The End?

In his eighty years Martin Mercier had never experienced anything like this. In his eighty years he had never acquiesced. No matter what came his way he always expected it. “Le jeu, c’est fini,” he muttered to himself but when he looked at his failing wife Narcisse, he thought, les jeux…her life and his. With their fiftieth anniversary imminent he envisioned the waltz, the pirouette dizzying, her body so close it was indistinguishable from his. Unable to imagine life without her he felt the futile quest of the human spirit an absurd necessity he could now relinquish. As he peered into those chestnut eyes through the dark, endless tunnels that turned back on themselves, his fear returned, one he could not subdue through any amount of logic or discourse. The brain, he decided, was a painful organ, thoughts slicing through it like the jagged edge of a knife. Better to get past all this, better to move beyond it. He sipped from the fluted glass, the effervescence a deceptive reminder of what he would leave behind. The tightness in his chest made his breathing labored and the sweat of his palms made the pills soggy. His wife, on the other hand, was feeling no pain. On the morphine drip she’d been hallucinating a hot, white light surrounding her, evaporating like fog, through which swallows arced and banked off cliffs while the sea below crashed against the rocks with a virulence.
Martin twisted the empty packet of Gaulois, threw it on the floor and opened another. Chain smoking was a luxury he could now afford. “Just think, Narcisse…” He was grinning when he said this. “They will have to clean up this mess.” The ashes, the butts, the spilled champagne, the broken glass from the vial he emptied… By they he wasn’t sure who he meant. Who would be the first to find them? He didn’t want to think about it but he hoped it wouldn’t be the kids. He couldn’t imagine; it was too perverse.

Yes, his children would have to forgive but in time they would come to understand what happened. Especially Dylan, the costume designer. He envisioned the folds of Edwardian dress gathered and stitched for the adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Oval Portrait”--a painter so obsessed with the portrait of his wife he literally steals the life from her. Remembering the nature of the work made him shy away from gazing upon his dying wife’s face for fear he would hasten the end. At this point he simply couldn’t bear it.

Electro Shock

"There’s all this electromagnetic current," Gracie explains. "The kind you can test with devices that make skin contact. You know, like EEGs and EKGs and that sort of thing, but what I want to know is where does all that energy go when a person dies, the field around the body, the one that intersects and surrounds us, the vibrational field…”

She says, "People didn’t vacate lower Manhattan because of the toxic residue. They didn’t vacate out of fear. They vacated because of the massive amount of electromagnetism unleashed into the atmosphere by 3,000 dying and deceased people.”

excerpt from September 10th

He anticipates the inspector’s ludicrous objections. Not the structural insulated panels with pre-installed electric and plumbing, that is, if the unions don’t rampage. Or the walls of fire proofed recycled newspaper. The galvanized steel roof with photovoltaic panels and the cistern that collects storm water for irrigation, reducing water and energy use. Who could reject this approach in a city notorious for excessive power consumption? They’ll say the Dutch seized Manhattan in Battery Park, imprisoned the Native Americans and built a city of stone, that New York was built to last. And he’d counter with recycled plastic--a half life of a trillion years.

excerpt from September 10th

The crack of ice reverberates like a dissonant intruder moving through the loft-like space. Pacing the site line from the euro kitchen back to the drawing table seems like the longest walk of the century, his only solace in the smooth jolt of transparent liquor diminishing from his water glass.

too late

In the distance a large crane like a giant insect moves across the Brooklyn waterfront near the site where Brian had developed the architectural design for sustainable living, a joke as far as he is concerned in a world that no longer deserves to exist, and for all intents and purposes would not, not in the same context no matter what measures are taken or how determined its inhabitants. Bottom line: it is too late, too little too late—an expression that whirs inside his head like the rotors of a helicopter that maintains position and altitude but cannot advance or land. Too little too late…too little too late.

geography of a disturbed mind

“That still doesn’t explain what you’re doing with my wife.” I’d like to wipe that shitty grin off her face, won’t leave until she talks, so I take a seat in a chair by a smallish TV. The sound is muted, the room silent. Images of war, mass graves, bones scattered, flash across the screen. It could be happening anywhere. Rwanda, Bosnia, Lebanon, Poland, the West Bank. The human need for destruction is eternal. All boundaries are elastic. They stretch back and forth with enough tension until they break and form new territory.

excerpt from unfinished novel

You'll know why I never finished it when you read this excerpt:

I have a hot, white love. Hot because it burns right through me. White because it's blinding. Each time she walks into the room I turn away with disgust. I know what's going to happen next. Sometimes I imagine The Retaliation. I shove a rag into her mouth. Tape it shut. Tie her wrists and legs. It is fear I want to give her like wrapping paper on a birthday present. It is the fear.

My room is kind of ordinary I guess. Double bed, old bedspread of cowboys and Indians. Posters plastered to the wall. The Unabomber, Johnny Cash, BB King, Theresa Russell and Charles Manson with that nurse. Underneath my mattress are all the magazines and the knife I bought at a pawn shop last week. On my turquoise dresser there's my wallet on a chain I usually hook to my belt, my hair gel, a comb and a little bowl of hard candy my mother always fills. Without thinking I'll take a piece then spit it out because it's so disgusting it makes me want to puke. Shit, man, what's her problem?!

In the corner on my night table is The Shrine. A lock of hair. A piece of rotten fruit. And a fingernail. Infinity plus Wound equals Sacrifice. I'm waiting to take the belt she uses. I want to work that one in.

the lie he perpetrates

He looks up marveling at the light as it casts a hue over the neighboring high rise and notices how color is light, a kind of visual intelligence that is stratified and deepens in intensity when the physics are right. Could anyone possibly understand this, he wonders, then admits he doesn’t know fuck about anything, that his wish to be non-existent is not some self-fulfilling prophecy but a last resort. He finds himself down near World Trade, choking on the toxic stew of fried building materials and watching people stare through the holes in the large round cutouts of plywood surrounding the carnage. Tourists are taking snapshots of their loved ones with the devastation, like a famous ruin in the background, reduced to a roadside attraction as if the event had not really happened, the unthinkable, not in a neighborhood near you.

the low down

Thinking about the open vortices he designed to cool the compound for the money changer, Brian misses the door to the Greek coffee shop and decides to catch the next one two blocks down. When he walks in, at the corner booth, he sees his sister Gracie, her disheveled hair an indication she’d been up all night.

"Remember ‘The United States of Euphoria: Life on the Edge of Time?’” Gracie, at age 15, doing hallucinogens with her best friend and recording it for posterity in the form of an essay she handed into English class. At the time he believed her fascination with drugs would pass but it was the beginning of a life long addiction for which she would pay, time and again. He reaches out and this time she lets him touch her hand before she withdraws it. Scrambled eggs save the day, that and a glass of orange juice.