He props open the back door with an old flip flop, lying on the couch to face out. Through the wrought iron bars a windy black patio and fire escape, bleary lights of high rises, rounded cutouts of wooden water towers.
The night is cool, not frigid, but it's perfect in this zone of turbulence, between the whistle of the outside and the oven heat rising unceasing through the floorboards. It's not yet forty degrees and the landlord has already fired up the furnace. Thus, the open door.
He mutes the television and cuts the overhead light, preferring the cozy yellow of the lamp to blaring white of the fan. Total buzzkill. He settles into the corners of the couch, the soggy armrest cushions, cracked plywood frame, shaggy throw pillow beneath his neck.
A line of white smoke rises from the tray on the coffee table, the tip of the burning paper matching the plastic of its holster. The smoke is pungent and rises slow, straight and thin, jack's beanstalk to the clouds except when the wind picks up through the iron bars and jiggles it.
On the television a shiny tan man is gesturing stiffly before a cartoonish display, sweeps of fat blue and red arrows, little animated stamps of thunderclouds and snowflakes. There's a front coming in tonight, down from the north east. A coming cold.
He lifts the spliff to his mouth and sucks with his lips, then breathes the collected smoke. He balances the burning joint back on the orange ashtray, folds his arms, exhales slowly.
He should be writing. There's a battered notebook on the coffee table, spine bent with a chewed black pen, cover mottled like a psychedelic Holstein. He should be scratching out pages until his hand cramps up, the acid in the tendons so fiery bright each word is a struggle.
But he wavers, takes another drag, looks at the off-white pages, clean-lined, blank. He thinks about how he'd begin.
Now, he sees himself rising, sitting up on the couch, hunched over the coffee table, the words scrawling out from the pen, black and formed and forever there.
Continues smoking the joint, watching himself writing the events of the past week, but not actually writing them, wavering on the urge to write them, to commit them to text.
He thinks about how personality disorders are set at childhood or before, how they evolve through family members, and come out at repeatable, tiny events, catalysts of drama. But then back up and out, wondering if he's revealing too much by writing about it, that literary greatness is driven by an unhealthy narcissism, it takes a bold inner-dialogue to write things worth reading.
He's flashed with the insight that smoking cannabis causes self-consciousness, an infatuation with the grunt work of the body, the meaningless wanderings of the mind, settling on lowest common denominator stuff like junk food munchies and cartoons, turning away from deep familial narratives because they are a bit embarrassing. And yet that's what our lives are, he thinks, this narrative lived in slow motion that amounts to all players growing old, crusty, despairing in the cold, only to die.
He settles on nothing and the whole musing is a bubble that's now popped, floating up with the rising smoke trails.
He puts out the joint and goes to sleep.
***
He dreams of a formless black maw rising from the deep dark. When he wakes with the first glare of light, he wonders - what of the dark things that are hidden from us?
This is November. The month of dying, fading. The decent into winter, before the glimmer of the holidays. Forsaking summer, the golden evenings giving way to mist.
He thinks of betrayals, starving nights, terror in the void. He thinks of mindless bureaucracies that enslave the mind for generations. The useless institutions, the absurd drowning horror of disease, escalating conflicts driven by faulty communication, racism, petty hatreds. Where are these things? Are they here? Are they visceral?
The muse speaks to him: These are the things that must be on your mind, in your writing, in your art. Not the capture of petty struggles, interpersonal relationships, the change of normal seasons. We need earthquakes, flooding, disaster, pain, suffering, twists, backstabbing, alien invasions, demon summoning, zombie risings. We need tsunamis of frozen glaciers, mutations of polar bears into spike coated war beasts. We need suitcase nuclear explosions, stripping the very skin away, staggering, glazed in red smoke muscle. We need terrorist attacks and CIA eavesdropping and vault robberies and plane crashes. We need Cthulu rising from Hudson Bay.
***
After work, when their schedules align, he meets with his friend John. They settle into rickety wooden booths, sample exotic European ales, discuss art, film, literature. They talk about the words they write, the pieces they're working on. Most of it is banal, awkward pauses, knowing glances to females at separate tables.
"I can't write," he says. "I can't find a story to tell. All I have are seeds."
"Seeds?" John asks.
"Yea well, you know. The root of stories. That first spark that catches your attention. I have a ton of them, but I don't know what to do with them."
"Like what?"
"Oh, I don't know. This guy I saw on the subway, looked like Wesley Snipes in Mad Max gear. He had a bleached blonde mohawk. What's he about? All the pregnant mothers waddling around, with their little brown bags and appointment books. What are they about? The skateboarders that hang around Union Square. I mean, they live here in this city. They must have a story to tell. I just can't latch onto it."
"You have to stick with one long enough to tell it."
"That's the problem. I see them for a few seconds, then it's onto the next interesting one."
"You have ADD," John says.
"I do, I really do. What were we talking about again?"
***
At work he has become an expert at procrastination.
From the minute he arrives there's ten tabs tunneling into the net. RSS reader, mostly tech and philosophical speculation blogs. Real estate and celebrity sightings. He checks his fake investment game, his social networking profiles, aggregate photo sites. All these streams and chains and links of superfluous details.
He wonders if he's just re-consuming the same stuff repackaged. Half the stories bounce around the echo chamber throughout the day, the news cycles circulating down and out, from the first rough headline, picked up from a wire service, echoing wider, a stone in the pond - the daily papers and newsweeklies, the politico blogs, message board feedback loops, then analyzed by a big name editorial writer correlating his latest book deal. And back in again through the same cycle.
It's dark by 4:30. He feels trapped in these drywall chambers, grey carpet and cubicles. Mire of normalcy, despite the chaotic streets without. He's been thinking about Himalayan expeditions, those mystical adventurers catapulted to the clear, thin atmosphere, even more those who never return to civilization. Those lost souls, drowned in the airless cold. Spirits in the ice, luminous for all time.
None of his music interests him. He grew bored of the summer but he's not really ready for winter. What happened to fall? It died on the vine, curling in crisp brown, swept by the cold November rains, the early dark.
***
"I have so much trouble starting. It's such a finicky thing. I can stare at the white page for a long time. Just sit there, ready to go. But not."
"Yea," John says. "But you just have to start. Pick a word and go from there."
"It's not about the word, it's about the flow. The flow of the whole thing. If that first sentence isn't just right, nothing starts. It'll just die."
"The muse is a strange creature."
"She can be a coldhearted bitch sometimes."
"Don't dis the muse."
***
The wine pours like water and looks like blood. He turns off Saturday Night Live, halfway through a skit. He hunches under big black foam headphones, letting the randomized soundtrack set the mood for his night.
It's getting colder but his back porch is open to breathe in the air. The heat is rising from below, through the hardwood floors.
He's happy with his life when he defines happiness as mild, peaceful contentment. Everything falls into place, like that Radiohead song. But he realizes there's nothing with any momentum, nothing ecstatically alive. It's a very adult feeling, and it makes him feel a bit scared.
Not just because he's in his mid twenties and societal rules imply that maturity is still a few years off. Usually he ignores those societal rules, and if he ever pays attention, it's only in jest.
Most of all he wants to live a story. A life worth reading in a pulp serial. He wonders if it is. He's accomplished a few things worth noting, but then he realizes his life as a protagonist is too comfortable - too many nights sipping good wine, too many steak dinners, sex when he wants it, curled up on a soft couch, watching on-demand films. His life will never comprise a story worth hearing unless he puts these things by the wayside.
He wants to set out into the cold dark, the wilderness outside the city, something daring. He wants the life of a nineteenth century adventurer. He wants to risk his life for a story. Otherwise the story isn't worth telling.
What he longs for is the solemn lake, the lone pass, too desolate to approach. He wants a ridge top raped by rain and snow and hail and wind. He wants trees haunted and twisted, racked with horrible demented forms, the cold grey expanse beyond sucking in the myriad spaces between limbs. He wants a landscape forsaken by all others.
He wants to be alone for miles and miles, nothing but rocks and earth, the sky and the fallen leaves.
***
"But like I was saying about seeds," he says. "That's how I see people in this city. Just little flashes of light. You never see the same person twice - it's rare if you do. Almost magical. I mean, the people I see once in my life - maybe this slice of time when they're tearing their hair out, or just got fired or landed a raise or fucked their crush - that could throw their entire existence off for me. I could see them permanently as one thing that never really existed, save those few moments we intersected."
"So - what's wrong with that?" John replies.
"Well, think about it. That's how everyone is seeing everyone else. No one really knows anyone else, just this sliced perception. These seeds. And for me, it feels like everyone's on the verge of something. They seem exhausted. Anticipating something truly frightening."
***
He thinks he must be going mad. Consuming too much post-modern nihilist art. Not able to see straight, little black dots on the sidewalk, stomped gum or dog shit or dead leaves materializing on and off.
He keeps seeing the same girl over and over. New York must have clone armies of five well-dressed businesswomen, the same pea coat, grey or black or tan, the same sleek haircut and snap of heels.
The cold and the dark of the late afternoon, always outside it's dark and cold and the wind whips through the alleys, past the hydrants and newsstands, fluttering newspaper.
A lack of exercise, he's dizzy from the weak bloodflow of a brisk walk between trains.
He zones out all day reading about failed Everest expeditions, ropes cut to spiral down crevasses, off thousand meter drops, buried in the permafrost half a century, found decades later, skin bleached white and bloating.
He's not depressed, just frozen, his mind the opposite of lucid, dim and dull, ears and eyes packed with too much cotton. The afterglow of a long hallucinogen burn, the down slope of a caffeine binge.
The muse speaks to him:
Let things con-jive in a maelstrom of organic organs, like the composting leaves post fall, after the angry autumn winds, the heightened red of the trees against a steel sky, a backdrop of nineteenth century modernist triumph. The manicured park, the cultured habitat for duck and man, farmed trout, fat green reeds underneath the thick stone arched bridge, the chlorinated water reflecting the high rises, the rich penthouses and their unjust balustrades.
A dinner of filet mignon and Easy Mac, a banquet of canned cheeses, toupees, Wal-Mart fashions, faux smiles. A celebration of the mediocre, the lazy workdays browsing the internet, addicted like a slug, dragging behind a long salty tail of slime. Ignorant like the small town masses, bred on network television and mass-casted newspaper, unthinking, drowned under the cacophony of the outer world, the thing that roars unceasingly and only allows select few to decipher its cryptic meows.
***
He drinks tea.
He dips the string and watches the mesh bag bounce, steam misting off the top. Tendrils of heady brown swirl out and down, seeping into the boil, then the cracks in the porcelain are obscured in the opaque brew. He waits another minute, till the leafy tan takes on richer tones, red clay, rough bark. Then he lifts the teabag completely out, watching the bubbles puff and drip, the spices trapped behind the papery mesh, a single hot drop falling.
He gets in a rut where he can't think of what to write. He has habits and quirks that he thinks can drive him, lift him out of writer's block or laziness. The hot cup of tea, steaming yet untouched beside him. It's a finite elixir. While it contains warmth, he can write and blab and scribble disconnected thoughts on the page. But if the last bitter corners have seeped away or the drink gone cold and he's not yet latched onto a story - it's hopeless. He'll grow distracted, lethargic (despite the recent injection of caffeine), flip over to the television, computer games, stupid internet videos. The stories come less frequently now.
There are glimpses. Tastes. He can see iconic characters in crisp detail in his mind, if he cocks his head at a precise angle, bites his lip. Closing his eyes is rarely important.
It makes him weep when he considers the possibility that he's not part of any great tale. That his life will be comfortable and reasonably successful, but he'll grow old and fat and lazy. That he'll seep into a sluggish morass and the dream of greatness will fall away, a husk of youth. It makes him weep to know he's getting older and he's not pointing towards any spectacular targets.
He knows there is beauty and adventure and struggle and triumph and stories worth reading. But for him, in this dim half world, they are distant. He can't find them, only wave blindly at the upper atmosphere, supposing the faint light spot is the sun behind the clouds.
Outside, it's cold and it rains. There are always sirens. The streets are filthy. The pedestrians trudge with a sort of sadness, down turned frowns, save the assorted women who are at once beautiful and untouchable, living mannequins for Fifth Avenue corporations.
Under the press of relentless architecture, molded faces of gray and brown stone, bleeding asbestos soot, dripping green ink from corroded iron skeletons and scaffolding, he feels small. Unknown, unacknowledged, cold. Batted about; a molecule.
His breaths are shallow. His eyes are down. He lacks the energy to plug white buds into his ears. He sees only industrial crust, grime, ruin.
***
"So should I put it on paper? Is it worth it to record the lie? Maybe I'm just in this mood, or the weather's bad, the light's off. Do I want to create this whole aesthetic that's potentially frightful, nihilistic?"
"I think you can only create what you see," John says. "You can't really make anything new."
"You don't think so?"
"Art's a synthesis, right? Everything's been done. All we have are new combinations. So go ahead with what you were saying. Horror, right?"
"Not quite. More like, the anticipation of horror. Before it hits, before there's any evidence of it's existence. Just a nuanced hint of it coming."
"Yea, go with it," John says. "Don't hesitate to create, whatever it is. That's what everyone else does. Everyone who can appreciate art can make it - because they form the very same connections when they see good art. When they get it. Cause you know, when you consume art, when you get it - you're recreating its meaning inside your own head, your own internal vocabulary. You're mixing it with every other creative thing you've ever consumed."
"They might not be any good at it."
"Given. But they can try."
***
The rain abates for a time, and the sun warms the air and the wind through the street canyon dies. He looks and sees the glisten of light on the high metal buildings, the angle sliding, imperceptible but relentless.
For the first time in weeks, he smiles.
Today, it feels like spring.
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