his world, She was her own entity. Complete with opinions, reflections, perceptions, memories. He actually found himself marveling at the fact that he was sitting with another actual person. He suspected she felt the same way, but wasn’t sure. He was too terrified to be sure.
He was angry, she was exhausted, and they said all sorts of things. Undeniably true things, at least in those moments when words precede thought. A close silence followed, as they were running out of masks.
After he left, she put on a Joni Mitchell record and cried. She says Joni Mitchell helps her cry.
It was surprisingly easy to get caught up in this alleged holiday spirit, even for a cynical sonuvabitch like myself. That’s how I found myself wandering around the local mall, blinded by deep red, looking for various trinquets to make my Maiden happy.
To those who know me, this may sound absurd, but let me assure you - no complete metamorphosis occurred and I am by no means a changed man; no horrific bouquets were purchased, nor heart shaped pillows, and surely no jewelery. And I was certainly not love drunk to the extent of being able to ignore the hordes of barbaric man-apes galavanting around and spending ludicrous amounts of money.
Nevertheless, some mental switch did flip on, and presents were acquired, and that was it. Done. I have exchanged currency for the possibility of creating a smile on another human being’s face. I am the cliche. I AM Valentine’s Day.
While I got my things together
she found a page of ABC stickers and said she wanted to leave her name.
“Where?” I asked.
“Anywhere.” she replied, turning to my bookshelves, sticking the letters all crooked and misaligned, arbitrarily, as if the borders weren’t even there. When she was finished, she smiled at me and asked if I’m ready. I said I was.
“Let’s go, then.”
We’re still going.
There are some people in the world, not all of them but some, whose faces are so annoying, so down right aggravating, and these are the people that want to talk to you. They want to tell you about their day, or about a problem they have with a friend or parent, and while they’re ranting on and on about their miserable excuse for an existence, all you can manage to think about is how their head would look on a stick.
