Chapter 7
I yawn, and step back from the computer, nearly finishing a chapter where the main character meets the “love of his life” in a cemetery.
(What did I…)
Apparently I had been scratching my arm with the tip of my pen instead of the butt, so it looks as though my tools turned against me.
(I wonder if I can connect the dots and spell out “Homo fugue.”)
(That would be a fabulous tattoo.)
(New skin cells.)
(If you have a ship where all of the pieces have been gradually replaced by new wood, is it still the same ship?)
Tea time!
(“Drink me” to wake up. Coffee, coffee, tea, soda.)
(“Eat me” to sleep. Advil PM.)
I thought these night hours were supposed to be symptoms of being young and restless… But I’m 21 and I’ve had this since I was a baby.
Parent’s baggy eyes and mid-day naps with jaw slightly open.
Falling asleep with book in hand or football game turns on.
Switches to an infomercial about cooking fish.
(What are you watching?)
(Oh, I didn’t realize you were asleep…)
Extended bursts of energy followed by burnout.
Days of super production… LSAT on LSAT problem, staying up until three doing homework ahead of time and getting lost in novels that weigh as much as a small child. Everything has been super cleaned, enough Clorox to smell it from the hall, eyebrows plucked and red, hard to pay attention with my friends thinking too much about the other things I have to do, or what clothes I have left after some of them got ruined by the school dryers….
And then suddenly it stops, and everything moves in slow motion.
Everything is more difficult to do but I’m calm, a figure moving in an atmosphere thick as amber, lulling poppies, we’ll never make it to the emerald city if we fall asleep.
(Is this what relaxation feels like?)
(I very much detest it.)
“You don’t always have to be doing something…”
… actually… I do.
(Who was is that said you only need 5 hours of sleep and could still be productive.)
(Ben Franklin?)
Sometimes it’s nice to be awake when the rest of the world is asleep. You can hear the little things like planes passing over head, the wind shifting in the trees.
(The wind. How can something so seemingly insubstantial be so powerful?)
I find I like 3:00 at night the best.
It’s the sort of time when the weekend winds down.
If you’re outside and cold, you get back and get all warmed and cozy.
(Close your book; the next chapter will be their tomorrow.)
Must mean I’m a witch though, enjoying 3:00 at night.
Why is night so evil?
Parent don’t want you to be out or night, people who come out at night are up to something bad.
I ought to move somewhere else, where they start dinner at ten and sleep during the day.
Sounds ideal to me…
(Except England of course, last call at 11, getting all dressed up at 8 or 9.)
(Strange.)
And here I am in New York, conveniently “the city that doesn’t sleep.”
(Why New York brags about insomnia is beyond me.)
At least I sort of fit here, city of caricatures, city of bust your ass, except everyone here likes being so tough.
(I’m about as tough as “the Cure”.)
I need a different late night city.
(Oh, chai tea, fill my soul…)
(Hmm, it seems a bit mundane to write an ode to tea.)
(I’ll write one to the boy in Spanish class, I like what’s his name… oh yes….)
(The one with the nice blue eyes who moved a desk over and sat next to me; I might have made George after him.)
Wish I could say it was an accident.
(I remember those silly R.L. Stein books. He’d introduce every one by saying that any person who is terrorized in his books and resemblances to anyone in real life are merely coincidental. I guess that makes sense in those sort of things, but still it seems so silly.)
I shrugged.
(I’ll own up to it, I don’t care. Most of my characters are based off of real people.)
(Probably not you though.)
(You’re so vain… you probably think this book is about you.)
(Trust me, it’s mostly about me.)
(I’m vainer than you are.)
(But don’t we all want things to be about ourselves?)
(I’ll own up to that too. I’ve wanted someone to write a song about me. A good one though, not a crumby one where I’m compared to the moon. I want to be someone people talk about, but in reality, few people know or have ever known me and if they take notice of me, it’s as indifferently as “yes, there is a tree over there.” )
(There are so many background people who think they’re in the foreground.)
(When, truth be told there is no foreground.)
(I have 500 trophies, but it doesn’t mean I’m special.)
(I need a calling, like the Protestants.)
… Can playing devil’s advocate be a calling?
Well, being a trickster seems to define it better.
That sly figure that gets away with things other people don’t.
Kitty began to paw at a bagel playfully as if it were her pray.
She stalked it from all angles, and then pounced.
“Awww…” Bertha watched her lovingly. “Who knew something so vicious and diabolical could be so cute!”
“I know.” George smirked. “But you always manage to surprise me.” He kissed her on the cheek.
“I’m not that bad, am I?” Bertha frowned.
“I said you were cute, love.” George emphasized. “And yes, yes you are. But hey, it keeps thinks interesting.”
“You know what I just realized…” Bertha sighed. “Wait, wait stop over there, there’s an abandoned Mustang.”
“Well that’s awfully convenient. Of course it’s not a terribly subtle car.”
Too late. ‘Well ours doesn’t seem to be holding up so well. Bertha sat there, mouth open. “I want.”
“You like cars?” George looked at her oddly.
“It’s sort of a long story… but I did drive a mustang once, and ever since…Please, please let me drive. Please.”
He gave her a look. “The last time I let you drive we nearly got in an accident.”
“I’m not that bad of a driver…” She pouted.
Silence.
“Fine…” She sighed. “But only because it’s the apocalypse and if we run into something stopped on the road I don’t want you to blame me.”
“Fair enough.” He shrugged, as they pulled over. “So what were you saying you realized?”
“Oh yes um…” She was temporarily distracted by their new surroundings.
Neither of them noticed the severe damage done to their car.
“…ah, that’s it I was going to tell you Happy Birthday!”
“Oh thank you. I forgot about it honestly.”
“Hmm but I feel horrible I don’t have anything to give you right now…” She pouted.
“Well write me an ode then.” He shrugged.
“What sort of ode?”
“Like from the Odyssey.” George craned his neck to check for any potential oncoming traffic, as they headed back to the city, both secretly nervous about their families.
“Oh ok.” Bertha took the other half of paper, and spent the time scribbling out various ideas
After a half hour of relative silence, Bertha took it out and opened her mouth but then paused, embarrassed to read it.
“Oh blue eyed Adonis… eh I can’t read this.” She blushed.
“What you’ve never written poetry before?” He nudged her.
“No I have.” Bertha sighed. “Much to the dismay of my poetry teacher… but I thought we were just going to have to learn poetry not write our own, do you know how horrible of a poet I am?” She blushed. “It’s so bad. Like really, really bad. Writing poetry is generally not a good deal.”
“It can’t be that bad.”
“Oh, no it is.”
“Well just read it quickly then… it’s like pulling off a Band-Aid.”
“Alright she sighed. Here it goes…”
Her voice changed as she began to read.
“Blue-eyed Adonis I’ll follow you everywhere if you let me… I’m sorry.” She started laughing.
“No, it’s sweet. Keep going.”
“Ok.” Bertha grew bright red and read off the rattling thing, which we cannot include for fear of dead poets digging themselves up from their graves and physically attacking the author.
He was quiet for a moment.
“See I told you it was dumb.”
He pulled her into a short kiss. “You’re sweet. Hmm…” I suppose I should have to write you an ode to what the…”
Something swerved out of the way and started honking.
They sat at the side of the road panting.
(Time couldn’t pick a more inconvenient place to resume than on a one way street.)
As they got closer to the city they stopped for gas, still jumpy despite the fact that time had clearly resumed.
In the meantime, back at Dunkin Doughnuts, the man spotted the half-sheet of paper with the eye on it and began to pack up his things hastily.
“Shit they’re on to me.”
He was running so fast, he barely noticed his co-worker, but hastily ripped out of the parking lot once he discovered her.
“God, god I can’t believe I got her killed.” His hands were shaking on the steering wheel. “Vinny is going to have my fingers for this.”
The eye symbol, apparently, had been a sign of the local mafia.
“Well did you think of anything yet?” Bertha asked as they came up to the city. They would have to fix everything, and had to text their families. George’s mother was probably to the point of calling Brian, who of course, George had forgotten to contact.
“Hmm… well I guess it isn’t really a poem, but here it goes… you make me want to be a better person. Is that good?”
“Aww baby!” Bertha smiled, and kissed him at a stoplight.
In the next car over a teenager scowled at her.
There are always those obnoxious, selfish people who spend Valentine’s Day trying to make people feel sorry for them because they didn’t have the guts or initiative to try and get involved with someone.
It’s not the people who are thankful for their friends and family on Valentine’s Day despite being single.
It’s that sour type.
Like Bertha before George.
(“Thank goodness I’m not you anymore.”) Bertha smiled.
I was about to break up George and Bertha when the fire drill rudely interrupted my miserable progress.
“Ugh! Didn’t we just have a fire drill?” I shouted down, complaining to my roommate.
Four grumbling minutes later, we settled in one of the couches in the campus coffee shop.
“Oh no.” I grew pale. “I left my story out there in the open…”
“What could possibly happen to it? I doubt anyone is going to read it.”
“There’s more truth to that than I care to know. No I know no one will read it but still… it’s like my baby and I’m like a mother bear. If you read my story before it’s perfect I’ll rip your head off.”
“What’s it about anyway?” She asked curiously as we waited for my chai tea.
“Well it’s sort of a generic love story that goes horribly wrong. And everyone dies.”
“I thought the guy was going to live, what was his name… Chris?”
“No, it’s George.” I blurted out, face hot. “I’m going to do two fake outs. So the first time around he thinks it’s Bertha but then he meets…what’s-her-face… well he meets someone who he think is perfect but it turns out that she’s just working for the mafia to avenge her father because she and he are from opposing Italian families. And her brother is involved somehow too, he’s the main guy, she just sort of gets in the way of everything and both her and George end up dying. Except she doesn’t love him so while she dies for love of her family he just dies for unrequited love of her.”
“That sounds fun.” Katie said flatly. “By the way Rose mentioned going out tonight. Now, I am certainly not going out, to that crumby sticky little overpriced bar because if it’s crowded I may get violent.”
“Understood.” I sighed. “I wouldn’t mind going out.”
As I spaced out, I noticed a pair of glowering, sulking, accusatory eyes.
(Well, what are you looking at, strange person?)
(I hope you’re not in the unfortunate position of liking me.)
“Chai tea!!”
“Thanks!” She picked it up half burning her fingers. “Do you think that we can go back in the building by now?”
But unfortunately clusters of people still surrounded the building, which held a deceivingly large number of people for its size.
Girls and boys in sweatpants flirted with each other by the yellow light of the lamps.
“Yeah… we have had a lot of fire drill…”
“Oh, I didn’t know you lived on the fourth floor…”
(I guess you can’t fault them for it. You never know where you’re going to meet someone. If you listen to the stories of how people met, it’s usually in situations that don’t necessarily warrant romance.)
(I wonder what the R.A.’s must think of people as they go from room to room.)
(You can tell a lot about a person by the way they keep their room.)
(I really, really do hope I’ve closed my notebook. Most people aren’t snoops, but there’s a good chance I’ve written something offensive.)
It had happened before. One time I got so angry and written a subsequently fiery poem that it offended the whole literary magazine at their college.
(Probably the line about ugly girls not having a monopoly on intelligence…)
(Eh… still don’t regret it.)
(Of course, I hadn’t realized that part of the coven was on the board.)
(Is it a coincidence that Bertha can’t run away from any of her enemies either? They leaked in there too, the damn corpse kickers.)
It started off when they started to sit near her in class. Then some of them began to follow her around, to the library and unfortunately they figured out where her dorm room was.
The first few weeks of it were hell, because she had mistakenly believed that it was all either coincidental or that they had wanted to be her friends.
But then things started to get weirdly stalker-ish…gave her the feelings of a fly caught in syrup… yet in the end…
(Is it horrible that they disappoint me as enemies?)
I waved reluctantly at the R.A.
(She was very into bonding.)
(I think R.A.’s are supposed to be though.)
(I have my friends and group of people I know I can trust. I don’t want to cause any trouble but I’ve found it’s a lot easier to keep to myself. It doesn’t mean I don’t like other people. On the other hand I do, I think other people are very interesting.)
(I guess I just like being the stranger.)
(I can’t even “go native” in my own life.)
Thankfully my notebook is in the same place, untouched.
Notes in the margin, something about a proposal.
(That’s weird; I don’t remember writing that...)
(Guess it could make things more tragic?)
Into the furthest, darkest corner of the desk, stay safe your sacredness.
Tear me out of this repetition… classes, homework, bed
, no sleep, call home “yes, yes everything is fine I was thinking of doing this or that in terms of graduate school” “Oh don’t worry about that yet” “Was thinking of getting a job” Zebra comforter is not a person I want to sleep with the boy I like but I can’t, because he told me I’m not good at sleeping can’t very well blame … why do you own so much black? Are you acknowledging your own mortality New York… for being known as being so shiny I just see you dim, black on black on black clothes everyone business standardized.. very well very well.. teach me to be someone who looks good in a suit and keeps her mouth shut, that’s the best for everyone right?... a job isn’t a calling anymore, a job is the new goal…pick a job any job… if you don’t love it you’ll grow to love it… but I don’t want to be ordinary..
Bother. I’m destined to be ordinary. I’m going to make myself a bag of popcorn and least enjoy the entertainment value in all of it.
Maybe life will make more sense if I stop trying to make sense of it anway.
Nothing good on. Change the channel.
Shit, is it Valentine’s Day?
I hate Valentine’s Day.
Light streamed in through the windows of her old room, in her parent’s house. It smelled like incense and ink. Waft in the Homesmell.
It was the perfect setting for her monologue.
“Shakespeare, so obsessed with his trade found it absolutely necessary to shake the earth like an eager child with a snow globe causing Ophelia to stumble into the lake. “Oops.” He presses his fingers to his lips. “Well I should make it look like a suicide. Elizabethan women seem to be killing themselves off all the time anyway.” Shakespeare, the man eating popcorn in the graveyard on a paint chipped Adirondack chair next to a grave that says “Yoric”. “I daresay Yoric, this is all very entertaining, these living people. Yoric?”
No response.
“Thou asshole. I swear I’m going to make fun of you later for this, just you wait.”
All of the strange happenings in New York led Bertha to “the All America city”.
Bright Victorian houses, more decrepit closer to the hospitals contrast to the well-trimmed seemingly endless suburbs, giant courthouse looks awkwardly super phallic, the land of private schools and lawyers and movement, Elmwood with your blonde cornrows and coffeehouses and local artists. West side rowing club, lighthouse run be careful if a shady van follows you as you run through… rowed up a body once I heard.
Death city. Death of industry the old creaking steel mills on the water. Teenage-wasteland
Sabres-games.
I don’t quite belong to you, don’t have the flat nasally aaa-a as much, but then I don’t have the Wisconsin oohhh as in “Don’tyaknow!, and sometimes there’s even a Western Pennsylvania twang odd how sometimes my mother sometimes sounds like she’s from the south.
Bertha felt home in her winter house, in her winter room. Blue-grey sky on bluish snow when it’s cold and the world seems so empty that a passing plane is as loud as your stomach grumbling during a test. Blue paisley sheets, and blue gray walls blue notebooks with blue ink of course, blue shirts all stacked together. Blue-lonely and blue-homey all at once.
Walls all covered with drawings and posters for silly things like how to read tarot cards.
Downstairs, the imposing black and white photos.
Don’t know much about them only knew them when I was little.
The legendary eight, only one still living.
All the old lace and old hair-cuts, short and curly, looks like everyone had dark hair.
Some smiling-some not. The Italians aren’t smiling; the German, Polish, Austrian, and Hungarian with smiles.
One Italian bride particularly pissed off. She left Italy before discovering how short her arranged marriage husband was.
One identical looking to my father. Eerie. Hanish pronounced Ha-an-nish.
Pasquale. Came over at thirteen, looks so very severe but we look the same. Same eyes. Do these people live on through me?
And weirdly enough I am committing identity theft.
These people, my dog, these pictures and the glossy piano and blue blueness of everything it all belonged to the author, but now… it’s mine.
If I am her and she is me, can we both be?
Father, son, and holy-ghost; author, daughter, void.
“Hey.” George came up from the basement hair messed up.
(I wonder what we’d look like in a black in white photo.)
There’s something so poignant about him being here, walking around as though he’s in an intruder in the dead of night.
In the kitchen my father began to make crepes.
So strange to be here, near the couldasack that I used to play “house” on reluctantly with the neighbor. I preferred kick ball to imaginary babies. Get out of the street when a car drives by “Hey Arnold” style. The neighbors that sent me down the hill in the backyard in a baby doll stroller tiny thing that I was, but lanky like a stork. Can’t say I didn’t want to do it then, can’t say I wouldn’t do it now but my butt is too big and the stroller has been since sold at a garage sale.
Spanning out like Google earth it looks like a green eye hill.
“You guys hungry?”
Thankfully we were, and able to challenge to the several paper like grilled crepes waiting to contest our appetite.
(So strange being back at this table. Brother in college. The little boy who used to head-butt people sitting in his usual spot across from me. Parallel points.
And my sister doing her residency. Far less of a shopper now. Still expressive like an actress.
Dad goof ball still visiting the hospital now and then and biking with mangled knees.
Mother calm to his stress. Quiet, intelligent, always reading, rolling her eyes at my father.)
When you see people like that who are all settled down, it makes you so impatient. I want to be able to own a house I come to every day, not rent some place that isn’t quite home yet. I want to have the token husband and give in to the pull of church even if I don’t believe it I’m probably still going to raise my kids the same way maybe just once a month with the church though.
Other people idealize youth, running around clubs and pubs studying beauty but honestly… I want adulthood so badly. I don’t want Ke$ha and vodka like I’m supposed to, I want cheese and wine with a few friends saving up for some exotic vacation. I actually like classical music and reading. I’m cool like that.
Without warning we are on our way back.
It’s horrible: it doesn’t matter how many times you fly, airports do not get nostalgic. Planes yes, but airports are like hospitals. Cold blank walls with the sealed exits and the sub-arctic conditions, as if people really want to be this cold. All craziness ensuing. The temporarily misplaced persons express anguish in their nomad-hood.
Bertha grabbed George’s hand.
Across from them sat a man dressed in a pink bandanna and what looked like a kimono, shouting loudly. “And he said go out, got out and be the salt of the earth.”
Bertha frowned. “Salt of the earth, what a strange concept…”
“Mhm.” George was playing some game on his phone.
“If you salt earth it makes it difficult to impossible for crops to grow. That’s why the Romans salted the earth when they conquered Carthage. Why would anyone want to be something so destructive and counterintuitive?”
“Well…” George tilted his phone, engrossed in the screen. “It might be the renouncement of mundane food and simple pleasures for the concept of eternal food.”
“Maybe.” Bertha shrugged, and pried open her rather large novel trying to get re-immersed. But the impracticality of salting the earth or being the salt of the earth still struck her.
(There must be something I’m not getting. Salt adds flavor so maybe it has to do with creating a culture. That much I get, but then why not just say the salt of your food. And besides, the point of salt seems m
ore for garnish than for anything else. It’s like saying be the insignificant seasoning, don’t be anything substantial.)
(Is adding salt to the earth like adding meaning to life? You don’t necessarily need seasoning to survive but it makes eating life a lot easier.)
(Or maybe it means that they should be endless, like grains of salt.)
(I haven’t the slightest idea, but having dropped Christianity, at the expense of potential bad luck, I should promptly find a Christian to throw over my shoulder for good luck.)
Naturally the flight was running late, Buffalo was a dead end stop, and the planes seemed in no rush to get there.
“Alright folks can I ask that you move your bag to the apartment above your head.” The flight attendant had a stretched worn out smile, patience wearing thin. It was difficult to tell if she was being polite or simply going mad.
As the plane ascended George’s hand gripped her more tightly. He wasn’t one for flying.
But Bertha felt at home among the clouds.
Real heaven, looking down at the world and seeing all the different ways that cities were plotted out, the beautiful city lights the lakes, the tiny clusters of farms and valleys. Being able to see different parts of the country picturing different lives: families on farms, families in the city and the mountains, local bars and restaurants and different accents plotted out: it’s all just so perfect. We went up, saw the charted cities, and pulled the gods down with us
And then comes the longing that comes from being above the world that makes you want to get back into it.
I want to explore all those little towns, all the nooks in the different boroughs, hear silence in the Rockies and hear everything in New York. Dissect the suburbs of each place and listen to a million different perspectives. Explore the boiling nectar cities in the dark.
Who ever said Paradise was in the east?
I am living a bit in the past on this plane due to the extended distance from the earth. When time sits still my past comes for my bounty, wielding clubs.
(Odd that they should all pick the same flight.)
Do you ever wonder what would happen if all the people you’ve ever had problems went all met up at the same time?
(Trying to find some similarity between all of them but it seems futile. Let me think, let me think let me think…)
One doesn’t make a move, one doesn’t speak her mind, one doesn’t play guitar well, one doesn’t….
Doesn’t.
That must be it.
I despise the half-assers and the cowards of the world. The roommate who let the love of her life slip away passively.
The men who tried just friends as a move.
The people who just sort of live their life, no emotion, blah blah blah blah blah. Vanilla.
I wonder what it would be like to be boring.
It sounds horrific.
I don’t want to be safe.
“Folks we are about to descend. Please place your tray tables in the up-right position. Use of all electronic devices is now prohibited.”
The woman came back around, shrill as ever, waking George out of his temporary slumber.
(The liquid gold tendrils greedy veins grasping, clutching, cities burst leaked lights across the country all Technicolor veins.)
(Come to think of it I’m pretty tired too.)
(A tad hung over.)
(Despite my whole philosophy I must put out the disclaimer that flying is more like Paradise when you aren’t hung-over.)
(At least I’m not sitting next to anyone obese or sweaty or with a baby. Or all three: the trifecta.)
A bit of turbulence on the way down shifted some of the bags above my head.
(If somehow this causes my notebook to fall out and I lose it…)
“Oh my God.” A woman exclaimed. “Look out the window.”
What had used to be Westchester had apparently all burnt down.
Blackened chunks of debris floated in the Hudson.
But rather miraculously, it seemed as though the fire had been contained, and had only caught the very edges of the city the way fire begins to eat and blacken the edge of a page before it fully catches.
Bertha gazed at George as he slept. He looked so peaceful and cute, curled up like a squirrel. She kissed him awake as they landed.
“Hey love.” He just-woke-up-grinned and wiped some of the sleep spittle off on his cuff.
“Hi baby. Aww you’re so cute.”
“You’re cute too.”
The flight attendant looked relieved as everyone began to turn their cell phones back on.
The five minutes after you land somewhere is always the longest. Cramped legs pulling suitcases awkwardly from above and sort of half obliging and half cutting to get out of there. Everyone wanting a shower and fresh air…
“You know I had the weirdest dream.” He yawned. “But I really can’t remember what it was. Oh well. I think I was going to ask you something but I can’t remember. Did you ever happen to go back to the Margins that one weekend with your family…?”
“Yeah I did.” Bertha noted bluntly, and unconsciously smirked a bit.
“Bertha….” He said, more exhausted than anything else. “What exactly did you do?’
“Nothing.” She said, blinking innocently.
“Alright.” He looked at her suspiciously. “I don’t believe you, but I figure you can’t keep a secret for very long you’ll probably end up telling me later anyway.”
“Mhm.” Bertha nodded curtly. “Don’t worry about it love. I just had to get a few things taken care of.”