The History of Writing (Part Three) The Night Before All The Reporters

She wrote: I've thought about this longer than I can really estimate or measure. Since at least he came back...or maybe since he left....maybe since I was a child, I don't know... I do know why people say they don't know like that, now, though. (You really have to be careful to count your small victories in life. Make a lesson of that. Plenty of people say that, but most of them don't have a drop of serious commitment to stand on. I think it's all the little victories we get to have when we're young that proffer any real chance of comparison for everything else--victories or otherwise--to make whatever sense it does. Like you have to have confidence to really have faith or else whatever faith you have will just be the fear you're born with pretending to be something else.--That I'm sure of.) 

Start with this: last night was the final straw, or certainly close to it. There was a fire-drill in our building. They have them about every 3 or 4 months just to make sure everyone remembers from the last time and I guess so the firefighters don't have to drag any more asphyxiated corpses out of the building than they really have to. Almost everyone complains (or, like me, they go into some meditative limbo where other peoples' boringness isn't quite as insufferable). On one hand, it could just be scheduled for daylight-hours, like just before or after lunch, when most people are a little restless or don't have much to do, but on the other hand, a fire most likely isn't going to show up when it's convenient. And honestly, there's something just a little special about being up at those hours. You wouldn't want to do it on a regular basis, but so many times a year, like an accidental holiday, I think strange things do more good for us than the average person gives them credit. (Again, I mention serious commitment, here.) 

At any rate...we had this fire-drill. All the miserably old people (most of them in their 50s) regurgitating their lame philosophies of self-importance. Everything harder than it has to be. And...my dear, sweet, funny Sisyphus: he never doesn't look hopelessly suspicious when he's around other people. And he speaks with the urgency of a sloth, when he does speak. I can't help noticing how they raise their voices every time he enters their proximity or does something that interferes with their social myopia. I want to let it go, pretend it's not as alienating as it is. But they won't let me, will they? It's like a t.v. show written by angry people who won't own up to their anger. Maybe, in some crazy/indirect way, that's where all this domestic terrorism and round-the-clock surveillance and the petty non-drug addictions and the pettier drug-addictions actually started with. Like, since Forever there had to be some real danger & insecurity, you know, from all the animals before us and figuring out which was which and which plants you could eat and which were utter poison. And then even as enough families produced enough generations and there were all of the individual, private societies rising up and following their different human inclinations, there were whatever excuses of people that would eventually give birth/shit-out a Nicholas Peter Levanarskie or a Dr. Milo Gollander invading everyone else, and...I think you can fill-in the blanks, at this point, right? 

Have I digressed again? 

I think I digressed again. 

It was the first time Sisyphus had been in a fire-drill. Not in all of his many centuries, anywhere, had he been familiar with such protocol. He told me, after the firefighters said everyone could go back inside, after he said what he said that brought about all this fuss with the Jung boy and this Randal person--he said it was like picking up a pencil for the first time, or deeply kissing someone you weren't related to, or remembering after a long time of forgetting. And how I loved him for that. I felt like a bastard-reimagining of Juliet, or the Goddess Persephone whenever she was allowed on Earth for six months. This blood that I could never keep, but I know was mine first, this thing that was tall and robust and superior to even the invaluable wisdom of someone like Lord Buddha in the once-upon-a-time... 

When we were all standing outside, the silky darkness of heaven warped ineffably upon Brooklyn and the Earth and all her children: he said, "I think I saw this once when I was in the afterworld." 

Everyone else was talking in conspiratorial whispers. I mostly just held his hand and told him not to take the fire-drill too seriously. In all of my hundred-plus years, I can't remember feeling anything with that level of calm-connection to what was going on outside of me. Their whispers died like stepped-on insects, and at least a few sets of eyes pivoted to where the unlikely declaration had arose from. You could feel the undue animosity going down to your bones. 

Soon enough, we were going inside. Soon enough, there'd be more trouble than anyone was prepared to deal with.

**** 

Sisyphus felt her hand on his chest a full minute before the alarm, which was certainly audible, registered in there. Her grace seemed to be her largest obstacle and her finest asset both. Her eyes sunk into him with liquid understanding as she ordered, "We have to go outside for a minute. Just put on some pajamas and whatever shoes you'll be comfortable standing in the driveway in." "The drive..." He was a bit deaf to sarcasm, but rarely asked for an interpreter, and never told people how to speak. 

She took her hand from his body with expected hesitation and she stood up with that body you'd never suppose had enjoyed its 60th birthday, let alone all the others, and her bones carried Samantha more like an automated-servant than an organic product of the world as she went to one of the two dressers in the room that they both shared and she removed her sleepinggown hoping he'd at least peek at her small, kempt breasts and the belly with just an extra-turkeyleg of fat coercing the eye down to the austere bush like a horny squirrel as she did so which he'd only occasionally allow himself to do for a healthy shyness to that quiet ecstasy until she'd moved naked again and again so many times the foolishness of not doing it outweighed whatever rumor of sin or over-indulgence might arise from doing it and sometime between never leaving the bed at all and well before he really wanted to, Sisyphus came out of the sheets & blankets, put his feet on the floor and did as he'd been instructed. 

There were some other people from the building in the hallway as they exited the room and they joined the other people as this moment of scheduled anarchy brought everyone from their separate dormitories and through the various shared-spaces & staircases of that utterly cantankerous building with a kind of disciplined hostility that push-shoved through whatever doors were opened and finally person by person by person onto the western-sidewalk of MacArthur Blvd. (*named for the General, not the Foundation) and the forms of a few became the forms of about a hundred and Sisyphus & Samantha were shuffled into the mix like everybody else and he politely asked her a question and she told the hero of heroes how fire-drills worked. 

He said, "I think I saw this once in the afterworld." 

Anyone could feel the eyes on them. Ignoring it was like ignoring a tornado in the clear distance, or a frog where you're not used to seeing frogs. They called him Troy when speaking but just the same exercised heightened caution, as though in the company of a confirmed heretic, or someone with the reputation of a compulsive liar. A comatose person could register it. 

She looked at him, semi-numb, equally wanting him to continue and to save it. 

He didn't really know what else to say. He was listening to the foreign cry of the alarm penetrating the air & atmosphere with a perverse, yet thoughtful curiosity to the sensation it produced in his ear, in his chest and surely whoever contacted the building's supervisor the following morning heard the hero, then, and either one of them might have dropped a dime on the local news team soon after, and this whole.... 

The alarm was finally strangled and they all went back inside to their rooms and she held his hand with renewed investment, ready to live the whole crazy thing over again. 

****