The History of Writing (Part Three) Samantha & Sisyphus

As the morning forecast had predicted, the day's humidity has condensed into a cool front, the glass of ice type of cool that touches up against the skin in a godly, firmly tender way. The sounds of Brooklyn reach out of their own dimensions and toward one another with a kind of accidental generosity, implied understanding. As though the drivers of ten-thousand vehicles--cars, trucks, motorcycles, bicycles, cabs, busses--enjoy a bizarre telepathy, a supernatural mutation of energy that even the most devout misanthropic breed of atheist would have to smile at without chagrin or bitterness or animosity. 

Samantha is sitting with her beloved Sisyphus. The couch holds them well, Italian leather purchased on a 6-month installment plan. They are looking at the television, playing an old black & white movie featuring Marlon Brando. Neither knows the title, but Samantha has thoughts, partial memories of a world that can neither be confirmed nor disconfirmed. She has been brooding, of late, of her time in the world in the aftermath of when Levanarskie fired a riflebullet into Troy/Sisyphus's heart, when his 1926 life--the briefest of all 3 up until then--slammed him back into the afterworld, barren of all physical objects save the snowdust-material of long-extinct stars and he and the silky grace of time expanding. 

The cold front brings a certain quiet as it becomes rain. Horns punctuate from places unseen and in their lack of context engender themselves to a strange and beautiful concert. These millions of choices and actions that become like glue, improvised adhesive, magnets of a presence that saturates all within proximity with a shining gestalt. The percussion of the rain splinters through everything dear and neglected, hard as the refusal of a god and dead as quickly as one forgotten. Thunder, gigantic, uncaring, booms across all of Brooklyn and Samantha feels as though she's the only one in the city who's heard it. 

Snuggled beside her, Sisyphus feels her move and connects this with the thunder. The porcelain-thin echo of lightening pulls his eye toward the fire-escape/balcony. 

She cradles him in response, the memory of finding his scorched body and the abnormally terrible nausea carried within that ineffable carriage and the pharmacist and the 4-C delinquent and the shock of contact within her returning. 

Marlon Brando on the t.v., now, then, forever. 

"Let's go outside," she says. "I want to feel this." 

"Okay," he says. 

She opens the sliding-glassdoor and the air moves through their clothes with brisk replenishment and their unison further solidifies and the sounds of traffic and the lazy wind of conversation and another quick blast of thunder and the sight of it almost colorless yet of a presence inseparable from its vitality as the light bleeds out of the day and all within it towards a matrix impossible to measure and beyond the limits of competitive endurance gather on her and Sisyphus like gods of a kingdom none would name.  

"This is nice," she says. "This is nice." 

"Yeah." 

"When I came here, from Tennessee? There was this big orientation all the new people had to go to. It was supposed to make us feel less awkward. They told us how everyone had drug issues. And anger issues. How everyone was carrying all this insecurity and it was making us sick and there was nothing we could do about it so we just had to own it and say things were nice when they happened to be. 

"It really bothered me. All the years I was a prostitute. That man who shot you... And when I left Brooklyn everyone wouldn't stop saying how sorry they were? I lived with that family I told you about, and when they were having the big orientation I thought of the mother, how depressed she was, and how everyone told her there was nothing she or they could do about it. They said: Well, you've had children. There's nothing else that can really be expected from you, so, just try to take some comfort in that. You have money." She blew a mean breath. "It was such bullshit! Then and now. Everyone's just supposed to be in a funk all the time. Laura taught me that word. You would've liked her. It was a word they used a lot in the 70s. That crazy asshole Charlie Manson gave everybody with long hair a bad name. All the kids who were trying to figure out what to do with themselves in their later-twenties and thirties would say, 'You're just in a funk. You'll get over it.' Or they'd say, 'Man, I'm all in.' I liked that one, too." 

 After Jimmy Carter left office, it was like a hundred years of history were just deleted. This puppet of a fuckhead of a double-inverted misanthrope, Ronald Reagan, helped introduce a shit-stupid form of algebra like William (Seward) Burroughs had his jizz vacuumed out of his anus and they put that into a Campbell's soupcan, the can grew legs and arms and a face, and the whole concoction grew up to be the ugliest cowboy since John Wayne. 

It was bad. 

"But this is nice. Being here with you makes me feel fine with everything." 

He felt fine, too, but there was also something else. Maybe the rain brought it out of him. Paper-fast bullets of water, the rumble and fade of the city below. He remembers pushing the boulder. He remembered pushing the boulder. Steel vigilance expanding in his neck, chest, temples. His eyes are solid black, olive-tone returning from the white mask he'd been reborn into. The rain, the rain, the rain. All of it of a piece. 

The memory of a word emerges from a nearly-forgotten abyss. 

The word is contempt.  

 

 

 

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