#is that all the elder goths and punks I know have come forth from the woodwork to tell me all their horror stories from the 80s and 90s | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

castlehead · 7 years

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"Still even wounded you do not see it. I can tell. I do not see it myself but I feel it a little."

--A FAREWELL TO ARMS

Before taking his last step off the train, or so could one only presume his last, and this, depending on where to delineate an official last step from one to another place, first of all, as in, where it is in no uncertain terms that one place might turn into the other one; also, this, depending on the exact distance as would remain to be covered by this older man, to his platform, from where he lingers now, measured in full when the traindoors open and he sees the challenge of space clearly: this elderly transient to go then traversing the precarious gap, upon traversing the rubber hazardyellow lip or perimeter extending a little beyond, exposed by the maw of the open traindoors.

Sure, it is directing easier access to the platform for the elderly, but this easier access to one day be for the benefit of a different elderly: some inhumane people who fled to these suburbs and towns, the makeup of this train’s schedule, to avoid hearing their boomer father use the word ‘bootstraps’ ever again.

For this defeat, in the eyes of we the young a defeat and almost a deluding, we became walking mysteries indifferent to the mystery we were, so as not to feed its underlying egotism. But yet we go on consuming the starved plenty of a fleeting culture’s bled out products, of irony and meta; perhaps are even punks or goths that will become tolerators of plaid and khaki, and of other bad priests of the norm who mainly cannot use their walk too well.

Out of a certain laziness of presence we develop the needing of a presence, whether with us as one we do not quite understand or one as us that we must understand or else be rendered meaningless and absurd. We youth who walk to chain coffee stores to free some manner of beast,—expectedly find nothing.

Anyway, this lip or perimeter or halfway bridge or a public aid, exposed once the train had inched to a stop, exposed, the hazardyellow lip, when the doors opened automatically, his muddy eyes having betrayed him and suddenly for the old, or older, man, a foot or so more of extra space to cover, well that he hadn’t seen from where he was standing bobbing on the train waiting infinitely. So hadn’t been able to judge whether or not to hurry from where he was once given his mundane chance to go home, to his home, a vagary or fluke somewhere in nervous ether.

And lastly this, this ‘last step,’ depending, also, on the ground covered between one and his next individual step, though anyway to be negligible, with each individual step taken by this poor transient fellow, with his many odors that travel into the next room probably when he goes indoors. Individual steps. Generally speaking, the approximate length of them, that is: each shuffling and slight step to be predicted based on a record of every move this old transient has made dragging a pendulous ghostliness in trash bags because he had had nothing else across the Earth in search of a life in which to throw the garbage, or liveliness, or something—he now for sure, as one sees it happen from outside this reality, having intended to get off the train, off this clanking hooked-up chain of big metal parts that look like candybars on wheels in frank need of repair: and the fake wood siding and posters for events longexpired and uncomfortable seats and all of it a holy dissociating: it is all there, in there:

Having arrived at his stop, or his stop, so could one only presume,—before taking his last step off the train: an olderlooking man, or transient, with these very brown and sightless, almost suffering eyes, suffering, and drowning in, and blinded by, and steeped in prophetic mud,—an olderlooking man there, before exiting the train, silently faltered, and he, silently blocking the doorway; in his head, but who knew, multiplying all these processes like distances and other quibbles, through time itself: though the traincar was not at that time populated by more than a handful of riders: and the hassled hump of his spine, going stiff upright, though he in his tacit universe without speaking. Or was just maybe a haggard diviner for some higher spiritous language.

He blinked twice quickly where he was, gauging his surroundings or perhaps reality itself for all the pith in the stare; perhaps sniffing out some new realization of horror. It looked like whatever he thought was not pleasant like the weather was today, nor were a mundane pattern, like one would experience in transit among strangers. He hesitated again, then, turned his head with great caution towards a younger man who was sitting a few seats away.

The younger man at present did not notice the older man nearby. There at his threshold sniffing out for his varying portents.

The patiently idling train's doors were opened to a station not to be specified here, fully precluded from the narrative, here, but perhaps is somewhere else living out its possible story. An anonymous destination somewhere in a world of the more abstract details.

He turned his ragged body towards the younger man. The train was empty and fluorescentlit, empty, besides this youth who sat and a few other passengers sitting and the older man who had gotten up to leave the train but now stared, quite conspicuously, at the youth. He hung his brown overfed eyes on the youth.

The youth had eyes of a blue color and they seemed to perish and fade into the back of the retina and then, one got the feeling, become a tender and human lightness, perhaps theoretical, a seeming thing of a good trait, but for all that shining as strong as it could from the charred back of his skull, taking some of the blackness of wherever corner in his head it originated to the torsional surfaces of his expression, the youth's, and even when he relaxed his eyes there was some momentary thought of void, in whoever might be looking into them at the time.

His blue eyes, however, did not meet, refused to meet, his insipid, obsequious, lost gaze, and the pretty, perished blue eyes continued to trace the modest, unassuming suburban country out the window, and just within the youth’s peripheral vision, stood—though considerably obfuscated—the figure and presence of the older man hunching his frame against the trainrail and looking at him.

The youth was a youth but his expression was that of someone older though not necessarily more mature. To anyone who bothered to observe he appeared not yet wholly disciplined by life nor yet wizened and made tough by the going out of experience…as if desperate to accomplish, and yet haunted by a failure that announced its coming, without coming; was dominated by an infinite premonition of failure. Some odd fixation or permanent thought on this loomed above his head, and was still to come and to bear, and would, if and when instigated, throw into question whatever meaning there might have been for his life.

Something oafish, something burly and oafish that stood in the way.—

The old man continued to peer and wither and he knew all of these things and his movements were few and baffling and he swayed gently back and forth in a dull torpor as though drunk and he stared at the youth with an intensity both strange and familiar: unfocused and dull and yet a conscious urgency beneath it, however subtle, was there, as if the old man desired to swallow both of them up into his own nakedness, an intimate, static, soundless place. It pierced the youth, if only because, this old man, in particular, seemed dedicated to watching and waiting for the youth to watch him back.

From time to time, however, his eyes would suddenly widen and the old man would give a sharp twitch of the head as if making to stifle a manner of nervousness felt between them and which was unspoken and abstract. And the more he peered and withered and twitched the more the old man became instead an old, barnacled creature—or, monster—in the eyes of the youth. His eyes his blue eyes we are speaking of the youth they continued more desperately now to trace the suburban countryside, disregarding the stare but widening their blueness slowly as the blue youth wondered why the train continued to stay at the same stop, until he understood, promptly terrified, that the train and this particular slice of time, which felt somehow disrupted, time itself had stopped to wait for something, anything, to go on, between the youth, and this form of dreams,—just an old man to all the others for the blue youth suspected himself alone in his opinion of a man to be seen externally not but mere and frail.

All was still: it was the stillness of the World itself in pause for the sake of whatever discourse to follow, between them. The youth who sat put his knees together, and he clenched the muscles in his thighs, and the train did not move, and the elder’s eyes were fire on him. The youth was sitting down in a seat five feet away from the elder and the elder stood inert against the train rail looking, looking.

Sweat moved along the crevices of the two shiftless forms on the train, and something like fungus grew within the quiet between them. The quiet was bloated and pungent. It made green the things around it. The train doors closed vaultlike at the old man’s stop. The train shrieked as it moved, as if in a cyclone, and the youth finally could take no more and looked into the ravaged eyes of the old man and saw him, the eyes like wet cinder, like slugs reamed the youth nearly backward, and the train was like a cyclone.

But neither of them spoke. The youth could not stop looking nor could the elder stop and their eyes were contrasts of each other and also their eyes were contrasts of their very souls because the youth’s eyes were blue and peaceful and the sickles of his irises were defined yet he was angry and afraid and the elder’s eyes were like wet cinder and dirt and the Earth and they looked blind and without aim and yet the elder seemed to know more than the youth ever could at least to the youth. The old paranormal spoke to the youth and it was like the sound of the bray of a beast and it was wild and echoing in a trance outwards to breach the dark air and the sound was cloistered in the heart of the placeless wilderness of quiet that existed between them: and the youth listened closely, and the paranormal said:

“I KNOW YOU.”

…And that in a voice, a voice which B. would feel drifting into his mind whenever recalling the early, emptier days spent in the care of his mother and father, days now to him as but an intrusive gap in time. The train stopped once again, and, without another word, the old man with eyes burnt to black ash and the Earth pushed his old bones through the stubborn doors towards a destination like a humble ghost.

B. was the sitting youth and as the train moved forward and away from the humble ghost B. slowly allowed his expression to lax into a soft frown—a frown that, like the pace of a clock, changed slowly, to the point it was not recognizable. After what seemed like an eternity the train slowed down to his stop—and he, before getting off, as if to put emphasis on the change, said at almost a whisper:

“No. You don’t.” And that as though to defy whatever placeless sort of uneasiness the elder gave him. Something grey and infectious that still managed to trickle down; invading his character and ribs and drowning his heart with fluid. Something would be there, would be there and would come out, during this visit, he sensed; something cold, something vague and cold that made B. think that this would be a very bad day.

“Give them a chance.” B. smiled and, and, and the smile was abandoned. "Shit."

. . . . . .

George had got a pool installed. They had more money these days but were not as pushy as most old people were and did not complain when the drain was not put in right. Until today, George and Eleanor had busied themselves inside the house just to avoid that drain, which growled and crunched, terrifically, and seemed to shake the pool itself as though it were eating it.

Until today, when George got down to working his arthritic librarian hands (for he was the owner of a bookshop/for he had bad arthritis) and baggy muscles to rearrange one pipe after another until finally after four hours of work damning vain sweat: the whole vain thing was giving him a headache: the fatigue of his body and the soreness of his joints and the bookkeeper hands barely able to move—all hilariously spent—and he finally preferring the suave and shady chaise lounge to the sunpale concrete and pungency of the chlorine.

George looked grim. In his old mind he felt something push. Some obscurity—some kind of obscure bubbling in the swamp. A last croak of testosterone withering out like an agate in marble. failure infiltrated his old mind like a gas. The pipe continued to roar.

“I took action though. That’s what counts.” This being the weak-kneed voice of George.

“Let me call a professional.” This being Eleanor, who sat down elegantly and lovingly next to her husband and stroked the patchy tuft of grey hairs atop his wide, blatant skull.

“Oh, dearie, poor dearie.” She said.

. . . . . .

B.’s senses sharpened too much and B’s weight in step or body lifted suddenly and the sun seemed to protrude and boil his courage up but still he moved down the road and he popped and fumed in the heat.

On he walked though and the sun protruded further against B.’s tight-woven blazer and pressed pants—giving an edge to everything B. looked upon—giving an edge to even the asphalt B. walked on.

And he stopped and stood outside of his home, once again—for the first time, in a long time. There was a strong, solar heat swooping and burning him out and it swooped wildly up B’s socks and evilly drifted about the clamp of B's’ collar and his tie was a noose.

And…it exposed as well those familiar and ignorant lilies, sitting blithe on the front step. The windows, he felt, and the door itself all positioned as one fantastic and ignorant face, waxing welcomes like those lilies. With lips whitewashed and pollenyellow tongues, they chanted, over and over chanted:

“Welcome, welcome, welcome.”

. . . . . .

“Goddammit, that’s the door.”

George had let Eleanor get him a cup of tea but she always made it too hot and so it sat there on the living room table, sifting off its English Breakfast warmth in curlicue tones. George sat upright on an old couch on which the cushions had begun to deflate and with his wasted spindles against an afghan cloth and white eyebrows curling like warmth from tea, George looked like a very wise, very blunt old cricket.

“George, don’t get up! I’ll get the door; rest your head; please, just rest.”

Eleanor walked from the kitchen to the door and had some swiftness, some orderly bounce about her that implied a certain list of expected ringers: Nancy Charles for her math homework help or Don Drieser for the polish back or that old war veteran George knew…what was his name…

“Nancy, I don’t know about today—” And Eleanor opened the door and saw, standing gaunt and fearful under the suburban summer, B.

. . . . . .

Looking upon him, George and Eleanor saw B.’s postwar form, which was not so different than before: B. Softness was a short man, but his arms were long and when his arms bent, the intricacies of bone shifted mechanically under a timid layer of skin—but his hands were not timid. They were pale and a bit too hairy; they worked with a natural and studious grace that suggested someone more understanding and wise. When he stood, his arms hung languidly, and his hands both drooped downwards, like long snakes.

To describe the thick insecurities of this family one would have to look at what was not said. It is with silence that thoughts are procured, that people are measured—it is with silence that strategies are made. Eleanor Softness—then fixed upon her son, had little to say but: “Oh.”

Now evidently there was much going on between them and much that wasn’t said. Eleanor had said what she had said while still believing that a general acquaintance was standing before her. Too distracted by the mechanisms curiously at work in her head to change the tone of her voice.

So, she said—‘oh’—and,

upon witnessing for the first time in a long time the face of his son, George Softness quickly picked up his tea and gulped, burning both hands and lips in the process.

But Eleanor, then, seemed to suddenly realize B. had been there. Eleanor’s plasticity in smile and feature faded as quickly as George had burned his lips:

“Come in, B.…”

“I’m going to get some more of that tea.”

George had then gotten up for a refill of that tea but his mug was already full and Eleanor did not seem to let B. pass.

“Come in,” Eleanor said, still standing, meekly, in the way.

So B. came in---

. . . . . .

The odor itself held in it something sickeningly familiar. The familiarity of home stank like rotten meat. It was the smell of an age: a violent age: a long-ago, long-dead sense in him. It cheapened with years, unlike wine it grew rotten.

But, it had a sort of revolting antiquity, sort of the inverse of wine, cloying and needy with apology: the smell apologized for itself: B. Softness was angered by the smell because of that: the smell did not deserve to apologize. And the memories. Memories juicing in the humidity of the smell; memories amputated like an arm from B. Softness’ mind. He held his breath when coming in out of some inchoateness that quickly lost meaning. B. Softness laughed like a wretch but it came out like something warm. He wondered that he had been gone—for a long time he had been gone—

Looking outside then it seemed about twelve in the afternoon, as the light through the window had a vigor and acuteness only made to a sun in the middle of sky.

B. Softness pulled up a wicker chair and dust erupted off it into the suffocating bay window light. He felt suddenly very allergic to this place. B. Softness sat down to approach George and Eleanor and his eyes were swelling. George and Eleanor sat before him. Their little faces peered at B. Softness with concern.

Someone spoke but no one was sure who it was that spoke.

. . . . . .

“How are things, are things alright? It’s been alright here. I’ve started a few backyard projects. You know, I’ve always wanted to be the type of person who had a green thumb. Tell him what you have done, George...oh, he’s done some truly wonderful things, alright, truly, truly wonderful…George, tell him about the bookshop. George owns his own bookshop, now, B.”

“Oh really? Well—tell me about it, if you would. Of course it’s—”

B. paused and folded his arms pleasantly and did not finish the sentence because he was caught off guard and distracted by something in him that hated the posture of his own folded arms—because it was pleasant—and somehow subordinating.

“Well,” George’s hands felt themselves along the knuckles,

“I’ve worked on this particular project for over a year now; it's actually doing quite well.” His hands pressed forward conversationally.

“Oh really? That sounds great. I’m glad you found something that suits your tastes.” B. Softness’ hands coiled around themselves:

George’s hands advanced further then bailed out abruptly and swung around to scratch his chin, then clasped together, as well, secretly mocking B. Softness’ own funnily coiled ones: “What tastes?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Meaningless. Disregard it.” B. Softness wrote the thing off and the hands flapped awkwardly in George’s face:

“No, I want to know what you mean.” George smiled warmly; the hands perching like puffins on his upper thighs, retreating.

“And you, mother. How have you been?” B. Softness pushed them together at the palm as if a slice of ham and lettuce and mayonnaise were scrunched in-between the two extremities:

“Oh,” She leaned and glowed and cast a fleeting eye on George, fingers tapping soundlessly on the soft couch. “I’ve just been helping George with his business—”

“And we’ve been getting business from people who’d rather shop in a simple bookstore than a mega-mart.” Said George.

. . . . . .

You see, this old, repeated adage of most regular, level-minded folk who shopped local and talked their agenda and feared their big business was the perfect stopgap to keep George from talking about how it felt when you walked into the store, the first time: the hoary musk of decomposing paper and print: the wealth of ownership in something: a great, goldeny sort of a wealth that straightened George’s tired spine. These things were not so pleasant to B., thought George, he would not be interested; he would not understand. He’d just think I was talking about myself too much…well, damn it, I’m old! So what? I deserve to talk about myself—

—There was a spatial pause that breathed deeply.

“Well, it’s nice that you’re back now…” George smiled broadly and said this. The smile reeked of distance.

B. Softness—pulled up his tie—to try to look nice—

“Well it’s nice to be back—you know, for a little while.” B. Softness emphasized the last words. He felt a refreshing release of hatred when doing this but after that a sadness, and a disgust; like he would visit and then go away forever. Like he meant no harm.

. . . . . .

His hands seemed to balance themselves in the air and his thumb counted each smooth fingernail; George’s pounced back out at B. and lightly tapped the bulb of B.’s knee as George moved and shifted; Eleanor’s launched like firecrackers over everyone when Eleanor stretched her entire body and moved her arms straight up.

Then, everyone’s hands fell, furtively, to nowhere in particular.

. . . . . .

Eleanor Softness was stealing looks at her husband. And George stole looks at her: the eyes asking each other, nervously, relentlessly: “What does he want?” And, yet, Eleanor said, preening each vowel:

“Why don’t you stay for dinner, B.? We’d love to have you stay for dinner.”

Eleanor Softness also reeked of distance smile-wise yet B. noted a dip of the head—a subtle, subtle widening of the eyes—that suggested truth. George, though, looked at Eleanor, gripped his tea handle, and coughed gruffly:

“Yes. Yes. Why don’t you stay for dinner?” said George, wavering. And,

yet, George sharpened, and said: “And…and, make that tea cooler, next time, Eleanor?”

So B. stayed for dinner---

. . . . . .

When George and Eleanor had a chance to leave the living room they hurried to the kitchen and stood, in silence. Turning over the situation.

“George…B.’s back.” Eleanor had very wide blue eyes and when she said this they stuck out like vast, opulent pools, as if she were begging for something, and George could not tell whether she was afraid or confused. George thought: Eleanor usually always seemed so reserved, so willing to please George, so agreeable to him. Throughout the string of their lives together, Eleanor and George had always been close, always a team. But he could tell sometimes that her female clemency would push her away from any of George’s more vigorously brutal preferences. Eleanor would still be in her supporting way and and and yet George detected beneath the oddly imperial sand of her thought a foreknowledge that whatever brutal preference it was that George had at the time, it wouldn’t succeed. This applied to their plan to put their rival bookstore, ********, out of business; this applied to George buying a gun. These objectives settled relatively around the house---picked up off the floor, and dusted off, and put back down, sweetly. George still had no gun, did not know what type to buy, did not bother looking. And Eleanor continued to support the vacuum of these endeavors with a nod.

George’s eyes were muddled from age but were still a nice baby blue. B. Softness always thought it strange how a cold man like him could have such soft, forgiving eyes. But George was the old, stinking madman…the crotchety father…just wanting a little peace and some books to tide him over…and, even if his eyes were muddled he saw that Eleanor seemed more aloof than usual and that she probably realized B. Softness wanted something out of them, something that was hard to draw out—money was tight—and, as that day went on B. Softness would look into his parents' eyes and would feel in them the same hot glare of the old man from the train.

“He wants something, I know that!” George tensed and thought of how to approach his son. He’d always been angry, that boy. Not angry, just difficult. What kind of difficulty? George couldn’t place it. Every instance he could think of had its own flavor of anxiety. They took him out, didn’t they? But B. wouldn’t have it. So they let him stay home, and he became anxious. He complained all the time---that was B.’s definitive accessory, his mouth. And he talked and George listened. And soon enough George got tired of listening; I mean, energy isn’t something you just snatch from a fucking tree, he thought. He needed time for himself, and B. refused to accept that. Simply put. And

they talked, to an extent, George thought…but him, George…friends? That wasn’t how it was with his old man.

What really got George angry was the fact that he always meant well with B., loved him, to whatever extent he could. But B. didn’t…well. He didn’t do something. It was more than a problem of acceptance, George knew that.

“Fah,” said George declaratively.

It was something similar to chess, this parenting business. The right words had to be said in order for things to turn out well, the right moves made across the board. But most of all it was a game and was nothing more than a game…

George felt his own dry pensiveness throbbing in his head like a wound. He thought of life; he thought of B. He thought about the dimensions of parenting, about how many layers there could be regarding this; what it meant to be a parent, to raise a child—while Eleanor spoke mostly through her big worried beautiful calming eyes.

. . . . . .

B. Softness smiled insanely: his parents retreating like startled deer to the kitchen: not sizing him up but more bleating out to themselves all the dumb anxieties and testimonies and contrite hosannas he had heard from them, before, at one time or another…expecting B. to pick up on the reason for this, which he did, and see behind it a sort of validated importance regarding how very full of gravity, earthshaking, lifechanging his appearance at their front door was.

Why had he come back? he heard them whisper, just loud enough to imply their wanting him to hear.

And his father leaning against the counter, slouching: the sphere, the pooch of his old gut: speaking but with looks that whispered, and both, in B.'s blue eyes, metaphorically wringing sweaty, conspiratorial hands, devising yet another plan to get him out. B. Softness smiled, chuckled, even sometimes barely able to control himself from letting out a sizable laugh. Yeah. That would have really scared them. B. Softness he could not resist smiling could not do anything but that. The appearance of being happy was something that had become instinctual, almost an obsession, so that no time was left to actually feel that way.

Like riding a bike; instinct. And when B. Softness had first started smiling—recognizing early on the need to perpetually grin around his parents in his own house and in such and such a way of obsequious mania as to appear idiotic, nearly—in discovering this, B. knew also of a drastic need to mature. Quickly. On his own. And he worked ever harder throughout his years spent living with his mother and his father to conceal the further indignation of having to camouflage his own discomfort in order to be accepted by these people—parents—and, so, yes, you see, he grinned, now—for that same sad reason—that is, in order to cover up a feeling of globlike frustration now thumping out to him the memories of the old, stilted times between him and his mother and his father, times becoming unburied in his skull, like corpses, their definitions may putrefy but with a look at the teeth you can find that frustration, globlike; globlike because something of a fungus had been thriving for so long on these times, these corpses of memory once-lived. Fucking times; times from the beginning rotten, born rotten; and they would only succeed in getting rottener. But B. Softness had in him like an intimate gong something else that sounded out to him that childhood could be better than it was, for him. Forever he searched his parents for that something extra. But, if he had gone to the dentist, the talk at the dinner table would solely and in scrupulous detail involve his trip to the dentist…if the conversations grew in depth they would extend as always to the far reaches of what was on television; which neighbor or friend had done what to someone else; and, if B. Softness pressed on, his parents would either grab any reason floating in the air to be angry with him or would plain change the subject back to dentistry. And then things would fall back into monotony. So it went for years, and wet, sloppy, globlike time piled on him. And the want…morphed into frustration…

B. Softness while still at home during the masque that was his childhood would have nightmares in which, upon leaving the table and going out of earshot, George & Eleanor would speak of their feelings and dreams in secrecy.

. . . . . .

The conversation did not range far. No talk of much else but the T.V. news, or the local news, or the neighborhood something or other. In fact, the whole thing seemed a great slew of banter: a mighty brick wall of bullshit stood proudly on the coffee table between B. and his mother and father: George Softness built his bricks, built them readily, proudly:

Something happened:

Eleanor had just finished cooking, and the audible sizzling had stopped. In the background, one could faintly hear the busted pool pipe, straining,

making its strange gargles—

“I think there’s going to be a fireworks show next week,” George said. “That should be fun. I haven’t seen one of those in awhile.”

“Yes. Fireworks. Yes that should be great. I won’t be around though, unfortunately…I can’t come. I—have to go back—overseas—” They discharged him weeks ago.

B. Softness thought glumly that the time had come to finish his visit. After dinner, he would leave. He would say goodbye, and leave. But none of it would matter. He forced himself to think that this entirely futile operation wouldn’t matter so it wouldn’t matter to him.

B. Softness smiled and clenched his bones. He was angry. Eleanor came out of the kitchen. George Softness looked at her expectantly; B. Softness looked at her too, politely, but expecting something else,

some relief from the banter—

“Well…smells good.” Said George. And they all advanced towards the table and Eleanor Softness chuckled a bit---almost said something, haphazardly--

. . . . . .

When B. had entered George & Eleanor’s house the mood had blackened between all so it would be hard for an outsider to discern that Eleanor’s comment came with it an eruption of deeper, stranger blackness. The conversation had become personal. Old questions and problems were brought back. Problems of who was to blame and and and for what reason.

B. had thought, vaguely, that those questions would be solved when he joined the army. It seemed at the time like a period of closure for him—a period in which he’d regained a stability long misplaced—

—this would seem sensible to anyone who saw B. before he went off. It seemed as though he were struggling against the turning of the Earth—all the time—

George coughed awkwardly

. . . . . .

B. recalled proudly his years in the military. The places he’d seen in the infantry. Mostly the people he’d met.

It was there he had changed. He had become his own man. He had held a gun; had wished more and more to become the gun he held; had fumed, and fumed; had learned to control his head and yet somehow did not attain peace from this and from this learned that peace was not a matter of control but of letting go.

And he did, eventually. He became his gun, that is: accurate, quick, efficient. Such violent persistence…so sad. Then he aimed himself at his family, in the confidence he also would not stray. But there were darker things—as well—things much more primal, more guttural: things that roiled out of B. a distinctive guttural anguish: a very private, specific overexposure that only he could know: though what he was exposed to he did not know.

A psychologist might have fastened him under the broad umbrella of what is known as trauma, where so many others are fastened, like shrapnel in one's thigh. But, B. would’ve found that answer too broad for his liking. In his mind and maybe or maybe not in all others, what he had wasn’t common enough for battlesickness. It was too horribly mutated to be called any sort of pathology alone.

Too ugly to be resolved in just examining the psyche, all of it this ugly jetsam to be sucked through a busted drain.

And there were busted things in his family that were unnamed and that were dark too because the more they were refused the more indignant they became and in the eyes of B. the root of what it was that was bad and numb about his life he now planted in who his parents were, and he looked at his parents then and his parents looked back at him with eyes of disgust, of horrible loathing—

All this B. thought. He thought: My dear mother: my dear, dear mother: she wants to know all the little fucking details. All and every bit of the story—all the brutality—and, seemingly as extraneous, as wasteful—all this turmoil in my head about it.

Too late, Mom. Too late ha fine time to ask

. . . . . .

“Fine time to ask,” He murmured.

Anger sprang up from nothing it seemed to B. because anger was always there but he never used it—even in combat—he never used it, instead glazed himself over with that very impersonal, clinical virtuosity given him as inheritance by parents who for so long and in that same way of distance had attenuated his own resolve and had with the damage done weakened to nothing his own soul. To nothing: by now, probably to be observed by him as a gray and still-waning pallor in his chest: utterly faceless and so then unidentifiable; seemingly comprised of phlegm. And yet B. withheld from lashing out at his mother. Poor woman. The damage was done too long ago—had always been there. Blinded by anger and frustration, B. promptly and without warning forgot his years in the military. Forgot everything up till the moment he walked through the door, into his parents’ home.

—B.’s mouth opened slowly—

A trespassing numbness tip-toed, jimmied the figurative lock on the door—two years, three years, four years—a hunk of fat cut from him and left to die bizarrely and unrequited. It was a massive artery that had been redirected to where his mind did not toil. He could feel and hear the blood pump through the artery but could not see fathoms to where the artery led and and and B. closed his eyes and put his long hairy hands to his long hairless face, the face of one who is deranged by the sweetness and obscene frailty.

. . . . . .

Why can’t I remember? He thought

. . . . . .

B. thumbed through each artery in his mind and pulled out the very heart of his mind if only just to find one single recollection of any moment over the past two years. Any date on the calendar, anything recent at all besides erasure before this afternoon. It were as if the things he did—that is, any scene on his own, excluding the stagepresence of himself he crafted before the eyes of his parents—in itself, was excluded from his memory in an astonishingly terrifyingly swift fashion.

As if nothing without someone else mattered enough to remember—all of it so sickly trivial—

And then to his horror, B. saw erupting from the opacity of his thought and bursting forth through an opening in the fog the visage of that strange old man, and the old man watching him---those eyes of pulp---and the old man, saying

“I KNOW YOU.”

Like he had on the train, and that—over and over. The words. That sentence, delivered coldly, simply; almost nonplussed. And it was then B. knew what the eyes had meant.

It rang aloud in B.’s head and the ring reminded him of grenades. The sounds and the feelings of it were there but the stories and the touch and consummation of identity had gone—

B. was suddenly back on the train and the old man moved forward to B. on the train and his eyes were black abstract whorls that popped and popped and popped. They writhed nakedly and vulgar like demons in the old man’s hollow shriveled head. The black lines of lightning quickly flashing here and there, uncontrollably.

The old man took B. and shook him and spat out to his face that he had to go. The old hands gripped his shoulders—wanting, wanting to grip the man—wanting to push B.’s body into itself and crush him. B. convulsed, and, seeing it clearly, with a sensation of beauty so great as to suddenly know himself redeemed—this youth with the perished blue eyes—opened up his brain. He found gasping for air there in the center of his brain another, frailer youth, and knew then and for the first time an agonized, insane craving to father a child. It was the only way.—

He had to have a child but that came from him, from no one else it would come. A voice distinctly his and yet independent of his. That wasn’t hocked with the phlegm of untouched, filmy life---never any visceral sense, any friction or bickering or that old brutal pursuant called love between him and his mother and his father---just some coagulated pieces of tissue laboring around the house, playing with flowers, books; graying every so often and more and more each time.

He reached out manically for something fresh: an infant born from the little sheltered scraps of beauty still raging around in B.’s belly: the infant, with eyes so clear and blue and clean, writhing deep in the white sheets: wanting everything, absolutely everything in the World and and and only concerned with the new.

. . . . . .

He was red right there in the living room. A kind of ulcerous pain tried to jump up his throat and out and every part of him red and close to collapse however one looks and there ah there and wrenched horribly in B.’s features—wrenched, woven deeply into his features—were the spiritual contortions—the metaphysical knots and disproportions—the hurt twists of blameless injustice or blames not taken—the carnages—and—at—the—same time the dusts of what perhaps was his true and very soul. he clutched that face, that heap of contortions: that possible soul. He clutched it with his hands and he cradled the odd thing like a child in his arms with hands that had killed other men and the strings in his hands shot from his own fingers and went back at him like something sent whipping from a single strong gust. His body palpitated as though to a drum. The stitches in his neck projected outwards to their limits.

His soul would creep out when he opened his jaw and screamed. Blinded and wheezing and crying, barely alive and drowning in its own primordial ectoplasm—it would creep out. The soul that climbed and climbed up his throat, hoping to be regurgitated.—The sweat inched down B.'s neck in the effort—yet it was overall that strange old paranormal from the train who said—that said

“I KNOW YOU.”

He screamed, and all the breaths in the World went into his body as he screamed again

. . . . . .

George said loud and haggard shaking off the afghan cloth he had been wearing:

“What’s the matter with you, B.?"

George said the name with an attempt at authority.

"B."

George didn’t know what to do, so he said:

“Do you have to leave?”

George pointed a cantankerous finger to the door.—

There was a tin of nuts on the table and as George got more flustered he ate more and more of them and they crunched and growled terrifically in his mouth. George seemed more frantic suddenly; more scared. His old eyes were those that were weary of surprises.

Eleanor had been watching quietly and sat closer to George when she came back from the kitchen. The moments went by. B. looped himself over himself, on the wicker chair that he sat on. Looping himself over himself, over and over.

George & Eleanor—watched him—

. . . . . .

And…then, B. stopped; there was a calm among them; the calm hissed. The hiss carried and vegetated around them. It spoke fruitlessly into the minds of Eleanor & George.

B. opened his eyes. Eleanor & George were staring intensely at him.

“You’re right, Dad,” B. said—now knowing he had lost.

“This was supposed to be a short trip. I just came to pick something—up.”

B. had not come to pick something up.

. . . . . .

“Come on now, everyone. Let’s get to the table,” Said Eleanor, hurriedly, and her hands shook as she set the table.

. . . . . .

It had to be around two in the afternoon. B. Softness would be leaving soon.

B. and George both stooped over their plates and cast long shadows across the table as they did so. The shadows themselves mixed together in a formless shade. B. looked at what was on his plate---saw how unwelcoming it was: the carelessness of the meat---the meager helping of potatoes---the low-quality plate. All devoid of comfort. B. loosened his tie. The time for change was over.

“This is a nice table. Good. Well-built. It's the cherrywood one, from when I was little? I see the little dents in its surface from when I banged spoons into it. I guess I was, uh, still learning how to use silverware.” B. Softness said this, attempting good humor, and began performing surgery on his chicken. “Oh—yes. Yes, I don't quite remember that. With you being out so long.—” George said, as though B. had been out at a grocery store at the very farthest point on Earth from there, buying a jug of milk, for over two years.—“Ahem,” Said George.—He glanced over at B., weighing him, waiting for a response, but, none came,

only a sigh, a sigh—soft and it is broken.

. . . . . .

B. said:

“I should get off then, shouldn’t I? I’ve already taken enough advantage of your hospitality. Ha ha. I’ll see you soon. I love you. Yeah. Bye.” He was burning inside.

. . . . . .

George turned to Eleanor for a supportive nod yet received none. He laughed. Eleanor instead looked quite sad. George continued eating and believed that the visit had gone quite well. He had maintained the situation and been friendly to B. He looked upon the whole day as a success. He did not measure the situation frame by frame because each frame was bad but equaled out to something good because B. had gone but would probably come back wanting something else. Everything went perfectly. Except for the end part, of course—an irksome hiccup in George’s life that he would never quite understand.

But George found himself suddenly trapped in reminding himself of the hiccup and more hiccups throughout the day became visible and then suddenly these lifted feelings of his plummeted into the ugly fencing of his old and present life and it was like something thrown in the air and coming down. The cosmos of his own before and ever after coming down. The psychic residue of the before: things strange enough to remember: like jaunts into emotions unrelated to the event: like some leathery depression slinking into him while on vacation sharing beach chairs with his wife, by the sea, during a trip to some anonymous isthmus. Or, bizarre happiness while driving to the pharmacy to fill his prescriptions, which he hated doing. Or even nausea and disgust at the chipper, repetitive greeting to him by his neighbor across the way. The chipper wave of Mike’s hand that came surely with the day as would all other natures of the diurnal World—and it irritated George because Mike was not diurnal like the World was and so then he should not try to be with his greeting, and whatnot; and all of it mysterious like that and lacking form: the bookstore and getting angry at bookmarks in the antiques, ruining the page—I paid a fortune for this. And Eleanor with one tooth in her mouth now dark with general rot. And George seeing the whorls on his knuckles developing like wee caverns of flesh and age.

George said and his eyes were looking at blurs

“Gravity.”

Gravity. The short buoyancy of it. The small annuity of an object to be afloat in the air as though supported firmly—then, down to the ground it goes—descending without meaning or specificity and meeting the cogent argument of that ground: which is greenery, and sunken pelts and the excrement of all things made same. Were these random blots of feeling nothing more than the chemical omens of a long-been mind? Were they not this?

Were they, instead, the ludicrous discord of something welled in George’s head; the argots of a hidden canker in George’s life, given speech to their shadow by sometimes pulling apart the platelets of his ego…to get him to feel a difference in his son or wife or soul?

At that point B. had gone and Eleanor was washing the dishes and was in a trance of thought in which she thought keenly, and she realized this:

That boy came from me.

. . . . . .

B. Softness would not try again with his mother and father.

He was on a train from his parents and he thought about why he had gone back to see his parents in the first place. Thinking of it carefully for over an hour gave him nothing, and B. realized that maybe it didn’t have an answer. At first, it seemed like it had to be done. But nothing had come of the trip, and B. felt fine.

Besides of course, the mysterious disappearance of his life from his memory. He racked his brains to recollect any of it—there were no faces to remember—no tragedies to linger on—just the pungent feeling of all kinds of death.—

B. believed, however, that it was better to not dwell on these things, death; to not truly understand one’s parents was relatively normal in this society.

Parents did not really matter when it came to those big things: the relationship he had with his mother and his father did not end up gnarling up his sensibility, worsening B.’s sensibility; relationships do not, should not really be able to break apart that probity of any necessitous brain, that reasoning will of his brain—the thoughts, the figuring, the memories, the feelings, instinct—should all really be able to stay in their own ganglion of nerves and fat without altering themselves, deviating to ugliness. B.’s mind, to him, was never anything more or less than what he made of it; and as for parents, well…it was just a hard bump that everyone passed over just fine, as long as they tried…

In fact, there was something endearing about his parents’ fear of him, endearing because it was the one defining example of who they were; it was the one characteristic, the one reaction to him that appeared and reappeared without fail; something they shared, together, in his presence—something that they shared.—

And, yet, B. did, and would, feel himself grow older, and wearier, as he grew farther away from his parents. George & Eleanor. And—maybe I’ll be just like that old guy from the train, whatever it was he wanted…B. first thought this a joke, and smiled to himself.

But the more it stayed in his mind the more he ruminated on what it was exactly that the old man had wanted. Did he not even want anything; what was it he had wanted? Thought B. He wished passionately to know—to at least understand someone besides himself—to connect however blindly to other wayward selves. Then, he started relating himself to that stranger, and the old man, too, seemed to share something like a secret with him: the way he had mistaken him for someone obviously close: he obviously was able to see something positive like that in B., some friendly cosmetic in B.’s face that made him one of the World. But B. caught himself. This did not suit him, no, not very well at all—no matter what else he said or he thought. So, instead, he dismissed it—and watched the upstate country pass before him, and thought of the times to come. The unction of the train chugged off on the tracks like a martyr. Sunlight wimpled out across the windows of the train and made B. squint. The sunlight eventually disintegrated like crumbs into the chaff of the evening.

He looked out at the fugitive corners of light against the trees and as night came the cars on the highway shone like traveling eyes through the darkness and B. closed his eyes to sleep and found no sleep and found he saw only the old man from the train. The old man stood like a magus on the planks of his head. B. made the old man’s eyes green because it was more pleasant that way; more pleasant than brown eyes—the brownness of vague reflection, and as though concealing some inner judgment or doubt. The green eyes brewed knowingly in the old man’s head. B. craved an answer from the old man—an answer to rebuke. B. made the old man say something with B.’s own words. And his image merely a vessel to speak the sane, caged eloquence of the blue youth and the venerable greatness in him finally dusting itself off, and the words less embarrassed in their saying: and the old green eyes penetrating nonetheless, as the old man said:

. . . . . .

“There are no such terms for the little universe that is the family. Why must we be so muddled, when it comes to those we love? Why must an answer be so expository, when the rest of anything else is written off with concretions, and facts heavy as bricks?

An answer can be found in this example: a rock is a rock—a concretion, to the common mind—is something else to the geologist. A fountain is a fountain to the common mind, something more to the aesthete or architect. Yet geologists, architects, are specialists to special things; we are each the specialist regarding this thing of commonness called family. This is why it is something more than concrete.

Specialists run rampant in this World. Everywhere is more information to whet the blade of the brain. Nothing is concrete, really. What it comes down to is that there is nothing of substance to rely on, merely an edgeless reasoning bobbing up and down on a sea of additional aspects: all visible only beneath the surface: aspects known only to the people who wish to dive infinitely into them.”

The old man then darkened himself:

“One learns that the facts arrive later—ironically, with the death of a family member comes the requirement for a simpler answer to manifest itself. A sudden necessity for reassuring order and finite means and ends. At the funeral, the anecdotes are told as though they were the man: the neat and acceptable subject matter and endearingly sad stories of closeness altogether pull the past—the past of the deceased—into a dramaturgy. Even the faults are hilariously overblown; which, before, had been scrutinized past the point of obsession and argued over. Overblown to make the negative seem piddling. Seem charming and okay. It is a way to sum all the multitudinous reels of sub-terms into one sensible and orderly explanation for death. Parents were children looking up once, just as their children will be aging men looking down, free of their parents' ghost. Leaving them behind. At their death… “

B. thought of his Father’s death.

B. felt the sensation of death creep across his body once more when the train he was on jarred and derailed as it hit a red car that had been idling on the tracks.

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