Monday, March 20, 2006

Dream-The Author As Old Man.

Having fallen into disrepute at the end of his high school career and forced to withdraw his college admission at West Virginia after having been exposed (with a classmate) as a liar in the death—at soccer—of an opposing player some months before, exposed through the discovery of his passport being somehow held in hock at a new tournament in Australia, in which yet another opposing player, the goalie, had been killed, reduced to a bubbling yellow pool of guts and brains and jersey after attempting to stop a shot kicked much to hard at the small triangle of goal he defended, such exposure beginning prematurely an adult life that sent him on a trajectory of possible alcoholism and certain non-success, an old man, eyes runny with the dotage of many bitter decades, returns to his high school, its wood rotted and windows lined with runny liquid streaks, the light somewhat dimmer and the floorboards browner and more stained that he remembers them, to read for a small group of assembled students, most of whom have never heard his name, a passage from his book, not his first book, but now in the twilight of his life, his first book to meet with any small measure of critical approval, let alone acclaim, both of which he now received, if only from the most obscure and capable critics, themselves mostly old, none of whom with the audience necessary to vault this book, believed earnestly by these zealous few to truly be the mark of genius long concealed, to any sort of bestseller list. The school is physically much changed, to be sure, and the dust is gathered in the corners, but the same ivory bust of Alexander supervises this same darkish room located right off of the third floor library, where this group of very young students, sixth grade perhaps, now assemble, understanding none of what the school used to be when the author attended, indeed nothing of the author himself or the past, notably including no knowledge whatsoever of the author’s catastrophic pre-college Exposure to his shocked classmates, and they don’t see (as the author now does) that whatever spark of Good and Truth and Desire that existed in this man before his Exposure, still lives inside of him and is now being fanned and brought to flame in this man, for the first time in years, by the presence of these young children in this too-familiar place, much changed but not beyond recognition.

Two teachers are present. One is herself youngish, early thirties perhaps but heavy and slow and prematurely gray in streaks from the fatigue of supervising boisterous children without having any of her own, and in her too there’s a certain latent bitterness and resentment laps gently just inside the limits of her skin and finds occasional silent outlet in her overblue eyes. She regards The Author with suspicion, sees only his streaming, tearing eyes, and ascribes them not to the warm reemergence of memories and impulses long dormant, but to years of self-abuse through whiskey, and cigarettes, and God-knows-what-else, both of which are true, but only one of which is now active and alive and relevant. The other is much older, much older indeed, ancient even, coated with wrinkled skin that, collapsed in creases and flaps around her eyelids and sockets, obscures clear unwet white eyes that maintain and radiate harmonious equanimity even in the face of a tremendously bitter and increasingly cruel old age that has robbed her of most of her faculties. Into the cobwebbed room she walks lamely and half-stumbling with the help of a knobby walking stock, her weight shifting erratically between her out-jutted left knee (her good one) and right elbow (her good one, the one not linked to the hand that holds the stick), and she arrives, at the end of her journey, at an ancient chalkboard, yellowed with the fossilized chalk dust of many years and suspended by a hinge inside of a withered oaken frame that is fundamentally solid, but is decorated by shells on its corners and a coat of arms in its upper center. In the groove that runs along its bottom is a quarter-piece of nubby chalk, which she now retrieves and applies, with much effort, to the surface of the board, before writing in clear, precise, even strokes that betray no palsy, the Author’s name and the title of his recent novel. The Author, holding together above his head with the clasped thumb and forefinger of his left hand, as always, the four fern fronds of different lengths which when brought together and suspended as they are have become the signature headdress of one of literature’s most ancient, most obscure eccentrics, notices that a certain guileless infant smile is coming over his face as she finishes writing, and turns to him, and meets his watery eyes with her own clear eyes (which barely see and which have not been corrected by contacts or glasses), and meets his smile, too, and says: “The kids. They keep you young.”

And with that his smile finally births and bursts forth across his face, and his legs uncross at left-ankle-and-right-knee and recross gently at the ankles, and his right hand falls limply at his side, the fern fronds that they previously suspended dropping feathery and in lyrical slow motion at his front, back and sides, so that the four of them come to rest perpendicular to the Author as the cardinal points of a compass of which his being is the center. And suddenly the room is experienced again in full color, and full moisture, and without dust, and the life and the joy creeps back into the Author starting at the place above his head where the fronds used to be, enveloping his face, and chest, and hips, and thighs, and calves before it extends all the way down beyond his toes, and the camera finds his eyes, which seem to suck in the moisture they had previously leaked and hold it in, are reborn by it, and he notices too that the old teacher across from him is young again, too, her eyes also the same as they had been when they were young but unobscured by flappy ancient eyelids, and indeed her hair is curly, a luminous shade of brown, and her face is radiant and young and newly pubescent, and they are together, face to face, these two, surrounded by thirteen other young male students, in coats and ties, in this cleanly scrubbed white room, just as they had been, eighty years ago, on the day they first met.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home