Suspended
an excerpt

Suspended

The morning hours crept away, just as the sun and just as the thoughts of Harvey Wallace did. Most early hours Harvey spent in a daze, a confusion that swept over him and only let him go when he began doing something, and that something mostly turned out to be work. At least work gave him this grace five days a week. On weekend mornings he walked into the haze, guided by a little time to spare and a fierce imagination. Lately though, these weekend mornings had become lazy mornings, ones where instead of thinking and writing and reasoning, he had a cup of coffee, watched a t.v. program or two and then dwindled into the day thoughtlessly, hours passing by like a kite in the wind. Not that they hadn’t flown away on mornings he dedicated himself to leaning into life by analyzing and betting on it, because he’d wasted many hours on that as well, as far as he or anyone else could tell. And that seemed to him the funny thing, because while so many people commented on his peacefulness and sense of adventure, no one considered that the mornings he spent in meditation and repose might have contributed to his countenance. Nonetheless, on this particular morning, as the brilliance of a colorful sunrise faded to a drab light, so did Harvey’s spirits which could only mean one thing, he had shoved off to work, realizing again that he didn’t want to, preferred not to, and still had, as they say in this world, no choice.

Harvey held a boyish figure, slight and lean and incredibly small. A full grown man, he had the stature of about a ten year old, perhaps a full four foot five inches. Each day, on his way to the counting office, he dressed in a suit, coat-tails and all, with a little bow tie and trousers that tapered down his sides so that no mistake could be made about his musculature and slim waistline. The only problem with the outfit came from the coat-tails being rather too long, almost two feet too long, so that had he been a full grown man, he would have filled them out and looked normal. As it were, he looked goofy and curious, and some people mistook this curiosity for foolishness and a general stupidity. What they didn’t realize, as with most, is that capacity has nothing to do with clothing. Harvey had considered that old saying, ‘the clothes make the man’, and well, in this case, they did not, but everyone thought they did and so in a sense they made him small in the eyes of others. He was a little man. Not a boy, mind you, a full grown man, just a little one. Even in light of the misgivings of most everyone around him, he refused to turn the coat in for another one that fit better, mostly because the one he was wearing had been given to him by his father, a gift that Harvey took with him into manhood, looking ashamed as he did, trying with all his might to fill it out, hoping that one day a miracle would befall him and someone would guide him, or indeed he would find his own way, into the stature that had been entrusted to him, or in better words, had been expected of him. He was no ordinary man, living in an ordinary world with extraordinary expectations and a failing to meet them at every corner, as least as far as the naked eye could see, whatever a naked eye might be.

The day came and went, stress creeping into his shoulders and lower back as it normally did on the drive down 44 west, a slight highway for the traffic passing over it, always congested and inevitably thought provoking what with the pauses, breaking, speeding up, merges and exits, a rite of passage into the world of the living, a drive to work. In the half hour or so of driving he would wriggle now and then in his seat, breathe deeply, smoke a cigarette, listen to talk radio and listen to classical music when talk radio went to commercials and generally try to calm himself into the routine that faced him, a job full of numbers and silly interactions, some of which he enjoyed immensely and in fact saved him from resignation to a life of homelessness that surely would have befallen him had he turned in his notice and headed for bankruptcy. Money, that odd thing in life that everybody wanted, only a few people had and, according to the spiritualists, nobody needed. In fact, everyone needed it. In the years of Harvey’s youth he heard again and again an expression his parents used, “Money doesn’t grow on trees”. And he thankfully accepted this admonition, because trees, deciduous ones anyhow, did not constantly, nor immediately produce leaves, and if leaves were money the supply went away every year in the fall and did not come back until the following spring. The way he calculated it, if money did grow on trees, he’d have about a six month supply and knowing humankind was anything except kind, he’d probably have his trees burned or ‘picked’ and be left with nothing, which it seemed he had anyway. Growing seemed a slow process, and money growing on trees seemed an idiotic expression, but he didn’t say anything, keeping his silence, or keeping silent his outrageous thoughts, because mostly people didn’t understand. And when it ever came to expressing one of his fancy notions, people usually got a rise and started asking questions, which he rather liked because otherwise people just said yes and no and went along with the rhythm or normalcy known as, ‘what everyone else doesbelievessaysisandwantstobe’.

On the drive home the same stress tightened around him, making him uncomfortable. This stress though did not come from work, it came from the rest of life, the notion he should be about something, be seeing someone else if he was seeing anyone, and generally be in another state, another country, another occupation, another world. He also did not voice these ideas because a naysayer would come along, ‘Oh, get off it Harvey! Be thankful for what you have! Build your future! Relax!’ His mind didn’t let him. Much as he longed to be free, much as he longed to just relax, to live, to be content, he did not control the moment and this both frightened and excited him. Sitting in the car, on the same slight highway, smoking the same brand of cigarette, listening to a different kind of music, he mused and wondered what the next day held, and he knew it held the same routine and a world of different thoughts. Getting the thoughts down had become a task in itself, to say nothing of the immense work it would take to organize them into anything coherent that another person would be able to relate to.

Tonight presented itself differently than others. The same drive home got him thinking about life, as it always did, about ways out of or around it, about a realization of something beyond himself though he didn’t know what, about someone who could take him where he needed to be, a place where his jacket fit and he fit in, however that was. At home, he took off his suit, put on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt sitting down with a double cream oatmeal stout in one hand and a copy of Kemble Scott’s So.Ma in the other. While reading he could hear, in the apartment below him, the loud voice of a man, obviously upset about something. It happened that he could not make out any words, he could only tell that the man seemed upset. He kept reading and attempted to ignore the happenings, not wanting to meddle in another person’s business and to respect his or her space. A few minutes later the voice had raised to a volume where he thought he could make out words, only, now the monologue came so furious and quickly that the only words he could discern came at the end of the shouting – “You’re a stupid fucking bitch! Get – the – fuck - outta here, Now!” Hearing such an exclamation, Harvey nearly came to his feet, a mix of emotions coursing through his veins. He thought about the safety of the person being so violently evicted. He thought about the emotions of the man, who being so upset, sent he or she out of his place. For all Harvey knew it could have been a dog who peed on an expensive rug. Should he or shouldn’t he go out and see what had happened? He’d seen countless news programs and read numerous articles in newspapers, magazines and psychological or sociological journals, and even seen t.v. shows, where people who could have helped at a given time did not. On the other hand, the news always portrayed heroes and heroines, and so did Hollywood and literature, who when faced with a situation such as he had just been faced with would have been down the stairs already, willing to take whatever came to ensure the wellbeing of a fellow man. Was something wrong with him? Was this what people had been telling him all his life – “you think too much!” But here, as in every tiny corner in life, questions existed, and though answers existed as well, you would have to suck up space and be left with nothing, with the truth, the only thing that existed outside of the realities and ideas that filled the little corner you were looking into, in order to make a right move. And here the hard question – does it matter, this thing called truth? Could Harvey have been right to refrain and consider interference? Would a hero have been right to intervene and act as protector? And would that right have been different or more or less wise had the person interrupting, ah, intervening, been a man or a woman?

During all this thinking, something curious happened and Harvey came to his senses. Hearing faint murmurs from the apartment below, he couldn’t distinguish between the possible voice of a t.v. star acting a performance…a man watching television after violently throwing out his girlfriend seemed odd, Harvey would have been fuming and probably taken a walk or gone out to drink…and the possible subtle supplications of a woman who apparently had taken the abuse well and had come back for more, or had made up her mind to change her ways. Any story would have fit at such a point because no story could be told, nothing was known and probably nothing ever would be. Life proved itself a comedy and a tragedy that way, funny because of how much went unknown, a tragedy because all that we know seems pretty fucked up. Just the other night a television show host had said on David Letterman, “The world is an evil place, an evil place and no one wants to think about what’s happening overseas in Iraq, or Afghanistan; they want to turn on ‘Dancing with the Stars’!” Harvey thought the statement true and not true. The world could be evil. Nonetheless, it might not be that people don’t want to think about tragedy and the world’s problems, it may just be overwhelming. After all, ten thousand years of philosophy, religion and science had not cured humanity of its bickering spirit, its spirit for destruction and greed, its capacity for enjoyment or its ability to show immense kindness in the worst of situations. He’d heard the old saying, “There are two kinds of people in this world,” and thought, yes, it’s true. And wanted to add, “There are two other kinds of people in this world, and two other kinds and two other kinds andtwootherkinds.” A man downstairs had possibly beaten his girlfriend, wife or pet. A woman outside possibly committed an indecent act, or cooked a poor meal or drew her last straw of criticism. A man upstairs could have possibly intervened and played the hero, yet decided to sit in his chair reading, a kind of taking his chances, letting things play out their course and deciding that whether he knew or not what happened, whether he followed up and found out the reasons and consequences, none of it really mattered because it didn’t concern him. Apparently, the other people in the garden style apartment building, and there were seven other apartments, felt the same way, and whether from fear or wisdom, those people stayed in their places as well and let life go on around them, while it pulsed through them.

Excerpt 1

Who’s that? Niles. Let me in. No. Come on Horace, I’m not joking, let me in! No. Niles came to visit Horace every Tuesday night, mostly because it was the only Tuesday night his girlfriend Leslie had something else going on, and so consequently he had nothing going on. Horace had become vexed at such visits because Niles did nothing but incessantly bitch about Leslie, wondering out loud whether she could be the one when she apparently could not be, and would consequently never be. It’s just that, well, you know, she won’t go down on me. Like every time we go to get into bed, I mean I want her to and I ask her to and she goes down for a little while and comes up for air and never goes down again. And sometimes, I go, you know, down there, and it smells alright and everything, but man what a mess if she hasn’t cleaned up! Alright, alright Niles, enough! I mean, God knows that it’s bad down there when it ain’t clean, but everyone has there unclean moments, and apparently you have more than your fair share if she’s not spending so much time in your nethers either, you know? Why’s it a problem anyway? Why don’t you just shower ‘fore you start and let bygones be bygones? Hell! If that’s the only problem, you’ve got nothin’ to worry about, nothin’ but changin’ a few habits!

Truth be told, Horace had never had a girlfriend, and probably never had sex either as far as anyone could tell. The two came off as good friends though, and Niles always took Horace’s advice, because even though the latter had no experience, he always had good ideas. And good ideas counted in Nile’s book. Presenting a pair that could outlive time, good ideas mixed with a world of experience, it seemed they would ride into the sunset and never come back, just burn and burn the closer they got to the light and so the story went, the closer to paradise. Horace always wondered why man wanted to go to the moon. It’s cold out there. Now the sun, why don’t we figure a way to put a floating greenhouse in the middle of it and grow the hell out of whatever we want? Guess the scientists say you got problems with heat, and no water and all that, but ain’t neither of those on the moon either. Too much of a good thing. Whatever.

Comeon man, just let me in! Horace wanted nothing of the bitching that night. He’d just stomached some of his own, and sat in front of the t.v. in a daze, wondering how life could be so unfair, how people could impute intentions to him that he didn’t have and then make him have those intentions. You know those moments where someone says it’s alright that you feel a certain way, and you don’t feel that way and you say it, and they come back with, no man, it’s really alright, and it’s not alright ‘cause you don’t feel that way, until the anger they say it’s alright that you have, that you never had in the first place, becomes something you do have, until the anger you didn’t have is replaced by an anger you have that grows by the minute, not because of any original intent but because of the ignorance of someone goading you on. Horace marveled at those moments, ones that so heavily influenced emotion, a tiny window into the soul, which if the truth be told was a glass case influenced by everything going on around it, let’s say a mirror-glass case where you can see out, but no one can see in unless you open the door to your soul. Horace had just kicked out his girl, yelling and carrying on and was too embarrassed to open the door, ‘cause it had only happened a few minutes earlier and Jane, that was her name, had probably ran crying past Niles on the way out. And the goddamned walls in the apartment building he lived in were paper thin. You could hear anything. Many a night he heard some jack ass upstairs playing music. And it weren’t no music either, more like an incoherent mess of something new, like the guy had been trying to ‘work something’ out and it wasn’t working. The whole building probably heard him. Had anyone heard the violent hands of force? Did anyone notice the small voice of supplication? Could anyone hear Jane’s whimper when her heart skipped a beat from the pressure her biceps and triceps were under from his grasp? And what the hell was wrong with these people? No one did a thing? If he’d heard his own abusive, abrupt, loud mouth he would’ve beaten himself senseless. Well, it would’ve been another man, but no way in hell existed that he wouldn’t have been down the hall, or down those stairs to confront any man who bad mouthed a woman, or even a lowly dog. Niles had no way in. And Horace had no way out. Alright man, I’m going to sleep out here until you open up. Closed doors never helped anyone. I heard you yelling when I walked up here, felt Jane crash against my shoulder as I opened the door, I can even hear your crazy breathing right now…and what the hell is that, the t.v.? How can you watch t.v. at a time like this? Aw hell, come on in, man.

Christ! What happened? Interesting how a crisis can bring a difference about. Niles never asked questions. Once the door opened so did his mouth and he barely closed it until Horace would say, ‘Good night Niles.’ And even then he’d bowl out the door with a mouth full of expletives, ‘Fuckin’ great time man, it’s so good to see you, we gotta keep doin’ this every Tueday night, it’s my only piece ‘a sanity man, my only piece’. So, here came something new. A question. A genuine expression of concern. Well, Jane’s converted. Whaddaya mean converted? She’s gone and done it man, she’s become some kind of Jesus an’ Pals girl. She said we can’t sleep together anymore, that it’s a sin, that we can’t watch our soft porn, that we can’t even talk dirty to each other. And she said she’s really considering our whole relationship! Ten years man. Ten fuckin’ years and here we are. Oh god I went ballistic. You want to insult a man in his own house, deny him because of his beliefs. That’s about as good as sayin’ ‘Hey, you, yeah, you piece of shit, you know what, fuck off, ‘cause you got it all wrong, and to beat it into your head, if you thought I loved you, forget it, morality beats a relationship any day, any day, you hear me?!’ And she’s havin’ a baby of mine too! I already got one kid tied up in a fatherless affair, I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let some messiah come between me and my kid that’s on the way. What the hell is wrong with these people anyway? Don’t they have any common sense? Here Jane comes talking about wanting some space, not wanting to see me anymore, blaming me for sex and the burden of a baby and whatever…you think we weren’t fucking on the way home from the doctor’s office when she found out? I mean, hell, we had it on the entire weekend in celebration of the news. Three days later she’s cold as ice. Won’t return phone calls. Won’t talk to me in public. We had to see a goddamned counselor just to speak a word to each other. She comes over tonight, brings me a birthday cake, makes me dinner…we’re havin’ a conversation and she just wants to be friends. I could expect that much. And she wants rights to the kid. That I can handle too. Much as I want the kid, let’s be honest, a howlin’ baby for the next two years is not exactly what I need to get straight. And after all this, she says, “I don’t think anything is going to work out between us, I might just take the baby and move out of state, you know, really get the space I need”. Wait a minute man, she said what? I felt sorry for her on the way out, but honestly, fuck that bitch. How could anyone do that? I mean, you’ve meant nothing but good by her, treated her like a true lover, bent over backwards to make the situation right, and she’s gonna up and leave. No way. No way I would stand for that. No way I’m gonna stand for that.

Excerpt 2

He sat on the bleachers at dusk, on the opposing team’s side of a freshly groomed baseball diamond that served both as a t-ball field for children and the “home field” of the neighborhood slow-pitch softball team. When children weren’t at play, the adults were. Orby knew, as did all other twenty-somethings that adult activities mostly took place after children’s bedtimes, or at least when they napped. He had a child of his own after all. The mother, however, could not be found anywhere. She’d moved on to populate the world in a quest for shirking off a responsibility-laden childhood of her own. Stella would come to town, stay with a man a while, normally the first she met, bear a child and vanish almost before the umbilical cord could be severed. She planned on paying back what her parents had called her good fortune with misfortune. Orby had no idea. He certainly had ideas now, what with a ten month old son to raise, a menial job and seemingly no hope of flying away. How a woman could up and leave her child, let along a man she professed to love confounded him. He’d been duped. His parents would have provided more support had they mean to do so. They did not. Mom lay at home in a sickly state and dad worked a day shift as security guard at the local shopping mall, laid off from a factory job. Maytag had moved out of Newton, Iowa because, according to Whirlpool, who’d bought them out, more money could be had elsewhere. They didn’t believe money grew on trees either, apparently. Besides, Orby had moved to San Francisco chasing a dream of some day becoming an artist of some kind or another. He really loved art, and had a talent for it, thinking that a little determination would allow him to create a movement, his own movement, where different mediums of art mixed with dying nature, debris, decomposing matter. Instead of composing a masterpiece, he would decompose one. The problem though lay in the very idea. In order to accomplish the work, he would have to preserve the very essence he sought to capture – a dying leaf on canvas no longer decayed; a rotting log of wood mounted on concrete in a controlled environment ceased its slow return back to the earth. In the midst of conjuring up his plan for a decomposition revolution, he took to lapsed time photography and learned in lapsed time that decomposition took months and in many cases years. It didn’t pay. He had to ask himself if pushing the point of the laws of physics, the second law of thermodynamics that partially says everything is in a state of decay, were worth it. In business terms he wanted to know what the return on his investment would be. Nineteen months ago the answer to such a question did not concern him. Indeed he’d never even thought of the question. No immediate need presented itself. Nineteen months ago he had inadvertently put in practice another principle, though debated in circles of science – life begets life. And life falls apart. It took almost two years but he saw his own decomposition, his own undoing, unraveling before him. His idea of art played out in his very life, and had he the wisdom to video-tape it all, what a time lapse movie he would have had. The words of Thom Yorke kept playing out in his head – “When I’m at the pearly gates, this’ll be on my video-tape, my video-tape.” Following this notion, he kept a recorder with him wherever he went, and whenever, wherever, whatever Thom got into, that is what Orby named his son, he got into it on video-tape. A created life, a movement toward decay, even while growing, even while rising, soon would fall and the whole beautiful act would be caught on video. What a novel idea! Unfortunately, and she could go fuck herself as far as Orby was concerned, Jane would have no part in Thom’s life. And the young boys early decent, later on, could undoubtedly be traced to the decay of something else, namely a relationship, and that inevitable and determined entropy could be traced to something else, a dissolute relationship between a mother and father and their daughter. World’s had a funny way of colliding, and no one could see the whole picture, not one could point to a time where things started to fall apart, because the trace went on and on throughout history. Even books and records could not capture reasons, even philosophers and scientists could not agree, even religion did not satisfy the thirst of a man to know how we’ve come to where we are. Orby had begun a mission. The record of a life. And it would be painful and happy and beautiful.