Sentenced

Stephen-Paul Martin

Quick as a flash, quick as a face looking back at itself in a mirror, the world becomes a page that gets ripped up and thrown away, but right before that, Justin Case buys a book on the politics of madness in fifteenth-century France, not because he's interested in politics or madness, but because his long-time lover Donna Masters thinks it shows more clearly than any book she's ever read how sanity becomes a tool of oppression when defined by those in power, and she's threatened to stop going out with Justin Case if he doesn't buy the book, read it carefully twice, and discuss it with her at length, something she claims he never does, something he's refused to do because discussions with Donna Masters quickly become disagreements and then fights, which means he's trapped because they'll fight if they talk about the book and fight if they don't, but he thinks he's got a better chance of not fighting if he reads the book and agrees carefully with everything she says, even though he knows that keeping the peace will only postpone a separation that's been a long time in the making, even though he fiercely hates reading, a feeling which baffles not only Donna Masters but also most of his other friends, since he comes from a family of diligent readers, all of whom pride themselves not just on how much they read, but also on the quality of what they read, as if they were in a class where students got more stars for reading serious books than they did for reading trash, and maybe it's this high-brow attitude that leads Justin Case to read pulp fiction and pop psychology and carefully avoid anything his family would approve of, though if this is truly the case Justin Case is unaware of it, knowing only that either he has to stop avoiding the inevitable and tell Donna Masters to get lost, or loathe himself even more than he already does by allowing himself to get bullied into reading a book he has no interest in, a book which in any case he's already spent good money on, twenty-five dollars that could have been used in several other ways, a thought that haunts him as he steps awkwardly, self-consciously, from the over-crowded bookstore into the over-crowded street, where so many things are happening at once that Justin Case can't focus on himself any longer, or rather he can't assemble the specific aspects of his identity with enough coherence to produce the person he's always told himself he was, which means that in addition to being someone standing in dry sunlight outside a small dark bookstore in a city filled with every conceivable form of madness, he might also be a man wearing a black tuxedo in a small boat with his nude ex-wife, drifting on a summer lake in a forest near the remains of a wax museum, a mesmerizing silence broken rudely by a scream from the shore, but since his ex-wife can't see anyone who could have screamed, she shuts her eyes, leaving her former spouse to stare above the trees, where it quickly becomes clear that most of the sky is gone, replaced by a huge machine comprised of parts of other machines, and when he tries to figure out what its function is he feels like throwing up, or like a jazz improvisation that suddenly stops, leaving a strategic silence that upsets the small crowd in the dark of a seedy waterfront club in a fog so thick it feels permanent, opaque as a page that remains blank more than a thousand years, finally giving way to signification, or what might be signification under conditions quite different than those that govern the current situation, a single word comprised of letters no one has ever seen before, slowly becoming visible, rising from what seems like a depth of a thousand miles, a distance vanishing as the letters become fully visible, suggesting that for a set of laws to be at all possible, a set of counter-laws mandating precisely the opposite must also be possible, and in fact must precede its own possibility, like a story comprised of transitions between what would have been thrilling episodes had the transitions not been been so compelling that the episodes never took place, or a school for astral projection burning down on the fourth of July, or a sepia-tinted postcard of a partially destroyed lighthouse on the coast of Nova Scotia, where a finger the size of the Washington Monument points at the sun from turbulent waves, or a mystical experience destroyed by a spelling mistake, an action taking the shape of all other actions, or someone catching a talking fish but getting bored by what it says, someone who decides that it's time to take stock of her life, get a good resume together, or marry a man with big-time spending power, someone who likes to think his wife is home all day writing sonnets, energized by images that teach her how to give him four-star blow-jobs, even though she knows that a scenario like this won't please her feminist colleagues, unless she can convince them that by giving herself time to write she's doing what she needs to do to make the kind of difference she's capable of making, even if it's not the kind of difference other women might be making, not the kind of difference some women think all women ought to be making, an issue that drives her to stare out a window facing an amusement park, where the screams of junior high school kids on a famous roller coaster cause her to lose track of what she was thinking less than a second before, a gap that quickly takes the form of a sunlit elm in autumn wind, etching itself on the sky to become a calligraphic inscription, something which in itself means nothing until it gets defined or in some way acted upon by other signs which in themselves mean nothing, like something disappearing into something disappearing, like a story in which nothing happens until a crow appears, approaching from a distance that seems to exist only because the crow is approaching from a distance, and the crucial events in the story take place in this distance, too far off to give readers much of anything to work with, a dilemma Justin Case has faced many times, and which he tells himself he won't put up with anymore, having finally decided that he has to face the truth and tell Donna Masters that he doesn't have time to read about lunatics in fifteenth-century Paris, even though he's always been attracted to the image of cackling idiots in dark basements filled with bubbling alembics turning pre-linguistic base metals into the gold of clarified passion, though his interest is not based on a firm belief in the actuality of such transmutations, but rather on their possibility, like someone who endlessly delays the consummation of his desires because he'd rather be on the edge, craving what he knows he doesn't really want to possess, and Justin Case keeps rehearsing the speech he tells himself he's finally found the courage to deliver, knowing that he might lose that courage and stand there like the total wimp Donna Masters seems to think he is, talking as quickly as possible to conceal his limitations, as if by cleverly ridiculing the very notion of self-esteem he could compensate for his own lack of it, imagining Donna Masters hurt and angry but concealing her true response by acting like his decision to separate is nothing more than arrogant self-deception, and of course he knows she might be right, and he prefers to think she is, because it gives him an excuse not to follow through on his intentions, not to make a decisive move he'll later be responsible for, except that by making such a move he can free himself to start going out with Emma King, his new supervisor at the computer store, and even though she's twenty-five pounds overweight and Donna Masters has a perfect body, Justin Case prefers Emma King because the fact that he's twenty-five pounds overweight makes him feel inferior to Donna Masters, especially when they take their clothes off and it's obvious that she looks much better than he does, but Justin Case is not so self-deceived that he can't see the obvious, that the best move at this point would be to get honest enough to look at himself, admit that the flab on his waist is there because he's mad, mad in the sense of angry and mad in the sense of crazy, each disguised as the other, each the cause and effect of the other, having slowly established a chemical pattern that dominates both mind and body, and of course he's also mad because of all the ads he's heard and seen, and like so many other disturbed young men and women, he's made madness out to be a higher form of sanity, a strategy to subvert the socially-sanctioned patterns of banality and violence that pass for mainstream reality, a position from which he's learned to reject everything people expect of him, everything but the need to survive, working at computer stores most of his adult life because he can get a paycheck without caring about his work, a routine he's mastered so well it's become a fat paperback novel in which he's not the main character and doesn't have to do all the complex things expected of a protagonist, allowing him to function maybe sixty percent of the time without serious conflicts and confusions, though this too creates problems, leaving him at odds with conflict-based models of sanity that dominate the so-called Western world, leading him to suspect that if he doesn't reposition himself in the tall tale he keeps telling himself, he might well find himself no closer to his own thoughts than people are to constellations that don't exist anymore, stars that died out long before their light appeared on earth, yet something about the fear this process generates feels right, since it might in some way be compared to what happens in "My Favorite Things" when Coltrane drops the familiar melody and takes off on his own, not knowing where he's going but knowing what he's doing, and across the street Justin Case can see an image of himself reflected vaguely in the window of a men's clothing store, right between two undressed broken mannequins, an image obstructed by clusters of people moving in both directions, so he looks down hoping he won't see an eye opening in the palm of each hand, knowing that he's come too far to be cautious, too far not to be cautious, too far to know what caution is, or too far to know what it is in situations he's not prepared for, not that he's ever been good at preparing for anything, because after all there's a huge difference between preparing and obsessing, between an alphabet recited backwards and a clock that has nothing to do with time, between a sentence you've written yourself and a prison sentence, a difference which might well dissolve if it made sense to imagine Justin Case suddenly realizing that he's trapped in a mad sequence of words and phrases made by someone he's never met, someone whose values he doesn't understand and can't quite trust, not that trust implies understanding, because the fact is that though no one understands anything, people often claim to trust themselves and other people, so maybe an important step to take at this point is to put words like trust on probation, and maybe it's also time to flush words like important down the toilet, and maybe the time has come to acknowledge the damage done by figures of speech, but if we begin disposing of words and verbal strategies that seem suspect when we look at them carefully, we'll end up with almost nothing, stripping ourselves of the most human of all technologies, reducing ourselves to the proto-human creatures Prometheus made the mistake of enlightening, a wonderfully heroic gesture that was nonetheless based on a distorted view of the situation, a strange way to describe the perceptions of someone whose name implies a grasp of time to come, but the question that needs to be asked at this point is whether even a mythic figure like Prometheus can look at something objectively, without distorting what he's looking at with his own agendas, because Prometheus must have foreseen the pain of his own torture, a vulture's beak in his abdomen each day, meaning that his vision of the future was already mad, thoroughly warped with fear and disgust, not to mention the remorse that must have come when he foresaw the degraded purposes fire and language would one day serve, purposes identified with technological progress, the dominant cultural paradigm, but then terms like these would turn Justin Case off, remind him of his brainy parents and even more of his brilliant older sisters, both of whom are dead ringers for Donna Masters, which may be why Justin Case's mother likes her so much, wants her to set her son straight, help him cultivate his intelligence, an agenda Donna Masters figured out right away, and since her own mother was dead and she liked Justin Case's mother so much, she's had every reason to push him to read books on arcane subjects, though she insisted there was nothing arcane about fifteenth-century madness, since the author claimed Foucault was wrong, that the modern line between madness and sanity was actually drawn before the Age of Reason, in the late Middle Ages, when the moral force and violence of the Church made all deviations from sanctioned understandings more than dangerous, but when Justin Case tries to read Foucault he gets bored quickly, not by the subject matter but by labyrinthine sentences that take forever, and Justin Case doesn't have that long, a feeling that's thrown back in his face over and over again as he walks down the street and sees people rushing because they feel time running out on them, an anxiety that's not simply millennial panic but has its roots in neurochemical networks, massively complex combinations of what might look like tiny factories running down if such a comparison weren't already infected by the values of a society obsessed with technology, and even though Justin Case works in a computer store he's bored with computers, tired of the way people talk about them all the time, disgusted by the way computer innovations force people to spend money, leaving those who don't have money behind, adding to the atmosphere of panic that's so prevalent it seems normal, unavoidable, even civilized, but Justin Case still finds himself resisting it, or using it as an excuse for problems that have nothing to do with technocratic oppression, problems that loom larger as Justin Case approaches middle age, which might be another reason he doesn't want to read about the Middle Ages, since he's not one of those people who looks much younger than he really is, though this would be a perfect way to describe Donna Masters, and this may be why during fights she often shouts that she could do much better, and Justin Case can't disagree, since he sees the way men look at her on the street or at parties, but for some reason she never tries to find another guy, never says yes when other men ask her out, and though Justin Case has told himself that love is the reason, he knows that the truth has more to do with Donna Masters's deep insecurities, related in some way to her mother's death and her father's mysterious absence, something Donna Masters never talks about, except to say that he's been gone twenty-five years, and privately Justin Case has come up with many explanations, the most recent of which was based on Donna Masters's interest in madness, leading him to speculate that her father went crazy and he's locked up somewhere and Donna Masters secretly visits him once in a while, that he went off the deep end when the pressure of being a single parent got so extreme he could no longer face the pressures of his career, which Donna Masters once confessed had something to do with National Security, a tough job that became even tougher when he uncovered secret information about the Vietnam War, documents clearly revealing that the U.S. wanted control of Southeast Asia not because of the communist threat, but because of the many poppy fields in the region, abundant sources of heroin to be introduced by the CIA into places like Watts and Harlem, a method of riot control, keeping the starving class in its doped-out place, but he knows how mad she's gotten when he's mentioned things like this, so he's never done anything but try to look tragic when Donna Masters mentions her dad, though it's often seemed strange to Justin Case that Donna Masters can't seem to stop mourning her father, can't seem to turn the corner, but of course Justin Case knows how fear of turning the corner feels, even though he's turning the corner right now in a literal sense, suddenly finding himself with a postcard view of the World Trade Centers, fading western sunlight flashing fiercely off at least five thousand windows, filling Justin Case with romantic feelings, lies about how beautiful his life will be with Emma King once he gets up the courage to throw the book in Donna Masters's face, or to break up with her in a more intelligent way, an option he quickly questions, since if he tries to break up with her in a sensitive manner she'll talk him out of it, knowing he'll agree with her because he doesn't have the guts to fight, knowing he'd rather lie to himself than face a challenging truth, a limitation Justin Case no longer has the energy to confront, especially since he feels contempt for people who claim to be honest, convinced that such people are dangerously self-deceived, out of touch with how difficult it is to grasp even a partial truth about anything, to say nothing about how hard it is to put that partial truth into words with anything like precision, how dangerous it often is to speak plainly, knowing that if truth hurts then the partial truth people can sometimes tell hurts even more, and even if such reasoning is nothing but a way to run from confrontations, Justin Case has finally come to accept that he's a coward, a word that used to make him sick if he thought of using it on himself, but now it's not a weapon anymore, and there's a huge difference between using a word descriptively and using it prescriptively, though Justin Case can't always tell that difference, but as he imagines telling Donna Masters that he's read the book and was fascinated by it and can't wait to hear what she thinks of it, he's pretty sure his use of the word coward will be primarily descriptive and therefore harmless, and he'll sit there in her fifteenth-floor condo nodding and smiling while she fiercely agrees with the author's claim, summarized obscurely on the back of the book, that madness cannot be regarded as uncharted or unchartable mental space, a mode of being that by definition stands outside mainstream awareness and its legitimizing and regulating mechanisms, since the boundaries of madness have already been firmly drawn by the merciless language of non-madness, and to claim that what takes place within those boundaries can't be defined by the boundaries themselves would be like trying to use a TV set as a washing machine, and Justin Case knows he'll want to respond by saying that madness can be created by individuals and used for subversive purposes, that it isn't just something people collapse into when they can no longer read the script society has taught or forced them to write for themselves, but since he wouldn't have said this because he truly believed it or even understood it completely, but rather because he'd heard someone say it on the radio with rock music playing in the background, he decides that once Donna Masters begins holding forth he'll simply nod and smile and repeat what she says in his own meat-fisted words, trying to make her believe he believes that she understands madness even better than the author she's commenting on, even better than Foucault and other technicians of the unspeakable, another phrase he heard on the radio with rock music playing in the background, and he tries to remember the music itself, the soundtrack of a discourse on insurrectional madness, but he can't quite get the beat, the absence of which makes him feel uncoordinated, especially as he turns another corner and bumps into a tall blonde woman wearing jeans, a white shirt, and a black bowtie, and when he drops the book she picks it up, stares at the cover, an obsessively detailed Flemish painting of a bald screaming man being drawn and quartered, and she looks up and smiles at Justin Case in a sly way that he doesn't quite notice because he's too busy excusing himself, reaching for the book he thinks she's about to return, but when she looks back at the picture and shows no sign of returning it, he thinks he might just let her keep it, tell Donna Masters that he didn't buy the book, letting the fight that's sure to come destroy the relationship, resigning himself to feeling like shit for quite a while, mentally revising scenes from the ten years they've been together, putting more decisive and perceptive words in his mouth, saying in fantasy everything he lacked the guts to say in reality, ridiculing himself because he knows he still can't say them out loud, still can't rely on himself in tense situations, knowing he'll mentally flog himself, convinced that self-abuse makes him a better more virtuous person, allowing himself no romantic escape, since he knows it would be a mistake to get hooked up with Emma King when she could probably get him fired if he ever broke up with her, but even if he knows it's better not to get involved he might do it anyway, because he imagines that Emma King will kiss him in such a way that he'll be powerless to resist, the same way Donna Masters kissed him into submission when they first got involved, having met in Washington protesting the Gulf War, Donna Masters because she knew George Bush was pigshit, Justin Case because friends had insisted he get drunk with them and wear an Imbush George Peach button, and she'd pushed him up against the Washington Monument, pinned his arms against the white stone walls, kissed him so hard and so long that he thought his teeth would fall out, then insisted on meeting his family when when they got back to the Big Apple, but she hasn't kissed him like that in years, and the mere thought of Emma King commanding him with a savage kiss makes him want to rush back to the store before his lunch break is over, burst into her office with a juicy smile on his face, slam the door and fuck right there on her desk, though it occurs to him that she might feel strange about doing something so blatantly unprofessional when she's only been on the job three weeks, and besides, the tall blonde woman is asking him where he got the book, handing it back to him, handing back a decision he thought he'd gotten rid of, and he's so mad he doesn't want to tell her the name of the store, but he's been trained to think it's dangerous to be impolite, so he smiles and gives her directions, leaving out a crucial detail, an omission that might be a Freudian slip or might just be a sign of his confusion, and when she says thanks her bowtie spins and squirts him in the face, reminding him of the time he worked as a barker in a circus, learning to love elephants more than people, because after all elephants don't wage war, don't contaminate nature with advertising slogans, don't suck people's blood with legal procedures, don't use language as a tool of self-deception, though about this last point he's never been fully convinced, and the woman is laughing, handing him a tissue from her purse to wipe himself off with, telling him she could tell he was the kind of guy who could take a harmless joke, which he knows is just a polite way of saying he's the kind of guy people like but don't respect, the kind of guy they wish they could respect but clearly can't, and this more than anything else tells Justin Case why he spends so much time and energy trying not to run into people he knows, people with whom he'll have to account for himself, make sensible amusing observations, make sure they like him enough not to mess him up, a feeling which leads him to look at his feet, as if they might be somewhere else, and when he looks up she's gone, part of the teeming seething rush-hour mass, and the sky looks flat and white as a page, and the tall dark buildings look like words on a page, a page getting torn in half and torn in half again--again and again, quick as a flash, quick as a mirror stealing someone's face, replacing it with a gap where nothing and everything trade places.

Copyright © 2009 by San Diego State University.

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