Gutless Wonderment
I don’t write much fiction anymore, having given up the MFA program’s ghost a while ago. Joining a Creative Writing department was, in retrospect, a crutch I used to force myself to write, not getting that this was a bad sign for someone with aspirations to write anyway. That was also one of the reasons I started this blog. I guess I would still like to write something, but I don’t seem to be able to think in overarching narratives. The stories in my head don’t take the shapes of the novels I thought I wanted to write, they’re more like cryptic nuggets, scene-setting without the arc or sweep of even the shortest story.
In 2005 I was obsessed with ripping off The Corrections. To that end, I wrote two connected scenes:
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The carpet in the terminal was grey. Eugene allowed his shoulder to drag facilely on the concourse walls, ignoring the glances of stomping passengers with an adroitness that only emotional despondency and anxiolytic drugs allow. He let his heels drag the floor, too, and his eyes to review the crowd of people, his ears the whirling din of suitcase rollers. He was still calm. He was savoring every nanosecond.
Through the haze of medicine-head and deliberate lethargy, Eugene managed to drag out the 200 yards of walkway into an impressive 24-minute journey. To aid the cause, he sucked at every drinking fountain lining the way and was able to make a completely redundant restroom detour. Coffee habit and multivitamins gave the piss a healthy, glowing citron. Businessmen coughed angrily into white basins then pushed levers all the way to deluge. Eugene counted to 10 or maybe 40 with his eyes closed and rounded the corner towards the customs check and exit way.
The narrow gates filtered the crush of humanity into a steady trickle to the other side. Here the travelers sped on or exploded into welcoming arms. Little tumults of joy popped up. Eugene was still begging for a few more seconds of anonymity when his mother cleaved her way into the ambience.
“Gene!” His high was seriously in danger. He managed to hoist his eyebrows and turn his gait towards the scream, but she didn’t think he’d seen.
“GENE!!! RIGHT HERE HONEY!!”
He sidled up and splayed a few fingers on her forearm, but she still hugged him outright. The fact that he didn’t shove her was a testimony to modern pharmaceuticals.
“Hello, hello,” he said.
“Oh, just look at you! You’re here and home! Goodness, and so tired looking.” She frowned.
“Yes. Where’s Dad?”
“He’s getting your bags. We’ve got to get out of here before five or we’ll be driving forever. C’mon, hon.”
They threaded their way to the baggage carousels. Pat was a vociferous walker; her aggressive tempo made snaky pockets of air in which Gene could follow several paces back. When he found her again she was standing with his bland giant of a father. Even in his late sixties, Donald posture was imposing, but the bags on his face and unselfconsciousness of his leering stare betrayed the fact that he was an old man; a man who needed helping with things.
He smacked his son’s shoulder hard. “Look here!”
“Dad,” Gene looked around his father at the passengers jockeying for position at the carousel tubing.
“Couldn’t tell which one was yours. Left my glasses in the car, but the damn things are all black anyway!” He was still thumping.
Gene moved along the wall of people to the carousel maw and jerked a navy blue shoulder bag over several 10-year olds. Don followed, tentatively watching. He noticed mauve slopes curving under his son’s eyes. “S’matter?”
“I’m just exhausted.”
“That’s why you sleep on the plane, buddy! Let’s get moving and beat that traffic.”
He was close to sleeping on his feet, but familiar mechanics moved him in an inertial pull behind the two jostling bodies. They were both still talking – to him? to each other? – but he was busy savoring the damp pall of his sensory input. It lasted all the way out of the concourse, out the multi-tiered doors and into the thunderous zoom of the parking levels and alleyways. It lasted over fields of endless colored asphalt and into, finally, an unassuming tan vehicle’s interior – clement and thick with small-scale Greenhouse effect. It lasted through the jerking peristalsis of city traffic and on-ramps, lasted over the 60 minute smoothness of interstate travel, lasted into the tortuous cants of suburbia, lasted the walk inside, the walk upstairs, and the pitch of his fully-clothed body onto a creaking and quilted twin bed. It lasted for fifteen hours of formidable sleep and when it finally stopped lasting the following morning, solar beams from the window alighting the room’s infinite particles, he nearly died of grief.
Donald was roving around the front of the house. He looked here and there, seeing disorder. It was true, he thought, that he’d always looked forward to preening the yard in his retirement years. To wake up early with the sun, his only concerns being the ministrations of yard work had seemed like such a dream in the working years. It was honest work, surely, that left black ellipses under one’s fingernails and t-shirts blanketed with perspiration, and once you were finished you felt your accomplishments in marrow; your sinew even. And that was hardly something he was offered in all the forty years of dealing with the banal riddles of patent law. Hardly.
And it had been exactly that, for a while. Don and Pat’s lawn had been the crown piece of the neighborhood; a triumph of verdure sculpting. But over time the lawn assumed the burden of responsibility. It became harder and harder to get out of bed to face the mess of leaves and dew every day. The damp, cool mornings only promised evaporation and heat; the scalding underside of the Earth. Every day the previously day’s work was beaten back in screaming millimeters. No sooner would he cut the grass, trim the Azaleas, butcher Rhododendrons, and Nature would begin to regain its losses. Every weekend spent relaxing with the paper, catching up with old friends, or navigating the upstate routes (it was wine season, after all), Nature would punish him for lapsing in his vigil. Nature was not mocked.
It was like so many things, Donald thought. It was Now vs. Always; He and Time wrangling over his own life. He could only win in the moment, nothing more. And how beautiful it had all seemed through the glossy sheen of office space. Now it was just now.
And now, sleeping upstairs until ten in the morning, Donald thought with trace resentment, was his prodigal son, Eugene. The inexplicably sullen youth had arrived the previous evening, looking strung out or exhausted, and filed into the house and immediately to bed at barely seven o’clock. Tired after finals, Pat had insisted, but Donald thought her naïve to think their son was capable of unselfish consideration. Both of their sons had always been firmly standoffish with their parents, part of a generation of cryptic nonchalance. They grew up disseminating nothingness; practical, forceful ambivalence. They wrote books and plays in which nothing happened; they made 120 minute films starring rocks and mud; they did nothing and still angrily thought that nothing was the modus operandi of it all.
He got angrier at this thought.
Donald wielded the shears on the holly bushes flanking the house. Many of his old tools had the crunching wail of rust, yet he refused to part with most of them in favor of the black-rubber Christmas presents Pat gave him every year. The old and the reliable deserved better surely.
Their neighborhood was a curious hub in the town. Most of the houses were small yet proudly manicured postwar constructions which attracted an odd economic audience; the middle-middle class, the Dead Center, Gene had called them, relishing his pun. The plain autochthons of Sunwood were neither the rich ostentatious with their enormous cars and satellites flowering on the roof, nor the caustic mortgage-junkies with their plastic graveyard lawns. Sunwood was one of the last pleasantly wooded neighborhoods in suburbia, lined with age-old Buttonwoods, Willows, and Maples. Many of the residents were in City Council and the Chamber of Commerce, and steadfastly refused the lucrative offers of developers to the adjacent woodlands into mountains of slathered clay. Sunwood felt artistic; friendly and old.
The sun raged on Donald’s neck as he stared into his work. Rivulets of sweat raced down and around and dripped. A hundred grand. Four years and a hundred grand and he’s just going to come home and sit there.
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I have no ideas (or plans, really) on where to go from there.
