Oof

            To me, the first few pages are like the memory of a sunny day.  I see pale yellow silhouetting a canopy of green leaves, and I must be running because the view bobs as it changes.  My steps don’t thump, and there’s nothing for the moist brown trail to stain~  not the pant legs of my jeans, rolled into a cuff at the ankle~not the crumpled white of my worn leather tennis shoes.  The brightness on the other side of the swaying leaves is just the vision of a place I’d like to be.  I am marvelously not a part of it.  The things that make it real—my actual presence there—are absent.  Instead there is just a perfect image of a sunny day.  A place I cannot go.  It is perfect, and I turn the page.

            It’s directly out of 20,000 Leagues, the old-fashioned scuba suit I wear.  The helmet weighs about forty pounds, and it squeaks unbearably when screwed into the neck gasket.  In a strange but somehow appropriate inversion, it’s shaped like a tin fishbowl.  As the fish swim by the tiny oval of glass edged in copper, and see my head encased in the metal bowl, do they feel sorry for me?  Why are fishbowls shaped like fishbowls?  I remember the one that sat on the mahogany built-in of someone, someone forgotten’s study, with its high paned windows closed to everything but the sun that revealed the whorls of falling dust.  The body suit is made of thick rubber, a joyless body condom so thick it blunts any sensation coming at me from the outside.  It is dark blue, the color of cold.  I’ve sunk deep.  If I could look down between my feet as more and more line is let out, I would see a colder blue slowly eating the edges of my life-sustaining suit.  The man said it’s made of the same stuff as a dish glove.  Plants and weeds I don’t know sway in the subsurface ocean breeze.  Slowly I dance like whorls of dust in the light of a high window on some gone-forever spring day.

            When I wake up it’s like my head is being slowly crushed by the power of staring at the sun.  Heavy things, metal things are being dragged and dropped on the planks I appear to be laying on.  My hair is wet and cold.  Men are shouting but what they say is indistinct; their shouts reach my ears like muttering.  The chains and boxes and God knows what else being dropped around me, reverberating through the planks and into my wet head, my sunblind eyes, are becoming genuinely perturbing.  A leathery, 10-pound hand is slapping me.  I go to speak but first must spit out the briny water filling my throat.  I want desperately to tell everyone around me: “What the hell…What the hell do you all think you’re doing?!” I want to tell them that they’re all terrifically mistaken, doing it all wrong.  “Stop it!” I want to say, want to scream.  But all that comes out is greenish water.  My squinting face squeezes it out like a sponge.  It comes from the corners of my eyes mostly.  “Stop it!  Can’t you see???” I want to scream, “Can’t you see?” as the warm water squeezes by the thimble-full from my unseeing eyes. 

            When I wake the sweat has drenched my sheets and is now turning cold, especially between my legs.  My head is fairly well soaked.  I automatically try to contort my head to accommodate the clock to my field of vision.  I hate the glowing digital numbers, bright red, too bright, and I wonder if a clock with uranium-green numbers would be better.

            What is today?  What I mean to say is: what is today that makes it different from others? but my mind misses, and instead I begin to answer it existentially.  Today is a sequence of places situated in terms of the times I am to be at these places.  I will do activities appropriate to them.  And in a while I will be back here.  In bed. 

            I sigh in disgust with myself, No! today is something important.  The meeting.  Today is the meeting. 

            I smell cinnamon.  Someone is making French toast downstairs.  Its buttery scent visibly wafts up the stairs, through the cracked bedroom door and into my mind.  It smells good even though the good-natured girl sizzling each thick-cut slice on the cast-iron skillet—even though I do not love her.  I will eat her French toast.  She’ll have fucked it up somehow but I won’t say so.  She’ll be pleased as she watches me pretending to enjoy it and telling her it’s wonderful.  She’ll smile and clutch her hands at her chest and I’ll wonder if this was what life was like fifty or a hundred or two hundred years ago, perhaps in Henry Bloom’s slumping house.  That thought will cause me to wonder even more at what life is supposed to be now.

            The meeting.

            I roll, catching up all the bedcoverings up between my legs, simultaneously wrapping my arms around the defenseless pillow.  My shoulder cracks.  I decide that I don’t want to leave this warm, interstitial place.  But instantly I also decide that this story’s going somewhere and so I throw off the covers, climb up over my pillow and down the homemade loft steps, cursing the cold, and subconsciously hoping to God that at least the sun will be out.

            If I’ve dreamt, my dreams are already forgotten.

            Even though snow still coats all the places where grass would be if it weren’t February, the streets and sidewalks are wet.  The recent cold has been making the mere act of stepping outside a gesture of pain, perhaps faintly masochistic.  However today is just wet.  Nothing will freeze.  The dull ache of sunlight illuminating the myriad shades of grey makes the day feel almost spring-like, triggering a chain of memories of other such days, peppering my past.  These memories are like oasis in an expanse of time so uniform that it’s impossible to recall one day from the next…I don’t even remember what last Tuesday was, and I’m afraid that if I try to, truly try to recall it, I still won’t be able to.

But today is different.  The rules are on hold.  Maybe it’s just me, but the nuance of Spring is having a tangible effect on the city.  Cars slurp by on the wet streets, sounding of satisfied sighs.  People’s mouths are free of the thick wool scarves that choke them and so they talk loudly as they trot to wherever it is they need to show up at.  No one on campus, it seems, is in a hurry.

I’m happy. 

Instead of thinking about where I need to be, I’m thinking about where I am now…and it’s nice.  Involuntarily, my brain is churning up recollections of other days and places I’ve felt this way.  My god! it seems as if I’ve been so many places!  Each place had its own life, its own routine, its own vastness.  Are they really all me?  I remember San Diego, even though it was only a few short days, and all those times I was in Seattle, riding in Joe’s car to the outlying places, not having to bother with planning the route.  All I had to do was ride.  I remember taking the old line from Tokyo to Enoshima and wondering if the train was an undestroyed remnant of pre-war Japan, but not really caring because my Ipod was spinning song after perfect song, complimenting the clack of the swaying, weathered-orange car.  All I had to do was ride.  A car slurps by and I sigh.  I chastise my self lightly for getting too wrapped up in where I’ve been and forgetting all the places I haven’t.

Is the meeting really today? 

If I have another sip of my coffee I will feel better.  My good mood is slipping away.  My self-image is changing.  Moments ago I was dynamic and unique, able to ford all obstacles with ease; I was good-looking, beacon-like to others, they were drawn to something intrinsically bright housed within me and manifested in my glow; I was made of a substance called youth, eternal in a changeable way, but never diminishing.  But now as my thoughts have traveled behind the eyes of certain others, a few individuals whose view of me I wonder about, who maybe don’t see me as I see me, who maybe see something less flattering, repulsive even…has all got me wondering how I really am.

It’s a foolish thing I’m doing: sitting in my head but trying to look at myself from Jon’s eyes, or Anna’s or TJ’s or Jake’s.  I feel rebellious.  So what if they see me as a punk, a loser, a weirdo, a freak, a creep, it doesn’t make me so, let them look!  My world of Minneapolis is feeling claustrophobic.  It’s time to get out for a while.  It’s time to go to far-off places with new sets of people.  I feel the west coast calling. 

I think of the meeting.

When is it again?  When am I ‘sposed to be there?  I feel sooo stupid.  It’s next week!  Why did I think it was today.  Next week.  Two-thirty in the afternoon.  It’s four o’clock now.  If it were this week it would be over by now, I’d have missed it, but it’s next week, thank god.  For a smart guy I can be so absent-minded sometimes.  I think that makes me eccentric.