The History of Writing (Part Three) Just Visiting

He'd been rehearsing a brief series of mantras strategically memorized, legs slightly parted, feet set evenly, hands beholding each other like fists. The darkness inside him offered little of comfort but its steadfast challenge did meet the second-degree ex-con with a certain assurance, like a cold rain on the skin or using a thick needle to sew pieces of leather into a single composition. The other passengers on the train to Manhattan chatted and chattered among themselves and sometimes their sound awkwardly smuggled itself into the enormous vacancy of his interiority and sometimes his one-pointedness overtook the odds. When he thought of his heart as an organ, his memory would reliably & categorically shuffle through a kind of suggestion of a picture-show from the very go of his strongest, most vivid impressions, breathing and speaking and listening in-toward-for a date without color or number. As though within every man resided an homunculus approximation of his earthly demise yet the appall of it were undermined by a presence only marginally stronger. What wisdom lay between the two Randal had forfeited the right/responsibility to decipher a long, long time ago. In his youngest years even resembling a search for intellect, the half-misanthrope was determinedly apt at the scientific arts: the spiritual ones were simply too muddied and besotted and neutered with the centuries of bad, violent faith and the facetiousness of the 1980s to really afford calm investigation. And when he'd burned one social-bridge after another until it landed him sleeping in blankets in the woods behind the floor-remains of an abandoned bankrupted department store at the limit of some urban territory that would hardly even count as a city by our standards, Randal was deadset on his way to making friends with all the people a decent psychologist could predict he would & shouldn't, faith was something between a plastic turd and a plant you can't identify. 

He rehearsed his mantras. Tried to lean back in the bench to alter the bloodflow, repeatedly failing, repeatedly getting angry with himself. The peoples' voices cajoling and harassing and the wind of gravity sucking everything from the physical to something not quite physical. Kubrickian trauma & aftermath forcing everything into the loathsome reverse of itself with cruel tenacity and the substance of either reduced to ghastly imitation. 

Randal Fincher meditated with a ferocity rarely even seen in devout prayer. He was so used to nothing that the slightest true addition seemed to exaggerate the living stuff of his body beyond endurance. Not quite a nihilist, never a disciple of anything: he'd been gradually tortured by circumstance without relief without fail he'd nearly become like one of the many, many inmates he'd become familiar with over the years who could speak with undeniable coherence yet whose most profound opinions seemed hardly more than jokes re-told out of habit. He both hated himself and hated himself for hating himself. 

No God nor Universal Creator to be found as the massive-vehicle arrived into Grand Central Station. Only the slight interruption of conversation as the other passengers rose from where they were and collected their belongings and went out to the platform and the unique press of manufactured heat and the apophenically synchronized snapping and cracking distorted with similarity and echo and whichever part of the thinking-brain negotiates coincidence and distinction. He'd waited until a certain pressure had exhausted itself from the car and some kind of normal breath could be produced and maintained. A daypack and a single medium-sized suitcase and the work clothes he sported plus a windbreaker that didn't weigh 100 grams to ornament his person. This deliberate cacophony of an individual moving from the train, to the platform and the world that is so unmistakably Manhattan and every righteous and evil thing it should represent to a waking-mind regardless of origin or intention. 

No God on the evening sidewalk where people shifted for space to talk to each other among the traffic and calls for cabs and orders for hotdogs and the sky like some digital-painting of itself. 

He double-checked his phone that the motel-room reservation hadn't been interfered with and he thought briefly to hail a cab for whatever that experience should deliver and then he felt a deep craving for dark alcohol, something he'd enjoyed without shyness nor remorse since in his adolescence but was compromised to ruin during his years of imprisonment & rehabilitation. He felt it, now, as the sound & workings of the city flowed with pleasurable abrasion through the fiber of his sternly grateful body. And then he continued, entered the morass of that unlikely moment toward a bar. 

I saw him enter--without knowing who he was, obviously. 

Setting the suitcase between two stools at the bar and removing the daypack to place in the floor there beside, "Bartender?" 

She moved from where she'd put some money in the register and went to the handsome figure. "What am I pouring for ya?" 

"A pint of Guinness, please & thank you?" 

"Anything else?" 

"Not just yet." 

She brought it back and told him the price and he asked if he could start a tab and she asked for a credit card and he brought one from a simple black wallet and gave it to her well-trained hand and while she brought it back to the register to the name on the receipt Randal looked at the delicious beverage with the kind of stoicism that can't help but bring attention to itself. 

I'd generally been in the habit of either pretending I didn't see someone I wanted to talk to, (unless they were a female,) or else employing a slightly dickish strategy of giving people their way in conversation as quickly & efficiently as possible until the next one came along. 

But not him. 

This was the sort of thing you'd resent yourself for the morning-after, and I've always had a pretty strong rule for avoiding what might bring me resentment. (Life seems to come pre-packaged with enough to inspire garbage-feelings as it is.) 

I let him drink half the beer, get at least a little decompressed, and then I made my move. 

"Excuse me?" 

He looked at me with reserved curiosity. He looked like I think I look when I'm looking for an old answer to a common question. He said, "Excused." 

For someone who definitely wasn't Black, he was a lot like us. Not just music & film things. Mannerisms, appetite, timing. "I don't wanna put you out, but you seem..." I had to chuckle at the dumbness of it, "familiar. You from Manhattan?" 

He glanced at the luggage. "Just visiting." 

"Right, right." I thought. "You mind if I sit with you a minute? I'm straight. Blah blah blah." 

This seemed to help things. "Okay." 

That one I got around. I climbed up on the stool and ordered a beer and that warm thing that usually dies a second and a half after you feel it stayed with me. "Name's Baxter, by the way." 

"Randal." 

"Randal." I said, "Okay, so can I ask what you're visitin' for?" 

At that point, the most convincing liar since Abraham couldn't tell you they hadn't heard of this Troy Thompson-guy who'd supposedly been reincarnated. It was the same story that didn't take up a full minute--or just no one involved in reporting it didn't give it a minute of their time. I mean, a dozen dozen people might look up at the flying-saucer and they're all at least gonna see a circle, right? 

He clearly looked a bit like a schmuck, honestly. Not that any sane person in that situation wouldn't. "You watch the news, Baxter?" 

"Course I watch the news." 

"I mean just the generic morning stuff. You know, like, whatever the cable company pipes in." 

"You mean like PhenoLength?" 

"They have that here, too, then." 

"They got that shit everywhere." 

"So... Just know I feel like the most gullible person on Planet Earth saying this: You know this Thompson-guy in Brooklyn everyone's been talking about?" 

"Yeah, yeah..." 

"Well, I was in jail a million lifetimes ago and about once a month I'd have this...dream of meeting a guy that'd explain all my problems and tell me in no uncertain terms why they'd happened and what I was supposed to do about them." Gathering strength, "And then way later I'd gotten back into Albert Camus, like really, really deeply like when I was a kid and so I started thinking about the Myth of Sisyphus, again and when the whole news-thing started and I saw the Thompson guy's face: I thought Sisyphus. I requested time off work, packed a bag and, basically, here I am." 

"You wanna shot?" 

We didn't leave until they put us out.

****