“Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced.” –James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
“Do you know what I’ve seen? I have seen the fields aflame. And everything I ever did was just another way to scream your name.” –Florence Welch, “South London Forever”
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Mr. Smiley’s smiley face looks me dead in the eyes with its dead black eyes and smiles wide, just smiles wide. The circles pop over the cups, the little table numbers, the chromium blue cooler, every paper bag toting a smiling yellow sugar cookie crinkly fastened with a smiling yellow sticker. The unmistakable friendly neighborhood marketing ploy of Mr. Smiley’s Coffee & Diner. Why do I torture myself so? [Response. Unlimited free refills—long as you take it black, of course.]
If the caffeine overdose doesn’t kill me, the parking lot will—that unassuming deathtrap with its slots painted crisscross and no clear path to the diner’s entrance. Witness the barrage of SUV-sailing moguls who have places to be and the money to spend on speed if speed could be bartered and funneled through another of their endless verticals in technological abacus marvels. Today’s survival story provided by way of a woman in a black Audi as long as a tank I once saw at the border of Turkey. Backing out of her compact spot I thought she’d see me—I’d already begun my cross of the black sea, dead sea, pavement soon-to-be red sea? on foot. She must not have checked; she didn’t stop. Let her run me over, I thought. Such a bizarre, fantastique way to go, no? But ah, she yonked to a halt, saved by a glance in the mirror. I mounted the sidewalk, imagining the breathy stream of curses blown at me from her air-cooled terminal of built-in screens and blinking buttons. Dumbass kid. Don’t I know Audis have the right of way in Horseshit County! I fought the impulse to flutter a wave as she hauled anchor and pushed off into the waves of county roads.
Now I watch others suffer their own near-misses from the windows of the diner. The attached corner room pins together three walls of glass, ceiling planters dangling tendrils of ivy, terra cotta or mustard-colored pillows sagging in their chairs. I experience the uneasy sensation of sitting in a fish tank.
Conversation floods in pieces. Uni girls clack velociraptor nails, convey in chirps their latest interpersonal operettas. Women soaking in the tidepools of stale mediocrity share their spiritual revelations born of the previous week’s inconveniences. And the men—the men’s throaty swagger echoes in business lingo I will never comprehend while bobbing about us all like the decapitated head of God: that swarm of golden smiles.
I stare into the one face that blesses me without a leer nor even a mouth. Wrapped around my wrist, it has long since given up its original purpose of steady, silent circles. But a stopped watch still holds its hands beneath the weight of time. I hold my breath beneath the weight of time.
My iPhone has told me—in its daily memo of that dreadfully opaque concept clung to by the fingers of postmodern zen gurus, bad therapists, and most people in their thirties known as wellness—that I cultivate the unrealistic expectation of functioning like a healthy person despite forgoing appropriate amounts of sleep. To which, were I to respond with a petty rebuttal similarly pulled from the internet, I’d tell said memo to light a cigarette over a gas stove and calm the fuck down. But to argue with the internet, to argue with one’s phone—that sounds uncannily like one merely arguing with oneself. I wish any of the old literary masters were still living; I’m sure they’d have simply the most glorious fieldtrip writing flash fiction out of that subject. Man as the iPhone, the iPhone as man, the iPhone as God…
“But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking?” Virginia Woolf asked, “—the entombed soul…the self that took the veil and left the world—a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.” But my phone is not a lantern. It is no sentient entity; it bears no intuition. The meek might inherit the earth—but I intend to rake as much as I can from life whether or not it meets my unwieldy demands. Sleep be damned.
I drop my head to the edge of the table, gripping the sides like a ship’s wheel turned horizontal. Where are we headed, captain? The clamor of neighborly dialogue hovers in the air like the wailing of seagulls.
I feel a brief flicker of shame in admitting the fact, but I don’t nurture affinity, nor much respect for my fellow countryman. By all accounts of my callous observations, Americans swan about life believing the “American experience” is universal. Or more accurate, perhaps—a universal experience is not a concept grasped by the average U.S. citizen. There is no universal—there is only America; the foundation of the world cemented in Walmart and pop sockets and DoorDash and business slacks and monthly checkups and weekend barbeque and front porch flags and committees and strip malls and Kate Spade and crocs. And all the looking out, all the looking out and nothing looking in. Nothing here is lost on me, though so little proves of use.
I shudder against the tabletop, caught in that inept current between maniacal laughter and silent howls. The back of my jaw clamps up—a recent development as something in my gums has begun to communicate in physical though uncoded signals. I run my finger along the fleshy ridge, attempting to divert the pressure, and am reminded of a character in a certain psychological horror film. As the gruesome mysteries of his surroundings align, his gradually rotting tooth grinds from inconvenient to agonizing—until clamped and cracked free during the sinister doctor’s grand soliloquy. I find a morbid satisfaction imagining the pain in my jaw equivalates to some nagging suspicion or truth growing in unignorable reverberations—but simultaneously fear of worrying it to the point of discovering there’s nothing there of consequence. Irritated gums? Nothing more? Well here now light another cigarette pour another coffee cup have a nice day.
I don’t make progress in any self-appointed tasks—I’m not sure why I’m still sitting here. In these black maelstroms of unillumined emotion, it becomes readily apparent that the will to progress lies slain at the feet of lacking motivation. I ought to leave—leave the bodies of text where they lie and sling off the half-formed corpses. If escape proves the only viable offering, I’ll gather my things, brave again the open warzone of parking… Until, without having lived them, I see the memories that will form the rest of my evening as they bleed and converge in kaleidoscopic madness.
My car will rattle its precarious rhythm as it whines down the road. The setting sun will bathe the countryside in gold. Hillsides and emerald basins cupping chestnut-flanked horses will trumpet their pastoral glory in waves of dusk that roll to horizon oblivion. There will be no one with whom to confirm or deny the sudden swell of sentimentality. I was born on these plains; why should I feel such reluctance in receiving their moments of unrivaled beauty? And the river rolling on one side of the road, and the old three, four-story houses nesting in hills on the other—they make me see how Daisy Buchanan really could have lived here all those years ago—before she up and married and all those forlorn suitors, those dangerous dreamers went and drowned themselves in disillusion.
The drowning sun catches sheets of cloud and turns all to red and rose. The sky blooms in pink smoke. A falcon claws a dead tree, upsets a deluge of blackbirds. I trace their patterns in the sky, search for forewarnings. I paint prophecies between the lines of their flight and the fingerprints of cloud. Smoke signals, flight patterns—and I too have passed down the long, black river. I too have whispered the ballads of my sweet madness to the evening breeze.
I pass a pair of horses grazing the field. They bend rust-colored, save for their heads, colored a pale, almost sandy gray. Two horses with death’s face, they spark a vision of the plains rippling to life in curtains of flame. Furling apart in a spectacle of time running both forward and back, I see the future of America, rolling tongues of fire, a spindle-treed wasteland, horses shrieking in triumph, aircraft growling in downward spirals, hungry stragglers wandering backdrops of desolation, united only in their division. But the seams of the future unravel into the past; gunshots echo in tails of smoke, horses still dart frantic, peoples slaughtered in the name of progress, nature harnessed by innovation, an earth still set on fire. The world has always blazed in light, and its ravages reveal themselves to me each time I stretch my eyes across the hills.
We can believe the advancements of our age makes it somehow different from all the time that came before, but the world will always continue to change—and in so doing, merely repeat itself. Truly this will all keep spinning—nations rising and falling, copulating, separating, swallowing each other—until the earth itself is ground to dust and the ancient powers awaken and the angels return to exact their righteous vengeance and all is reborn.
The sun yields to darkness by the time I enter the labyrinth of skyscrapers and repurposed warehouses. I have agreed to meet friends who still straddle the awkward line of acquaintanceship at a bar deep within the city. I park my car further away from my destination than is necessary on account of my own enjoyment in winding the city’s darkened passageways. Their mysteries feel more tangible, more lenient to revelation when shuffling between pools of shadow.
An inner-city cathedral looms out of the steel-brick grid like an optical illusion. It pierces the grimy sky with its crosses; orange afterglows of pollution ring them like halos. My mind sets a transcendent choral number over these pockmarked streets. A beacon of reverence, the church heralds the ancient world, and I am reminded of another cathedral in another city, not unlike this one. The memory of that cathedral signals someone lost; from the outside, a promise of majesty, of comfort—within, a ceremony of departure. A rite of lamentation.
The confrontation that comes with realizing how little we’re able to hold in this life dislodges my illusions of attachment. It leaves an air of sorrow, but this is the cycle, isn’t it, between reality and my morbid imaginings? What with my kingdom hedged in impassable thorns, I never allow myself a conqueror. I leave no room for ruin, a sacrifice of heart on the metaphysical altar, relinquishing any hope for the might-have-beens. I dance, dance the constellations breathing fire and offer up my vision of whichever lover has warped my perception of reality into another balletic hunt—some dark winged Eros with no room for the divine outside of what his material lusty schemes can devise. For me, this course of death and resurrection always reoccurs. I lay myself out—I return—I bury any lingering phantoms. I pick my sword up off the floor and get to work on these ghosts. A massacre of musings.
I feel the currents of the earth moving in time with my blood, even as the world itself does not, but moves against me. I nurture the will, but I cannot find the means. I mold what I catch in my fists, but I want the rest of the world to yield. It has stood resolute for so many years.
Still reality claims all I would seek to rearrange, and the currents of its electric rivers flow unobstructed. There is no hiding in its blaze, no twisting of these waters into shapes I’d rather face. The teller continues to take the tickets, the server to wipe the tables, the critic to scourge with essays, the bartender to pour the bourbon, the scholar to read page after page after page. The rhythm of these our lives continues and without intersection. I try to make things happen; when I can’t make them, I try and let them. Still they fizzle into some shade of indifference, inaction, always the ghost of the hope, the ghost of the oh well, the ghost of never anything I can hold. Maybe if I wanted my desires less, they would have the breathing room to grow into something more.
I clip over the crumbled sidewalks. I leave the cathedral to drown again in these Thursday evening shadows. I pass through a surge of people but battle these streets alone. What risks we run for a little touch of life. What cracked and darkened streets we wander. Home to some, labyrinthine to others. And my mind flicks afire with all the fragments I catch from the lonely townhouse corners. A peal of wisdom from the man in the alley: “Momma always said keep your ears and eyes open you might learn something.” The creative thief in me needs lifebloods such as these. I can try for some connection or dream about it. Much easier to skim the depths for what I need and drop the rest back in the vacuum of chaos. I’ll fashion my own fiction of truth, thank you.
But what is this life of mine if half-formed? The tiny, dark-haired woman pushes her cart of groceries down the crosswalk. What drives her on into the night? Who does she push it for?
I am the first in our party to arrive at the bar. This does not disturb me; perhaps because I am used to it. The deck outside is quite crowded, almost unanimously occupied by students, the air clouding with wisps of exhaled smoke while shaggy canines weave between what legs they can at the extension of their leashes. After ordering my drink I settle at a table in the corner, watching the lazy tangle of conversation unfold outside. I am less intrigued by what the revelers might be saying than I am by the torpid streams of thought that must snake between them. What questions do they ask each other? Sure. But what questions are they afraid to ask? Do they harbor private depths—or does the liquor and the cannabis loosen everything out of them—in more or less subtle methods?
For all its golden lighting and hanging plants, all the little college-town night-life charm, the bar still smells like a roadside gas station bathroom. It’s a strange capsule of nostalgia. I collect my drink. It’s served in a mason jar with a striped paper straw and beneath the gin, tastes of botanicals and lavender. The bartender steps outside for a moment, leaving only a middle-aged couple at the counter. Over the radio, a dusky voice sings about the mournful plight of his broken promise to get sober. Dazedly absorbed in the menu, the couple calls out their order. No one hears them but me. I take my drink outside.
My little gaggle of acquaintances has arrived and claimed one of the few remaining picnic tables. They erupt in a flurry of the evening’s updates, which I am more than content to sit and absorb. It takes several minutes for them to place their orders and collect their drinks, rotating in a sort of relay race that pauses each time they collide with some other chum who happened to be there the same night. During all this languid carnival someone ends up putting a second drink in my hand. Gin out of mason jars and I’m straddling the wooden bench of the picnic table, fingers restless and drumming out the song of the stars on its worn, weathered surface.
Around us the neighborhood crawls in dull stars of lamplight and the angular shadows of Victorian townhomes. Somewhere above, bobbing on the surface of reality, I hear my friends playing a game of “who’d you rather?” I suppose three drinks in, everyone begins to look more attractive. But no longer lost in the swarm of glittery-eyed youth—I scan all the sidewalk shadows for ghosts. Something, someone flits out there and remains almost intentionally elusive. Some entity drifts between these streets, and if I only search them deep enough, I believe I might will it into visibility.
Some odd number of minutes or hours later, the ensemble has begun to dissipate, and as I stand up to go one of the girls drops her glasses on the floor so I pick them up for her, for which she gives me a hug and a casual “love you,” and my voice sticks in my throat, because I feel I ought to say it back—there is no reason why I shouldn’t, but I can’t say the words. And I remember how my sister asked me not that long ago why it was everyone in our family had such a difficult time verbally expressing their love, and though at first I dismissed the sentiment, now I think she might’ve been true.
Without my full awareness the sidewalk morphs into the road as I return to my car and make my way home. Rippling backwards in rows of bobbing, electric pupils, the city dissolves in veils of emerald shadow. And if the city were somehow personified, what would I see in those eyes? What does it silently, inanimately communicate? Do its whispers still thread beneath the earth, as steel turns back into wood, as asphalt yields to water, and the countryside furls on into the night? These, my days of the city; these, my days of the road. But with the stars connecting in sequence like the beginnings of some celestial endoskeleton, I think oh, wouldn’t it be grand to see the rest of this world? To return to those ice-fire mountainscapes of my youth, lands that beat with a different heart. To glimpse their horizons and step beyond for once. To see is not the same as to know, I know—and I have tried to know America, but I have said it before—it still holds true—I have succeeded in knowing it only by way of its roads, only by way of its words, left behind by those who walked these streets before me.
Choose, if you will, another nation, another city. A simple stroll in foreign lands rips through layers of history and one feels it buried about in the bones of every corner one rounds, whispering in the very ground one walks upon. These voices are not as strong in America—in a town like this one near non-existent. But the people do not listen for it, do not want to, do not think to. What could one dream of than to have a plot of forest raped for them—on which build a most grand, unremarkable mansion? For what could one wish than to disappear in a world of white carpets, blue-white screens, pool maintenance, car washing, and bills—then for lack of worth in all this, compensate by injecting the self with a thin, glorified identity—some mass-produced glittering pedestal on which to stand? They feed their worth to the system, to the corporation, to the financial advisory office, then tire their arms working the bicycle tire pump that inflates their sense of self. No, suburbia sings nothing.
In a dazzling haze I steer my car into a pull-off on the side of the road, hillsides and distant forest unwinding to the right—a freshly erected set of luxury homes scraping the sky to the left, the Psycho House multiplied with unsettling, indistinguishable variations. Car slumps into park, I fumble with the door handle, unfold my legs from beneath the wheel, feet meeting earth, wind meeting me—and I am running, flying up the hillside, soaring for the center of the field, and the present melts and the night blossoms in terrible, paganistic waves. For the closest I can come to capturing any shade of the past is to dance at the crest of these undulating green hills—barefoot, bare-chested, arms to the deadened sun, stamping out the white-collar incubi of the future. The trees morph in their silhouettes as all birds of prey take wing; they funnel overhead. The sky turns another wash of red. Somewhere in the hollows of earth a rabbit attacks a coiled snake. I sink my soles into the loamy surface; I may keep hold of little in this life, but I will always have the unbridled spirit I was born with. I harness it now; I dance as if to summon the ancient ones.
Burroughs’ words echo in my head. “America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.”
And still—I want the light at the end of the lake. Cursed as they might be, I want the flame cupped in the palms of the river, the lantern shining in the upper window. I want a different channel for the pain than casting it through the ether to that mirror world of lost things. But I have none—so I do what I do and take the deer at the edge of the wood, I take the bunnies in the brush, the bats flitting circles and the trees cupping the moon; I remake them, reshape them into terrible vessels. I like to think I wouldn’t have to, but there is only so much I can mold out of the soul of an empty union.
I find my knees sinking into the earth. My hands tear into the dirt, into roots, and everything is black and wet and shifting—my hands stain, my body aches, my stomach seizes—but I am digging, digging far into the yawning cavity, clawing out infinite clods of soil. And I am dancing, dancing myself down into the wasted waters and crawling up, out across the fields. The drawbridge lowered across the river, but I do not run for Elysium. I do not run for peace. These Valkyrie trailing the sky on their pale-faced death steeds are not an escort, but a cohort. I do not want the blessed fields—I want the heart of battle, the plains for my bitter dance. I have read the warning signs, but I scrape my hands against the earth—I search for the source of the life, the pounding tune, the heart woven into the network of ancient roots…
But my hands find nothing of value. And I am sitting alone in an empty field, wind cupping my face, trees fluttering their undivined secrets, and though I clawed into the earth, I have also clawed into my chest, and the cavity yields nothing, hands digging inside me, there is only wet and emptiness and nothing, heaving masses of nothing—and so intent on uncovering, uprooting, unveiling—should I have been planting something instead? The land yawns in the gash of a black divide; my chest gapes in a black chasm. I arch my neck to the sky. My mouth makes to open, my throat makes to cry—
A scream of light cuts all sound from my being. The sun exorcizes the night, rising high in the shape of a perfect golden sphere, a perfect yellow smile—
I lift my head from the coffee shop table, memories of the future dissolving, exiled. My laptop screen blurs into focus, glimmering a familiar, faceless white box of text. The application prompt unfolds in its steady petulance across the top. Describe in twelve-hundred words or less how you view your current role as an American artist. I lower my gaze to the tiny bar in the screen’s lower left-hand corner. The number of words reads four thousand. Drat. Oh dear. Alas. Fuck.
a literary labyrinth 