Snatch XIV

In charge. What an idea. More control than I've ever realized. Well, the illusion of control. Whatever hand is on the plug no doubt can pull it without warning, on a whim or by some preordained schedule, no way for me to know. No way to know if there even is a hand or a plug. And would I want a warning? That's something to chew on, and for all I know I have plenty of time for the chewing. All the same there are plenty more things on which to chew, so many that merely prioritizing them could take forever.

If not, though, if the plug comes out before I finish this thought, is this the thought I wish to be my last? Well, it must be, or I'd be thinking another one. So there goes the illusion of control and the pressing weight of its responsibility. A luxury, this sense of free-fall, for the moment anyway, riding a whimsy that steers away from the darker concerns. Plug? What plug? Pain? Sanity-robbing pain? Yes, yes, of course. I've mentioned it, it's uncomfortably near, in memory but congealing to theory the longer absent. My faith's in the whimsy now. She's in charge. Why deny her?

Snatch XIII (pain)

“But bliss is an ambivalent if irresistible flirt. An opiate flash. An instant of fragile magic. Its recognition both grace and corruption. Yet, aware it only mimics redemption, is relative and can't last, carrying enough of the before to divine the after, I accept this gift with a deeper gratitude than I might have imagined, float with naked trust on its unearned buoyancy. And why? At the start, I suppose, because it distracted the pain.

“Oh, the pain. My infantile anticipation of it fell woefully short of preparing me for its arrival, its suddenness and magnitude. A jolt of such surprising intensity, so unrelenting a murderous force, my immediate sense was of collusion, that somehow this boiling intrusion into my every essence, blocking the denial patterns in my neurological coding, was in part my own doing, my reckless push beyond the existential boundary to an ambiance where the practical joke held court.

“That has to be it. A joke. Else I'd be dead, no? And the pain? Well, hell, that's a damned good question. It never did stop, mind you. Never diminished. Lit me up with celestial wattage, apparently for good. I'm still astounded how adaptable I must be to have gotten past its shock and managed to put the pain out of reach simply by paying it no heed. Like the tinnitus I've had as far back as I can recall. The constant locust whine I hear only when I turn my attention to it. The pain, this ultimate rending of nerves and the maddening whine by now I'm sure are in deep cahoots. I could laugh as well, knowing I remain in charge.”

Snatch XII (pondering paralysis)

“I mean, theoretically were I to try to move something, just a finger, or blink my eyes, or take a breath, even, and I couldn't, and nothing would happen, no action the signal from my brain would affect, I...the panic could kill me, scare me to death. Not that death alone, just by itself, would be so unwelcome. Total paralysis? Absolute, unequivocally complete paralysis? Another story. I'd go mad. That would come first. And not the sort of gibbering, slobberingmadness that's a sanctuary from comprehension, the psychological womb where one feels safe from memory, from its secrets, not that. No. No. No. But the kind of madness that's in stark, unyielding, undeviating communion with a feral imagination so unmanageable it surpasses exponentially the most hideous fevered delirium where even then one instinctively senses at least the hope of a latent mercy just beyond reach.

"Not this time. The madness residing in this unconscionable imagination feeds off the likelihood of every fear one has ever experienced and can conceive of experiencing looming just out of view, waiting to do with one what it wishes whenever it chooses. This I am without doubt would occur were I to try to move and fail. I would know beyond rescue I am stuck in a hellish, incrementally whimsical doom. A fly of uncommon sentience caught intractably in a web across which the measured approach of some other on the connected strands can be felt but not yet seen. No thank you. I choose, for the moment anyway, to keep the option of knowing open. The merest possibility of physical freedom in this circumstance of lethally slender range is nothing short of bliss."

Snatch XI (blood)

Blood. Portal to basics. A demanding focal intersect of now with ever. Distractions vanished in relevance. Whose, the initial interest. The sense of a voice, one of his own, weighing implications of the blood being of the preferred other: A wound from him? Accidental? Negligence? Otherwise...

“Otherwise it would have been assault, by me...” Public voice when he's tense. Tension leaves with its recognition. Ultra private voice: “That's bullshit. No memory of anybody near and if I'm not remembering them it could be somebody else or something hurt somebody and it wasn't me but what the fuck did happen? Is it me then? My blood? Nothing hurts, I don't think. No, don't feel anything, pain, itching, nothing. So if it is my blood? My blood. OK. What the fuck. Just on my face though. Just there? So how'd it get there?

“But I'm just guessing, OK? That it's blood. It could be bird shit hahahahahaha. But what about the rest then? The numbness or whatever. Could I move if I wanted? If I had to? I don't have to, I don't think. Do I want to? I don't really want to, I think, although I could be rationalizing. Shit. I shouldn't be afraid to see if I can move. Just to see. I think I am, though. Afraid. Maybe just theoretically.”

Snatch X

Accepting the likely identity of the wetness on his cheek--his right cheek, the sensation having appeared it seemed in the hollow just below the malar bone and trickled to a pool at the jaw--relieved with a certain doleful satisfaction his initial quest for resolution, and impelled the segue into a more pressing realm. Whose blood, and how did it get there?

The answer depended in large part on context, he knew, and with this understanding came the astonishing discovery he had no clue as to where he was or even who, his inward focus so intense it excluded all else. The terrain on which he found himself, allowed for no conscious navigation, no initiative to examine sequence or linkages. An awareness did exist, but it was subtle and elusive, a passive cognition with authority only to interpret, to question, hypothesize and form tentative conclusions. What seemed to be memory fragments appeared and vanished with no apparent affinity. An incrementally expanding hunger for pattern made its proximity known through the chaos. Yet a countermanding energy struggled away from all restraints, all familiarity.

Tension between the push and tug of these forces burgeoned and ebbed without apparent rhythm, and this uncertainty created a dichotomy of its own that both pleased and jarred the nerves, requiring of him an acquiescence with no semblance of expectation or chagrin. As a babe, he wondered, in the womb.

WHAT CAME BEFORE – Gay Degani

What Came Before is the first novel I can remember that within no more than ten heartbeats after I finished it I went back to the beginning and started it again. It was that good. Also, the tangle of mysteries was so subtle I had to re-read the “teaser” prologue to nail down what who I was pretty sure was who and which whom was in fact whom. And once I started reading it again, I simply couldn't stop. I kinda hate when that happens, because my stack of to-reads is so tall it could topple and injure me at any moment. But I simply couldn't stop. What Came Before is that good.

It confused me at first, I must admit. But as I kept going I eventually understood the problem: I was inside the narrator's head so completely I started wondering if I was the one going batty rather than her. Like this:

If I’d only used the coin-operated washing machine here at the apartment instead of using the Maytag at my house, the woman wouldn’t have found me.

Stop. Focus on today. Grocery store, essays, this afternoon’s ceramics class, the feel of clay between my fingers. A shower. Get back to normal. My new normal now that I’m “on leave” from my husband to – do what? Find myself? Oh, God.

I glance at the clock – 8:15 – and flop on my back, let yesterday unreel itself against my eyelids: Phoenix was barking in the side yard. Me in sloppy sweats, grabbing wet clothes from the washer, suddenly interested in escape, not dry socks, I slammed out the front door of my house where I should be living, but don’t. And then the slip of paper floated from the doorjamb onto the porch, settling, thin and persistent, at my feet.

See? Was I facing a possible gender crisis if I kept reading? It worried me a tad, I must admit, to identify with such a flaky female narrator. What saved me was forcing myself to identify indirectly with the husband, thinking maybe he had slyly persuaded her to go “on leave” from him to give him some – what? Peace? Nah, I didn't do that. I just now thought of it. What saved me, kept me reading despite my worry the narrator would scramble my mind like hers, was wondering just what in hell was on that slip of paper that “floated from the doorjamb onto the porch, settling, thin and persistent,” at her feet.

Gay Degani

Such is the genius of Gay Degani that despite a knack for transferring to our sensibility her protagonist's incessant mental agonies over every little thing she compels us to reach beyond the struggles of inertia and impulse for whatever lies just around the next corner. Like the armed robber staring into the barrel of Dirty Harry's .44 Magnum wondering if there's one last cartridge in the cylinder, we “gots to know” what in hell is on that slip of paper.

And before long we learn how the narrator's head came to be the mess it's become, and by now we really like her and we're more than happy to climb in and help her try to straighten things out—vicariously, anyway, although I did find myself from time to time using the sort of psychic English one employs with scary movies. No! Don't open that door! DO NOT GO DOWN THERE!! That sort of thing.

Want a quick peek at backstory? OK, just a quickie now. The protagonist, Abbie Palmer, was four-years-old when her Hollywood starlet mom committed suicide, turning on the gas oven and sticking her head inside. Abbie has a vague—very vague—memory of someone carrying her to safety from their home. Now, forty-eight years later, she's a college English teacher, mother of two, and the vaguely dissatisfied wife of a successful lawyer. Thinking the well-dressed woman who knocks on her door is yet another reporter wanting to dredge up memories of her famous suicide mom, Abbie uses profanity in ordering the woman to leave. The handwritten message on the slip of paper the woman stuck between the door and the jamb before she left says My mother is your mother. Abbie is white, the woman: black.

Were What Went Before a soap-sponsored radio melodrama the organ music at this point would swell with a sort of dum da dum dum effect. And I likely would flip the dial. That I kept on and on and on, even reading it again, despite that initial less-than-subtle dum da dum dum effect in my head, should tell you either I am a tad soft in the head or What Went Before is one helluva fine read. Either or both are possible, of course, but, soft or not, my head has handled enough novels over the years to be able to tell the seeds and stems from...whatever. As Cheech or Chong, or both, would have put it back in the day, What Went Before is good...stuff.

As with most debut novels of this extraordinary achievement, writing it was not the author's debut putting words into print. Many come to the novel after developing and honing their skills writing short stories. Gay Degani is long accomplished in the art known as “flash fiction,” which is gaining wider recognition by the hour among aspiring literati. I'm so new myself to its appreciation I shall describe it as a sort of poetry without the esoteric language, rebellious punctuation or artsy arrangement of lines on the page. It is prose exquisitely trimmed and compressed to exclude all but the very essential tenderloin of a scene or story.

Bringing this skill to her novel, Degani gives us crisp, fat-free writing that keeps the mind alert, agile, appreciative and, best of all, racing along to find out what there is to find out. Even the publisher—Every Day Publishing—is in on the flash fiction thing. Here's the company's explanation:

Every Day Novels combines the bite-sized craftsmanship of flash fiction with the depth and complexity of a novel — perfect for busy readers looking for a short tidbit of fiction each day, who also appreciate the greater plot and development of novel-length fiction.

For me, though, the “short tidbit...each day” advertisement didn't apply. I simply could not stop reading, tidbits be damned.

[find more Friday's Forgotten Books reviewed at Todd Mason's amazingly eclectic blog: http://socialistjazz.blogspot.com/]

  

Snatch 9

Thing on the cheek. Been there forever. What the hell? What is it?

One of those things you finally pay attention to, knowing somehow it's been there all along but has never drawn your awareness enough to take into account. Now that it has, it's front and center, so much so its mystery obsesses him to the exclusion of all else. Blocks context, immediate memory including whatever outlook held sway.

Conclusions leap to and fro. A tear. No. Would have dried long ago. And what emotion might have caused it that wouldn't outlast something so mundane as a tear? Water? From where? And only one drop? Nonsense. It's imaginary by now, whatever its cause. More than memory. Sparked into permanence by the stark effect of its appearance, its utter contrast with the context it supplanted.

What could do this? Something primal, had to be. Wriggled down through an evolutionary strata to a once vital nerve center, an ancient survival algorithm so smothered by centuries of social priorities its signals are all but ignored outside the most clamant demands. Relief, maybe, from some unacknowledged primal torment? No again. Relief is fleeting. This continues to disturb, if only by implication, with its essence: the livid power of a single drop. It could be blood.

Snatch 7 (scream)

The instant of his knowing lasted barely long enough for the sense of recognition alone to adhere, that he knew the scream and the face, falling shy of particulars of what he knew. No more than a flicker of insight that leered just beyond his reach like a vague itch or a scent so nebulous it might well be illusory. Yet it remained, with its promise of intimate revelation nourishing deep within him a seed of unholy dread.

He could avoid the face now. This was in his power, to exclude sight. He could ignore the visage, but not the scream. The scream allowed no diversion, no denial. It was shrill, swelling in volume and authority, invading, enveloping.

In desperation he parsed nuances in the accosting decibels until he found aloof one faintly audible frequency combination, a pair streaking high above the main in an apparent duel for supremacy as, entwined in primal struggle, their nearing the very edge of human detection torqued a frail valedictory tremolo which of a sudden rattled the cap off a conditioned psychic restraint and loosed an explosive geyser of such maddening ironic appreciation that under ordinary circumstances would have burst forth in foot-stomping hysteria.

As it was, as he attempted to communicate to the shrink something to account for his apparent distraction, hoping by this to release enough of the emotional pressure to return to his stoic posture, as he began to pronounce with great care the name Mad-e-leine, getting out only the Mad, the full counter-interpretative weight of the hyper-falsetto squeal still gripping his distilled attention, now, without the grace of transition, rendering utter pathos, the intolerable, unthinkable agony of its significance to the human soul, forced out of him a scream of his own, a wail, more accurately, a raw, wretched, verbless testimony of unrequited sorrow and grief scraping up from his intestines and through his abdomen and throat and out into the room and the world and further, further...

Union (snatch 6)

“Scream.”

“What?”  His reaction was spontaneous, despite a synchronous understanding of what she meant as she uttered the imperative. He felt her face turn to him. He kept his eyes on her ballpoint, frozen a half inch above the pad.

“It might help.”

Her voice had softened further, reaching a tonal intimacy that cupped his heart with an easy, intuitive confidence. Alarmed, he raised his eyes to her face, and in doing so he heard it, the scream. He thought at first it was Aggie, that her humming had moved to a higher register, ascending to soprano or beyond. A ragged crescendoing shriek, it seemed. Could it yet be music? A cry of terror? The questions went moot when the swelling sound oscillated and then became two. Aggie's ditty tripped away, leaving the shriek in solo.

He knew it now. Knew it well. He moved his focus to the face, and realized he knew it now, too.

Union (snatch 5)

Oh shit in neon lit up his mind an instant after he heard his voice say it, the “I'm scared of dying.” He'd meant it when he said it, he thought, but with the oh shit came a deeper understanding of how he really felt at that moment. Well, how he felt now, not at the moment he'd blurted it out. A more philosophical construct had winked at him soon as he'd said it, calling him first on using such a colloquialism, as if he'd lifted a lyric from “Old Man River” or regressed to something a child playing in a sandbox might say, and reminding him he'd long before conquered with sophistication his primal fear of personal finis.

His blurting it out had come on a whim. Nothing more, he decided, and began probing for the whim's derivation. An instinctual breakout? Was he losing control, his cognitive authority reverting to rationalization? He suspected this is what the shrink was thinking, had been striving for, employing professional dicta to unveil. He watched her ballpoint execute swift, exuberant swirls on the legal pad, while her face, he saw with a flicked glance, yielded nothing save studied dispassion.

  He knew she believed she had him. And maybe she did. Ordinarily he dreaded blushing, so much so that merely thinking about it could bring it on. He felt the heat rush to his face now. A flash of panic, then the realization his blood betrayal should signal he was onto her trick. She must know he was no fool. He wanted to sigh with relief that this instinctual eruption might be saving him from the other.

Out of control yet, though, riding his hard drive. She'd found the chink, happily noting nuances. Dangerous. What the fuck, he figured, and sighed, remembering almost too late to keep his lips apart.

BEYOND REDEMPTION – Gary V. Powell

I lost another chunk of innocence today. Before I read Gary Powell's story “On Horicon Marsh,” the sound and sight of wild Canada geese honking in their flying vee always thrilled me, always, as they had William Styron until that one autumn day when they caused me to stop, riveted with fear, and I stood stranded there, helpless, shivering...having, in a quote from Baudelaire...“felt the wind of the wing of madness.”

Styron's account of that experience, which I read some twenty-five years ago in Darkness Visible, the memoir of his descent into crippling depression, added a curious dimension to my appreciation thereafter of honking geese, an echo of mysterious danger in my wonderment at how such an innocently fascinating spectacle could trigger such personal devastation.

“On Horicon Marsh,” in Powell's short story collection Beyond Redemption, has added yet another dimension. This one is of sadness mixed with the admiration I've always felt for these amazing birds that mate for life and migrate thousands of miles by instinct twice each year. 

 Two couples and their children gather with scores of other tourists on an overlook at the famous Horicon Marsh in northern Wisconsin to watch a thousand geese fly in and congregate at the five-hundred-acre stopover on their winter trek south. It's nightfall and well below freezing. Sleet batters the tourists as they stand on the overlook watching the gathering birds. Now comes the part that will color my reaction to the honking vees forevermore:

Mitchell has anticipated the arrival of the geese all day, but instead of the rush of boyish wonder that once accompanied this moment he's troubled by an awareness he's never before noticed.

The geese fly in, land, and groom, with apparent indifference to the human audience, except Mitchell senses the participation of an agency more fundamental than mere indifference. The geese are so engaged in the business of survival that they can spare no interest in anything else. Attached to their every movement is a grim economy. They are required, second by second, to pursue, in the face of cold and snow and exhaustion and starvation, their precarious existence.

Beyond Redemption's singular stories, all of them, carry the potential to bring new light to the reader's understanding of some universal facet of life. Many of these jewels are woven so artfully into the narrative's complexly layered fabric they can be overlooked on a first reading. The “Horicon Marsh” illumination is more prominent, and reappears at the end in a twist that put a smile on this reader's face and left a warm glow in his heart.

Another of Beyond Redemption's tales, “Homecoming,” lingers with me so poignantly I still hear the melancholy Dan Fogelberg chords that played in my head while I read it. Two high school chums, Dee Dee and Billy, now nearing middle age, reunite after the death of Mikey, who had been the football team's star running back. He died a drunk. Billy was the star quarterback. He's now a handyman, Dee Dee a lawyer.

After they scatter Mikey's ashes on the beach where all three on the same day had lost their virginity to each other, Dee Dee and Billy...

[for more Friday's Forgotten Books see the listing on Patti Abbott's unforgettable blog]

Union (snatch 4)

So tearfully gratifying was the promise of Aggie's melodious humming it whisked away into its customary ignorable background the interminable locust chorus. A downside accompanying this positive note arrived with the voice of the shrink du jour.

“What are you thinking?”

He flashed on the shrink, this one a youngish woman with regular features spoiled by the pinched, nervous expression skin would instinctively assume fighting a facelift. Her narrowed eyes peered at him with rote interest. Annoyed on principle, he nonetheless wanted to share the delight of his newfound joy. To this end he smiled, shifted his glance with deliberation to her shapely legs and back to her face.

“You really don't want to know.”

She tugged uselessly at the hem of her Confederate gray skirt and swiveled her hips ever so slightly away. Her mouth twitched a single instance, eyes relaxed a tad then retreated back to their professional squint. A yawn stifled her sigh, fingers providing genteel cover for both. Remnants of the sigh adhered to her vocal response, softening the voice in a way not prescribed in training texts. “But I do, Jack. It's what we're here for.”

The “we're” dispelled whatever reverie had seemed to be forming. His irritation was sudden and visceral. He wanted to say It may be what you are here for, lady, but I have no choice in the matter. No fucking choice, and, oh, by the way, leave those legs of yours here when you go. I'll tell them whatever they want to know.

Instead he said, “I'm scared of dying.”

Union (snatch 3)

It took him a long time, a long long time (subjectively, as he had no technical means of measuring duration, and had not determined a way to objectify its sense, understanding in theory the Indonesian concept of Djam Karet: “elastic time” or, less poetically but perhaps more definitive, “tachypsychia”) to accept with

nonchalance that he might never capture a fixed image of Aggie in his imagination. And with fairly rapid diminution succeeding acceptance the notion of picturing her in his mind ultimately and with virtually no whoop di do relinquished any purchase whatsoever on his conscious agenda. Somewhere in this deconstruction of expectations his aural faculty started transmogrifying.

Deaf. This is what first came to mind. I've gone deaf. It came near the end of an extended silence, a blessed silence at the outset. But when it stretched beyond the ordinary gaps in vocal communication, when it reached into conscious apprehension of the tinnitus that had rasped interminably for as long as he could remember but which normally submitted to distractions of the meanest sort, when now the rasping dominated completely, smothering whatever words emitted palpably from his larynx, words he felt with his tongue and lips that had to be responding to something most likely uttered by the current shrink but which he evidently had not received aurally, he suspected he'd gone deaf in a way undoubtedly unique in whatever annals were kept for hinky shit of this nature. He puzzled over what he seemed to be saying in reply.

This puzzlement found no relief. None, despite many repetitions of the apparent tacit communication. He was settling in to deeming it merely one more mystery of life (sans the “ah, sweet”) when a sound made it through the febrile wall of noise with such piquancy it evoked a tear from his left eye (the one that routinely moistened with little warning or rationale except predictably in changes of exterior temperature).

It was a musical sound. A small, lyrical, artfully rendered, wistful, frolicky tone. The sound of Aggie humming.

Union (Snatch 1)

He didn't start to notice her, really look at her, until he'd been through any number of shrinks. (The “any number” was as close as he could come to estimating, as he'd never liked math, avoided it whenever possible. Had he cared, he knew, he might have gone back in his memory and listed them—the shrinks—by body language: fidgety, bored, tedious, intense, male, female, ambiguous, obese, anorexic, intimidating, timid, that sort of thing, in any combination. But he hadn't. It was Aggie, he realized with a start, who was the constant in all of this. The shrinks came and went. Never any reason given. It was Aggie, the nurse or aide or secretary or whatever she was—hospital administrator for all he knew—who remained. And when the moment arrived that he realized this, when it dawned on him, slapped him awake from wherever he'd been, from whatever depth of cognition or intuition or somnolent withdrawal or last-ditch delusion or—what the hey—unwitting denial, the suddenness and clarity of the recognition of Aggie, disturbed him more than anything that had come to mind thus far. Disturbed him so much the erection he'd begun to think of as permanent grudgingly released its tyrannical grip.)

[to be cont.]