[lit-ideas] Inflicting more novel
- From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Lit-Ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 27 Mar 2005 03:17:39 -0500
Here's the ending of my novel, _Last Days_, a part of which I had
inflicted on the List earlier. It shows the undoing of a gallery owner
who has been trying to find five missing sculptures throughout the novel.
Lorti is a postmodern Don Quixote, which is to say Don Quixote with a
very complex, selfish, and elusive heart. He has lost almost everything,
his gallery has burned down, he is soon to be sought by the police, he
is badly burned, his Sancho Panza is dead, and he is pursuing his final
clue about the location of the missing sculptures he has been tracking.
_____
From FRIDAY
Imagine being completely alone and calling it home. The words written,
the song beautifully sung, the dervish dance, the shocking thought – all
carried out alone. The smell of the body alone. One's face turned to
another's face through mirrors. The hands that always hang like leaves.
In being alone, the routine of rehearsing silence. Here one could turn
to things, the study of objects, a young girl's diary, a science
syllabus, a history of events--or sex with no object, stillness with no
counterpoint clamor. Is this the house that you built, you who are
alone? Critical, a judge without a trial, all social faces and forces
fled, a God beyond the self? No one to amuse or recommend. Is it a fear,
this being alone, this separate track? The fear of being alone in the
deep ringing of a damn bell without mercy? It is a truck to take the
garbage of time to the dump. Now. And now. And now. Alone. No talk--and
though one would crave it--no conflict. No nasty talks with doubters and
errant well-wishers, no Socrates to quiz you to the Real. And the Past?
To be so completely alone one would have to blot the past, the past so
crowded with people that memory can walk a long way. Alone with God in
the present -- is that what we are and how one does it? The rigors of
workday routine must also vanish. Must language go? Must space? Do we
not deflate like abandoned balloons? Isn't everything in us meant for
something else? Completely alone: slowly leaking all our books,
technology, thoughts, gods, colors, sense away. Leaking everything we
have received. Leaking time and restlessness: is that alone enough at
the end to be completely alone? Will death be solitude or will it be
folded back into the fabric of all we share with others? Completely
alone. Say its horror out loud. No rage wide enough to hit a mark or
spur a retort. No hands to touch. No pain to explain or joy to deploy to
others.
The rigs and derricks of northern New Jersey stood out in a blasted
landscape of metal and mud. On either side of the six-lane highway,
withered marsh grass ran into ponds of green water. Cinder block
warehouses and generating stations crowded to the edge of the marsh, an
oil storage depot abutting a factory refining water repellent. Scrap
metal mountains bearded tank cars in storage. Overhead a diligent queue
of jets sucked into the sky.
He drove through a gray and white and brick-red landscape arrayed with a
tirade of traffic. Highways blossomed in all directions. It was a
landscape of single-minded purpose and energy, the dusty attic of New
York City crammed with old industrial furniture, railroad keepsakes, the
photo albums of vanished enterprise. It was a landscape of transition
with no future save its remediation. In its rush south the road promoted
warehouses selling cedar chips, turf grass, Portland cement. The
chemical taint of the air began to vanish, and Lorti's lungs lightened
as hills began to enclose the road. The first trees appeared above tall
concrete walls, and he relaxed his driving. The horizon greened. Piles
of broken gray and brown rock bound into wire blocks lined the base of
hills. Lorti was ashamed and furious at his burns. Both his arms were
burned and he could feel the patches of burns on his back, each shift in
the seat urging a hot grasping claw. Blisters were forming on his legs
in painful buttons. Pouring bottled water on his face and arms, he
moaned at each gesture of the car's traffic pantomime but kept driving
on 78 West.
Ahead a state highway sign, REST AREA, and Lorti slowed the car up the
ramp and into a pine-lined parking lot. He parked next to a brown
station wagon. Slamming his car door, Lorti limped up a knoll to a cedar
picnic bench. A tall man got out of the brown station wagon and followed
Lorti up the hill to the bench.
"Jesus Christ! What happened to you?"
"Accident," said Lorti, "What have you got?"
"This address," said the man, passing Lorti a slip of paper.
Lorti slid an envelope across the table. The other man pocketed it and
rose swiftly.
"Wait! The sculptures are on a boat?"
"It's more like a barge. Listen to me: get a cortisone shot. Time to go."
The man returned to his car and drove away. Lorti stared at the address
on the slip of paper. Birds were circling and cars and trucks were
coming and going. A dog barked from a distant triangle of green. He had
been appropriated. Bullwhip Gallery was gone. His career was trash.
Insurance might pay the damages but he was still a ruined man. He could
be arrested at any moment. Time was running in the opposite direction.
This was knowledge of long ago. A salt whiff of sea air blew through the
pines.
Looking up from the table, Lorti saw a fat man in a green T-shirt
watching him from outside the public rest stop. The man was clinically
obese and his black beard and baseball cap seemed to confirm Lorti's
suspicions: he was trying to give Lorti a vibe. The man kept beckoning
him, nodding his head toward the restrooms, his bearded face insolently
pleading.
Lorti shrugged and tried to get up and rush to his car but couldn't. The
burns on his back and legs had accommodated to a sitting position and
didn't want to be moved. He had relaxed too much. To conceal the burned
fringe of his Hawaiian shirt, Lorti jammed his legs under the picnic
table. Now he was stuck. His hips, legs, and back refused the motions
needed to rise. Misted with sweat, breathing heavily, he grunted and
rolled inside a puzzle of flesh. He could not swing his legs high
enough. Against his wishes, he remained on the bench. He felt like a
bodiless head. The fire had appropriated the sovereignty of his body.
His will was a deposed potentate who issued insane and unheeded decrees.
His eyelids clouded with sweat. Lorti wondered why Hatboy's work had
obsessed him. Hatboy grasped some power greater than his work. It
couldn't be his styles alone. Three of the five sculptures reminded
Lorti of Gabo. But that was crazy. That was obviously not true. Yet that
was what he had written in his notes on the photos Hallam gave him. Gabo
was no Hatboy. After his Realist Manifesto, Gabo went from metal cutouts
to kinetic sculptures to architectural works like Column at the MoMA. He
knew what he was doing. He had his theories. Hatboy had no theories.
Hatboy had none of the basics: no formal training, no prior involvement
with the arts, no sense of how his works fit with other works. He had
reinvented the wheel, but in the act of reinventing the wheel, Hatboy
had created five immortal forms. Or maybe they had created him? He had
no tradition and probably couldn't create one. Stan Hallam was dead: he
heard it on the radio. It was all an issue of control.
The fat man still signaled and leered from the comfort station. Lorti
rolled on his hip and swung one leg up on the bench. Holding the bench
with both hands, Lorti swung his other leg up. Gasping, he rolled into a
crouching position and rose to his shaky feet. A prisoner of skin, Lorti
hobbled back to his car.
Once inside his car, he screamed from the sudden pain across his back.
Driving back to Manhattan was summer in reverse. The green became gray
blocks of industrial purpose. Concrete grew at the edge of the road,
eclipsing trees and terraced landscaping. Water towers and power lines
replaced mountains, marsh blended into macadam. The stinking pile of
Manhattan revealed its gaudy west profile, jagged and severe, a frantic
mob of glass and steel. The city seemed the armor of a vast, malign
reptile trawling the river's mouth. It was a mountainous and clumsy
boat, infinitely jury-rigged, anchoring in the gray haze.The tunnel
wasn't crowded and he maneuvered onto 40th and 8th Avenue. On WNYC,
Horowitz played Schumann's Fantasy. At 42nd, he turned west to 11th
Avenue and drove north. The car smelled of burned fabric. Lorti
swallowed a handful of diet pills and washed them down with bottled
water. He parked the car at 72nd and West End Avenue, went into a
bodega, purchased a prewrapped sandwich, a quart of orange juice, and a
tube of zinc oxide. The sales clerk's face only showed fleeting alarm.
Lorti's burned shoes scuffed through black and brown dust under a lazy
traffic light at the entrance to the park.
Beyond the entrance, where the park slopes toward the Hudson, he turned
to a row of empty benches. Gratefully, he sat -- yelping as a tender
spot touched the bench – and settled. Ignoring circling dog walkers, he
unwrapped and ate the sandwich. A calm view. He creased open the orange
juice and drank it all. He belched and groaned. He wasn't even sure why
he was here. It was a decision he made. A matter of principle. During
these last days it occurred to him that death was the ultimate natural
expression of appropriation and concealment. " Concealment itself must
be appropriated. Yet nobody was listening. He unscrewed the zinc oxide
and smeared gobs of the cold white paste onto his arms and ankles and face.
"What is thought?" he thought. He didn't mean "What is thought?" in any
abstract sense. Lorti was really curious about what his own thoughts
were. As he thought further, Lorti became aware of himself thinking. He
thought about himself thinking and wondered what he was doing when he
was thinking.
"Do I vocalize my thoughts?" he silently asked himself. Lorti strained
to hear his own words as he thought them. "What is thought?" he silently
pronounced to himself. "This is too difficult," he thought, and he
relaxed his mind. Having thoughts in words took too long. It slowed him
to think in words. He noted this. He felt unexpectedly lucid. The
brilliant sky, the full lush trees along the rest stop, the barking
dog--all seemed perfect props for his deep feeling of lucidity.
"I was thinking my thoughts to myself," he thought to himself.
Pigeons gathered at his feet and pecked for crumbs from his sandwich.
Lorti remembered Tina. He remembered the sound of her name. Such a
homely name. Veils of grief closed him for a moment at the image of her:
a tangle of brown hair on her tanned thigh, her charming crooked tooth.
Anywhere. He mourned for the spirit in her as though it were something
other than his own. Lorti knew he had his own breath – wheezing as he
bent to salve his ankles with zinc oxide, the pigeons scattering –if
nothing else. Rising now, as if urged by a desire to move beyond his
memories, Lorti ambled through a tunnel into the lower park. He walked
down a concrete ramp and went right, past picnic tables and a running
track enclosed with trees. Finally he came to the walkway aside the
Hudson, and up ahead, the 79th Street Pier.
It was already evening and the orange sunset flickered in the Hudson,
painting the water and the shore in a dance of summer light. Seagulls
shrilled and small boats slid into the distance. A chain link fence
enclosed the dock. Houseboats slapped against the dock and the wash of
the river pulled the creaking gangway against the hulls of the closest
boats. He opened the lock on the fence and hobbled onto the wooden dock.
The houseboat was the worst piece of junk on the boat dock, every bit as
bad as the note had suggested. It was a gray and brick-red tar paper cube
patched with corrugated aluminum sheets, a flimsy shanty palleted on
pontoons. Lorti examined the padlock on the wreck.
Producing a thick ring of keys from his scorched trouser pocket, he
rattled keys in the lock until one turned it open. He slipped the
padlock free and pushed the door. It swung open about a foot and caught
on something. Lorti saw that it was a small link of chain secured from
inside. The chain was an antique galvanized fastened from the door to a
wall of the houseboat. Merely pushing against the link made it snap.
Inside, circuitry clicked as he lunged inside. Just beyond the door was
a shelf with a battery powered Coleman Lantern. He switched it on and
the room filled with white light. He noticed the electric box by the
door as a series of small explosions outside threw him against the
floor. Lorti realized these explosions, small shape charges, had blown
away the mooring of the houseboat.
Propelled by the force of the blast, the houseboat spun away from the
dock out into the Hudson channel, caught the swifter current, and was
drifting downstream toward lower Manhattan.
He stood and examined the interior. There were no sculptures in the
houseboat. It was a trap. The box by the door was a detonating circuit
on a timer. A tiny orange light on the box winked at him and a second
explosion ignited the wall of the houseboat. Again Lorti was thrown to
the floor. He crawled to the open door. To the west, Battery Park City
was preparing for evening and the lights of the World Trade Towers were
becoming visible. Fighting the fire was useless; smoke built around him.
Lorti stood in the doorway of the burning houseboat. Everything was slow
and clear. He saw pigeons flying to shore. Smoke assaulted him with
bitter gases and all he could think was to jump. He could see the
flashing lights of the shore patrol boat approaching. Evening settled
about the city, and the circuity of great block buildings of Manhattan
were slowly being lit. There was nothing to think about. Lorti took a
deep breath and jumped.
_____
(c) 1997 Eric Yost
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