MORNING; DEFENDING THE NATIONAL HONOR; WHERE YOU FIT IN TO THE STORY

MORNING;



It was one of those nights when you turn around and the sky is thinning into bright watery blues. Now, he likes sunrises as much as the next guy, but after a night of heavy drinking, there`s always a mocking laugh in the birdcalls ringing through the air. That sunrise is endgame, and he hadn`t found what he was looking for. Sunrises are great when you wake up to see them, not when they silently sneak up on you and remind you that you are going to die.



But that, he thought, is how Buenos Aires nights go. Just leaving a protracted period of self-sequestering, the arrival of a friend from school had pulled him out into the infamous B.A. night once again. The people here start late and go long, usually drinking slowly into the morning hours. They take their time, rarely getting drunk like the palefaced northern european stock tend to do around 11 or 12.



He waited for his friends on the corner of Defensa and Estados Unidos. It was time to go home. Sensible people were up, walking to their jobs. On the other side you have the rest of which he was a part, one of the hordes of people, young and decrepit, beating the dead horse of the night into gibbets, then scattering the gibbets, then going out to look for another dead horse. He surveyed the tiles on the street. Square and white, ribbed with rows of shallow canals, smokey gray-blue in the thin morning air. Tree roots had burst up from the ground, stretching from a large tree with biege and leather mottled bark. Reclaiming terrain. This was happening all over the city, roots elbowing their way upward, cracking and breaking the tiles, forming ramps and leaving shards to be kicked or taken by passers by. Like earthy memories pressed prone under the tiles were pushing thier way upward to shake off moss and dust in the burgeoning sunlight.



Larry looked at his hands. At first glance he saw a uniform reddish pink. In a few seconds a shaded mottle of white, yellow and red, like a camoflauge pattern, revealed itself, flushed red at the thumbpad and at the base of his knuckles. He made a grate with his fingers and looked at the white tiles silvering, then at the red blood beating through his hands. He alternated between the baloon shapes of his hand and fingers and the shattered grid of the tiles. Everything would clarify in the light that was coming. Hands would fall on tools, feet would fall on tiles. The daily round reworked in it`s endless little varieties, crowds massing into and through bottlenecks on sidewalks and subway tunnels all over the city. The hand reddened. The tiles blued. Morning played it`s trump card, light, and he lived the day in a few seconds in his head, saw himself leap through the motions at dream-speed and crash-land into his bed. But he couldn`t go to bed tomorrow yet, he hadn`t gone to bed tonight.



He regretted telling off that Berkelely girl. But that was three bars earlier, already the distant past. He only regretted it briefly. As far as regrets went, he had bigger fish lurking under the lilypads in the mud pond of his memory. He`d had to do it. Someone had to stick up for good old North America.



Where the fuck are they? Who am I even waiting for. He wanted bed. The argentine, a 32 year old, who as far as he could tell worked in some paralegal capacity, had gone upstairs to look for his American friend, who had disappeared. He walked to the curb and back. They were friends, but they also had nothing to do with him. If he thought about it, he had no idea who they were and vice versa. What would happen if he just turned off his phone, got in a cab, and left? He was staying merely out of a sense of politeness. There wasn`t any obligation. Nothing held them together except for a few rounds of drinks. He spat on the curb, hitched up his belt and turned the corner, hailing the first cab he saw.



DEFENSE ON DEFENSA;



Of course, the worst attacks on his sense of National Identity didn`t come from Argentines. Well, that`s to say, those attacks were rare and, when they came, he could never be sure he understood exactly what they meant. There was the bald man in the black shirt who, when he noticed Larry`s broad, open shoulders and blocky walk, shouted ``CIA! CIA! Me das un cornelia.´´ He`d questioned his friend as to what the hell that meant, after grumbling Spanish retorts to himself for 10 blocks, but no one could figure out what a cornelia was.



The worst and most articulate attacks came from, of course, other expats. For some reason, everyone who used their passport had similar political reasoning. While it was easy to be against the war and smear George Bush`s name all over the world, those were a given, and Larry wasn`t going to step up and defend causes he didn`t believe in, causes to which he guessed he was opposed. But politics for Larry were always a matter of dissent. There was no viewpoint, there was only a stance from which one could attack another. If meaning was relational, then it had to follow that belief was relational as well -- one defined one`s viewpoint not by inherent merits but by what one disagreed with in others. If this was the case, than the only way to arrive at any kind of belief was to negate every belief one came into contact with. But that was just a flimsy rationalization. He did it because it pleased him to.



Anyway, living abroad aggravated his contempt for liberal elitism. Having supped on its sickly liquor once to many times in the US, now it`s mere fumes could produce an autonomic retching response. Al Gore`s pious face looking upwards towards the heavens as he recieved a Nobel Peace Prize, Hilary Clinton`s smiling as her cheeks struggled against their natural sag, promises, threats, all made him want to puke. So when he heard



`No, oh my God, you don`t want to go to Texas. Like, think texas, think of like, typical American, people who voted for Bush, like, ugh, consèrvative...`



His ears pricked up. She was right next to him. That distinctive nasal whine, the valley-girl turned international representative of the Democratic party. She probably went to American University, or Vassar College. Her sentences flacidly intoned upwards and trailed off towards the end like useless curliques flung off the ends of a teenage girls cursive. Blonde. He twitched, saliva rushed into his mouth. She had thrown a guantlet and she didn`t even know it yet.



He turned around, sliding his Gin and Tonic exactly two feet across the bar, squaring the traitorous slime who was badmouthing his native State. For, for the time being at least, he was going to be a Texan.



``You got a problem with Texas, missy?´´



``Excuse me?´´



His quarry turned from her local chat partner, who was wide-eyed and nodding to the loops and drops of her squeal with canine avidity. Her hair fell about her shoulders, shiny and blonde with the kind of volume that makes a hairdresser jealous. She had cut her teal T-shirt at the neck to reveal her shapely shoulders and cleavage for easy perusal. She was quite good looking. In fact, she was a hot piece of ass. But Larry wasn`t interested in that at the moment. He had an axe to grind.



``I said, you got a problem with Texas?``



``No, I don`t have a problem with Texas. I have a problem with the, like, idiots who live there, you know?´´



``Idiots, huh. Where you from?´´



``Berkely California. And that`s not like, even a part of the United States.´´



He noticed she was wearing a T-shirt that read `The Independent Republic of Berkely.´ That pushed him right up to the edge of saying something with more bite. He sipped his Gin, placed it carefully on the bar, and leaned in a little closer.



``OK, and where exactly do you think it is? What is your nationality? Where do you come from. And don`t give me that world citizen bullshit. Until they stop checking ID`s at the airport, we still live in a world with national boundaries. What made you hate your country so much you want to secede from it?´´



``I might be a little more inclined to identify myself with the US if it weren`t so full of close-minded assholes like you. What the hell are you doing here anyway, cowboy?´´



``I`m here in this bar looking for you, right now. It don`t explain nothin`for me to tell you why I`m here, or why I got this chip on my shoulder.´´


The porteño was cocking his eyes from face to face, trying to hear what Larry and his prey were saying to each other. The din from the downstairs room and the jukebox blaring Madonna hits threatened to swallow their argument. Larry alternated his gaze between the backlit rows of bottles, filled with neon liquids, red and green and pink, and the pretty face in front of him.



``I`m sick of city girls like you indicting people you`ve been sheltered from your whole life. What the fuck do you know about it? About close-minded, conservative America? Your country is a red and blue map on election years and what you read in the New York Times, and that`s it. No wonder you hate yourself, soaking up all that bullshit.



You grow up patting your friends on their backs for sharing the same ideas as you, you go to a College where they affirm what you always knew was true, and the degree you get is your badge to know everything about everybody. So you can`t reconcile what the nation does abroad. Instead of doing shit to change it, you whine about how fucked up the situation is. You don`t support the war. I`m sure you don`t. But did you pay your income taxes last year, or did your dad pay them for you? You might not support it, but you paid for it, and that`s what`s causing your identity crisis.



So you blunder around the world, stitching Canadian flags to your backpacks, whining about how ignorant people are in Texas and apologizing for things you have no right to apologize for. But let me ask you somethin´. What are you going to do, driving on the interstate, when your car breaks down? Some ignorant redneck is going to fix it. Ignorant rednecks built your house, paved your roads and put groceries in your supermarket. Ignorant rednecks drove the truck that carried your new outfit to Anthropologie. All you have is contempt for a people who´s ideas are more diverse and developed then your own, developed from experience, not from an immense vocabulary of bullshit it takes 4 years to digest and regurgitate. Yea, we`re the pimples on the ass of progress, brainwashed by Fox news. Go ahead and lecture me about global warming. But before you get all misty-eyed, dreaming about what a better world it would be without all of us normal people, ask yourself what the good old USA would like if it was full of useless educated fucks like yourself. If I´m close-minded, your just fucking blind.´´



Having purged the bullshit that was building up after weeks of hearing the same crap, Larry took a big swig of his G&T, slammed it on the table, wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his denim jacket, smacked his lips, and went off to find his friends. They were smoking by the window in the back of the bar.



``Let`s get out of here.´´ He said, hitching up his belt. ``This place stinks of bourgeousie guilt.´´ He would recount what he said to the Berkely girl several times that night, and each time it would be a little more eloquent, well-worded, forceful, and convincing. By the end of the night, he was longing for a second chance to tell her off, because with the new additions and edits to his argument, he could do it in much higher style. But the opportunity never presented itself. The rest of the conversations he had were muddled back-and-forths in Spanish, all beginning with the response ``Estados Unidos´´ to the question, shouted and in English, always, ``Where are you from!´´

WHERE YOU FIT INTO THE STORY;

Beginning this again, I can`t help but think of Mark Z. Danielewski`s intro to his novel `House of Leaves.´ There waits on the first page the single sentence, possibly the most gnawing hook I`ve read, `This is not for you.´

Well, Honey, I`m going to start at the opposite end. This is just for you. This isn`t for anyone else. The best part, the sweetest revelation, is that you`ll never read it. Don`t kid yourself. Most likely you`re the wrong person, and have no idea what I`m talking about. Even if you are who I`m writing to, you`re not. I don`t know or care who you are now. You are yours. The adressee of this, whatever the fuck it is, is, and will always be, mine. And mine, and mine alone.

Who are you? You`re at my heels. You`re in the air. You`re circling around my head, obscuring minutiae I would otherwise be noting, a string of yellow pearls around a skirt of fat on an old woman´s neck, how the white lines of the crosswalk have been scraped away to almost nothing as I step into the street, the sun blinding out the traffic light in front of it. I don`t see these things. You`re shining behind them.

You`re the proof that everything I thought when I was 16 was dead on. You`re the sticky stuff, what I can`t get rid of, although I can see in especially lucid moments that I wouldn`t want to even if I could.

Because this morning I woke up bathed in your sweat, dominated by your dreams, and that afterglow hung on me through toast, coffee, a subway ride, work, and all the rest. Like a laughing squeezed through my innards, bursting the bolts of fittings as it passes, ping, pang, a steaming cloud cresting at the base of the throat. I swallowed the laugh and regained control. Because that control is something you gave, or something I took from you.

Who were you? You are an amalgamation of female parts, and memories of female parts. You are an argument I keep fresh with your image, words and responses, back and forth. You are the receptacle in which I try to put the last word. But I beat around the bush, and everybody knows what the last word is, and why it can`t be said. There is no turning to face the future.

You are at least two, that`s to say, your based on at least two true stories. I`m not sure what process I employed in your fusion, or why you continue to remain seperate in my unconscious. When you two synchronize the rhythms of your returns, you will be unstoppable.

So just when I think I walk with my own two legs, your white flesh falls over my dreams like a heavy snow. And I wake up loving like I learned to love you first, loving in silence, loving in shame. I tried a thousand things to stop it, I stretched you over another`s skin, but she rejected the procedure twice and limped away. You`re the donated organ that nobody wants, a heart on a bed of crushed ice in my closet. I made you into a cartoon and killed you in the traditional ways. I pushed you off of cliffs, dropped anvils on you, tried alien ray guns, pepperred you with bullets from the rubbery barrel of a tommygun. That`s when I learned that cartoons are almost impossible to kill. You could be elastic, a hole, whatever. In the end, I was the one who would end up being chased.

So where do you fit into the story? You`re not a muse. Please. If anything, you gave me obscure, sentimental poetry. When I try to write about you, I find myself surrounded by clichès, like the explorer in the tomb fighting off hungry rats with a dying torch. Those words will eat me like any other who`s been in love. They`re insatiable, and more durable than laws. I`ll love you forever. I think about you every day. You are my life, my heart, my soul.

The truth is, you don`t fit in. Anywhere I put you, something else important pops out. So I``ll leave you on the sidebar, scrolling down, separate and paralell, maybe meeting somewhere in the distant. Past or future, I guess we`ll never know.


AFTERNOON LIGHT;

What do you think the light looks like? He asked. I think it looks like melting butter.

Palermo lakes, 5 PM. The sun slipped behind the darkened branches of a huge sycamore, behind the curving lake. Plastic bottles listed with the swans and the ducks.

A slow funeral, she said.

COMING SOON

Stay tuned for next week´s update: THE EXPAT POET DEFENDS HIS NATIONAL HONOR AGAINST SEVERAL PERFIDIOUS ATTACKS

THE EXPAT POET THINKS ABOUT WRITING A BLUE COLLAR SCIENCE FICTION HORROR STORY, BUT FALLS ASLEEP INSTEAD

The idea first welled up when he saw a graphic novel of H.P. Lovecraft`s ``Forgotten Manuscripts`` against the glass flanks of a kiosk as he walked down Av. Corrientes, just before the Pastuer station on the B line. He remembered loving Lovecraft as an adolescent, although his novels were a bit hard to follow. When he saw the black and white illustration of an old man with a longish beard fringe gaping his mouth-hole in utter terror, the whole Lovecraft aesthetic came rushing back, associated with certain other memories. He bought the book for 17 pesos and 90 centavos. The man selling the magazine seemed impressed with his choice, and said, ``No hay mucho de Lovecraft.`` He was right, it was the first time he`d seen any Lovecraft in Buenos Aires, but he`d seen stranger things. Looking down after taking his the blue plastic bag, he saw some other books stacked under the display racks, and while he couldn`t tell you the titles, he remembers illustrations of hooded figures cresting hills under enormous, pock-marked moons, broken-windowed towers leaning in darkness, and other horrific paraphanalia. It warmed him to think that a person who sold used car listings and porn had his own taste and interests. It gave him, he thought, character.

So the idea was gaining momentum as he skipped down the subway stairs and got in line to buy a ticket. A horror story. He`d write a horror story. That was it - no more of this autobiographical crap. He`d always liked that mood, that vibe, that horror aesthetic, and he`d always regarded H.P. as a cut above the rest of the horror crowd. Like, in Edgar Allan Poe`s league, except with out the French stamp of approval. His demonic halucinations had inspired entire genres in cinema, music and video games. No one talked about him much in Lit. 101, for sure, but he was much more widely read than some of the bizarre texts he`d been obliged to read and write about. What was that one, that terrible book for Intro to Modernism? About a fat immigrant woman in NYC in the nenteenth century? Some slavic name. He thought about the descriptions of her body, this giant solid earth-mother type body, and how he imagined her as white and flabby; then he thought about the insane, flabby, putrid Cthulu wading out of the sea in the story bearing the monster`s name.

As the subway`s windows slow-scrolled by, obscuring the other side of the platform, he looked at his own body to see if his gut was noticeable underneath a white button down shirt. Yep, like the slavic woman and Cthulu, he was a rack of bones for hanging disgusting white flab. Oh well. He crowded up with the others, blocking the path of three passengers trying to get out. They pressed their way through the impatient wall of flesh and faces and limbs in front of them, and he got on the train, leafing through his recent purchase.

The idea was now swelled enough to be given a name, but it also started getting mixed up with his massive insecurities and vanities. The story would be the one. The break out story. He`d finally have found an audience. He`d write a best-selling collection. He`d laugh at all those hacks pumping out magic realism that thought it was surrealism, or vice versa, in thousands of MFA workshops across the country. The book tour, the interviews, the lit groupies. His dramatic rise to literary fame fell step by step into place in his mind as the electric womk announced the closing of the subway doors and it slurred out of the statioin.

There was also Claudia. She`d read it and fall in love with him and be his. They`d get married in the States at the family lakehouse and he`d convince the old man to bankroll her immigration and find her easy employment. He saw himself getting a blowjob in the bathroom of the family estate in Westchester, then her legs cocked and hinging in the air as he plugged away, taking pot shots at her squirming, furry darkness. Yea, that was it, a horror story, already a collection of horror stories, and a novel besides. He knew a promising film maiker in NY, a friend of his from school, yea, he`d love the idea. They`d collaborate on a screenplay, which of course would sell for millions. There was nothing to it. Get the aesthetic right and it`s a done deal. He was tired of writing about himself. He wanted to write something different, to create something out of nothing, a story that could live in a self-sustaining universe. The subway coasted into Puerryedòn. He tucked the book under the transparent sweat splotch in his armpit.

The heat was unreal. It was viscous, draining, like a vampire fog bloating itself on the energies of the people. Womk. The doors hissed open.

He got out and pushed his way through another sweating wall of humanity, massed up with the crowd in front of the escalator. Jesus Christ, he thought, why doesn`t anyone use the stairs. Fuck. If you ever touch... But the idea was getting even more tangled up and swollen as he skipped the line and two stepped up the stairway twenty feet down the platform. A blue-collar horror story. That, he thought, was original. He`d had another idea a few weeks ago about telling the working man`s story. No, not some Marxist polemic shoved down the poor guy`s throat, a genuine approach to the problems of working class America. But he hadn`t settled down to write that one. Maybe he cound combine the two. A working class horror story... In the future. Now that would make a great screenplay. He was getting ahead of himself. He emerged into the swampy chiaroscuro of the streets, Puerryedòn, crowded with the workers going to work or leaving work or working in the streets, but he didn`t see them, absorbed in his idea.





He ducked past two business men strolling and chatting at the pace of sun-bathing crocodiles, and his train of thought was interrupted by an involuntary ejaculation; outofmyfuckingwaydon`ttouchmemotherfucker. But he just mumbled ``permisso`` and stretched out his stride as he got in front of them, feeling free and agile as a cat. He banked right on Boulonge Sur Mer and then crossed left, between a white van and a taxi, carefully timing a running spurt to the other side of the street, and rounded the corner onto Lavalle.



A plotline. That`s what he needed. An event. A happening. An occurance. He didn`t have much experience with plotlines. In fact, he had no idea where to start. The idea of a plot put him in mortal fear. The only thing he`d ever been able to do was write short, obscure prose tracts he vainly called ``stream of consciousness.´´ He defended this lack of ability by arguing with himself that real life didn`t come in tidy plotlines - that if you asked someone to tell you their story, you usually got either a blank stare or a sparse list of achievements: graduations, stints in the army, first jobs, deaths, and weddings. No, he was after the salient moments, when the incredible richness of the world broke unexpectedly through the glaze of quotidium. These moments were characterized, for L.F., as moments of bright color, complex patterns in buildings, broken concrete, or clouds, and other things he found impossible to describe. He was jealous of photographers, visual artists and sculptors.

He didn`t want to say ``a rusted tugboat on the banks of the river.´´ He wanted you to see that particular tugboat in that particular bank, the unique dapples and orbs of chemical-cheese-colored rust, and the rotting wood on the decks: the image, in total, of a thing. Right down to the details. Rusted iron hoops through which ropes once passed, the heron, black beak like a thorn in profile against the sigh of blue behind the boat, expiring into purple darkness.


But he`d always run into insurmountable problems. One, his vocabulary was woefully inadequate for the kind of detail in the things he wanted to portray. There were innumerable items lurking on the tugboat, and he would need a duden to name them all. But of course, that wasn`t the only problem. He didn`t just want to list the different parts. He needed to have an apposite metaphor or simile for each one. And he was already running short of similes in his brief career as a unpublished expat writer.


Yea, he thought, the stream of consciousness stuff was alright, and he could always hide a lack of content behind ``formal experimentation´´ or an ´´aesthetic,´´ but the chances of connecting with an audience by using tricks like those were slim. He walked under the lifeless stare of the manikins behind store windows on Lavalle. Lifeless manikins. Yea, there was something salient about that. He should put that in a prose poem. Or maybe a story about manikins coming to life and going to clubs in Buenos Aires. A man pushed a cart stacked high with recyclables, swearing as passing cars honked at him. Hmmm. Manikins. That was surreal. Nah, to clichè. Forget about it.

What he needed was a real plot. He jogged up the stairs to his first floor apartment, which was next to a Jewish community center, flipping the keys on his finger so he`d remember not to put them in his pocket and have to fish them out 30 seconds later when he got to his door. He unbolted the deadbolt, undid the lock, threw his backpack on his chair and stripped off his shirt.

A plot. He needed a plot. His notebook lay laughing on the desk, awaiting his afflatus. He yawned and farted. Should he start at the last event and work up to it, or start at the beginning and improvise, working out the details in revisions? He wasn`t sure. It wasn`t writer`s block. That was a myth for the lazy, he just really didn`t have an idea, besides that he wanted to write a blue collar science fiction horror story. Ok. Start with a bricklayer in his chevy. Smoking a cigarette. He pulls over to go into a rest stop and it`s closed, so he walks up to the edge of the New England forest to take a whizz. But how much should he say about the bricklayer? Will they even lay bricks in the future? His pen stopped its rasp on the paper. He scratched himself. What was his name? Buzz? Frank? Did he live in a trailer, or a duplex? Did he vacation in Maine? Maybe, instead of smoking, he should be a dipper. That was better. He should have a fat wad of tobacco in his lower lip at all times. As he gets mauled by a gibbering space demon. No. Getting mauled by a quivering demon jelly was an unacceptable endpoint to a plotline. That story could be told in a few sentences, saving the reader pages of useless meandering. And though he thought he could describe a decent demon from another dimension, he didn´t think that literature should consist of bricklayers being slain by the undead whilst urinating. No, it wouldn´t do. Fuck. He needed something else. He needed real plot.



But if there was nothing literary to fill the gap between Buzz the Bricklayer taking a piss and being hewn limb from limb by a formless mass of howling mouths and razor claws, he knew he was lost, because that was all he could come up with at the moment. He was starting to feel ridulous. The whole idea had already balooned and deflated, and there he was, lying on the floor, watching the ceiling fans blur and shake around the nipple-like glass bowls. He was hot and tired and chafed. No, there was no point in even getting started. He might as well have started his law school apps right then.



On the other hand, the nipple-light wobbled stupidly, throwing back the shadows of the fan onto the ceiling, and if he stared at it for a few seconds, the spinning shadow blades appeared as a pulsating asterix. Maybe, he thought, there was something salient about that.



A plot.



He passed into a sleep haunted by noises of buses and cars on the floor.



His bananas had achieved a state of turgid putrefaction in a plastic bowl on the kitchen counter.