Short Story

This is the beginning, thoughts and comments are welcome.

He sits inside his studio. On the floor, cross-legged, with his head cocked slightly to the right. He imagines his eyes are able to see through the different layers of paint and he visualizes the different steps, the other images buried underneath the topsoil of his finished work. Or at least as close as he gets to finished, he’s never said he’s been finished with a piece. He has sold unfinished pieces and has no problem with that, but he’s never called something finished, he just gets bored. His latest is a remake of a Garfield comic strip. It’s painted diagonally across a canvas the size of his wall. Jon is replaced with portraits of the past three popes. Garfield is a carefully reproduced baby with a nosebleed. The baby is identical in all three panels, except for one where he messed up the hand a little bit.
He hates it when people ask him to explain his work. Understanding is dominance. It is psychological rape. It’s all about sex and power and massaging one’s ego. At least that’s what he thinks. Though he has painted over the word bubbles about twelve times and each time painted the exact same words, he feels compelled to do so again. He thinks about Koons’s pink panther. How society is maturing. How we have been running on the same track since the Paleolithic. Perhaps the Garfield baby should also have a broken arm, a piece of bone just barely poking out the paper-thin skin of its fragile little forearm. Maybe.
Jon doesn’t seem like that bad of a guy, but do you know any single man that has both a cat and a dog? Of course not. It just doesn’t happen. This whole thing is ridiculous. It’s all based on a lie. He stands up to rip the thing off the wall and throw it to the ground. He rises, gripping a stool but his right leg fails him. It's fallen asleep. He sucks air in between his teeth as he just barely touches the tip of his big toe to the ground. The drive to destroy has stalled completely. A figure stands in the middle of a room with no more furniture than a stool and some easels, the silhouette shifts slightly leaning more and more back to its center of gravity. The sound of rattling comes from the other room. Plastic resounds against wood followed by a crash. He hobbles over and finds his phone on the floor. He unlocks the screen and navigates to the message icon hopping impatiently in the corner.
"You owe me a new set of silverware, Pete."
The question, the obvious one resulting from this text message, is what did Pete do to his friend, Chris's silverware? Pete was troubled by the fact that he did not really have an answer to that. He recalled many things from last night. His already somewhat drunken stumble to the bar down the street. Getting thrown out of the bar for groping what looked like a woman from behind. He did get in a fight somewhere, with someone, which explains the bruising and the cuts, but what about the burns on his forearm and fingers? Surely, they weren't there yesterday. The welts were swollen and pink. He prodded the fluid-filled pouches of flesh with his index finger. The resistance was both pleasant and somewhat painful. As the backlight for his cellphone turned off, he noticed his reflection. One eye looked like it was gangrenous. How did he miss all of this when he washed his face this morning? Did he? The first thing he remembers today is sitting cross-legged in the studio. Fuck.
He starts getting dressed. A lack of clean clothes is nothing new. Everything he owns is paint-stained. Sometimes he worries that he is too stereotypical. His shoes are slipped onto his feet, which are slipped out the door, which is shut after the feet have slipped outside. He stares at his feet as they navigate the steps and attempts to untangle his thoughts. Pete looks up to see his neighbor. In his mind they both stop on the spot, they stare deeply and longingly into each others eyes. He would say exactly what she needed to hear. He would know what that would be. She would grab his arm and he would pull her in close. They would just stand in each others embrace, eyes clenched closed, teeth gnashed, their hearts trying to break through their chests. And just as the joy would build to intolerable levels he walks into the deli. A familiar bell rings somewhere behind him.
"Petey! What can I get you?" a fat, older gentleman behind a six-foot-high counter smiles impossibly widely at Pete.
"Just..." he fumbles through his pockets and pulls out a wad of papers, "I'll have a..." receipts, post-its, torn looseleaf, no money though. "I don't seem to have any money on me. Heh, do you think I could put a sandwich on my tab?"
His smile shrinks and warps into a tight, straight line between two pale lips. "Sorry, but this ain't no bar, buddy, we don't really do tabs around here."
Pete pleads, "C'mon, you know me Mike, I live down the block, I'm here every day."
"Well then go back down the block and get some money, sorry kid."
Defeated and malnourished, he exits the deli and the bell rings again, signifying his failure to provide for his own basic needs.

Not the next Albany travel log.

Yeah, no log. But there is this!

What do you do when you don't want to do what's next? He sat at the plastic table on his patio. Hot ground beef, formed into two patties, grilled over charcoal, lay on a plate. The steam from the burgers clings to the edges of his glasses. He does not notice. His wife steps outside holding two beers, a salad, buns, plates and other fixin's, as she likes to call them. She was smiling until she noticed his brow, folded into a corrugated forehead, drenched in thought.

“Hey,” she says, holding up the beers, “I picked these up at the supermarket, they're Belgian... I think. I've never seen them before.”

He exhales a “Huh.” With just the slightest movement of head and eye to show that he recognizes her presence.

“No cheese?” she asks.

“We ran out.”

“Well, I was just at the store and I could-”

“You would think that I would be used to this.”

“To what?” she asks while sitting down, placing the plates and opening the beers simultaneously.

“To eating food once it's cooked,” he sighs and lifts his eyes from the burgers to her. His glasses clouded to the point where eye contact becomes impossible. She continues staring, expecting the rest of the thought, as if that one were not complete and self-contained. Twenty seconds pass without a word exchanged. She finally breaks the silence. “What?”

“I feel like I'm only going to eat these because they're cooked.”

She continues to stare, “Are you not hungry or are you having an existential crisis?”

He is sure that he was never asked that question before. “Fuck it, let's eat.”

“No, no. What do you mean? Did you not cook these because you were hungry?”

He assembles a burger with too much horseradish mustard. “I was... am hungry. That's not the problem.”

She sips at the beer without breaking the now possible eye contact. Her intention was to stare at him until he spoke, but her face scrunches into a ball when her brain registers the taste.
“Ugh, too much hops. I can't drink this.”

“I'll drink it. Pass it here.” They pretend to wrestle over the beer. Eventually he wins, takes a sip and lets out an overproduced Aahhh.

She leans back in her chair, smiling. He can't think of anything to say. Neither can she. Another few moments pass and she reaches for a bun.

He starts, “My mind keeps falling into grooves, familiar thoughts, worked and reworked. And it's- and it's like... Christ, like if these thoughts were a physical, circular path, I would have worn down my feet to nubs and dug a trench several feet deep. And every time I notice I'm in this path I can just get out, climb on out. But the deeper it gets, the more familiar, I worry that the day will come that I won't be able to get out without a ladder, or non-metaphorically, anti-psychotics.”

All she can manage is a “Hmpf” and proceeds to assemble her dinner. He takes some salad and leans back in his chair, one arm on the rest, the other slowly pouring beer into his mouth. His eyes twinkle like an eight-year-old's might after getting into some mischief.

She looks up, “You know you're not crazy. Stop being such an ass. Is this life not interesting enough for you? Do you have to live in fantasy?”

“Sometimes it's not enough,” he regrets the statement before he says it but does so anyway. “I mean- this isn't about you.”

“No of course it isn't.” she heads into the house and comes back with a bottle of wine and a glass.

He watches her pour a glass. The red splashes and sloshes, a drop jumps out onto the table. The antisocial group of molecules that don't want to be like the others, and maybe it's not desire, maybe it's pure physics. Maybe the entire history of time was a story leading up to and flying past that one droplet proving to be unique from the rest of the wine in the glass. His mind has jumped back onto a well worn track, the scenery familiar and perhaps comforting.

He says, “You know every year, almost all the atoms in your body are replaced with new ones.”

She drinks from her glass.

He continues, “So we're not the same people we were last year. We're not the same people when we woke up this morning. Our physical makeup has been altered considerably since we sat down.”

She continues drinking, refusing to come up for air.

“It's no wonder people change. We're destined, preordained, to change and reinvent. It's the human condition.”

She finishes her glass and breathes deeply. “Are you asking for a divorce?”

He stares for a second. “What? No. Jesus, no. Why? I wasn't at all-” At that moment he noticed a sadness and determination in her eyes that he's never seen before. His beer fizzes quietly, releasing carbon dioxide into the air, but for some reason they can both hear it.

Swans

[Reading music: Dan the Automator - Third World Lover (feat. Kid Koala)]

“You’re old enough,” my cousin Mohammed said before we hopped on his motorcycle. I was eighteen and, despite our family’s objections, he was going to show me the “real” India. Up to this point, my Indian experience consisted of nightly dinner engagements with obscure relatives, unsentimental gift giving and marathon video-gaming. My mother, my younger brother and I returned to India every four years and each visit had been identical to the last.

Mohammed and I arrived at the local butcher's market. It was nothing more than a ceiling and support beams, but the suffocating odor defied the open-air architecture. The butchers worked on large concrete slabs. There they cut the meat and laid it out for sale. Skinned goats hung upside down from chains extended from the ceiling. Flies swarmed about. Unoccupied butchers absent-mindedly swatted them away. Stray dogs freely entered the market, lusting over the goods, kept at bay only by a shout or a whack.

Mohammed began taking photos with the camera my mother had bought him. A few butchers noticed and approached us. They assumed we were reporters and, before Mohammed could correct them, began complaining. Mohammed translated, explaining that the market was municipal institution and the butchers thought that if the wider public was made aware of its gruesome conditions, they could force the local government to clean it up.

Mohammed criticized the Indian press. He drew a parallel between my family shielding me from the filthy, inhumane side of India and the way the media served the public. Desperate, impoverished people wanted to hear good news, not to be reminded of the ugliness of their lives. And that’s what the reporters and television anchors gave them. Everyone wanted to pretend that everything was okay.

By now a small crowd had gathered around us. Despite Mohammed’s attempt to explain that we were not journalists, a man pulled us aside. He led us to the local public bathroom. First, he pointed out the local police station and then directed our attention to the bathroom’s confines. Even from ten feet away, I could smell the stench of urine and feces. Of course, it was a stinking rotten mess. But what the stranger wanted us to notice were the two men, who were able to withstand the odor with broad smiles. They were sitting on the floor, just beyond the entrance. One was heating a piece of aluminum foil with a lighter. The second had a straw with one end hovering over the foil, the other end in his mouth. The restroom didn’t have a door. People were walking in and out, urinating with ease and washing their hands before exiting. The police station was only two blocks away.

Next, we came to a river. Mohammed explained that rivers were considered sacred in Hinduism, which was why people were bathing in the murky green water littered with trash. He explained that their bathing was making the river even more polluted; the run-off from the soap stayed in the current and, further downstream, people were doing the same ritual bathing, adding their own soap-scum to the water. Each attempt at absolution deteriorated the river further. From the middle of the river rose a temple, thin and tall like a dagger stabbing through the current. It was five stories tall. Due to the high tide of the monsoon season, the first story was completely submerged. Walking along the riverbed, we were confronted by a hoard of what Mohammed called “professional beggars.”

“These are beggar colonies,” he said. He claimed that they allowed only the most disfigured and heart-wrenching to join their ranks. They worked the streets together, sometimes clashing with other beggars over turf-rights. At the day’s end, they split the earnings amongst the group, dividing it along their hierarchal lines. When Mohammed wasn’t looking, I gave an elderly woman with a face like crumpled brown leather and stubs for fingers twenty rupees.

Mohammed had been taking photos since we stopped at the butcher's and now he wanted a shot of the entire river. He wanted it all: the fanatics bathing in the toxic water, the beggars preying on the faithful, the temple standing erect amidst the flood. We climbed a ladder leading up to the roof of a nearby two-story building. As my cousin took his shots, I surveyed the area. In a pen beneath us, the cows were eating out of a large pile of trash, feeding on leaves that were used to wrap portions of rice and chicken. Between two cows kneeled a man and small girl. They were picking leaves out of the unopened trash bags, scrapping up the remaining rice and chicken and shoveling it into their mouths.

“That’s not something you see in America,” Mohammed said, “people eating besides cows.”

***

Later on during the same trip, my entire family took a vacation. My mother considered it absurd that our family had spent their entire lives in India without ever seeing the Taj Mahal. So she rented a tour bus, a driver and a guide, and we set off for the sights of northern India. We visited Agra, Delhi and Jaipur to behold the treasures of Indian civilization.

There was a hotel in Delhi with a bridge. To reach the hotel’s front entrance, you had to drive over this bridge. It was completely unnecessary. It was constructed as a gimmick to make the hotel seem more luxurious than it actually was, something to compensate for the green blotches of mold on our bedroom ceiling and the half-functioning air conditioner. The bridge passed over a small, man-made valley complete with an artificial river and two swans. River may be an overstatement; it was drying up and much more akin to a shallow stream. The swans waddled beneath the bridge, hiding from the unrelenting north Indian sun. The edges of their feathers looked rusted. They moved awkwardly and were missing feathers. They could have easily flown away, but it seemed as if their wings were clipped.

[This story won the Fall 2008 Harman Writing Nonfiction Competition and will be published in next semester issue of Encounters magazine.]