Face to the Wind

A Fable

 

         Something twisted across the face of the full Moon in the high cold October air. Something about it caught Karl's attention, but he dismissed it as a piece of blown paper, perhaps, or maybe a Halloween mask, twitched from some careless child's fingers by a sudden gust. It was approaching that time of year, and it did seem to have something mask-like about it. He would see it twice more before the end.

 

         He continued his walk, something he had been doing since his teens. He used to enjoy imagining the lives going on behind those banal suburban façades, thinking of it as some sort of aggregate cultural richness, until he had learned better. “There are eight million stories in the Naked City, most of them approximately the same,” he sourly paraphrased to himself. Still later he had worked his way to the truth of the matter, which was that experience was for the individual alone. Now he might as well have been walking through some Lovecraftian necropolis, if one inexplicably well lit. He quirked a half-smile at this. What squamous, rugose horrors of ancient evil, exuding nameless ichor, were lurking inside, in the dark?               

         There! From the corner of his eye, he saw drapes twitched shut, by a pallid hand – or tentacle? His smile brightened to three-quarters. Finally he caught the name on a mailbox he hadn't noticed before. PICKMAN it said, and he laughed aloud.

         With this, he passed on to a dark, undeveloped section that he thought of vaguely as the gap, and his levity fell away. No doubt, in time, these vacant weed-grown lots would have something built on them, but now there was only the ribbon of sidewalk, strangely clean and luminous in the moonlight. The high eye of the Moon recalled the lines from the Frost poem:

 

         One luminary clock at an unearthly height

         Proclaimed that the time was neither wrong nor right.

         I have been one acquainted with the night.

 

         It was an old thought, but that caught-between feeling was a permanent resident. The time of his life had never been wrong or right. But ahead, beyond the dark, there was home, and warmth, and something to eat.

         As he entered his home, he noticed without noticing the dusty smell of indifferent housekeeping, and the various smells of his only companions, books. Leather and ink and the bitter savor of acid pulp disintegrating. They towered against all the walls, congregated in heaps on horizontal surfaces, and some seemed caught out by the light in mid-scurry across the floor. Lordly leather, bourgeois buckram and plebeian paper stood together in egalitarian federations. And, he supposed, if you could make a symbol out of that, you could do it with anything. He briefly considered the distractions of television and the Internet, but felt no answering enthusiasm. As he trailed fingers over the spines of the books shelved along the living room walls, each seemed to whisper a brief review in his mind’s ear.

         An early infatuation with existentialism, abandoned when suspicion grew that  an apparent impossibility to express something clearly might mean that there was nothing there to express. A thick, creased copy of “Being and Nothingness” earned an open sneer.   A still earlier infatuation with Objectivism, which he now considered a triumph of attitude over coherence. Derrida and other leading lights of Deconstructionism, which was the funniest philosophical hoax he could remember. Overall, he now considered formal philosophy a sack woven of millionfold words, and containing nothing much.

         Ah! “Stoopnagle's Tale is Twisted.” Good enough. He took it along into the kitchen, and read it while heating up what he still thought of as a TV dinner. Filled but not gratified after eating it, he reflected that the manufacturers of such things might as well give up on mashed potatoes. They had been trying for thirty years at least, with a very poor showing for it. After the simple cleanup of this feast, the few scraps looking strangely more genuine and organic than the original meal, he looked around the minimal equipage of his kitchen, feeling a familiar unrest, something he had been ignoring, or not done, or was missing – something. Whatever it was, it had been with him for a long time, and it seemed accustomed to being left hanging. It didn't bother him too much anymore.

         Lying abed, he slowly, thoughtfully broke the bindings of the day. He had long found that actually trying to sleep was futile, so the best plan was to prepare to be taken unaware. He thought about women. He did not live alone by choice, but by the apparent lack of choice. He thought that he had very little to offer a woman, and the utmost in personal honesty that he could bring to the consideration only confirmed it. How to explain, then, the fact that many of those who seemed to have even less value, even negative value, were not sleeping alone tonight? Partly dumb luck, he supposed, but mostly because they knew how to play the game. Thick-skinned enough to shrug off rejection, deriving their ideas of self-worth from ignorance and simple delusion, willing to use the crudest forms of psychological manipulation and coercion, and conceding only a very limited humanity to their targets.

         At this point, as he almost always did, Karl laughed at himself. These thoughts were a well-worn rut, and he could not for long avoid recognizing the strong notes of whining and self-justification. For all that, he still felt that the die was cast, and his options had closed. And his metaphors were well mixed.

         With that, he gave himself over to his few memories of the purely physical attributes of women. It was with the wonderfully soft, warm weight of breasts in his hands that sleep finally found him.

 

         In the dead hours of the morning, across the huge dull orange face of the setting Moon, another strangeness blew in the high cold winds; but there was no one to see.

 

         The skreeking of the alarm, sounding like a huge tin cricket, dragged him back from sweet oblivion. One groping hand, as if animated from afar by a clumsy puppetmaster, found and silenced it. With grim resolve, one eye opened, and seemed to consider whether or not to continue with this painful and self-abusive process. Sadly he decided, as he almost always did, that he was already too committed to stop now, so he set about rekindling the fires of body and spirit to a point just sufficient to get him to work. He disliked cheerful morning people, but only in abstract since he didn't actually know any. It was the idea alone which was offensive.

         Listlessly he assembled a costume, and tasted the idea of breakfast. No? No. Perhaps he could do something quick and easy, some toaster pastry perhaps, but the idea made him feel inexplicably sad and faintly nauseous. His stomach largely ruled his day, but it did not do so in detail. Some people he had met seemed exquisitely sensitive, skillfully riding the tides and currents of caffeine and blood glucose – and, of course, telling everyone about it – but he felt like a sullen rock in this surging sea of affect.

         On his way out the door, his eye was caught by a framed document that an antic mood had hung there some time ago. It was his own epitaph.

 

I proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my body to the earth.

As I am forgotten, and would be forgotten, so would I forget.

 

         The contrast between this epitaph, and the one that was supposed to have been carved on the tomb of Alexander the Great, seldom failed to amuse him.

 

A tomb now suffices him for whom the world was insufficient.

 

         Somehow, the final frisson of enjoyment was added by the fact that he had stolen his own from T.S. Eliot. As he savored this, like a frigid breath of utter desolation from the shadows of his mind came the thought that if the day ever came when he could no longer amuse himself, there would be very little left for him.

 

         Work was – work. He assembled widgets in a huge warehouse of a building, lit by energy-efficient metal halide fixtures, and run by idiots. Dressed in his antistatic smock and wearing his antistatic foot strap, he ran his card through the scanner by the door which logged him in, and waited for someone to tell him what he was doing today. He was, he found, assembling cradles. A flimsy piece of sheet metal, a fragile and badly designed printed circuit board, of which about half failed final test, and a large and usually warped plastic casting which often needed to be trimmed with a pocketknife. This was a multi megabuck company which sold hundreds of these things. Karl reflected, as he often did, that the first competitor which had its shit together would eat them for lunch.    Speaking of lunch, it was announced that it would be free today, since there was going to be some sort of meeting in the break room.

Karl considered this a pretty good deal, free lunch for the price of feigning attention for half an hour or so while some empty suit gibbered at them. He was pleased to find himself sitting next to Kathleen Sullivan. She was a broadly constructed woman, with short sandy hair and a rather extravagant bosom, which he liked to speculate on in odd moments. It was purely aesthetic speculation, though, since she was a lesbian. She had neither confessed nor proclaimed this, but simply mentioned it, and she was friendly and not interested in issuing gender manifestos. Karl rather liked her, and wished that she were more intelligent than she was. His own sort of smarts had not proved to be any advantage – in any realistic sense, in any leverage on physical reality, perhaps the opposite - and it also severely limited the number of people he could talk to freely. Talking to most people was a tricky thing, to both communicate and avoid giving offense. Sometimes he felt a pride of intellect, but it was like a pride in blue eyes, no accomplishment of his. Empty and sometimes shameful.          The suit's speech was nothing special until he mentioned employee loyalty, a gross tactical blunder which caused a few sniggers and a distinct restiveness in the audience. The suit yattered on, oblivious. Loyalty here was strictly a one way street. The company demanded it, but would terminate any employee if it looked like it might save a nickel. Karl had already survived three purges of salaried employees, and the twice-yearly Termination of the Temps was a sorrowful spectacle. He leaned over to Kathleen and muttered “Really a credit to his phylum.” He instantly regretted the words, and wished he could recall them. He glanced dolefully at her, wishing that there were some way he could apologize, and saw a very strange thing. Something that looked like a wavering distortion of light, the flurry of hot air over a stove burner, was settling like a mask over her face. It seemed to him that somehow he saw it more with his mind than his eyes, and he instantly related it, for no clear reason, to the thing he had seen drifting across the face of the Moon. It only lasted a second, and Kathy's only response to it, if it was a response, was to smile. Then she said, “Teleology recapitulates phylogeny.”

         Karl stared at her, stunned. If she had suddenly turned into a newt, it would at least have offered a beguiling element of fantasy, but with this he didn't even know where to begin. Then he noticed Jean, his section leader and immediate superior, gesturing impatiently at him. He had a pretty good idea why, and depression settled over him as he went to her office.

         Ten minutes later, he was closely shadowed by a rent-a-cop who made sure that he didn't pocket anything valuable. No longer an employee, he could safely be insulted without limit, and the management's real nature was no longer concealed. He cleaned out his locker and handed over his ID tag and parking pass. He had been fired often enough to show a stoic reserve, and not be surprised or bitter about being suddenly invisible to people he had almost considered friends. Strange things in the sky, unaccountable behavior, all were infinitely trivial. He knew he should be making plans, in fact should have made one for this situation long since, but he hadn't, and now felt trapped, immobilized in congealed misery, unable to do anything. His only emotion was a dim wonder that he still, foolishly, felt betrayed.

 

         At home, sitting on the couch, quite a lot of dead time went by. Nothing available had any trace of interest. He sat like a mechanism which had exhausted its last stores of energy, and might at any minute collapse in dust and rust. His heart kept beating because that was its function, and it was not yet badly damaged enough to stop. What was his function? He knew that the only answer to this was that he had to create or discover it himself, and that task he had failed absolutely. The job was only a metaphor for and distraction from this fundamental failure. Loneliness welled up again, calling to emptiness, and again he fought it back, leaving only a stuffy nose and a single disregarded tear running down a now expressionless cheek.

 

         More time passed. At last, as if triggered by some unsuspected timer mechanism, he decided that it was time to shop for groceries. He had no idea what he was feeling. There was a Wal-Mart nearby, and that would do well enough.

Emotion returned like a sudden bolt of lightning from sullen skies as he saw some dullard hesitating between two brands of potato chips in the food aisles. With savage judgment, hurling aside his usual diffidence, Karl saw him as bone-stick-stone-stupid, slack-jawed with dull surmise over his very simple problem. Then he felt a sudden, startling pulling at his face, as if a latex mask were being peeled off, and a devastating feeling of loss and horror as at the same time the thousand voices of his environment, the whispered knowledge always with him and awaiting his attention, began to recede like the sound of a tide retreating for the last time. Glycolysis, the Krebs cycle, the old Roman salarius, the Medieval argosies of the spice trade, the differences between wheat and triticale, all the infinitely multifold ways the immediate environment was integrated into the world at large. His mind clutched at them, but his mental fingers seemed to close only on air.

         Then it was as if the fingers themselves began to dissolve, and then the knowledge of how to use them, and finally the memory of ever having had them. Muscles and mind alike relaxing, he became what he observed. Among the bright, now meaningless colors  of the merchandise, he watched as the shopper made his decision. Karl watched him leave.

 

 

The tale is told.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

 

the first competitor which had its shit together would eat them for lunch.

 

I was there, and they did. The company was named “Telxon.”

 

 

         Also, and I cannot emphasize this too strongly, I am not Karl. There is, of course, some percentage of me in Karl, but the determination of the percentage is left as an exercise for the reader.