Slice/Bread: Part I (Just Another Slice of Life)

<Originally published 21 December 2016, date changed to put it above Part II>

~The World Ended Yesterday,

And We’ll Get Around

To Dealing

With That

When We’ve Finished

Absolutely Everything Else.  So Hold

Your Damned Horses.

Capisce?~

  

**[Warning:  This narrative will reveal no great ideas or profound revelations.  If you're bored, don't say you weren't warned.]**

Sometimes there aren’t any lessons.  If you can’t gain wisdom from the simple act of being in a place at a time with such company as you can find or borrow, then you must learn to accept that wisdom is a sly and slippery little beast that can elude even the most dedicated seeker.

Sometimes, when I’m feeling wiser than usual, I like to think that wisdom is a sly and slippery little beast that will only approach someone who neither seeks nor desires it.

          Sometimes I just want to slap myself silly for being pretentious.

I was going to write about Terri today, for a couple reasons.  But that feels dangerous, for many other reasons, or at least a couple reasons that can be stretched out and rationalized until I’ve managed to convince myself that I made the right choice.

          Perhaps my restraint is a form of wisdom. 

Though I seriously doubt it.  I don't do wisdom.  It makes me itch, and occasionally tricks me into drinking too much.     

So we found ourselves in the city on a chilly November eve, raining as though Tlaloc himself were unleashing all his frustration at a 1000 years of slowforgetting.

I should re-word.  We drove through the city on a wet and chilly November eve.  We never actually found ourselves in any metaphysical sense.  There is no lesson here, nor wisdom.  Just a story.  The names are all changed, the events are not, and the world goes ploddingly on either way.
Anyway. I'm being overly digressive and maundering.
I do so love a good maunder.  It makes me happy for reasons that I can certainly articulate; I refuse to do so, however.  I gotta be me, right?  Well, I don't gotta, I suppose, but I wanna.  And that's how you get started on a good maundering.

~***~

The trackless paths we followed crossed and re-crossed a downtown made alien by the constant surging and ebbing of storms.  We could barely see the roads; we relied on our best guesses regarding the locations of the lines painted on the roads.  I say 'we' because, while only one person was driving, the rest of us felt compelled, either by a sense of self-preservation or just a need to share our stupid opinions, to tell the person driving what we thought of her navigational skills.

               The signs that occasionally appeared through the heavy rain could only be interpreted by knowing already what they had written on them and then taking a leap of faith that the "Pedestrian X-ing" sign hadn’t recently been replaced with a "Bridge Out Ahead, STOP OH MY GOD WHAT ARE YOU DOING? YOU’RE GOING TO DIE, YOU STUPID SONS-OF-BITCHES!  FINE, I’LL BUTT OUT.  IT’S YOUR STUPID LIFE. Whatever!  I’m not responsible for what happens to your fool butt…dumbass" sign at some point in the very recent past.

                Granted, that leap of faith felt somewhat safe due to the fact that the signs weren’t big enough to hold all those words, and the fact that the D.O.T. tended to frown on the phrases “sons-of-bitches” and “dumbass” on official street signs.

                Sometimes I think the government would be better for just telling people the truth about themselves.

                The torrents swept across the city in waves, each in turn, allowing the moon to peer groggily through thin haze for a few minutes before the next storm engulfed us. Every well-remembered turn felt like a guess, a truculent traipse into the darkness, a choice rationalized only by the fact that turning around and going home would be no less haphazard. Eventually, we had taken so many different paths that we might have been in the next world, for all we knew.

Through me you enter the City of Lament, I muttered under my breath, quoting Dante

Through me you enter into pain eternal.

Through me you enter where the lost are sent.

Justice moved my high creator sempiternal.¹

I would have made a good Goth.  The sophisticated sort of Goth, mind you, the type that doesn’t rely on morose quotes taken out of context, or one who needs to resort to thesauruses (thesauri) to look up fancified words or a dictionary to discover that ‘fancified’ isn’t actually a word.  The sort of Goth not overburdened with sense of my own mortality to compensate for the fact that I am clearly alive. 

It’s clear to me that I would have been an amazing emo kid.  But I have an aversion to gratuitous un peu de tristesse.  I just never had the stomach or gall bladder for the emo life.

Unfortunately, however, despite my best efforts, I have no such aversion to pretension.  I like to tell myself – in my most charming internal monologue – that I am merely ironically pretentious.  That my self-awareness trumps any cliché.

I do like to lie to myself.   My internal lying voice soothes me no end.  It reassures me that everything works for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds.

Eat your heart out, Dr. Pangloss.

Switching poems and nationalities, just because I could:

Dust hath closed Helen’s eye

I am sick, I must die.

Lord have mercy on us.²

The Good Lord, whatever form (if any) She might choose assume to this particular agnostic, has little mercy and, perhaps, less patience, to spare for us undeserving sinners when we refuse to just talk in plain no-nonsense 21^st century American English the way She always intended.

But there’s a reason I was currently thinking of poems about mortality.  We were inches from dying in horrific and/or hilarious ways. 

The mood in the car, though slightly too tense from the danger of the elements to be revelry, certainly induced a certain lightheadedness.  The night swirled with all manner of comfortable chatter, ranging from the silly to the ridiculous and looping over to the ludicrous before zig-zagging to the unintentionally sublime.  We had no good idea where we were going, precious little good idea where we’d come from, and steadfastly refused to speculate at length on either topic despite the relevance both questions held to our current predicament.  The longest road, we figured, is the one we couldn’t see in either direction even though we knew it extended beyond our sight.  It is, in principle, infinite.

          Actually, we figured no such thing.  I just figured it as my fingers moved to type these words.  As I said – no lesson, no wisdom, nothing but being and action and then being some more for good measure.

Finally, we gave in to the cognitive dissonances and just let *Tina turn where she felt most comfortable turning.  Though portions of the conversation were clear to me, others I just deduced from *Tina’s subsequent actions. 

Okay.  Next street, I’ll take a left. Maybe a right, but probably a left.

[A turn that was maybe a right, but definitely a left, took place]

Now?  Let’s go…two block and take a right.  Next intersection, another right.  Then just drive until one of us sees any neon sign that we actually recognize.

[I couldn’t say for certain whether she partook of any such pattern.  She seemed to be moving at random.  But I had a notion that’s what she said.]

Oh, that’s…the Mexican place, right?

[That, I heard clearly.  A window glowed cheerfully, if somewhat anemically, but there was no neon involved.  Nevertheless, she decided it was close enough.  It was, in fact, a Mexican place, if anyone is curious.  Whether it was the Mexican place in question, I cannot say.  In America, ethnically-specialized restaurants tend to follow motifs similar to others of the same culinary ilk.  It helps us clumsy, if well-meaning, Yanks recognize a place with a glance and decide whether we were in the mood for that particular cuisine.]

Now…look, the road splits.  That means we’re…

[She never finished the sentence.  Despite the uncertainty now hanging in the air, we veered left.  I think.]

Within ten minutes, we saw the familiar façade of the Irish pub that sat on the opposite side of the street from our destination.  There could be no doubt.  Even in the midst of a storm that would have driven Moses to stop by for a pint to soothe his nerves before splitting the mere sea ahead of him.  We instantly recognized the two viciously stereotypical Irish leprechauns drunken Riverdancing (which, to be fair, is the best kind of Riverdancing) in full neon glory, the massive mugs in their hands poised to do something unspeakable, either to the other Irishman or to their owner’s own belly.

[As I said – we dine out by the motif here in America.  Possibly elsewhere, but I’ve spent most of my life in America, with occasional diversions to France, Canada, the Big Rock Candy Mountains, and Mexico, so I can speak somewhat authoritatively on the topic.]

Mind you, we called out four different, but vaguely, similar names for this place, at least two of which were probably even more offensive than the sign itself, but we could certainly agree that we recognized it regardless of its actual name.

Son of a bi…I can’t believe that actually worked, I said, and *Tina giggled.

Her laugh, I must say, was quite lovely.

Arriving, unfortunately, was only half the battle.  Two-thirds at most.  It certainly didn’t break the seventy percent mark of the battle.  While we had world enough, and time (to quote the poet) yonder all before us were laid deserts filled with cars arrayed (to misquote the same poet).

That is to say, we couldn’t find a parking spot come hell or high water.  The high water gushed down the street.  Hell reflected red-tinted off the windshield of a car that had, quite invidiously and with a severe lack of respect for human decency, taken up two spaces.  The time searching was filled with muttered imprecations against the universe, the inventor of the car, and – for reasons too complicated to get into here – the vagaries of Greek mythology.  Most of these imprecations were quite vivid, to say the least.

This long eve’s journey into memory couldn’t be destined to end here, on a street barely visible through the torrents, under a sign with two tiny Irishmen making pugnacious gestures at each other with frosted beer mugs nearly as big as them.  We all knew we had to forge onwards.  Even through the rain, though, the nearly-invisible street glistened pitch under the streetlights, like a fading tracklit path, and somehow it seemed important we follow.

Plus, I doubt any of us felt confident we could find our ways back to our respective homes from here.

As we circled the block for the third time, I glanced up at the window where Slice/Bread would be hiding.  Through the rain, I thought I could make out the glimmer of lights slipping past the blinds.  A few moments later, my eyes shifted to the neon Open sign in the top frame of the same window.  The combination of a potential light creeping out and a bright, if somewhat subdued in hue, red sign seemed ample evidence that we were at the right place.

Apparently *Carrie thought so too, because she reached over my shoulder to point at the sign, a delighted “Look, they’re open” shouted into our ears.

*Tina glanced back to glare at *Carrie.  The car swerved a few times before she regained control.  Then she glared at *Carrie again, blaming her for the swerving incident.  The car swerved again and *Tina stopped glancing back, presumably realizing that this vicious cycle could never end well.

Finding no available spots after our fourth epic journey around the block, we broadened our circuit, circling an extra block.  Soon, we picked up a stalker, another car circling endlessly behind us, presumably in search of his own spot of vehicular exclusivity.

We circled the two blocks once and were debating whether to add the block to the rear of Slice/Bread’s block.

“Holy jeepers!”  *Cam yelled out from the back seat.  “Over there, in the parking lot!  Jeepers!  Someone’s leaving!  Jeepers!  We passed it and that jeepering car is still behind us.”

(Just so we’re clear, the words he used were not in any way, shape, or form, ‘jeepers.’  Or any possible variant of the word to fit into the different parts of speech.  None of them shared a first or last letter with ‘jeepers’.  They barely shared a jeeping language.  They certainly didn’t share a meaningful system of morality that we could all rely on to keep us strong in dark times.  But *Cam didn’t generally swear, so I don’t imagine that he, even under a pseudonym, would want me telling any random passerby the exact particulars about his lapse here.  I do not wish for anyone to get the wrong idea.)

In any event, language aside, *Cam was perfectly correct.  To our left, in a parking lot that seemed to service a small pizza place and an unsavory-looking ear-nose-and-throat practice that may or may not have been a mob front, a car had just pulled out of its space.  We were – as anyone with even the slightest understanding of how the universe worked could have predicted -- a full car-length past the entrance, with the set of headlights that had been following us sitting at the stoplight approximately 50 yards back. 
 The light was red, but, as anyone with even the slightest understanding of how the universe likes to manipulate traffic lights, it could turn green at any moment.

Sometimes, late at night, when I’m drowsing drowsing drowsing in the throes of the unmarked time twixt wake and sleep, I think about that moment and wonder what I would have done.  I like to think I’d have done the manly thing, the decisive thing, the thing that causes women to swoon and vicars to swear.

That is, the total lunatic thing. 

I imagine myself demonstrating a courage and vigor that I’ve had precious little opportunity to demonstrate in real-world conditions.  Due to the distressing lack of comically-evil Chuck Norris villains littering my days, the chances are far and few between.  In those moments preceding my true dreams, that time where the conscious is flavored by the trickling liqueur of the subconscious, I find myself slamming the brakes and the accelerator at the same time as I twist the steering wheel to the left, sending up a great sheet of water that falls back over the windshield as the car spins into it.  Driving blind for the brief moment it takes the wipers to clear the water off again, I bring the front end of the car even with the entrance to the parking lot and take a sharp right turn just as the car leaving the spot manages to pull out of the spot completely.  With a hiss of satisfaction, I jerk the wheel one last time, just (and only just) as the other car manages to move safely past us, sliding neatly into the spot while the rest of the car’s inhabitants struggle to catch their breath in anticipation of fleeing the car.

If I’m honest with myself, and I try to be on occasion, this drowsy daydream has no relation whatsoever to what I’d actually do.  It does, however, describe exactly what *Tina did. 

To.

A.

Jeepering.

T.

The rest of us exited the car so fast that *Tina had only barely removed her hand from the gear stick and was reaching for the key to turn the car off as the car doors slammed behind us.  If we were making an unintentional coordinated point, I was not privy to it.  I just wanted out before Fate and/or the Annals of History³ caught up to me.  For, most assuredly, Fate was sharpening her rusted Blades of Great Justice whilst eyeing us all with a displeased frown at our ability to emerge from that maneuver unscathed.

As if cottoning to Fate’s odious designs and strongly disapproving of said designs, whatever sympathetic eldritch spirits ruled the storms decided to turn the rain off almost immediately.  A light drizzle still drifted about us, but at least we weren’t soaked to the bone.  Well, my hair was soaked pretty quickly because I was wearing a leather jacket with no head covering attached, but the others had the good sense to wear hooded windbreakers, presumably because they were capable of seeing the future and deducing that they’d want to stay reasonably dry on our expedition.

If they were mocking me with their relative dryness, they had the good taste not to do so openly, at least.

When *Tina emerged – with a flourish, because there were entire weeks *Tina knew of no other way to do things than dramatically – she shook her head and rolled her eyes.  Actually, I couldn’t see her eyes under the drape of her hood and brim of the English driving cap that was her affectation of the month.  I just knew she would roll her eyes because that was just the *Tina I knew, loved, and (now) feared in equal proportion.

On rare occasion, I do miss such moments in time.  Not people, exactly, but those moments involving the people.  Maudlin nostalgia was never my curse.  Lucky for me.  Make no mistake, I genuinely liked these people.  A few, I loved.  Some I just found fascinating. 

But clinging to memory can be toxic if done wrong.  So I try not to miss the people except in the abstract way one takes pleasure in a nice dream or a serendipitous thought.  I’m not always successful – there are a very few, like *Terri or *Anne or *Linden, that I have genuinely missed.   Sometimes you just have to accept that certain people will always be a part of your story, even long after they exit.

What I miss, though, is that moment in the rain-soaked city, just after the storm has transformed into a light mist that drifts across us.  For a moment, you forget that the rest of the world exists.  At that point, in that place, everything is concrete and metal and an endless damp haze flowing over us.  It’s beautiful.   Yet, I still have to remind myself that there is much more to the scene.  *Tina looking adorably smug, *Cam looking bashfully at *Carrie, and *Carrie glancing up at *Cam as she feels his arm around her shoulders, their inchoate relationship not yet hardened by time, the paths ahead not yet set.   And I can only imagine what I look like, glowering at *Tina as her smug smile widens, knowing, just as she knows, that I don’t actually mean any of the pointed words I want to say to her.  I’m not even sure I pulled off a proper glower.

While I won’t claim to miss them in the sense that most people would associate with nostalgia, I will acknowledge that the moment would be incomplete without them.  That’s good enough, I think.

Footnotes:

1) Though I cannot recollect which specific translation.  Google keeps sending me to a Chinese source, which I’m pretty sure isn’t quite helpful.

2) from “A Litany in Time of Plague” by Thomas Nashe.  Yes, it’s a meditation on mortality.  No, I couldn’t tell you why I can recite the entire poem from memory.  Yes, I am aware that I should probably be punched for reciting it without irony and/or gales of laughter.

3) Future generations would whisper about these (again, completely innocent) stories of *Tina’s madcap driving adventures.  She’d become known as the Deuce Coup Devil, and entire section of the traffic code would be named after her. 

~To be continued in Part II~

Slice/Bread: Part II (Still Slicin' That Life)

~The Unbearable Hipness of Being~

**[Warning:  This narrative will reveal no great ideas or profound revelations.  If you're bored, don't say you weren't warned.]**

The red neon of the Open sign buzzing dimly through in the dark-tinted second story window of Slice/Bread was the only indication of its very existence, let alone its location.  No sign graced the door to the stairwell up to the second floor, no light crept out around the door’s edges.  Not a single written word on any part of the building indicated what, exactly, was ‘Open’ and whether or not the spider was inviting flies into her parlor.

I honestly don’t recall how we transitioned from the parking lot to the front of the beige-brick building.  At some point, almost certainly gibbering and wild-eyed, we simply found ourselves staring at the unmarked and unremarkable door leading to Slice/Bread, drawn unthinkingly to the location by that animal memory of the best places to find food and drink.  This memory had harrumphed and settled in to sleep at the back of our brains, hibernating until the day came that we’d need it again. 

What I do know is that the four of us all moved decisively toward the proper door as we stepped from the street to the sidewalk.  With a decisive flourish, we went straight inside as if we owned the universe and were meant to go anywhere we pleased. 

More accurately, we went straight inside after an extended hesitation brought about by the door’s obstinate refusal to simply open.  I grunted in frustration as I gave up, and allowed *Cam to try.  His efforts were equal ineffectual and he stepped aside to allow *Tina – who was clutching insistently at his sleeve – to take a stab at it.

By resorting judiciously to some gentle applied physics and basic common sense, she managed to immediately pull open the door we’d been trying to push inwards for the last 20 seconds.

*Tina frequently demonstrated a capacity for the sort of perfect genius necessary to counter our frequent oafish inability to handle the world around us in the face of more than one option for opening doors. She turned the act of saving us from ourselves into a particularly deft art form and I loved her for it.  But as much as I loved her for that, I loved her even more for having the good – and impressively difficult – grace of not making fun of us afterwards.

True love, I think, comes from the magic of opening the right doors in the proper manner and never breathing a word of disapprobation toward those too inept to pull it off.  An eye roll or two is acceptable, of course.  But *Tina kept her mouth shut, the corners of it turned up ever so slightly into a pixie-ish smile. 

I won’t pretend I loved her deeply.  I can count on the fingers of one hand how many friends or lovers I can claim to have loved deeply, and I wouldn’t use up all the fingers.

But I loved her truly.  That is, for realsies.  And for realsies is good enough.  I’ve always found a sort of redemption in this.  As long as we can love someone truly without necessarily loving them deeply, we’re not broken, right?  As long as I’m still capable of such sentimentalities, of holding fast to someone I don’t necessarily believe I’ll hold for overly long, I think I’ll be okay.
Upstairs, the restaurant was packed so tightly that even standing room was essentially a pipe dream.  Sitting room only existed because waiters and waitresses nudged, shoved, and groped people out of the way of those lucky few who’d scored a table.  Spider-climbing room did exist, mainly because very few of the patrons had been bitten by a radioactive arachnid and even fewer were in a position to advantage of the space on the walls. 

Besides, the walls were covered in neon signs and unspeakably precious pop art informed primarily by Art Deco, with the occasional Toulouse-Latrec prints from his Moulin Rouge period holding places of honor at the center of the walls.

Grabbing menus from a completely unattended hostess station near the door, we managed to reach the bar by dint of *Tina’s firm motion, though not without essentially engaging in random sex acts along the way.  I’m reasonably sure Slice/Bread single-handedly kept the local paternity test industry in business by forcing patrons to slither through every imaginable crevice that humanity’s eternal and incessant insistence on crowding together in small, dimly-lit spaces could possibly devise.

I’m also absolutely certain this particular chic brand of overcrowding violated fire codes that hadn’t even been philosophically conceptualized, let alone actually passed into law.

~***~

Before I continue, I do have one parenthetical to add here with regards to the inevitable naughty touching required to navigate this iniquitously hip den of humanity.  I’ve wanted to get this off my chest for many years now, and this seems like the perfect opportunity:

Dear Brunette With The Blue Streak In Your Bangs, The Scent Of Vanilla About Your Head, And The Incredibly Soft Green Angora Sweater That Just Begged To Be Rewoven Into A Blanket For Us To Lie Languidly Upon Together As We Made The Sweetest Love Any Two People Ever Made Together Under The Bluest Sky And Fluffiest Clouds Ever Devised By A Wondrous God For Our Mutual Viewing Pleasure, And, Oh, All This (The Encounter, Not The Hypothetical Lovemaking) Took Place At Slice/Bread, Just To Narrow Thing’s Down:

I’m terribly sorry that I didn’t call you the following day.  I had neither your name nor your phone number nor any reliable source of psychically-divined information.  But I did enjoy our seven seconds in Heaven, or at least in one of the nicer Limbos, that we shared approximately half-way between the drinks station and the PBR sign on the wall as I struggled to reach the rear section of the restaurant’s main room.  While I’m aware that a significant amount of time has passed since that lovely moment, if you’re reading this, please contact me and we can decide whether or not to continue what circumstances and basic space-time physics led us to begin right before that large, somewhat sweaty man in a blue jean jacket – what was this, a momentary digression into 1979? – forced me to abruptly change directions right into your left hip.

                 That last sentence was far more complicated than necessary, but you were there.  You know what it was like in the midst of the madding crowd.

                I do hope that the hip I collided with has fully healed in the intervening years, incidentally.  Mine stopped being sore around my sixth beer, so that particularly element of Our Grand Romance, at least, had a (relatively, depending on how one interpolates the context) happy ending.

                If, for whatever reason – marriage, or screaming heebies that some stranger is writing you letters so many years later, or a premature exit from the mortal coil, or even simply forgetting about the incident almost immediately – you don’t want to pursue this, could you at least drop me a line letting me know your life has gone well since that one magical night?  If you have shuffled from this mortal coil, a quick line to (in order of increasing preference) a licensed medium, a semi-licensed masseuse, or an unlicensed but quite adorable cuddle-bunny with intimate knowledge of the workings of psychic possession will be acceptable means of reaching me.

(Please don’t use Whoopi.  A celebrity would draw far too much attention)

Yours,

Random

(Phone Number Redacted, Mainly Because I Never Remember It.  Social Security Number Memorized, But None of Your Business.  Golden Ratio Also Memorized, But Don’t Want To Rob You of the Pleasure of Discovering It Yourself)

P.S.  If you happen to be Asian, you’re not the same one I’m talking about here, but you are more than welcome to contact me as well.  You had a beautiful smile, and while I’m fairly certain I saw you at [name redacted]’s party back during the summer, he couldn’t identify you from my (admittedly inadequate) description the day following the events of this narrative.  Either that or you were a dear friend and he didn’t want to inflict me on you  Whichever happens to be the truth, I want to assure you that I’ve changed a lot since then and no longer allow myself to wear turtlenecks in any but the most appropriate weather.

P.P.S. If you’re the Green Agora Sweater girl, don’t worry about the preceding postscript.  I’m reasonably certain Pretty Asian Girl wore an engagement ring.  So the odds are not good that anything will come of this.

P.P.P.S.  If you’re Pretty Asian Girl, current divorce statistics are quite promising, so, regardless of what I said in the post-postscript, I haven’t given up on you.

P.P.P.P.S.  If I’ve left anyone out, please send your name, a good photograph to help me remember who you are (nudity optional, though appreciated), and a quick top 10 list of your favorite authors with pictures (again, nudity optional, and not likely to be appreciated.)

It feels good to finally attempt to rectify an olden, and possibly deplorable, wrong against another human being.  If redemption is ever truly possible in this tired old world of ours, I hope to one day meet this strange blue-streaked lady in the sweet bye-and-bye and explain that even though our one-true-love just wasn’t meant to be, the excessive full-body contact we’d engaged in wasn’t just some impersonal fling.  We too often take this life for granted, forgetting that chance meetings in human mosh pits can still mean something special.  Even to this day, whenever I go into a place flagrantly violating all manner of fire codes and leaving me feeling the wondrous high of near suffocation, I wonder, just for a second, whether I’ll meet a girl with an even softer sweater for me to enjoy in passing.

My new-found appreciation of soft sweaters that night, I think, was just the universe’s way of telling me that everything has a purpose, even unbearably hip restaurants in stolidly unhip cities.

          It’s nice to know that His eye is on both the sparrow and the screeching magpies and every avian creature between the two.

          Hipness, incidentally (but not coincidentally, since I specifically chose to use that word here), practically oozed from the place in ways more obnoxious than most places can manage without a flugelhorn and a communal rifftrax.  When irony gets as tragic as it got in that place, it generally gives up the ghost and lets the power of positive thinking take over as the crowds move on to newer and more inane locales.

Unfortunately, irony was clinging on like it had a personal stake in the success of this place and a whole family of literary terms to feed.  Looking over the bartenders with hair and jewelry that defied both logic and most of Poor Richard’s Almanack’s better-intentioned advice for living a decent life, I suspected Ironic Detachment’s little brother Contrived Nausea had used Ironic Detachment’s connections to get a job here.

To give you a rough idea of the mindset of this place, less than four months later, it officially shortened its name to ‘/bread’ because (I was given to understand) the patrons had taken to this new cognomen with a ferocity that belied the terror they felt at the possibility of slipping into unhipness.

About eight months after that, it went out of business, having survived the endless vicissitudes of the au courant demimonde meaningless French phrase for just over a year and a half.  It was replaced with a gastropub specializing in Austrian and Bavarian beers and, for some reason, food from one of the more obscure former Soviet satellites.  While I can’t for the life of me recollect which one, I recall thinking that the CIA probably regarded it as a prime location to install a tin-pot dictator and a Mr. Coffee for those unavoidable stay-overs on their way to better-known places.

Whether by fortuitous placement or by an ancient curse by some malicious ifrit, some places are just damned to hipness and its inevitable treachery.

Because I disliked my actions being controlled by hexes, supernatural beings, or basic but seemingly capricious vagaries of geography, I never returned to dine in that particular location.  Unfortunately, I did suffer the occasional moral crisis of wanting to check out what sorts of food the gastropub offered.  I ultimately managed to resist the temptation with the help of dear friends and a complete change of residence that increased my drive time to approximately two hours even on perfectly clear days.

I don’t claim the two are related, just that fortuity takes many forms.

~***~

We finally found a place to sit after realizing the hostess had no intention of keeping track of new arrivals with any real diligence:  a frisbee table too small for one adult-sized person, let alone four, with an unnecessarily bright electric candle the approximate width (and perhaps same approximate symbolism) of my middle finger taking up the center of the table.  As luck would have it, the table was of a sufficient height (if not width) that one could easily rest one’s elbows on it without slouching, though doing so in groups larger than 1.25 human adults would likely, and did in this case, result some jostling disputes over shared personal space with one’s tablemates.

After examining the tiny table, I glance around to confirm that we had not, in fact, accidentally wandered into Mrs. Corney’s Preschool Workhouse for Piquant Orphans.  Unless laws concerning legal drinking age,, and regulations regarding the use of growth hormones on little children, had been relaxed since I last checked the law books, we had not.

Incidentally, my earlier use of the word ‘sit’ should not be interpreted literally.  Life is almost never that convenient.  I use it only in a strictly sarcastic sense since the ‘table’ – another word used in a strictly sarcastic, and somewhat sardonic, sense – was missing the stools that would have allowed us to actually sit in the accepted sense of one’s buttocks being supported by anything approximating a horizontal surface.

I cast several suspicious glances at nearby tables where seven or eight people, all with their own individual stools, had squeezed around their own varnished wooden frisbees in a manner that defied Euclidean geometry.  In fact, there was definitely something marginally Lovecraftian about the use of spaces and dimensions.  Since Lovecraftian geometry requires I believe in something too horrific to imagine, Euclid will continue to be my guide to what should and shouldn’t be possible.

And I will insist until the day I die that the sort of seating arrangement going on in that restaurant simply wasn’t topologically, or even logically, possible. 

When I’m on my deathbed and someone (if you read this, please make sure a ‘someone’ is around to do this with the proper reverence and aplomb) asks me about what wonders I’ve seen in my life, I will just cackle maniacally and harshly whisper Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! The restaurant…the restaurant… the seating…oh God….repeatedly until everyone flees the room.

We glanced over garish and overly beige menus hardly smaller than the table beneath them for a moment before realizing we’d never be able to have one menu apiece opened without resorting to some particularly torturous origami.  And this state of affairs still would have required finding someone nearby willing to accept the gift of our electric candle so we could utilize the entire table space.  So we closed three of them and gathered about *Tina’s menu, with *Cam being forced by his position to read the short history of the restaurant printed on the back of the menu.  Unlike some people, we were quite respectful of the conventions of Euclidian geometry.  Even when circumstances surrounding us seemed designed to rob us of our ability to do so, we managed to squeeze together in a manner that didn’t require M.C. Escher to illustrate. 

Not that it would have hurt to enlist his services.  There was a very thin line between what we pulled off and what would require a seven-and-a-half-dimensional artist to illustrate.

After a momentary perusal followed by a frantic examination of the other menus, it became clear that all we had available to us were beer and wine lists.  Since we were starving (in the familiar American stomach-can-still-hold-a-bit-more-food sense, not in a drought-stricken Third World sense) this turn of events put a damper on our excitement at finally grabbing a place to sit (even if sitting wasn’t actually an option at that juncture.)  Luckily, the table itself came up to our chests, so we could lean in comfortably and bitch about what our next option might be.

“Maybe we should go to that new N’mekl place down on Horizon.”

I had no idea how to actually pronounce it – a sure sign that it was almost as hip as Bread/Slice – so I just sort of mumbled nehmehkull. I might have thrown in an um sound for good measure.

“Go where?” *Tina asked

“Nmmmkl.”  I tried to keep my tone authoritative while slipping in the slightest hint of bafflement.

“What?”

“You know, nekmeekundl”

“Sweetie, it’s way too loud in here to be mumbling,” *Tina said, leaning in close so I could watch her lips as they spoke to my cocked left ear.  “It’s annoying.  Just talk.”

“I’m not mumbling.  At least I’m not trying to annoy you with my mumbling.  I’m talking about that new place over on Horizon Boulevard, just past the Asian market.  The one with the burnt orange façade and green-tiled roof?  Right across from Wells-Fargo?”

“Oh.  You mean N’mekl.  It’s pronounced nuh-muck-uh-el”

“Sorry, I don’t speak Swahili.”

“I don’t think it’s Swahili.  Bantu, maybe?”

Luckily, due to a confluence of idle curiosity and access to a good book on colonialism in Africa, I didn’t have to pretend I knew whether Bantu was more or less likely than Swahili.  Essentially the only thing I knew about the language came from some cursory research into “Heart of Darkness.”

“Any one of those major African languages.  Or maybe one of the more obscure languages from some particularly isolated region of the Caucasus?  Or Mongolian?  Have no idea whether Mongolian would be an Asiatic type language or more Slavic, like the Russians.  I’m just running my fool mouth for no good reason now, aren’t I?”

She shrugged at most of my questions.  All at once, because since more than one shrug would have lent my questions a dignity and value they didn’t deserve.  She nodded at the last one, however, because I was, indeed, just running my fool mouth for no good reason.

“Anyway,” she said, “I’ve never been.  Any good?”

I returned her shrug and added in a quick eyebrow raise.  “Never been there either.  I do know it’s supposed to be even ‘hipper’” – I managed not to add the air quotes because I’m basically a good person despite prevailing evidence to the contrary –  “than this place.  But I’m informed that their food is the best thing since…” 

I let my voice trail off as I deliberately examined the room around us.  I would have glanced at the cover on the menu, but this wasn’t the sort of place that would do anything so bourgeois as to write its name on the menus.  The place where one could usually locate a name contained an image that might have been a pastiche of Koons.  Or just a terrible, terrible mistake at the printers.

I considered whistling innocently as I waited for her to finish the sentence.   But, tragically, I’d never learned to whistle, innocently or not.

She caught onto my intention immediately.  “I’m not finishing that sentence.”

“No?”  I tried to inject as much hurt and sense of rejection as I could in that one syllable.  I couldn’t have been very successful because she just rolled her eyes.

“Absolutely not.”

“Spoilsport.”

“Pick a better sport and I won’t spoil it.”

“Fair enough,” I acknowledged.

The vibrancy of the place made me uncomfortable, almost itchy.  It was too self-consciously alive and kicking, like some desperate host’s increasingly frantic attempts to keep the party going despite the ironic detachment that had made the party so successful in the first place collapsing into a super-dense neutron star.  There was no subtlety remaining in the restaurant’s atmosphere, and it could be called subdued only in the sense that quiet dignity had been beaten down, subdued, and written off as an accidental death.  It reminded me of certain places I’ve been to in New York City, where the clichéd modern zeitgeist not only changed regularly, but often multiple times in the course of a single weekend.  Even the act of pointing out that this observation itself is a cliché borders on cliché.  This is why I typically prefer dive bars.  Or, rather, semi-dive bars, places just unsanitary enough that you feel like attempting a tour en l’air just trying to get across the floors, but not so unsanitary that the blood on the various surfaces from previous fights is left to dry and add character to the place.

Let me tell you from experience, the character is never one you’d want to be friends with except when attempting to do something incredibly stupid and not wanting any companionship from people who might try to talk you out of it.  We’ve all been there, of course, but it’s not something you really want to make a habit of.

Not that I was ever really a part of the modern zeitgeist in question.  Still, one does hear things from cooler people if one isn’t afraid of a little eavesdropping.  Back then, I could actually eavesdrop.  Time and fate, it seems, cure us of some afflictions by inflicting us with others.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who had come to the conclusion that we’d entered the maw of a particularly overwrought dragon and should retire elsewhere.

“How do you propose we escape?” *Cam asked as he glanced over his shoulder toward the door and slid his arm protectively around *Carrie.

(Yes, I’m just as surprised as you are that *Cam and *Carrie were still there.  I mean, I knew they were around in the vague sense that our party of four had remained a party of four, but it just seemed improbable that they had managed to survive my slightly unconscionable focus on *Tina.  I’m sure they had some fascinating conversation that I paid absolutely no attention to.  I’m sure I’d be a better man for having done so, learning many wise and terrible truths, but no use crying over spilt milk.)

“Walk,” *Tina suggested.

“More a sort of…rub and slide, really,” I pointed out.

*Tina smiled and added, far more obliquely than I was comfortable with, “Good.  You can really use the practice.”

“Pardon?”

“Just saying, your rubbing and sliding technique could always benefit from a little extra work.”

I’m pretty sure I blushed.  I’m equally sure that she had no defensible way of knowing anything about my rub and slide technique at the time. 

(What little she would learn later in no way disproved her current assumptions, I grant, but she couldn’t speak authoritatively at the time unless she was prescient, and, in all the time I knew her, I saw no evidence she possessed that particular ability.)

Still, I blushed.

Sometimes – just sometimes – *Tina knew how to get to me.  I’m amazed that I still remember her quite fondly.  Normally, creatures of pure evil don’t hold places of honor in my memories.

The first step seemed obvious.  We needed to somehow congregate and form a wedge.  Being stubborn, and, also, closest to the door, I refused to budge.  It made no sense for me to join them when that would just put me further away from the desired egress.  I looked lazily around, enjoying the fact that simple geography had given me an excuse to slack off while the others had to push through the crowd to join me.  Luckily for her, *Tina was close enough to just shimmy over to me.  *Carrie gave the scenario a bit of thought before ducking down and monkey-walking to the other side, ending up with her neck firmly between *Tina’s legs.  Though I watched with a certain interest and tried not to drool, that was as far as the new parameters of their relationship extended since *Tina moseyed backwards and allowed *Carrie to stand up.

That left *Cam.  Crawling under the table wasn't exactly an ideal option for someone of *Cam’s build.  Climbing over the table might have been theoretically feasible, but the number of ways it could end horribly proved too unsettling to contemplate.  So he attempted to go around the table.  A small gaggle of teenagers blocked him in on the counter-clockwise.  The wall blocked him on the clockwise.  Well a space as wide as a girl’s hand between the table and the wall technically allowed him to go that direction.  If we’d had three months to starve him down to the proportions of a girl’s hand, it would have perfect solution, assuming we had nothing else going on in our lives for those 90 days.

*Cam regarded his options and frowned.

“Go on without me,” he said, nobly.  “I’d just slow you down.”

Unfortunately, because he’s a jerk who didn’t actually want to sacrifice himself for our momentary convenience, he said no such thing.  Instead, he grabbed the table and started edging it away from the wall.  Eventually, the following Saturday, he’d made enough room for him to slide (with minimal rubbing) through the additional space.

Well, it felt like a week, anyway.  Stop interrupting me with petty complaints about the feasibility of my claims.

 ~***~

Eventually, we did make it back to the relative tranquility of the stairs, though not before *Tina kneed the groin of a dapper college-aged gent in chinos and a popped-collar Lacoste.  He tried to double over in pain, discovered he barely had enough room to actually experience pain, let alone double over in it, and glared balefully at *Tina.  Luckily, *Cam stood immediately to her left, his hard blue eyes glaring right back at the guy whose own baleful gaze suddenly had to shunt a bit to her right and around a cloud of cigarette smoke to reach *Tina’s face from a less dangerous angle, i.e. one that didn’t include *Cam. 

Always up for a challenge, I somehow moseyed in to her right and cocked my head just enough that it entered *Tina’s personal space in order to make clear that I was with her as well.

But not so far as to take any potentially-violent attention away from *Cam, because I figured *Cam needed to feel useful and I would never rob him of the chance to put himself in the line of fire to protect me.   And *Tina too, I guess, just so long as he didn’t neglect protecting me.

The Popped-Collar Kid shifted his gaze from *Tina to me and his brow unfurrowed only slightly, just enough to indicate he was re-examining whatever his original plan had been for possible flaws, but not so much as to indicate he was ready to let the matter drop.

After a moment, he looked back over at *Cam.  The furrow disappeared almost immediately, replaced by a mumbling frown as he turned wisely away.

                Being a 6’4” man in possession of a hockey player’s half-Frankenstein’s monster, half-dumpy dinner roll physique, an aggressively-shaped crew cut surmounted by a small blood-tinted fauxhawk, and the tattoo of a particularly angry and possibly drunk manimal of some sort peeking over his shirt collar at the base of his neck, *Cam’s charms were open to any number of appalling interpretations by any number strangers who happened to get on his bad side.  Or his good side.  Pretty much any side that could be opened to shallow interpretation.  His friends bore witness to his fluffy puppy-dog demeanor on a daily basis; strangers frequently just assumed he was a bulked-up were-beaver of some kind.  That fact that he was endowed with slight but noticeable buck teeth provided circumstantial evidence of the credibility of that particular assumption.

                Or maybe it was just me.  It’s entirely possible that the general population made no such assumption because they were far nicer people than me.

                Mind you, I’m not disavowing the were-beaver assumption regardless of how widespread it might or might not have been.  It served me in good stead more than once, and I won’t pretend I didn’t feel the slightest bit edgy around the time of the full moon, especially when forced by circumstances to be inside wooden buildings.  I’m just suggesting you decide for yourself how likely that explanation actually is in light of the information presented.

                So our little Mr. Popped-Collar Kid decided more important things in the exact opposite direction from us demanded his attention.  He shook his head, did a 180 to face the bar, and proceeded to stand there aggressively not caring about us anymore and doing so with a determination most people could only dream of emulating.  It takes an iron will to completely ignore anything that might compromise your sense of dignity, and a will of titanium to ignore the fact that your dignity was fairly damned well compromised already.

By the time we descended the steps and emerged from the stairwell (which, being approximately 3 inches wide, required further acrobatics to squeeze past an ascending couple just arriving), the rain had stopped completely.  Thin clouds were drifting across the sporadic blue patina of the moon.  It felt like the end of night, the moment when the words stop coming and the shoes feel tight around sore feet.  We still had energy, gregarious and twitchy, chattering at a pace too rapid to allow for much in the way of thought.  We were going somewhere.  None of us knew quite what track we would be taking, nor where it led; we just knew that the night hadn’t ended.

Or perhaps it ended long ago and we had kept going so long that we couldn’t bear to stop now, before finding out where this all was leading.

Sometimes I shouldn’t be allowed to ponder these things.  The result is almost always facile.

This is the place where I’m expected to draw some deeper meaning from it all.   As I said to start with, I simply will not.  Neither truth nor wisdom are necessary components of a life lived between all the infinitely divisible moments that make up our time here on Earth. 

And, no, there’s no lesson or moral to be learned in that either.

But I will discuss this one last point:  none of the names I use are the real names, as I’ve made clear before, but they’re absolutely true to the spirit of the people and places.  ‘*Carrie’, for instance, was a redhead in possession of vast psychic powers and a willingness to burn down the school.

Okay, no, that’s not precisely true.  She wasn’t a natural redhead. Just one on occasion.

(At least I don’t think she was.  Confirmation was a tricky bugger in this situation.  While *Carrie had many charms, she never expressed much interest in sharing pubic hair-related ones with me in the sort of intimate fashion necessary to ascertain the truth.  If she kept dye or hair-coloring in her bathroom, she made certain it was hidden from casual perusal.  Besides, she was the type to use a professional stylist for such things, the upper-middle class daughter of upper-middle class parents who fancied herself one of  the outsiders, the artists and actors and pipe smokers and every manner of recherché social activist who used trappings of wealth unthinkingly and without deliberate irony.  I’m not criticizing.  She was a good person who meant well.  I’m just saying all of us, even me, are prisoners of our upbringing.)

I suppose I could have asked *Cam, but I also suppose I could have repeatedly bashed my head against a wall until I believed whatever I wanted to believe.  That is, only two possible outcomes could result from asking *Cam:  1) *Cam would have regarded the question as entirely too forward, even from me, and shook his head disappointedly at the fact that I did something entirely in character for me; or 2) *Cam would have told me, with as much passion and depth as his benightedly infatuated soul could manage, with a wistful look on his face and a bit of drool coming out of the corner of his mouth.

In any event, the art of choosing pseudonyms, nom de plumes, nom de guerres, et cetera, is far more complicated than many people realize.  You’re picking a name that can’t be traced back to its owner, but somehow represents them in your mind.  Granted, not everyone is as punctilious or fastidious or ridiculous about this as I am, but I think the basic principle is sound.  *Carrie seemed like a ‘Carrie’ because she reminded me of a girl I knew long ago.  *Cam looked exactly like a ‘Cam’, and I couldn’t for the life of me explain what a ‘Cam’ looks like except to point at *Cam.  And *Tina?  I honestly have no idea.  Nevertheless she’s *Tina henceforth, sometimes even in my head.

But even using a pseudonym for them, I choose to obscure identifying traits about them because they now have families, possibly with beautiful and innocent children to raise, and I can’t risk destroying everything they’ve worked for by publicizing the sort of completely innocent things they inflicted all willy-nilly on an innocent world back when their families were nothing more than theoretical constructs.

I’m quite certain the preceding narrative would do no such thing.  But it’s about principle.  Though few, if any, people will ever read this, basic consideration never hurts, holistically-speaking.

And yet, if I’m being honest, there’s an entirely selfish principle at work here.  Pieces of our lives belong to so many different people.  Every word, every act, every epic search for dinner, belongs to whichever people are in your company when these sounds and motions and frantic meanderings occur.  As long as you’re not alone, you don’t own your own past completely.  Others bear witness, and can interpret and remember and misremember and flat-out lie about what they observe.  Your life is never completely your own until no-one you’ve ever known is left alive but you.

So, while I primarily change their names to preserve their anonymity, I also change them almost as an act of reclamation.  If their identities aren’t known, if I choose not to share this last detail, nobody can root around in my past, confront me with a twist on my narrative.  My life may not be mine entire, but my choices are.  And this is one of them.

~***~

But the “no-one…left alive but you” part is the most important one to me right now.  I wrote the phrase with all the aforethought of a shudder in the cold breeze.  I frequently type almost as fast as I think, covering several ideas before I even bother to pause and look at what I wrote and decide if it makes sense.  In this case, I’m pretty sure I’d been talking about that idea all along, from the beginning.  I just didn’t realize it until now.  *Terri suggested that I write to move on, though I doubt she knew what sorts of things I would write, the oblique and the incidental, the irrelevant become relevant.  With *E.A. passed away, and *M.W. too, it’s only natural to wonder what the difference is.  When time has swallowed up our separate lives and the world has faded, does it matter if we died or just went away forever?  Stories never change, after all, even when the characters do.

When all the world grows old and drab and even the sun barely stirs from fattened sleep, when ten billion years of evolution are laid bare and cold on that marble slab, what matters most?

The things we lose or the things we keep?

                This is my narrative:  the people I’ve lost, the moments we shared, just the two of us, can never really change.  That sounds comforting at first blush.  These are truths, eternal and unwavering.  They cannot be broken or lost.

                But then I start to think about the fact that they can never be added on to, or actually shared anymore.  When I told *E.A. I loved her, or comforted *M.W. after a rough day, I created a memory that didn’t belong to just me.  Is it the same memory when it was fashioned as a paired experience and the pair no longer exists?  She’s gone now, as are others, and the difference is pretty simple, the disconnect between a play and a painting, between sheet music and performance.

                As far as I know, every person named (or pseudo-named) in this narrative is alive and well, and, I sincerely hope, happy with their life.  That is the only thing I really feel I’ve done wrong; just because I don’t feel a need to rehash history and keep up with *Tina or *Carrie or *Cam, that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t feel like my world is just the tiniest bit better by learning that they’re all happy.

                *Cam and *Carrie would go on to break up a few months later.  *Cam took it surprisingly well, all things considered.  One weekend-long bender with a few of us keeping him from doing anything crazy, and life went on  *Carrie would move about a month after that.  Several of her friends held a goodbye party for her.  I even brought the beer.  I have no idea what has happened since.  *Tina got engaged, last I heard.  I never met the guy.  I just know that it involved an unexpected pregnancy. 

This is life in all its silly little swerves and complications.  There’s no reason for me to believe that they couldn’t be satisfied with how theirs turned out.  Though I’ll likely never learn for certain, it doesn’t matter.  I know enough to

And me?  Well, in spite of many things lately, if any of them were to contact me to ask, I’d tell them honestly that I’m happy with my life.  Some things that have happened lately are brutal, no question, but happiness is about who you are, not where you’ve been, at least in the end.  I am what I was back then.   They are who they were.  Some things don’t change.  I can’t really ask for much better than that, and that, children, is why I refuse to learn any lessons from these experiences.

~~Fin~~

The Giverny Life (TGL)

Part I:  ~The Giverny Life~

A single spray of rain dashed against the glass as the thunderstorm rolled across the landscape, somehow over the horizon and directly overhead at once.  Then another splash, and another, quicker and quicker until the individual drops were lost in the constant wash of water over the city.  Through the stormy haze:  drooping scrub oaks and grim-grey buildings and steaming cars all blur together, imprecise blobs of motion and muted tail-lights immersed in a depthless murk, merging reluctantly into meandering slippery hues joining together into the drowsiness of a million prismatic splotches, a groaning, a wavering, a suṣupti dreaming, not-dreaming, an endless flow of incoherent impressionistic lily-colored liquid streams swirling about each other, a Giverny life. 

                All my senses muddled and muddied, right in the midst of the mutable madding crowd, I lingered in the darkened corner next to the balcony door, thinking of other words that started with ‘m’ to describe my current situation.  Further accommodating my search for alliteration, people mingled and mumbled about me.  Occasionally, they meandered near me, a muddle of meaningless murmurs.

Leaning against the wall, I closed my eyes for a moment and shook my head, as if I could somehow disperse the incoherence by doing so.  The incoherence refused to be dispelled.   It settled in and made funny faces at me.  Metaphorically-speaking, that is.  I'm not crazy.   Usually.

The sounds all ran breathlessly together as I opened my eyes and stared at the door.  The door’s wooden frame contained a shattered fractal of stained glass, mostly purples and ambers and reds spreading out in a manner that could be called an artistic spiral if one were being generous while talking to some three year old proudly presenting the door as artwork.  Since no three year old stood anywhere nearby for convenient disapprobation (unspoken, of course, I’m not a monster), I just grimaced at the ugliness of the glass.    The raindrops now sliding down it did trace pretty patterns under the candlelight, at least.  In the center, a solitary pane of completely clear glass allowed me to see outside.

It bothered me, just a little, because it had no business being an outside door to a domicile.

Because the power had gone out almost an hour before, all the corners were dark.  Mine was the darkest, though.  That’s why I chose it.  The host had tracked down several candles, plus a couple of battery-powered camping lanterns belonging to a neighbor, so the room wasn’t actually completely dark.  One could still make out individual faces easily enough, though the jaggedness of the flickering shadows made them seem sharp and a bit alien. 

Still, I had lost track of the people I’d come with.  Perhaps I’d done so deliberately.   I honestly can't remember.  And if I had done so for that reason, I certainly didn't realize it consciously.  Pulling away in such moments can be a gratuitously random act with uncertain motives.  They moved, I moved, the world moved, and when I found myself in that shadowy corner, I settled in.  I watched the street two stories down and shut out the rest of the room as though it were nothing more than a momentary distraction, easily ignored, easily forgotten.  Chilly air blew from a vent overhead; I shivered and squeezed more tightly into the corner to escape the direct flow across my bare arms.   The cold breeze against my skin felt too much like numbness.

But it was a damp warm evening in a room that had seen more than its fair share of cigarettes and joints and cheap alcohol, all enhanced by lackadaisical college student cleaning habits.  The crowd smelled of faint sweat and fainter deodorants of every stripe, and, just beneath those, the pervading scent of old dust and dank and the slightest raw hint of incipient decay.  There was no escaping the sense of humanity huddled against the world, the herd instinct quelling their day-to-day fears and uncertainty, allowing them to hide in the endless moments of slightly drunken camaraderie at 11 p.m. on a Friday evening.  These were the sorts of evenings I knew, the ones that made me decide to be ridiculously melodramatic about their natures and impulses.

Though I could not make out specific conversations, I could isolate and tentatively identify various voices.  Recognizing neither friends nor acquaintances, I wondered how many of them actually were friends and acquaintances, passing in the shadows at the corners of my vision, the distinct, recognizable voices turning to wisps as they reached my ears.

                I could have looked.  The candles (mostly floral-scented in ways nature never actually intended flowers to smell) and electric lanterns (both of them glowing in the dullest and driest shades of dusty-white) might have provided sufficient illumination to find them.  Here and there, the tips of incense sticks glowed.  They didn’t actually light the room to any meaningful degree, of course.  They just provided points of reference.  Also, covered up the smell of pot, but I make no legally-actionable claims about the partaking, or not, of illegal substances in the area.  The room wasn’t that large; the crowd was approximately twenty-five people shoved into a space big enough for a dozen, maybe half that again if people weren’t too bothered by the prospect of getting to know each other a lot better than they intended.  They had been spread throughout the apartment before the power outage.  Now, only the living room and the part of the kitchen that contained the alcohol were lit.  So they gathered there, unwilling to call it a night with the rain still falling and the parking lot pitch black.

                But I didn’t look.  In the moment, it seemed an oddly futile act, as though I would understand only half the story being told by someone with little interest in making things clear to me.  All sound and fury, signifying nothing.  The sounds felt hard and heavy, an almost tactile tensile barrier between me and the rest of the party guests.  Instead, I sidled over to the balcony door, emerging into the halflight of a stormy day.

                The storm continued in sound and futility, blowing leaves against the door.  I could see it, feel it, and even smell it from a nearby window that had been opened the tiniest sliver.  The rain and wind shook the stained glass as I touched it lightly with my fingers.  The thunder growled more than it rumbled.    For a moment, I couldn’t remember properly.  Had it always growled?  Was the crack and rumble I expected nothing more than a flawed memory of cinematic and stage convention?

                Was I being ridiculous?

                Somehow, the last seemed most likely.  I’ve spent entire portions of my life being borderline ridiculous simply for the sake of enjoying the charm of the inane.  But I imagined the sheet of metal being shaken somewhere behind the curtains, a sound simply for my own benefit.  It was a ludicrous yet somehow pleasing thought.

                Wedged drowsily in the corner, time passing like slow fog sliding over me, I finally felt a hand on my shoulder.  *Stacey stood next to me, her dark wetsheened hair hanging limply over half her face as her mouth crooked into a smile – or a half-smile, I couldn’t confirm for the part of her mouth concealed beneath her hair, after all – and she said something.  Her expression and the way she looked into my eyes told me she was saying something gentle, something encouraging, something she clearly thought I needed to know. 

Though I could hear her speaking, if only barely, and partly by old instinct filling in the remembered sound of her voice, I couldn’t make out the words.  

I shook my head slightly and lifted my hand to tap my right ear with my forefinger.

She cocked her head a bit, looking puzzled.

It’s bad, I said quietly, and somehow she understood.

                Or perhaps she didn’t, at least not at first.   She simply repeated herself in the same voice, same tone, same volume, and I had to tap my ear again before her smile faded and she pulled me in for a hug.   I felt her lips against my right ear, a brief quiver of motion before she caught herself.  It felt like a kiss, and perhaps it was, at least in spirit.

We stood there for several seconds that felt as long as the entire evening preceding that moment, and she slid her fingers along the edge of my cheek and gave me another, sadder, smile before returning to her boyfriend *Henry.  I watched them for a couple seconds before turning my attention back to the window.

At some point, *Stacey must have spoken to our friends about our interaction, because the last thing I remember about that night is *Jason helping me out to our vehicles, holding me steady even though I wasn’t even remotely drunk.   But I allowed him to support me, and allowed *Stacey to help me get into my car, and they didn’t ask whether I was okay to drive.  They knew I was.  Instead, *Stacey waved before snuggling into *Henry’s not-inconsiderable amateur lacrosse-playin’ frame.  *Jason took the more direct approach to the mystique of human commonality by giving me a semi-solid punch on the shoulder and asked if we were still on for racquetball tomorrow.  Though I understood him, he mimed swinging a racquet, almost hitting *Stacey in the process.  *Henry practically growled and *Jason shot him a sheepish grin.

Yeah, I said.  We’ll get a court at 8.  *Jason smiled and punched me again before closing the door and letting me leave. He did like punching as the ultimate form of male bonding.  Whatever works, right?

                All these years later, though I remember the delicate angles of her face at that precise moment she spoke, the exact color of her single visible eye as she met my gaze, the exact sensation of her fingertips on my face, I still have no idea what *Stacey said. 

                I wonder if it was important.

That night is my earliest memory of everything going to an endless static tinnitus for an extended time.  It would go away later that same evening, when I lay on my sofa, listening drowsily to some Dave Brubeck coming from the speakers.  That specific memory is perfectly clear, though I could not tell you what happened between the time we left the party and the moment I flopped down to rest.  So I cannot recollect or describe the exact moment the static finally fell away. 

Because I remember the music – it was “Take Five,” on repeat, until I finally switched to “Blue Rondo à la Turk” – I know the tinnitus had left, if only for a time.  But time enough, really.  Given the bare and banal alternatives, you take the time, right?

Because I don’t remember the second time this happened, or the third, or any other time I could safely assign a specific place in the ongoing sequence, I don’t know when the music really started to go away for good, or which songs I started to lose first.

And because I have always suspected these days would come, I could no more feel sorry for myself than I could feel pleased at these gradual click-clacks tick-tocks of the inexorable.   

In the ensuing years, my hearing faded in and out, in and out, a slow slow slow see-saw always tilting just the tiniest bit more toward the pervasive silence with each motion, dulling bit by bit as the pieces of the world around me slipped away. 

When you start to lose a sense, its absence – darkness or silence or insensateness – almost seems to follow you over the weeks and years.  There’s the sense that something is out there, stalking, just waiting for you to be remade completely.  You slowly cease to be what you were.  Or what you are.  It’s no easy thing to separate yourself from the agglutinated self-image developed over the course of your life.  At times, you’re still 12 years old and perfectly able to follow a movie in the theater.  You’re 22 and deep in conversation with friends at a bar while the sounds of thrash metal thunder through the room.  These things happened.  You were there.  You know what you were capable of, and what you weren’t.  So when the silence looms like a great fog across the heath, you always wonder, just for a moment, why the expanse of the land suddenly seems so fuzzy.

Even when you accept it, as I did long ago, you can’t always escape the momentary apprehension that acceptance means you’ve given in, steeled yourself and marking an ‘L’ in the loss column.  Knowing better doesn’t always help – it’s a sudden thing, an insight that you weren’t looking for, like an unsummoned memory.

Mind you, it’s not a bad thing.  When it comes, it’s not so much a memento mori (metaphorically-speaking, of course) or a foreboding as it is a realization that life continues along its path as it should.  You were once this person, and that will never change.  And, though self-pity seems attractive to some, it’s not worth the effort, any more than swatting at that great fog across the heath is.

There’s a reason I chose the Giverny metaphor a few years ago.  I do understand how impressionism works, and, at first blush, the comparison doesn’t work well.  Monet painted the truth of sensation, the way colors came together to create objects.  Hearing loss is, in a word, loss.  No greater insight is gained by transforming formerly stark and clear sounds into a muddle of background noise.

But:

            As he aged, Monet’s eyesight worsened as cataracts slowly cut him off from the world; even the untrained observer can see the effect on his impressionistic paintings.  By his mid-60s, Monet’s vision problems had already started seeping into his art.  The muddled and indistinct slowly became more muddled and indistinct.  His previously-vivid grasp of colors grew stranger, reproducing shades and hues that would never have passed muster in his earlier work.  Painting from memory, his output became more erratic, less accurate.  While this sort of break from authenticity and realism would come to be embraced as the 20^th century developed, Monet’s metiere lay in colors, in creating image from impression.  Without clear eyesight, he lost access to much of what he’d striven toward for most of his life.  The disconnect proved frustratingly pervasive and definitive, so much so that he didn’t really grasp how bad it was until people told him.

Knowing the art world, had these changes been intentional, he would have likely been lionized for his evolving artistic vision.  But they were the product of eyesight grown foggier, of treacherous memory slowly transforming familiar scenes.  Breaking with the solidity, the sharp-hewed angles and replicable details became lionized.  This was never Monet’s intention.  Monet eventually went under the knife with an early form of cataract surgery.  Though it was incompletely successful (for reasons I can only speculate on, he declined to have an operation on his left eye) it did provide him with a scant few years of improved vision toward the very end of his life.  If nothing else, he could finally learn to appreciate the world’s colors once again.  And when he saw his output from the cataract years, he found it wanting, embarrassing.  He destroyed several paintings because they failed at matching his rediscovered reality. 

Some might argue that going blind also deserves its own reality.  Dim-eyed Monet experienced a different world from bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Monet.  All worlds are created equal under the lens of life experience.  All worlds have worthwhile truths, and a painting through cataract-impaired vision is no less reflective of the artist at the time than one free of obstruction.  I can’t dispute this.  The world grows fluid, and you work with what you get.  There are far worse fates, I think.

~Fin~