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Five

Harold Jaffe

1) Sword Swallowing

Considered by his peers the best: the most deft and refined among them, he was a slightly built male with a wise child’s face.

Sword swallower.

Not just swords but flaming swords, bayonets, cutlasses, rapiers, lances, spears, shoulder-fired missiles, even tall wooden staffs such as holy mendicants carried during times of plague, and now were carrying again.

He swallowed each and more, which was extraordinary insofar as he was wafer-thin with the face of a child.

Or a barn owl, white, commencing to hunt at dusk, peering down as it flapped noiselessly on broad wings, with—eerily—the disk-shaped face of a child, an infant.

I say “commenced” and “had” because the barn owl and the entire family of owls, as well as their fierce cousins, the hawks, were gone, officially “culled” in the collective mania of the bird flu pandemic, which turned out to be a false alarm.

Which evoked mourning and even anger in certain quarters, but robotic birds, though many fewer in number than their “real” brethren, proved no less entertaining, with no prospects of avian flu.

Moreover, they don’t poop.

He was, I am saying, a swallower but not a holy mendicant in the usual sense.

The mendicants, male and female, were a breed that had proliferated since the millennium.

They carried (but never swallowed) tall wooden staffs, faux-wood, since the forests, great and small, had been extirpated.

With wild birds and most of the wild mammals culled, with fossil fuel almost obsolete, the forests were transformed into sites of desperate fuel- seeking or into theme parks.

New England, the northwest, the tropical forests of the southern states, the great forests of Alaska, the once-protected national parks, the African bush, the rain forests of South America and Southeast Asia: extirpated.

In the process those former wildernesses, suddenly barren, released ruthless, million-year-old microbes (pathogenic terrorists) which infected our computers while assaulting and murdering innocent people and dogs.

Without actual wood, and because of the exponential success of technology, which now colonized every sector, increasingly mendicants, though not the swallower I love, carried miniature computers, palm pilots, cellular phones that dispersed anthrax and launched missiles charged with radioactive depleted uranium, but—this is crucial—only against bad people.

Really, really bad people.

2) Violent Dreams

Crying out, shuddering, shrieking, kicking, gagging, disabling leg cramps . . .

These he is used to.

But suddenly the texture alters, the already metamorphosed dream world is transmogrified.

These transmogrified dreams are indescribable but always (or virtually always) accompanied by an acidic sweet smell, cologne, such as an American network news anchorman wears.

Evil, ineffable dreams that smell disquietingly sweet.

If it weren’t for these dreams—if that is what they were—he would excise himself.

Pick up the lightweight Glock with his trembling hand, fit the barrel in his mouth, point toward his brain and pull the very sensitive Austrian-made trigger.

But if he killed himself with the Austrian Glock, or in any other tangible way, he wouldn’t be assaulted, tormented, tortured, dismembered—and, yes, somehow resurrected—in “dreams”.

He wouldn’t shriek, kick, shudder, gag, experience disabling cramps in his legs, angina-like torment in his chest.

He wouldn’t smell the expensive acidic sweet cologne that the male Supreme Court justices wear.

He wouldn’t dream.

Die nightly in dreams.

3) Shopping After Drinking Coffee

After a night of dreams, when he can scarcely raise himself out of bed, when he wants nothing, when he doesn’t (in the Buddhist sense) desire, is when he drives his dusty car to the shopping mall, one of the shopping malls, blunders through the parking complications, queues to buy his double espresso macchiato at Starbucks, drinks it, trashes it, then, being a biggish male, though no longer accounted young, nor even middle-aged, commences to furiously shop, knees high, elbows out, fists clenched (road-rage-off-road), goose-stepping, bowling over other shoppers, shopper-humans, young and old, but only the detestable ones, born detestable, made detestable by the invasive culture, as if they had no choice, it doesn’t matter one bit, he’s a lover not a political philosopher, even if he bloodies, maims, murders two or three or no one and ends up in, say, Mervyn’s, purchasing a fish tie or box cutter or pair of mismatched socks to validate his parking voucher, if “voucher” is what it’s actually called.

4) Facing the Wall

Vincent Van Gogh on the sanitarium grounds shot himself and missed a—as the phrase goes—vital organ, so he struggled up and to his cot and lay there and faced the wall.

When his brother, the loyal Theo, came, Vincent refused to turn from the wall.

He died that way a few days later, with one functional ear, facing the wall.

Nor had the ear he’d severed years before impressed the subaltern woman, the so-called prostitute, why should it?

He severed his ear because he wanted to die with a severed ear.

Because he wanted to face the wall with a severed ear then die.

Because he wanted to sacrifice (if that’s the word) his ear, but not his eye, never his eye.

Because he wanted to give of his flesh then paint then shoot himself and die.

Except he didn’t shoot himself correctly.

(It’s just like Vincent to shoot himself point-blank and fail to kill himself. Maladroit where he is not masterful.)

So he lay on his cot and faced the wall and didn’t say another word and died.

Actually he had not intended to shoot himself until he shot himself, pulled the revolver from his pocket, stuck it to his chest, fired.

Just like that.

Fire coming out of his hair.

The weird intense eyes.

Who painted a pair of broken-down old shoes such as the invisible poor wore and still wear.

Who referred to himself as a simple “bonze,” a Buddhist monk with no status.

Now his paintings fetch millions, billions.

Are hung in climate-controlled corporate boardrooms across the globe.

(Capitalist dialectic).

Gauguin, when he briefly tore himself away from himself, mourned.

Artaud didn’t mourn.

Artaud peering through the iron bars of his cell in the sanitarium.

Sitting on the bench on the sanitarium grounds with his caved face, his very thin legs crossed next to the psychiatrist (called alienist), with his legs crossed, who cared for Artaud without condescension (this being France) but could not penetrate him.

Don’t mourn for Vincent, organize.

Don’t mourn for Artaud, organize.

Organize if you must but only after ingesting a mind-fuck.

Empathogen.

Don’t ingest, congest.

Implode, fusion, fission (not fiction), revolt.

Revolting.

5) Shuffling

They’ve snatched your shoelaces.

You’re in a padded cell.

Cement floor.

Gray padded walls.

No window.

No way to hang yourself without shoelaces.

Not much to do but shuffle from the cot to the steel-gray wall and back again.

(Well there is an electronic device on a small iron table but you refuse to “boot” it.)

Remember not to lift your feet in their laceless shoes.

First shuffle from the wall to the cot slowly with your feet two feet apart and parallel.

Next shuffle back to the wall, again slowly, but this time with one laceless shoe in front of the other, as though you were a female in a very tight skirt.

Remember not to lift your feet from the cement floor.

The way Rita Hayworth might have walked after Orson Welles and Ali Khan (who was alleged to have used a secret formula for his majestic potency, accessible only to gigolos of his rank).

After Rita Hayworth got her Alzheimer’s.

Next shuffle from the wall to the cot, feet 12 inches apart, small shuffling steps, as though manacled.

Like a black male teenager in the Mississippi Delta stuck in Parchman State Prison and manacled for looking the wrong way at a white girl.

Yo, it’s better than being lynched from a magnolia tree.

Is it?

Like an old Jew in Buchenwald, his family, every one of them, branded then excised.

Like the homeless Vietnam vet, no teeth, his gray, bloody hair in a ragged ponytail shuffling back and forth outside the soup kitchen in the anywhere American city.

Like the 13-year-old brown-skinned boy snatched from the streets of Kabul and transported to a cell in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba in 2001.

It’s 2006 now and the boy is still there, in his cell, isolated, shackled, shuffling in his shackles.

The good thing is he’s managed to learn a few sentences of American English.

Though they’re mostly obscene words strung together.

Copyright © 2010 by San Diego State University.

Authors of individual works retain copyright, with the restriction that subsequent publication of any text be accompanied by notice of prior publication in Fiction International.