So this is the opening to OCCAM'S RAZOR, a short story collective I'm developing with my friend Xiaochang. It's rare that I share my writing publicly over the internet, so savor the occassion....
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Fortuitous Return
An Overture
You’re not supposed to believe it could happen like this.
Time has crept behind you like a pantomime. There’s no use speaking back. There’s an enormity in your walk these days that leaves a loitered specter on every street you walked before. Your hands and feet are on loan, shaking frantic with a lack of recognition. Gone are the days when you used them as your vehicle for expression, an exit from the caged, hissing enmity of your bones. Gone are the days where you lay on the beach with your arms cast up, reaching out into that bedlam of distant stars and jets, receiving a strange transmission that coils through the maze of your fingerprints and shoots straight into your heart, whipping you into a monster, chiseling you into a man.
You hear them coming from more than five blocks away. One ambulance, then another. You back up into a dilapidated brick wall you didn’t see coming, your shoulders crashing in perfect alignment with a pair of electric pink graffiti wings. You find yourself face-to-face with the traffic of this three-point intersection on the Chicago Northside. The “six corners”, as it’s referred to in this particular neighborhood.
Like so many of the intersections in this city, there’s a fatalistic perplexity to them; an intergalactic convergence of past, present, future. A danger from below. They are places that bring the entire world down to a single tether. Places with a perennial, almost menacing déjà vu. Places where people have been known to have strokes from simply waiting at the corner. Places where people plan to meet, then never find one another. Places where people clear out during storms, for fear of an increased probability of getting struck by lightning. Places where people are afraid of looking up; where tourists forget their maps; where senses merge and explode—where accidents wait.
The traffic shifts out onto the sidewalk. They come now in spectacular blur. (One ambulance, then another.) You study the unfazed pedestrian jowls, the willfully deaf marching up the train platforms in the same narcoleptic cadences, the eight foot transvestite in the bright red fright wig spitting into her paper bag, tossing it over her shoulder and crossing the street with a lax neglect. She misses the ambulance by a mere gasp of a second, then proceeds to strut into the revolving doors of the Wells Fargo, her ass jouncing like a hopped up mare, before and after everyone. She is spitting into the face of death, you decide. She has become supernatural without knowing. She is dancing with dinosaurs, reborn to herself. She can see the future in a way that you can’t.
You close your eyes and slam your wrists against the wall, hanging there like a decrepit crucifix ornament. You stretch your arms out to the of your graffiti wings, pleading them to take you up and dissolve you into a gas. But when you open your eyes again, you are back; back into barbaric concert of the streets, where the pneumatic bodies have filled them up, where they spin and shake around like sand, swayed by the sounds of domestic belligerence and nervous jazz. Back into the hypocrisy of the living, who forgot they weren’t dreaming, too stranded in the tremors of solitude to walk in accord. You swing your hands back into your pockets and watch the sirens shrink into the avenue and get swallowed up by the evening before you can insist that it take you along with it. You wonder where it must be going and force a scenario under pressure.
They’re headed west down Fullerton. Toward Logan Square. The building is above a liquor store and ear, nose and throat clinic. Typical story, really. A Puerto Rican landlady eaten alive by her canaries. The granddaughter has climbed halfway up a fire escape and is spitting out the gnawed off ear of her stuffed polar bear. She screams holy murder as the paramedics take her by the arms and pull her into a police van. (This is how her father was taken from her back in December.) They’ll assure her that she’s not in any trouble and unsuccessfully attempt to reach her Aunt Lucia, who is supposed to be working at the CTA booth at LeSalle and Van Buren, but fell asleep in the furniture department at Sears during her lunch break. Turkey and red onion. She should have known better. She will curse herself for being “in the wrong place at the wrong time” as so many others do. She will resolve to stop attending Sunday mass, tell her priest that: “Destiny is a starvation for coincidence.” She is probably right. No one is ever where they should be. Everything is just barely being held together.
Do these stories seal a space between you and the anonymous world? Do they recover a link to the unexceptional? Do they unbolt the corkscrewed lampoons crammed into each shrill, narcoleptic corner of this city? Do they confirm all those feverishly real, giddily debilitating blue strokes of recognition you experience upon meeting a face (or even the suggestion of a face) with a sort of inexplicable familiarity about it? The sort with an unrequited history that you’re incapable of tracing back, but are almost certain – no – unquestionably certain exists?
Or is really much simpler than all of that?
Because it’s like this: it is 1983 and you are thirty-three years old. You’ve shaved your head into a Mohawk like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. You are thirty-three years old, terrified you may never really finish “coming of age.” Thirty three years old, and standing before a crosswalk, waiting for someone to take your hand. Thirty three years old, and still no closer to knowing anything at all.
No, you’re not supposed to believe it could happen like this.
The nostalgic chime from an ice cream van is drawing upon you. Sounds of Latin children follow them as they breaking hands with their mothers, running out into the street like jackals. You’ve heard this melody before, though you can’t seem to locate when and where. Someone is singing along now. A hostage voice. A child’s voice. Near, then from faraway. Soft and sweet and sinister.
My son, John,
Went to bed,
With his trousers on,
One shoe off,
And one shoe on!
Diddle, diddle, dumpling,
My son, John.
The crowds irrigate. The voice crescendoes. The streetlights strobe. The billboards go blank. You look around you to see if you’re alone. You are not. There is a girl, a girl of seventeen in her underwear, standing just a kitty-corner away. Her back is turned away from you. Her arms are clasped upon her shoulders. Her arms are crossed upon her chest. Her gallant red hair is floating up like a cobweb. She is turning around now with her head down at the gutter. You can’t make her out in these shaking lights. She looks up at you, slow and afraid. The light above her thunders out and freezes there in a cryogenic blue. Her arms slide away from her bare breasts like an emaciated Venus. It’s her, you’re thinking. Your schoolboy infatuation. Your beacon saint of past, present and future. A girl whom you left by the riverbank sixteen years ago.
Yes, it’s her. It’s B.
She points out at the remaining four corners. It’s them, you say aloud. The boys in flapping collars. The boys in turquoise ties. The boys of Belvedere Academy. The boys whom shared that same beach, years ago, swapping your dreams with their arms cast up. Edward. Geoffery. Ralph. The Doom Troopers. The only faces you will ever know.
Yes, it’s them. And they want you back.
They leave their corners to congregate at the one left empty. B is standing there watching you, seeing the future in a way that the four of you can’t. Four, you think. The number of wings beneath a tabletop of chair. Four. The number of wings on a dragonfly. Four. The number of strings on a viola. Four. The number of seconds it will take to run across this junction to meet them in embrace, then start your entire life over again.
You dip one foot into the asphalt. The song recapitulates:
My son, John,
Went to bed
With his trousers on,
One shoe off,
And one shoe on!
Diddle, diddle, dumpling,
My son—
BOOM! The traffic whineys to a halt. The force comes crashing into your side like the foot of a giant. The impact bolts you into the air, turning you upside-down into a curling flail of limbs. The man in the ice cream truck springs out as you collapse onto his windshield. The van whittles back-and-forth before falling to its side. Your bones smash onto the asphalt then out it comes, a spattering rainbow of ice cream bars shooting from the rear-view window, landing around you in a lathering, sticky carnage. Your spine is ticking. Your canines quake. And the children have broken hands with their mothers, running out into the street like jackals. They’re seizing up the carnage by the fistful, cramming their mouths with your evidence. They’re biting at the cops who have stocked up at the curb to pull them back to the sidewalk. He’s still alive, says one cop to the other. They can hear them coming from more than five blocks away. One ambulance, then another.
The song is playing still.
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