I’ve been in trouble ever since I set my suitcase down.
— Bob Dylan, Mississippi
We’re going to start off simple: what if you’re walking along and you want to entertain yourself with a story?
You have to make do with what you’ve got. But if that’s not good enough, I have the ESK (the Emergency Storytelling Kit.) It’s a simple device, easy to use, and I encourage all of you to make your own, too. Mine is a lawyerly suitcase — a Samsonite 4923, for all you ‘Suitcase Afficianados’ — purchased at the Goodwill and filled with the following items:
1. A roll of stamps.
2. A desk/concierge bell.
3. Three Bo Diddley records.
Naturally, this isn’t the standard supply of the ESK. It varies per region. The Southwest is particularly fond of umbrellas and foreign translations of comic books. I hear Quebec refuses to recognize ESK’s from any other region outside their own.
Since this is a new device for me, I want to highlight all the different ways it can be put to use — its benefits and its defects, as well as its optimal operating conditions — on both a short term and long term scale. I’m going to walk from point A to D — that’s the short term — and do my best to tell a story along the way; if I need something from the ESK, I’ll use it. Next time, we’ll pick up from D and continue on until we come to an end. That’s the long term.
Mind you, this kit exists only in case of an emergency. You don’t think Simenon or the Hardy Boys opened theirs up every time they ran into a rough patch, do you? Of course not. There’s no need to see the airline create a special subdivision of bardic suitcases. You’re perfectly capable of spooling a string of words together and not get lost in the rotating cat of why. So: do it. Expand on this research. Try your own. See if these facts are accurate — if the ESK holds up the way it’s reported here. Publish your own findings.
The inside of the ESK’s resemble Cornell boxes — voluable parrots, faceless eyes popping open in-between bits of the night sky , negatives from Joan Crawford films, twenty-one compasses embedded in a block of wood covering up miniature compartments containing paper clips, marbles, a cut-out map of Florida desperately trying to hang on to a weather balloon trying to escape — a miniature piano that catches on fire whenever the ESK is opened — instructions on how to get the Hubble Telescope to sing — and see — La Vie en Rose — and countless more.
And they’ve been used by many: Walter Benjamin, who was carrying his finished Arcades Project across the border. “Protect this with your life,” he said, then ran into the woods, morphine pills flourishing from his pockets; Kerouac spoke of his works being like Proust but written on the run; Cortazar folded his VW Bus/Dragon into a suitcase when he was done traveling from Paris to the coast; to pass unnoticed — fedora low, collar up — through Desolation Row, Einstein carried his memories in a trunk; Bolano charged that Sisyphus escaped on a legal technicality, which we know requires a briefcase. Edward FitzGerald’s ESK became a boat. Stendhal carried a suitcase filled with enough pseudonyms to last a lifetime. Vollman’s was bright orange, and he sat on it to look out and around after he hopped aboard a train to Santa Barbra.
The ESKers of today — from what I’ve been able to piece together — hang around spots for 24-48 hours to get an idea of how the cycle of a day plays out in areas that might not have been mapped before, improvise songs with children late in the evening when they would come wandering out of their tents, and teach people how to twitter so events can flare up into the air, be captured and collated, an emerging string of grids, clouds, chords and arrows and shifts of time that encapsulate a portrait.
Borrowing a tip from Columbia, they send biblioburros to poor, isolated areas in Wyoming, Alaska, and West Virginia — where they hand out copies of the WPA Guide to the States, amongst other books, our favorite being, How to Use a Telephone Booth in Psychotherapy; or, I’m Just Going to Make a Call, No, Really.
They send newspaper clippings to their friends, the story about a woman losing her house to Andre Dubus, a story in the Washington Post about a robber entering a house, being offered a glass of wine and who then breaks down, only asks for a hug, gets it, leaves, drains the glass and then leaves it untouched in the nearby alley; or even a posting on Craigslist trying to sell “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” saying it’s only gotten ‘some intermittent use.’
They criss-crossed the co-authors of books, hoping they’d get confused when they showed up to speak with their other co-authoree, i.e., Sundays at 7:30 and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
And they’ve been conducting raids all across the country — often into used video stores, grabbing VHS tapes off the shelves — shoving them into backpacks and then running out the door — ejected VHS tapes from private viewing booths filled with people taking notes on yellow legal pads and dashed out the door as they ripped their headphones off and shouted, “Hey! Hey!”
I have a name, mind you. I’m not aiming to be a floating voice. I have looks and quirks, ways of dressing and only a certain number of dialects I can imitate. I came into the group with a name, but I was a blow-in, a stranger, and that became my nickname. “Blow-In,” they’d say. “Why don’t you hitch the next hurricane on out of here?”
And they’d introduce me to people as Blow-In, so I’d talk about having to leave town because I slept with someone’s wife, or because I was bound by a duty, a mission. And they’d say, What duty? What mission? And I started telling them my story about my twin brother exploiting local migrant workers out there back on the homestead trying to dig up some treasure I hid in an abandoned coal mine because my wife was running out of space to hang the buffalo carcasses in our little prairie-bound shotgun lean-to, and not only was exploiting the workers the half of it — there was a bullet halfway buried in my flesh, which I carried with me and refused to remove because it reminded me of the duty I owe to take revenge on my ungrateful kin for sullying my proud mother’s name.
And I’d tell that to folk. They’d look at me all slack-jawed, say, Is this true? And I’d laugh, say, No.
But before we continue barreling along into this story trapped within the contours of a smile and a come-hither, neon-infused emphasis on MOVEMENT, I wanted to pause for a moment to talk to you about Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita.
It’s a terrific film, filled with many things for many viewers, but the one thing that caught my eye in this was Peter Sellers. His performance in this film is notably different from Dr. Strangelove, and not enough comparisons are made between the two. In Strangelove, he plays three different men; in Lolita, he plays one, but it’s one who takes on many parts — the cop on the front steps of a quiet hotel, the school psychologist waiting in the dark, and a local townsman calling Humbert Humbert in the middle of the night.
There is something sad and borderline-hallucinatory about this, and this might provide a good grounding for what’s to come, though I have an overriding caution in calling it ‘sad’ and ‘hallucinatory.’
How I joined the ESKers factors into it as well: though they call me a Blow-In, and though there’s power in calling yourself a ‘Blow-In,’ moving your strength and courage into the wind, an infusion in — and with — all elements, there is something to be said for the persistence and virtue of honesty, the salience and safety that comes with being grounded in particulars, one of which is history.
When me, Bernard, and some of the gang were piling our table with a lunchtime buffet at Gray’s Papya’s in midtown New York one May afternoon (cheese fries wrapped in warm aluminum, beans and bacon thrown over hot dogs whose coverings were alive to breeze-chatter), I put the question to Bernard again, a perennial group favorite: How did I come to join you guys? Why me?
I didn’t expect an answer. I got one.
They told me they discovered me shouting my head off in a battered-down-by-the-dust white house in a nearby borough of a major metropolitan city on the west coast. I was running through a thesaurus like I wanted to pulp it, hand it back to the compilers and say, You could do better, apparently, invoking pulchrous multitudes, dropsical wefts, depauperate farkleberries bearing little to no fruit, calling for perichondriums to reinforce pericardial ballasts, all this in the name of a girl who I no longer remember but in the story was still walking around inside the house.
They say the only salient thing from my lips that night was this: “If you’re smart enough, you can become absolutely anything you want.”
It’s a sad thing to say, because there’s no dynamic to that for the internal self. It isn’t a two-way street (creation goes one way, internal goes the other), and it’s not as simple as this, but it’s worth leaving written. If you can generate creations without your own self necessarily being there — and who knows where it slips to or just beyond? I used to ask myself — then one wonders how to pre-occupy the part of the self that isn’t involved in any of this. Sellers could have been sitting in the dark for a long, long time waiting for Mr. Humbert. And what did he do? Devise more characters? Rehearse? Flip through a stray magazine or three?
The simultaneous power and need for escape for us vertiginous-makers! Cortazar wrote near the beginning and/or end of Hopscotch, “All endearment is an ontological clawing,” and no one claws harder than us. Nothing but a whirlpool-qua-whirlpool, boy. And as the wall spins upward — as I rounded through the house, watching her march from man to man in the room, coolly, calmly, and casually, letting herself be rubbed, pinched, and nibbled, trying to break my claim to calm and have me say something when I didn’t know if I was in a place to say it at all, to say, hands off, that’s my girl (because who says I want to be the one to make the decision for her if she cringes when she hears me say it? Says, Is that what you were thinking? and then that was the miserable game all along), me mumbling about what would happen if a nihilistic, suicidal bull tried to stop the running of the bulls, whether or not one could do DNA testing on a newspaper obituary, Alfred Eisenstaedt, P. Renoir’s obsession with hands and reading people by their hands (“Did you see that fellow, the way he tore open that package of cigarettes? He’s a scoundrel”), stumbling over parade-balloon size trash bags filled with a truly embarrassing amount of alcohol, for which I also made comment, saying Australia truly was off to a great start because of them, meaning you, you fine, fine gentlemen, speculating that if the United States continued to have dramatic population growth, its sense of self-identity would change (and it wouldn’t be led by technology, but by the amount of people who could use what technologies they have), and how it might, and how the lines of geography might define that, how I hadn’t read about a good old-fashioned train-robbery-by-horse in what seems like years, and where the last kind of story about that was buried in which newspaper — as the waves of these creations — kids shouting out lines from copies of rain-soaked Hamlets in the street because they’re sick of schilling for their product, groups of travelers taking turns at the wheel so they can write up how they were written up in Eureka, Nevada and Rushville, Nebraska (what shirts the bartenders wore, whose breath smelled like what, how the curve of the streets determined the rhythm of the cars as they slowly circled through town and under the blaring mountains), the Czech Government holding a contest for architectural spaces in the air, someone getting lost in Wyoming but only having maps from hundreds of years ago — as the waves spun higher and higher — I would stop and look at different parts of the house, apparently, I would stop and look and say, Is this my heart? Is this? Where am I going to smuggle my heart? More to the point: how?
And when Bernard got to there, I laughed, said, Is that true?
And he said, Maybe for all of us.
Which leads me to here, standing in Cambridge, Massachusetts, under the overhang of Out of Town News, waiting for the rain to pass. It’s 6:30 in the morning and the homeless are sitting up in their sleeping bags under the awning across the way at the CO-OP, cab-drivers’ waiting on the corner of the Chinese Restauraunt and cigar shop, their french slapping the curb …
Harvard Square is the only place in the world where someone will walk about shouting, “Nietzsche says, ‘God is dead!’ as if it’s breaking news.
But there’s nothing here. Not anymore. This city is safe, more for the kids splashing in the fountain in the summer outside the Science Center the kids raucously covering Buffalo Springfield in the Pit and hunch-shoulders passing through the yellow light of the Yard in Winter, and I need to go somewhere where I’m going to help set things right and ward off the moon-driven tides of the threaten-to-wrong. I hop on the subway. I need to find who else of my kind is left in the city. I don’t exactly know where to look, but a few spots come to mind.
When I leave Park Street, two things: one, one subway conductor leans out the window and tosses a baseball to another subway worker, who leaves the station tossing it to himself; two, I’m buzzed by a pigeon flying down the escalator (ABOUT TIME) and the first thing I say when I get outside is to a woman tossing a cigarette down a grate, I say, “This is how fish start smoking.”
8:45. A crowd of 24 waiting for the Boston Public Library to open. Man sweeping up flattened/steamrolled cigarette butts. What was missing from the last kit? Villains? A conventional arc? If that’s the case, I’d better find one that fits in a suitcase.
“Mr. Bogart, what do you have in that suitcase?”
“Peter Lore.”
“Really? Well, if that’s the case, go right ahead.”
Even though Massachusetts put little into the Civil War, they had one of the biggest spectacles post-Civil War — ten-thousand plus singers and a cavalcade of trumpets and smashing drums, enough that the composer snuck away in the middle of the performance, covering his ears and seeking quiet ground so he could take a break, and you could imagine the look on General Grant’s face ranging between “Ah!” and “Hmm,” something like that, a dot in the mess of a show like that, and I make my way on foot toward Brookline, still trying to see who’s where.
There’s an air conditioner on an office chair outside the Midtown Hotel. I leave a note: “Air Conditioner looking for work. Can Type 120 Words Per Minute.”
The afternoon finds me on a bench in the Gardens, the ESK to my right. The elephant rests on top. Reactions so far: a child in a stroller, no more than 3, giving me a steady, incredulous, “What-in-god’s-name-is-this-crap?” look. Others stare at the elephant, but it doesn’t seem to upend their world.
A woman enters the park, calling out, “Petey! Rusty! Abraham! Come, babies! Come!” A legion of squirrels forms a perimeter around the red-frazzle of a town crier. “Get a nice chestnut! Hello, sweeties! Hi, Petey! Maybelline! May-may!” Died blond hair turning orange. 50’s. Beige jean overalls. “Maybelline! Hurry, hurry, hurry!” She turns around, says to someone, “I don’t see Maybelline.” Then: “Hi, Sweetie. Where’s Maybel? May-may! Hi, girl! Hi, sweetie! … Burly?”
An African-American woman — maybe in her 50’s — walks by. She has on a leather jacket.
“Sellin’ that?”
“Nah.”
“Why’s it on the suitcase?”
“Well, I was gonna let it out so it could go to the bathroom, but —”
“But it’s not real!”
A man near Park Street hits every syllable of the word Le-vit-a-cus as he launches off his seat into a round of impromptu sermonizing. Taking a moment to look, two guys in paint overalls move on, pass a cop on a steed, and one turns to the other, says:
“It’s Tony the Carnivorous Pony!”
His friend laughs.
“Oh yeah,” he continues. “He likes fingers!”
I make my way down Winter St., then turn left on Washington. Crowds.
The Aquarium. Two kids in rainslicks. “Let’s get a hug on tape,” says one parent, wielding a camera. Another breathlessly counts out twice the number of seals than are actually in the tank. Later, seated on one of the benches they have out front, I’ll write in my notebook, Drink mouthwash, gargle coffee, see if your teeth know the difference (We do. — Teeth.) Currently, though, I’m watching a middle-aged woman make a goochy-goo face against the glass, saying, “You’re just like a Teddy Seal!” Or, possibly, “You’re just like a teddy, Seal!” though her delivery didn’t imply a comma at all. Or, “You’re just like T.R., seal! Go sign a peace accord between Japan and Russia.”
Three tourists down to my left. A couple and their friend, let’s say. They’re speaking French, but only in that way where you wonder if your ears are a bad radio, that whooping in and out of sound. In the tank, two seals are settling down next to each other to nap by a curve of the rock.
“Look at that!” says the girlfriend.
“Synchronized sleeping,” I say.
The friend grins. “First they try, then they marry, eh?”
I wish it were an ESK full of matches, or that there were ESK waystation across the city, where I could go and exchange one ESK for another, take a seat in the lounge with a cup of coffee and a crowd of children strumming ukeleles at my feet. I hear a man
talking about beefing up his thesis on Marlo Ponti, then pass a restaurant that has a giant flag draped out front. Someone’s biting into a sandwich. Above that, the text, which — reads aloud, “#1 Sandwich.”
“Good enough to drive both pinkies up,” I tell to a family thinking of entering.
“Fancy,” the father replies.
“You know, if that happened to all the fingers, it’d cause a wave.”
“And then he’d drop the sandwich.”
As I move from Washington back to Park, I see two jocks crying on the subway because they were going to miss a game.
I enter the subway again, pass a cellist (stubble, woolen cap, one earing) playing “Kashmir,” like starting a slow engine, that, and hop on a train heading to Davis, and it’s there I find fellow ESKers.
A drove of the ESKers are heading to a nearby mall parking lot to tell a fairy tale.
“Don’t we have things to do?” I ask.
“Sure,” says one. “Like going to a parking lot.”
“Really?”
“Parking lots are important, Blow-In.”
The ESKers included:
One who worked at a bank and drew little sketches of each customer that came up to his window; another kept writing John Ashbery letters with suggestions for other poems for other bridges across the country; an ex-comedian who was kicked off a British quiz show for getting voluble regarding the oversaturation/banishment of comics to that sort of stage; one carries a suitcase that has the label, “Ted Sorenson’s ‘Humor File’”
(“Never send a boy to do a man’s job, send a lady.” “Mr. Stassen announces he will run for Governor of Pennsylvania. He has already been Governor of Minnesota. That leaves only forty-six states still in jeopardy.” “In recognition of your athletic ability in hiking to my ice box to drink my Heineken’s.” “I don’t want to give the impression that every member in my administration is Irish. It just seems that way.”)
One came from a long line of individuals who’d taught each successive generation of Kings and Queens of Greece to swim and had quit his position one day and walked off the palace grounds.
One is The Red Baron and flies all over Harvard Yard, goggles, scarf, and all, trying to see what it will do to the Brahim-types.
Simon heralds from the example set by Ryszard Kapuscinski — he sleeps in his clothes with his shoes at the side of the bed, swinging around the same way every morning — schools grew empty — had tried to liberate a camp of children kidnaped by Franco, but the aftermath ended up being insanely complicated — who tried to keep as little Warlord-friendly equipment on his person as possible — cell phones, AK-47’s, and the like — (other palliatives) — whose phone regularly received press releases from the U.N., the State Department, the Foreign Office, and others throughout the day — “I saw refugees latch themselves onto the wheels of planes taxing down the runway,” he’d say, “the ocean filling with keys thrown in by those who didn’t want the coming army to find a polite way of entering their homes.”
The car pulled into a parking lot near the north of Medford.
Simon whistled.
“You don’t whistle for a parking lot,” I said.
“Even if I’m impressed?”
”Especially if you’re impressed.”
*
Jane Smith leaned across (fans of the opening “Once upon a time” should look toward the essay placed in the appendix “Fairy Tale Phallogocentricism and Sexist Repercussions: Why ‘Upon’ Is A Naughty Word’” as to the reasons for its omission) the seat and ruffled Matthew’s little head.
“I’m going into the store now. Are you sure you don’t want anything?”
“Yeppers.”
The door closed on Matthew Smith, trapping this fourteen year old, fair-haired boy in a metaloid box, who could feel the limits of the steel points as he stretched out his arms, lazily letting his eyes into the parking lot, letting the pulse rate slow as he looked upon droopy streetlamps, hundreds of empty cars, half-asleep storeboys shoving and pushing shopping carts into their corals — facts, facts, facts: the repetitive, omnipresent sheen of an endless pattern tick-tick-ticking away at Matt’s brain; this wasn’t his first parking lot, nor would it be his last — a seagull nigh 10 feet from the bumper trying to pick-up a loaf of bread, and a gang of monsters approaching his car from all sides.
The nascence of Matthew’s family life can be earmarked with the occassion where his father, Edward, decided to build their new home on the Mississippi River. A disaster from the start, building could only take place at night, due to the extremely questionable legality of the situation. Come nightfall, workers without a shred of english in their pockets would remove the branches and twigs that covered up the slowly evolving woodwork during the day. As work progressed, and the structure became more elaborate and, therefore, noticeable, the family and workers were forced to distract boats that came downstream through increasingly sophisticated methods.
At first they attempted to shame potential onlookers with mere whistles and catcalls. This succeeded for a time, but once the basement was built, and a giant set of stairs could clearly be seen emerging from the water, the process evolved.
One night, the husband dove into water, and came wandering up the stairs as a festival boat passed: “You’re right, honey! The basement is flooded!”
Soon the house fell apart, and they were forced to travel abroad. They’d bought pumps and reinforced the walls with concrete cinder blocks, even tried to incorporate the river into its design by making plexiglass passages for fish and others to pass through, but the house, which Edward had assumed was on or near the point of entry for his son, could only stand by and watch a large and soon to be surprised boat pass through the wood like a correcting pen zipping through a sentence.
The only reason to draw parallels between this surreal architectural excursion and the current situation in the parking lot hinges on the reason why Edward Smith, the father, chose to build a house on the river in the first place. Three weeks earlier, driving to Mexico City for some sort of conference where adults would walk up to microphones holding their papers to speak and wait for applause, Edward Smith looked out at the road while driving, saw a midget with the head of a bear waving from the river’s bank, and nearly crashed his car.
But to explain this, we need to go back even further.
*
The instructor came out of a store with a bag of sandwiches they distributed amongst the group.
“You taught the King of Greece how to swim?” I asked between mouthfulls.
“And his sons.”
“How are they?”
“Well, it took twenty years for them to do a single lap, and when they got back, they killed hundreds of people on an island in the Ionian Sea.”
“…”
“…”
“… What?”
*
When Matt was born, police arrived to question him.
“Are you Matt Smith?”
The mother widened her eyes, asked, “Are you talking to the baby?”
“M’am, this is official police business.”
“But you’re talking to a baby.”
“Whaddya think, Lou? He look like a Dark Prince to you?”
Matt’s father blanched. “A what?”
“A Dark Prince. A paper came up in our files saying something about the Dark Prince, so we made our way over here.”
The officer looked at Matt. “Where were you on the night of June 28th?”
“Here,” Steve said, pointing to Jane’s belly.
“And February the 9th?”
“Still here,” Steve said, “but smaller.”
“A wise baby, eh?”
Here the Mother interrupted. “Well, we hope.”
“Well, what about you, Mr. Smith? You wouldn’t know anything about this, would you?”
“Me? Of course not. I don’t know even know what you’re talking about.”
This was — “of course” — a lie. While the police continued on with their questioning — “Was the birth at all suspicious, M’am? Were you in, say, pain?” — recollections rose: “Dark Prince” was the code name for a project built for Matt. When Smith had first found out his wife was pregnant, and after he had traced it back to one of those Blakean, naked-as-the-day-they-were-born-never-leave-the-bed weeks holed up in a Parisian loft, he left his place of work and wandered into an accordian and banjo festival in a nearby park, his head a haze of serene white, where he ran into a little man wearing a bear mask (at least, it looked like a mask), picking at an ice-cream cone with his hands.
*
An old woman was pushing a carriage full of groceries by. The monsters stood up, and placed their hands on their hips. One kicked the tires.
“Winter treads!” he said. “Just got ‘em a week ago!”
“And just in time for the weather, eh?” replied another.
“I know!”
The woman passed, and the monsters, after checking their surroundings, returned their attention to the interior of the car, raising their horrible claws and breathing their horrible breath, all approaching and leaning in but Matt stared into their yellow eyes and didn’t blink once.
*
The little man wiped his hand on his shirt, offered it to Mr. Smith, and introduced himself as Lemar the Bear Midget.
“I understand you’re to be a father, Mr. Smith. Congratulations.”
“Thank you.”
*
These monsters — klopburgs, if you want to get technical — were responsible for hanging paintings in a great city. They were also the muscle (the paintings are really big.)
Matt, who had always worried his parents as a particularly inartistic child — he claimed to have dreamt about standing behind Leonardo as he painted the Last Supper, calculating how much each disciple was worth on the foreign markets — took in these klopburgs with equanimity, and was delighted to hear that there was a world he had yet to see.
*
Thanks to Smith’s magical ingenuity, he had rid the world of adults. It was a children’s world, now, he declared in a famous speech. “Whatever you wanted to be when you grew up, you can be that now.”
So it was that the jobs of Batman, Fireman, Princess, Veterinarian, and President suffered an influx of millions, reworking the social constructs of the globe. Washington became overrun with White Houses, some informal in their construction — tree houses, cardboard placards pitched in tent-line formation on the street; others were more formalized and well-known locations, such as The Statue of Liberty, the Golden Gate Bridge, Fenway Park, and Mt. Rushmore.
The labyrinth of bureaucracies skyrocketed: not everyone had the means to be notified whether or not a toy store or video game store or sports stadium was being annexed for play and amusement by these umpteen new White Houses.
“Growing up” to these kids meant freedom, not aging. That would come — quite literally — later. Meanwhile, superheroes flew to work, vetenarians spent their first few days hugging all their patients, food fights erupted in the farm fields, giant loudspeakers were attached to airplanes in an attempt to replace the noise of the engine with which this text can only approximate as neeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr … children stayed up as late as they wanted to see for the first time the sky change from black to blue to grey to a cracked-egg-opening yellow, all within the speed of a thunderclap; and curiosity leapt all over itself to put every picture book on the floor of the library and climb to the highest height to read them all, run strings across the oceans so kids could pull themselves from continent to continent on makeshift rafts, open up shoulders to the falling heads of newfound romances, and the option to have a long, complicated surgery and have the energy of all the voices, energy, jumping and singing from a small-room music show stitched into a new organ in their bodies, buried there, always thumping, somewhere near the pancreas.
*
They tried gathering around cars to tell this to kids somewhere around the age of Matt in the story, but that only meant that the kids in the car might think that the ESKers were likening themselves to klopburgs, which wasn’t the case with any except one, and then they tried to go after people leaving the stories with the carriages and/or bags, which suddenly brought back an unexpected memory back to one about how as a kid he’d approach people leaving the store with a viking hat on his head, saying, Would you mind telling me how you plan to vote in the next election? and how the people would say, No, that’s private.
*
“Where’s the Queen?” Lemar asked.
The klopburg scratched his head with a long nail, then unfurling the hand to the air, said, “Well, she was devoured.”
“Devoured?”
“Her dress turned out to be a Venus Frock Trap.”
“And she didn’t know?”
“Well, she did complain about shoes filled with flies.”
Matt stood nearby, out of earshot, stroking the head of a mariacheetah — leopards with sombreros and little dangling strings alongside and castanents who stand on their hind paws and clack-clack their feet on the ground to stun their opponents into surprise or awe while another sneaks up behind them still in sombrero and tackles them then and there, and thought of the woods in Paris.
*
While imagining this, cars come and go.
A few minutes pass as the sun sets and activity changes. When Simon tries to tell a story to a kid in a car, he’s handed a piece of paper. He reads it, and then makes an announcement to the other ESKers gathered.
“We’re going on a raid.”
*
And this is why I wanted to find them. We drive up to a warehouse sometime past midnight, somewhere in Chelsea or Everett, kick down a door, and it was a room full of suitcases tossed all over each other with the far-off distant gray A.M. yellow streetlights near the edge of the walls, there are numbers scratched on some (#3026, #37927, #6, #2, #47, #3, #42, #947-04-2012), others with stickers (AIDEZ L’ESPAGNE), and the ex-quiz show comedian goes over to the first ESK, opens it up, and there’s a person inside, an actual collection of arms and legs and head bent between the legs comes rolling out onto the floor, which makes me jump a mile, but everyone else controls their surprise better than I do and sets to work, opening up the ESKs and finding one person after the other — one announcing they’re rich and was, in fact, doing this for fun, and ask if there’s another one they can climb into — another who says, Oh, it’s over. He undoes his tie and crinks his neck in a circle. Oh, he says, this is lovely, and hugs the one who let him out.
One ESK makes everyone jump.
“Bernard!”
“Yes?”
“How did —”
“Doesn’t matter. Let’s get to work.”
Bernard runs us. Prematurely white hair. Jean jackets. We open more ESKs.
One has a guy carries around Shepard Fairey posters and stickers because after Aqua Teen and clearing out the performers around Harvard Square and then Quincy Market, he just had no patience left.
I open up one and water rushes out and a man with his hands wrapped in chains, who, after opening his eyes, lets out a long, long breath.
By the end of it, suitcases filling up the trash dumps in the alleyway, forming little islands around the green dump spots, there were hundreds of men and women stretching and blinking where there once were none.
*
While Simon was off fetching more cars, Bernard walks over to the swimming instructor.
“You’re Greek?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve always wanted to learn some Greek. Do you know any Greek?”
“A bit.”
“Like what?”
“Do you know that Thermos is Greek for ‘God of Thermoses?’”
“Wow. I did not know that.” He turned to me. “How about that?”
*
One thing bothered me about the nomenclature of our little gang, though, and while the phalanx of rented cars made their way down the highway, I brought it up with Bernard.
“I, uh, haven’t tried out the ESK in an emergency yet, Bernard.”
“You’re getting to be quite the questioner, aren’t you?”
“Well, I —”
He laughed. “Don’t worry about it.” The green placards swooped overhead, clumsy, ugly birds. “Your own ESK or someone elses’?”
“Either.”
“Time will come.”
“Or it won’t.”
“True. I’ve never been in good standing with time. Sitting neither.”
II.
We were still on the highway. I tried to make some conversation with the men in the back.
“What do you know about Proust?”
At this, the man —- who was holding a suitcase — jumped. Bernard nearly swerved. A few people — almost together — blurted, “What?”
“Proust. What’s wrong?” I looked around, befuddled and baffled.
“Nothing,” said the man with the suitcase. “Do you want to hear a story about Proust?”
“That’s not what I was asking, but, sure.”
He reaches into the suitcase and pulls out a single sheet of paper. It looks like it was the only thing in the suitcase. He unfolds it and begins to read:
“Marcel Proust once saved mankind from a pack of green, brain-bulging aliens, deliriously lascivious for human flesh. He was to be their first victim. Clustered around his desk, tentacles fidgeting through letters and pens, weapons trained on his forehead, their leader leaned forward, asking if he had any last words. So he wrote A La Recherche du Temps Perdu.”
He folds the paper, opens the suitcase, and puts it away.
III.
Larry Meckleson. He’s an Irish-Catholic with a pacifist streak from a shotgun azure abode dotted in one of the cubes near the shores of Atlantic City.
He was going to be a high-school teacher and dabble in writing on the side, have that link where the present pushes up into your face every day, and it wasn’t like he was bad at teaching, but when Columbine came around, he didn’t know what to make of it — and who could believe Gus von Sant’s take on it, anyway? — so he tried writing something and he encouraged his students to do so, too, because nothing can’t be left unsaid forever, and the FBI ended up arresting half the class for plotting terrorist activities, including one who was only just writing a zombie story, and when the school board heard about it in two hours later, he was fired, and so spent the next string of early mornings cigaretting his copy of the morning paper until on the fourth day, someone with white hair came in with a suitcase and slid into the seat across from him, said, “Larry Meckleson? We have something for you.” And the slipperiness of sentences focused to a point.
“I’m sorry?”
“We’ve something for you.”
“We?”
The man opened the suitcase and spun it around to face Meckleson. They were his student’s stories — and his, too.
“How — ? Who — ?”
“Because of this.”
He walked over to the counter, spoke to the waitress, went over to one of the TV’s hanging from a perch in the corner of the diner, put in a VHS tape, and it began to play.
*
The man with the white hair pops it out, and — holding the tape — walks over to Larry.
“What was that?”
“An Antecedent Tape.”
“Since when did Lincoln have an identical twin?”
“He didn’t. Some of the tapes are codes, some are what they are — most, in fact; they’re just terrifically straightforward — but most are messy. Sometimes it’s even decay.”
“And Lincoln’s was a code.”
“Right.”
“For whom? Saying what?”
“Well — not many people get to see the AT’s, so the audience is going to be pretty exacting. Usually they’re instructions for the next group of narrational institutions — contingency plans for the next 50 years, 60 years, 70 years, and so on. Often, it’s — how do I describe this? The AT follows the same folding pattern as a paper airplane or origami bird. And we’re acting under the belief of a few things — that there’s more in those folds than has been explored, that there’s something off that can be corrected when order transmutes itself into something else, a kind of imaginary dust that accumulates when order is left alone, often because of a chasm that others will later have to bridge …”
“Narrational institutions?”
“You know — poets riding the elevator to work. Quotas to meet. That sort of thing. Am I getting ahead of myself?”
“I don’t quite follow. What’re you talking about?”
“I am, aren’t I? It doesn’t matter. Point is, our interests lay contrary to theirs.”
“But what did you get out of that tape?”
“Roses. Lights. Twins. Other things.”
“What does this have to do with my students’ stories?”
“Where do you think I found them?”
IV.
The first video store we went into was planted on the corner of dirty parking lot, sharing its other corners with a church and some mobile homes. We went in with ski masks, throwing dollar bills into the air, shouting, “We don’t want your money! We don’t want your money!” while Larry, Bernard, and myself crashed through the Adults Only door and nearly fell upon someone like a Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin tumbling out the window fall because of this guy going at a typewriter one finger at a time with a stack of paper neatly off to the side and a TV and a young woman seated in a chair and wrist-length black sweater and clavicle length red hair and a wobbling assortment of of VHS’ stacked on top … and one, two, nine, we snatched them all, shoveling the papers into a sack, the tapes — including the one in the TV — into one bag after the other, and ripped the paper out of the typewriter … we snap a blindfold over the guy taking notes and then another for safety, there’s about five people back here, wheel him out past a store owner collapsed face-first into the carpet and shove the guy through the door into the parking lots and Larry raises his gun I say, “Really?” but he just pistol whips the right side of his head and he borderline-pratfalls onto his left side …
*
After the third raid — which took us to South Africa, of all places, the second us racing through villages in Southern France — something starts to happen: whenever we think of scouting another video store to hit, we hear a voice, one that usually says something like, “And the store clerk looked up,” though it doesn’t belong to anyone present. When I tell this to Bernard at a restaurant just off Rte. 92, he sighs.
“I wish we could have done more. Oh well.” He pockets a lighter and some keys and stands up.
We have to go,” Bernard says.
I look to Larry.
“Tramps like us,” he says, then lights a cigarette and rips his coat off the chair.
“Adios, Aoidos,” the host calls out after us before the door makes like a curtain and falls shut.
*
A few months later, the man who jumped at the mention of Proust comes up to me and apologizes. I assure him it’s nothing — that I’d forgotten about his surprise, which I had.
“Want to know what’s in my ESK?”
I nod, and he opens it. I look.
“What’s his name?” I ask.
“H.J. Ropeswick.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
IV. Iraq.
“God damn kid almost blew me up!”
He fires into the corpse.
“It’s a shame all this had to go to hell at some point. I mean, who knows how it got this way?”
“It went to hell last week,” I said.
“That long ago?”
“What the — “
Steady whistle of bullet-fire and balance-tilting roar of explosives. I throw open the ESK, and then I —
“This area has a lot of history, a lot of history, there’s fruit and vegetables covered with blood … and there’s no electricity, nor will there be — for a long time … power will come and go, come and go, all this over the entire day … There are some neighborhood women thinking of starting a baseball team … Would you like to go see a Mehrjui’s latest later tonight ? A long street along which a woman with a basket passes every day … Is that Faroukzad? Make sure the orphans get more than what’s coming for them.”
“What’s the matter with you?”
“”Give your men more time with the NVG. Nameless towns and wolf-like children, sewers shattered by the bombs, ‘cause if I was in charge of the war, Pedro would’ve been take in the 9th inning —”
“Did somebody give him their caffeine pills?”
“Pride in profanity. Shamals. There’s a difference between abstract theories and our shoulders. Which child will be the disposable child? Get some! There are hundreds of TV’s in that basement over there, waiting to be dug up after we’ve swept through — B-52’s lumbering on over to Afghanistan … sharing roasted sheep hearts for breakfast … the day of ‘today, my brother’ should never be tomorrow … no man should ever have to pay for the bullets used to kill his brother … the night will end; the sinking borders of a country pulling you down through a constantly transposed Heart of Darkness will snuff itself out … Soldiers asking for non-existent cameras again and again … the displaced families — all the displaced families … trying to find names on the ballot, trying to start again in Syria, trying to start again in Cairo … When will friends and neighbors return? When will they step out onto the porch for an evening cigarette? The next bomber to come to Faqma’s, I’ll make him eat “Rocky Road” ‘til he pukes … Kebab … How tomato and spice can settle on a good piece of meat … Black-market gasoline … Traffic lanes will soon vanish …”
“Will someone shut him up?”
“If you listen carefully you can hear the typing of a typewriter … and the smell of gently grazed tea … Has anyone worried that we’re training our soldiers to have PTSD? What’s the line between one too many caffeine pills, being starved, looking up traumatic experiences to exploit, having tear gas thrown at you 24/7,… and conscientiously inflicting damage? What’s the line between humanism and being a soldier? The man you’re looking for isn’t behind that door but is two doors down on the left.”
“Wait! Wrong house! That’s the wrong — house.”
We’ve advanced a short distance and the gunfire has stopped. We rush into an abandoned warehouse. It’s time to take a break. My back is against the wall. My mouth is still moving. I look at the open ESK in alarm. No form, no wisdom, all yet. I could kill Bernard. Holy mother of cow. The Captain crouches into my line of vision.
“Keep talking.”
V.
ESKs are delivered, ESKs are taken, and ESKs are our charge, our keep, the thing we roll up and stick tattered into our back pocket or the guitar case, suitcase, or bag of goods we bring with us going one step at a time into the bar, the auditorium stage, the emptying streets, or the congestion of commuters — it’s what moves us and keeps us on the move.
Bernard is loading a collection of workable ESKs into the back of a truck. He’s outside Pretoria, and his car is pulled over to the side of the road. It’s mid-morning, and with one hand on his hip and the other shaking the hair atop his head, he wonders if he’ll be able to classify all he will see, and how he will take in. Looks down at the ground. Finishes loading the rest of the ESKs into the back of the truck, and ties them down with some spare rope. He gets in, puts on a tape, and pulls back onto the highway.
