Half-Remembered, Fully Felt

The beginning of a story I've been writing over winter break, heavily inspired by Dave Eggers's novel A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, as well as events from my own life.

            Through the small window behind the stained wraparound curtain – stained with what looked like either coffee or a case of Montezuma’s revenge, Brook wasn’t sure – the November ground looked frosty and crystalline-looking.  Like the way ice cream gets in the freezer when you don’t touch it for months.  Winter wasn’t even a month away and already the ground was turning to ice cream, with a little grass for garnish.

            Brook’s mother let out a moan, one free of any intonation.  He couldn’t tell whether it was a moan of pain, or of grief, or of something else.  What something else?  People don’t moan under favorable circumstances.  Unless it’s an orgasm.  A really climactic, get-the-camera-rolling-it’s-the-money-shot orgasm.
            “Nurse!” he yelled into the hallway.
            His mother had been cycling in and out of consciousness as if she were running laps.  Brook had alternated day and night shifts with his twin sister Andi (imagine the confusion of their A.M. kindergarten teacher when she had taken a roll call on the first day of school) since their mother had stopped eating five days ago.  Andi had come in for the first day, while he had taken over that night – since Andi had a husband and two kids to look after and what in the hell did Brook at age twenty-five without a college degree have to show for himself?
            He had a plastic cup of cinnamon applesauce he poured into a little styrofoam bowl.  He held the spoon to her mouth.  “Eat up, Mom.”
            Mom made no gesture, no indication that she was even aware of his presence.  Nothing.

            Nurse Rhonda came in, a stout black woman whose purple scrubs made her look like a distant cousin of Barney the dinosaur.  “You called?”
            Brook was surprised she had reported.  He was used to waiting minutes that turned to hours that turned to what seemed like centuries for the women at the nursing home to come by, trotting at the speed of toddlers, with their squeaky food and medicine carts full of mauve-colored trays that were bizarrely shaped like UFOs and probably doubled as bedpans.
            “She’s crying out.  Maybe she needs more morphine.”
            “I already gave her the dosage the doctor told me.  Sure she ain’t just trying to tell you somethin’?”
            Gee, maybe I’m in utter agony and wish your useless ass would put me out of my fucking misery something?
            “Well, I think maybe a few more milligrams will do the trick.  It would make me feel more comfortable.”

            “I don’t think the law or my job bends for what makes you comfortable, Mister Stanton.  ‘Fraid you’ll have to talk to the doctor when he gets here in the morning.”  She stomped merrily back to her cart – “I’ll take her food tray though” – and continued down the hallway – stomp, stomp, stomp – like a good dinosaur.
            Brook took a seat in the wheelchair his mother had used when she was still mobile.  He wished he and his sister could’ve pulled together the funds last year to send their mother to Westhaven, the unequivocally more glorious convalescent home on the other side of town (because whatever’s the better of two options is always on the other side of town; don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise).  But Mom had spent most of the government pensions she had received since their father’s death on vodka and cigarettes and barely had enough left over for a stick of gum, let alone a nursing home that wouldn’t be in every way perpetually execrable.

            Furthermore, Mom’s Medicaid kicked in late, and most of the first three months of nursing-home-rent ended up coming out of Andi’s pocket, to her made-very-known chagrin.
            “So, I’m paying half a thousand a month for a woman who probably didn’t spend half a thousand on me for my entire childhood?” 
            “Well, I’ll pitch in a hundred or so.  Whatever I can scrape up.  Odd jobs here and there.  So you’ll probably end up breaking even.”

            Andi worked as a patient care tech at the community hospital to get herself through nursing school.  Her husband, Steve, was a nurse at the same hospital.  At times Brook wondered why the two didn’t just take Mom in and save everyone the trouble of having to stop by every other day to see if her meals were finally being delivered on time and whether or not she won the week’s round of Bingo and got to add a little something to her forty-five-dollars-a-week allowance, and to drive around town to spend that allowance on a twelve-pack of beer or some other hopeless expenditure like a new pair of socks that could never be allowed to travel to the building’s laundry unit, otherwise known as the Land-of-Say-Hasta-La-Vista-to-Your-Underpants.

            There was an old Sylvania television unit – TV was too modern of a term for it – in the corner of the room beyond the track that the curtain ran on.  A crappy soap opera was playing on mute – probably something the nurses watched when they came in to deliver meals two hours late.  These shows were only fun if women were beating the hell out of each other in their kitchens or swimming pools, which they were not.  Brook switched the channel haphazardly to a tabloid news channel airing a documentary on Courtney Love.  He gave up and turned the television unit off.

            His mother had gone through phases like this in the past, since she had been diagnosed with COPD.  She would give up talking first, so that no one could be sure of the problem at hand to do anything to assuage it.  Then she would give up eating, no matter how many bowls of peaches and cottage cheese and cups of 7-Up were placed on the wheeled table at her bedside.  Then she would zone in and out of reality – either an effect of malnourishment or a futile means of willing herself to die – no one was completely sure.  “They’re trying to kill me, they’re trying to kill me,” she would sometimes say, which in that hellhole was never entirely ruled out as a possibility in Brook’s mind.  This time wasn’t much different than the others.

            The door creaked open; Andi had arrived with last week’s laundry.  It had become increasingly difficult to change their mother since she couldn’t (or wouldn’t) move of her own volition, so the nurses had been leaving her in diapers and nightgowns that could easily be taken off and put back on.  Most of her wardrobe she had shrunk out of; while she had weighed about one-hundred-fifty pounds the year before, give or take, she was now a kind ninety.  Skin hung off in her arms and thighs like Grecian drapes.
            “How is she?  Said anything?”
            “No, but I’m sure that when she does,” Brook got up from the wheelchair, “it will be something glorious.”

Country Rain

His grandfather had owned a farm
Far from the city bustle, where
Easter eggs were cleverly hidden
in the nooks of trees.
Some were found, and placed in
wicker baskets filled with plastic grass.
Others were left to rot.
One boy, clad in overalls, didn't eat eggs,
so he threw them at his grandfather's ducks,
one by one, because back then he
didn't know anything about pain.

Sixteen years had passed,
and the boy, now grown,
drove his pickup truck through
that country town,
in search of his late grandfather's farmhouse.
It rained and rained,
and even with his road map in one hand,
and a cup of cheap coffee in the other,
he didn't know the address.
Somewhere in those creeping provinces,
that house surely still stood.
Perhaps he had already passed it.

Hump-Day Hunk: Chris Folz

 Because he's been here, misting over my computer screen:

Source Credit: CoverMenMag

Songs I Love, Vol. 2: The Smashing Pumpkins - "The Boy"

This song was released only as a b-side to the legendary album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.  While "The Boy" was not officially released until the "1979" single was issued months after the album's debut, I think it is easily one of the best songs from its recording sessions.  As a love song, it's about as simple as they come, dappling in the childhood innocence of falling in love for the first time, and capturing that spirit better than the five billion other songs that say the same thing.

MHz

The top is erect
like a Loxodonta tusk or the tip of
a pen.  A bastioned antenna that can broadcast
you into the 50s on Nostalgie or piss out the current
affairs on the Radio publique.  These sine waves whirl above
the smog and traffic like diamond dust sprinkled across a shipwrecked
ice cream float, so discordant yet dulcet in their dos-à-dos, minueting over
the quoins and the shingles that oscillate from vanilla to beige to vanilla.  Even
in the shards of sex shops and cobblestone the tendrils of the city are a chopped-up custard slice of brown and ivory puff pastry cream, dissolved chessman reflecting on an aqueous surface of pulverized sugar.  Who chopped off the heads of these bishops and squashed them into mille-feuilles?  From a prostitute’s parapet we can see the roads split off into twelve different directions,                    
each cleaved from their Neoclassical umbilical cords. 

In each direction past the fearful symmetry of Coca-Colas and Motorolas are boisterous arabesques that scream over the humdrum of sub-people stepping out of submarine-taxis like matryoshka dolls.  A slice of wedding cake they call the Sacre Coeur sits perched on one hill, guarded by blue horsemen who sleep on the job and a lady rained down with a cocktail parasol and an accordion, octaves out of tune. 

Homecoming

Brown the walls, dark the coffee stains
The carpet maroon, dusty museum rope
Smell of age-old food and medication tethered ‘round my nostrils
and the snaky rattle of the drinking fountain
spitting out water, poisoned and polymer.
Nicotine rooms with flyspecked floors as an oxygen tank
that muffles the soft, raspy sweetness of your voice.

It was the eighth of November.
Words whispered through willows of the unconscious,
Taunted by distant gestures of a clock crucified to the wall
With each second, pulled farther from the seconds that were ours,
when sunshine bled into your venetian blinds like grapefruit
and a deck of cards lay scattered on your bed.
Gin and rummy and games I never bothered to remember
between the indifference of your machine and cigarette breaks.
Fresh spring flowers and watered-down insta-coffee
soaked into my nostrils as I wheeled your throne
on wood etched with trails of a thousand others.
The legless man who roamed the hallways and never missed a hello,
Where is he now?

For 22 months you called it “home” but as you jerked your hand
from a compendium of phone numbers—addresses—grocery lists,
and jerked my tears to diamond dust
we knew it was not quite that, a mere mat at the door.
So when I float back to that November frost and the
cerulean clouds clashed against crimson sky,
I think of that mat at the door where you went to die.

Called it a garden on the sign, but what a joke, we knew.
The only thing that grew – your own impatience,
and I guess sometimes my love.
Even if it didn’t always outpace the hasty fleets
of birthday cards—grocery lists—poorly-assembled desserts,
usually shipwrecked upon arrival.

“Tell them I’m not here” I said when the phone intruded,
grabbing the month’s worth of laundry and inhaling a petting zoo
and abruptly vanishing, because sometimes the car radio
was an easier conversationalist.
Your hands were soft as a pincushion
and your body a mere framework
and you shrank into a new wardrobe each week
to break the static, because there had to be some change that didn’t
make its way into the backs of the daily paper.

It was the eighth of November.
Your hand squeezed colors into mine
under a cotton candy sky,
whether an act of conscience or electricity,
of love or of urgency.

"Conduit"

The X-Files - Season One
Aired: October 1, 1993
Starring: David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson
Written by Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon
Directed by Daniel Sackheim

Following on the heels of three impeccably-filmed and engagingly-written episodes is no easy task. Couple that with a formula that starts to mold as any televised series progresses, and the element of surprise begins to wane. Unfortunately this episode falls victim to both obstacles, but in spite of itself proves a valuable character piece, capitalizing primarily on Duchovny's poignant and determined portraiture of Mulder in an episode that provides a vehicle into his character's backstory.

The plot of "Conduit" centers around an alien abduction not drastically unlike those from the pilot, yet follows a structure more akin to the previous episode "Squeeze." Like that episode, this one doesn't do much to further the main story arc. There's no presence of alien implants, government cover-ups, or shadowy figures lurking around the Pentagon. But all the same it is a story about aliens, and thus doesn't qualify as a monster-of-the-week affair.

This episode is perhaps most notable for its focus on the Samantha Mulder storyline briefly addressed in the pilot. In the teaser, a teenager named Ruby Morris vanishes while camping with her mother and brother at Lake Okobogee (there's one for the tongue), a presumed hotspot for UFO sightings. The case obviously has a personal stake for Mulder, who is all-too-reminded of Samantha's abduction that he is driven to some rather slipshod errors in judgment, namely tampering with a crime scene.

One particular point of interest to this episode is the character Kevin, Ruby's younger brother who seems to be perceiving binary code through television static. Later in the episode these numbers are revealed to be part of a satellite transmission, suggesting that Kevin is the titular "conduit" capable of decoding messages from space. While this is initially written as the crux of the episode, it's importance is never quite resolved, as Ruby is returned in the final act with no apparent link to Kevin's psychic ability. "Conduit" was in part written by Howard Gordon, who would go on to achieve greater fame as the eventual showrunner of 24. One unfortunate commonality of his episodes are red herrings that have little fundamental bearing on the main plot. This one is forgivable, as at the heart of "Conduit" is Mulder's personal journey to face the loss of his sister, and the denouement is quite beautiful to say the least, but it detracts from an episode that could have otherwise been far more compelling.

Grade: B

"Tabula Rasa"

Lost - Season One
Aired: October 6, 2004
Starring: Naveen Andrews, Emilie de Ravin, Matthew Fox, Jorge Garcia, Maggie Grace, Josh Holloway, Malcolm David Kelley, Daniel Dae Kim, Yunjin Kim, Evangeline Lilly, Dominic Monhagan, Terry O'Quinn, Harold Perrineau, Ian Somerhalder
Written by Damon Lindelof
Directed by Jack Bender

This is my first review of 2011 (I started this week's other post two days before Christmas and took a break in between - getting four teeth pulled tends to do that to you), so Happy New Year, followers (ok, follower). Hopefully this year will be a time of much inspiration and motivation to write, but we will take things one week at a time.

This is the first episode to air after the two-part pilot, and while the premiere set the stage for a number of different story arcs to come, "Tabula Rasa" is perhaps a better example of the type of storytelling we will be seeing from the remainder of this series. While much of the same action and tumult from the previous two episodes continues to brew here, the script is almost entirely centered on the character of Kate, contrasting flashbacks of pre-island life with her post-crash story. I would have expected this episode to center around Jack with the weight given to his presence in the pilot, but it was a much more astute decision on the writers' part to focus our attention on a far more enigmatic character.

So just what do we learn about Miss Austen? Well, not a whole lot that couldn't have been left to the imagination, but enough to keep us hooked for more details. Grungy and penniless, a pre-island Kate stumbles onto a ranch in Australia and takes refuge for the night. The following morning she is discovered and awakened by a sympathetic farmer named Ray (Nick Tate), who offers to accommodate her in exchange for her accepting a job on the farm. When Kate agrees to a ride to a train station from Ray, it turns out to be a set-up. Ray has contacted the authorities, and the odious Marshal (Fredric Lane; last seen with a bread-basket sized hunk of shrapnel in his gut) is hot on her trail.

Things on the island don't fare much better. The Marshal is in critical condition and his death will surely sever the last link to Kate's criminal past on the island, but the situation becomes further messy when Jack stumbles upon her mugshot in the Marshal's luggage. Though he is unforthcoming of his findings (despite the much less discreet Hurley, a character destined to be a bastion of comic relief, too finding the photograph, and becoming particularly skittish in a subsequent encounter with Kate).

This episode is a bit short on concrete answers. We don't know what Kate did that put her on the run, why she fled to Australia, or just how personal the relationship between her and the Marshal was prior to the island. But faithfully "Tabula Rasa" adheres to the rich canvas of characterization established in the dual-pilot. When Kate crashes Ray's truck in an effort to escape the Marshal, rather than leaving Ray to die, she sticks around to salvage him from the wreckage. There is a powerful compassion to her character that strictly belies her opaque criminal background. Even as the Marshal, barely conscious and bleeding to death, continues to provoke her in his final moments, she makes the magnanimous decision to spare him a slow and painful demise. She doesn't kill him, but rather enlists a trigger-happy Sawyer, who doesn't really kill him either, but...it's better this scene be watched than recounted.

There's a motley of other "oh no, we're fucked!" moments to be found, namely a cryptic radio transmission found by Sayid (Naveen Andrews) and gang that Shannon (Maggie Grace) ruffledly translates from French into a distressing mayday that's presumably been on a loop for sixteen years. Elsewhere, the mysterious Locke (Terry O'Quinn) discloses the occurrence of a miracle on the island. But more on this next week...

Grade: A-

"Squeeze"

The X-Files - Season One

Aired: September 24, 1993
Starring: David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson
Written by Glen Morgan & James Wong
Directed by Harry Longstreet

One interesting feature of this show is its capacity to attempt different types of storytelling.  The first two episodes focused on setting up a standard for the larger alien/government mythology arc that would encompass the entire series.  "Squeeze" is something entirely different.  In-between the UFO chases and close encounters with the third kind, the writers would choose to branch away for a more anthologized version of the show, which would often include one-off characters with little to no impact on the core mythology.  These characters are often termed "monsters-of-the-week," due to their extrasensory and often grotesque capabilities.  Eugene Victor Tooms, who appears in this episode, would be the first in a long line of ephemeral baddies to come.

"Squeeze" is also notable for being the first script penned by Glen Morgan and James Wong, two of the show's most renowned writers who were responsible for many of the seminal, character-centric episodes that would serve as the archetype for a number of inferior replications by a number of inferior writers.  While the still-creepy "Squeeze" is certainly not their best, or even their most frightening script, it can be viewed as a harbinger of many great things to come.

So naturally this episode combines great moments of TV horror while simultaneously building on the characterization of the previous two episodes.  Tom Colton (Donal Logue), an ambitious colleague of Scully's is assigned to a case in which the livers of four victims were extracted with no discernible points of entry or exit.  Colton is happy to welcome Scully to the case, but there's no love lost for Mulder, whose loony reputation has made him a laughingstock in the Bureau.  Of course, Mulder doesn't let this stop him from taking over the case, and his scenes with Colton make for some rather hilarious dry humor.

Doug Hutchison puts in a fine performance as our very first monster, the aforementioned Tooms, a genetic mutant capable of contorting his body to fit into small spaces.  If that's not enough he's found a fountain of youth in human livers, the consumption of which having provided him the subsistence to hibernate for thirty years at a time.  While the alien mythology asks us to accept the existence of paranormal life in the world outside our own, episodes like "Squeeze" go a bit further and ask us that same question applied in the context of the commonplace and the mundane.  What is lurking inside the darkness of a sewer or behind the screws of an air vent?  There's a bit of judgment reservation required here - it's sci-fi after all - but it's interesting how the show juggles the improbable with the impossible and manages to make them both equally compelling and horrific.

Grade: A-

Songs I Love, Vol. 1: My Bloody Valentine - "Sometimes"

Happy New Year, everyone. I haven't felt up to posting anything since I had my wisdom teeth pulled two weeks ago, but like a trooper I was a victor to the pain and have compensated for it by indulging in banquets of fattening foods. As you can tell I didn't come with any good New Year's resolutions...

Until I muster up some good ramblings and reviews, I'll wedge in some musical intermissions here and there. This is a song and band I discovered relatively recently, within the past couple years or so, and have grown a fondness for. You can't really discern the lyrics in this song, but I think there's a message here that shines through in the overall ambiance. Really a beautiful piece of music, perfect for strolling rainlogged alleys while staring at your sneakers. An orgasm of unbridled emotion.