Anonymous

by F. H.

May 2012

QUEEN: Thou knowst tis common all that lives must die, Passing through nature to eternity... HAMLET: ...All is not well; I doubt some foul play. Would the night were come. Till then sit still my soul foul deeds will rise - Hamlet, I, 2.

Cheap freeway coke placed on a sterile tablecloth, next to it an unsteady tower of unbranded white paper cups on a table packed with chocolatecookies and a dripping metal can of lukewarm coffee. Everything was arranged when they, alone and one after another, slowly arrived like raindrops, turning their heads around, shyly, checking if nobody had seen them approaching the building. From the outside the house looked too ugly and too aggressively passive to be overlooked by passing strangers and so had established a famous secret over time. Some of the people faintly nodded as they entered the room and aimed at the refreshment table with fast, short strides as if to avoid the awkwardness of standing in the dim room, trying hard to prevent themselves from talking or looking at the other strangers with exhaustingly bored glances and so they helped themselves with simple distracting actions like pouring coffee or impatiently gnawing at a tasteless cookie. I tried not to look inviting or offensive there were stories to be told later on. My mind was already working. I waited for five minutes more to pass and then told them to sit down on the chairs, building a circle so that we could face each other. Five people had come tonight, two women and three men I had never seen before, and after everybody had written his name tag and had placed himself on one of the chairs in the circle, I started and I asked the man who sat next to my right side the question I always ask and because of which each of them had come here. My daughter... I... well, I... the man said, sitting with his back bowed and his tattooed elbows resting on his knees, thus covering his bowels and staring at an invisible point somewhere on the floor. A thin circle of white skin was at his fourth finger and he had started to rub his hands as soon as he had begun to speak with an unsteady voice that outside of this room must have sounded strong and dark like mahogany wood. Wont you tell us your name before you start? I asked with a friendly smile. Too often I had asked this question in meetings before. It was better to let them talk of themselves a little bit before they dove into the matter, to let them gain security to conquer their shame before they left into the stormy unknown uncertainty of their own deep sea of troubles. The man looked up, confused by the early and unexpected interruption; childlike shame rose up in his face for making an overt, but unwilling mistake. He cleared his throat and after a short soft strike with his right thumb against the tip of his stained baseball-cap he took in his former
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position with his elbows on his knee, rubbing his hands and staring at the floor. Ehm...sure. My name is John he said and I think... he was searching for the adequate word, not making it sound too harsh or too offensive. But there was no other word and he knew his search was just an empty excuse to win some time. I and the others looked at him patiently. He took a deep breath. Then after another few seconds he released his muscles and leant back against his chair. Now we could see his dark eyes and masculine brows and a beard that made his young face appear old in the electric neon light. He shoved his head. Now his eyes were pointing at the ceiling. It was the easiness of the matter, the crystal brightness of polished diamonds, still hard to grasp and impossible to wrap up into delusive security of words. The door opened, wind poured into our meeting and whirled up our concentration like ash dusted paper cups on a brown and windy autumn afternoon. A man came in, nodding without embarrassment at his latecoming. I did not know him either and I just indicated at the chairs near the wall and pointed at a gap in the circle. The man had no remarkable features at all and the only thing I noticed was his androgynous face. There were no name tags left and so he just sat down and was quiet. Then I looked at John and told him to go on. Well, I think my daughter hates me he said. John pressed his lips together so that they went white. John told us about how he started drinking after his girlfriend had become pregnant and I thought to myself that he still did not know how it could have happened. Words chosen carefully, a scavenger picking in the ashes for the precious rotten meat. He was only eighteen back then, she fifteen. His own parents and the mothers parents pressed him to quit high school and gave him a job at their firm where he loaded pallets of bricks onto trucks that drove them off to the coast where the housing market was still growing. They did that so that John could provide for the baby. After a few weeks the girls (her name was Cherry) parents bought a small one-storied house on the outskirts of the city and persuaded him to marry their daughter. Too young and too inexperienced to withstand their pressing, he gave in and married her and a week later they moved together. Earlier relationships had never lasted long, in fact he never had a relationship that lasted longer than a month and never reached the depth of love and soon there were inevitable troubles between him and Cherry. Pregnancy had stolen the excitement and
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easiness of love and put a backpack filled with bricks onto their backs. Of course, when the child was born problems did not go away, as he still had hoped for, but grew bigger and soon his days existed of a work he did no like, a wife he did not love and a baby he could not connect with because Cherry lived with her parents again the day she left hospital. He never took off his ring and though he did not believe in much or anybody, still there were some things he thought to be holy. His house was empty when he came home at six in the afternoon and there was only a dirty mattress and an old TV left after Cherrys parents had decided that the furniture was theirs and that there was no reason for them to let John use their properties. Then one day, after nine years of leading a life of wasted evenings with liqueur as love and loveless, expensive, ugly whore-sex and after nine years of humiliating work at Cherrys parents firm and spending more than half of his little, hard-earned wage for his daughter he did not even know the name of, an accident happened. He called it his second life-changing accident. There was only a luke-warm smile of the other people and even the man without name tag showed a curious, but still faint reaction in face of such a blunt self observance. John read about it in the local newspaper. A car came off the street in a heavy blizzard and crashed into a nearby tree. The police later claimed that the car drove too fast for this kind of weather. Anyway, the driver, a 24-yearold woman, had died instantly in the accident but her 9-year-old daughter, who sat in the back of the blue Buick (the part which had not been crushed to a heap of randomly distorted metal) had survived without a scratch. Two weeks later, John received a letter which said that now he was the only person left in custody of his daughter who had lived with her mother so far and who had died just recently. Though Cherrys parents wanted to keep and raise their only granddaughter they could do nothing about Johns legal right of custody because he was the biological father and no court or lawyer could do something about it. It was not a matter of love for John to raise his daughter, but a matter of proudness and revenge on his stepparents. So on the following Sunday, his daughter he had never seen before and he did not even know the name of, knocked at his door. Of course the relation just had the possibility of being worse and growing worse only. John said he had never felt like a father and did not know how to behave like one and was unable to cope with the situation at all. After half a year of yelling and Blossom (he still called her by this, his imagined name) running away from her father quite regularly, he could not stand it
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any longer, sill blindly believing that love was actually something natural that grew in a child and that not needed to be created through the faking of parental love. He saw her as the ultimate, first reason for his own misery, a life deprived of opportunities and chances and began to hate his daughter, claiming it had been impossible for him to love her because she was the living mistake, the accident that was triggered every other bad event in his life. Then, after his third life-changing accident, he took off his ring. He said he realised that love could not be created by actions. The earth quaked and I thought she must be awake and I went into her room to see her laying in her cosy bed, the blanket kicked away by her twisted legs and her body sweating and her chest soundly whispering in the dark. I was so alone. People talked in their own secret language, carefully dropping hints like Plato in his dialogues and laying false traces so that you would not be able to follow them into the unmapped mazes of their mind. They used common symbols but randomly injected their own unreflected meaning and distorted them so much that others could not make sense of the violated and unlinked associations anymore. It was on me to figure things out, to build the accidentally universal truth they were looking for and to tell them what they might already have known before they even had entered the room. Most people who came here used symbols as the thin transparent veil which covered the elephant in the room, its form still visible. Then it happened. He made a pause and looked at the others who now had been left alone to form their thoughts, to make the supposedly right conclusion. Things looked ugly when they were spelled out. And now that it happened... No clear relation between the subject and reality; indeterminacy of language. It suggests that the action was not carried out by him but instead by someone or something else, like a natural law or what some people might call fate or a not influenceable event. A way to protect himself. And now I am afraid of the dark, now I really hate the dark, it is inseparable and now I dont want it to happen again. Does anybody know about this? To k n o w: to have an information in your mind as a result of experience or because you have learned or been told about it, that is the definition of the dictionary, of learned men who wrote it down and made the meaning concrete, impossible to change for the next generations an illusion of stability. I guess her grandmother does John said, a look of blank certainty on his unmoved face. He hoped she knew. Sometimes everything circled
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around knowing, as if the deed had been nonexistent as long as nobody knew about it. K n o w i n g: present participle, inflectional variant of to know, expresses simultaneity. Not telling hid the matter because there was no statement that might have corresponded to reality. Someone began clapping, slowly and loud, a sound full of appreciation and movement. It was the man who came too late, the man with the androgynous face, the man with no name tag. He just sat there and stared at John, clapping, bowing his head to a majesty of an ancient realm. I could see that his left iris was yellow, his right one was red. I went across the street, chaos and confusion of people crossing the tarmac and nobody bumps into somebody else, a peculiar dance of needed distance and unwanted attraction that foreigners exhibit. And I thought how it would be. I was excited about dating somebody I did not really know a stranger, somebody who just had lend you some milk. I was already late and worried about my make-up the fear of exhibiting our body parts to others, ourselves perceiving them as ugly. But the world did not notice. I went in acting, behaving unnaturally, false sovereignty radiating form a mask. Tom was already there the empty volcano filled with steam, elongating like bubble gum. I sat down and I felt surprisingly good although he looked like a child behind the table, with his hideous face and his hair carefully styled by his unable hands. A real person sat there, no photoshop applied. And things went really nice and of course he was the greatest bore I ever spent time with and I realised I had made a mistake but did not allow my conscious to tell me about it and began drinking massive amounts of red wine in fast and huge gulps so that the elongated embarrassment ceased to exist and my mind laid to rest in the solitary universe of shapeless haunting creatures. I got drunk and the fun of playing a game was over, the desperate urge for attention, buried under a mountain of suppression, broke free like a phoenix and tried to grab the abominable man before you. And I went with him though you do not know the details, the great picture is still there. ... He was a contemporary composer and writer, though I have never heard of him. At the moment he worked as a greeting card writer and considered this a major step in his career so far, formerly having composed indifferent music that was played in Chinese restaurants and that had nothing to do with original Chinese music but was rather a random mix of pentatonic tones
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without major or minor intervals and while thus the pieces consisted of an interchangeable, weightless and randomly meaninglessness the job was very bad paid and soon he was replaced by a computer who did the work much faster and without an inspirational coffee break. He liked to think of himself as a hideous intellectual, multitalented artist, barely making a living, inhabiting a small and dirty flat near the train station where his genius was illuminated with inspiration by the rusty noise of trains breaking and coming to halt with a frosty screech; for him, as a postmodern artist who created atonal ambient-noise music in his free hours at night, trying to imitate the spheric mumbling of Ligeti and combining it with the swift but deep despair of Schuberts songs, the scenery of the train station was a necessary depressant. Another thing he did was writing poems: they were short and despised any kind of association, randomly picked words that lacked any hint of character at all because there was none to depict. Everybody could be a bad artist, an indifferent and unknown worm somewhere in one of the myriad swamps of our mega-cities, leading a life in constructed hopelessness and the artificial self-hatred of narcissism. No, it was way to easy and people believed him, she believed him, the extraordinary feeling of dating one of these rare outsiders who are barely visible against the blurry backdrop of society, but which, on the other hand, had always needed these outsiders to be able to claim what is normal. The woman, Anne, lived in the flat next to his and heard his noise in the numerous nights she could not find any sleep at all. She had moved in a year ago, after she broke up with her boyfriend who had cheated on her with her best friend, searching seclusion and distance from the painful memories. She had no contact to her family or friends of hers because she felt betrayed, as if all of them had known what had been going on and had silently worked together in this enormous conspiracy. Each day consisted of an unaltered rhythm: get up at six, a hot shower, breakfast (which consisted of a hot coffee that burned her mouth), working in the drugstore till five, coming home exhausted with cold Italian food she had bought on the way and an evening spend in front of the TV, napping and waking up at the crazy colours and sounds of the ads that were trying to sell you stuff you did not want in the first place but which efficiently created the illusion of needing it, filling a gap that would always be empty. This was always the problem for her, deciding what she needed and what she wanted and often things changed or looked the same and she no longer knew what she wanted. The days went by in fast, lucid strides of routine and repetition. The
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situation altered when she went to the flat next to hers, where she often heard noises like an animal and a strange kind of music, for the purpose of lending some milk. ... I never wanted to sleep with him I just wanted to sleep with him and then throw him out, not to get thrown out him. The millstone did its grinding rounds above her head, accelerating with each round. You did things in his apartment that you never wanted to do but which you thought you needed. When you stood up form the table said the man without name tag you went with him and you did the things you did not want to do, in blind hope or believe that he would love you for it and then you would dump him because you knew it would be good for your self-confidence that lay broken and scattered somewhere in your bathtub. You wanted to show him that you can get him and throw him away to show you could live without him, but you never had in mind that it could also be the other way around. You never thought that he would dump you even before you got dressed. And of course, you were drunk, in the helpless state of a child running from a police officer in plain sight, thinking it did something illegal and then it finds itself in the dark, cold woods, crying. All of it for a short bath in lukewarm attention, not seeing things coming and deceiving yourself. He said it without movement or anger, talking like a machine in the silence his sudden talk had aroused. Let me begin at the start so all of you will understand what I am talking about. I woke at seven in the morning, as I always do, hearing the noise of the garbagemen outside. I heard them before my alarm clock rang and I laid there with closed eyes and listened to the sounds of the city as it rose from its restless slumber of the illuminated night. Then it began to rain, a faint knocking on my windowpane, but it is not Kathy who wants to come in, no, it is just the rain. I got up and went downstairs to get my mail. It was damp and the letters of the newspaper had already begun to blur, the black ink revealing its true colours in obscure chromatic stripes. After I want back to my flat I prepared coffee, black, no sugar. I sat down at the table, and though the coffee was still hot I drank it, taking little sips from it, burning my gums, tongue and lips. On the table beside the cup there was the newspaper. I unfolded it and read it through. I read every article, although there was nothing new in it; everything had already been said and written before. The never-changing
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war, tragic accidents, killings at a school somewhere in the West, economic downturns and global crisis, rising unemployment and a woman had been shot in the head and survived. When I had finished the newspaper I took a shower, shaved and dressed and went outside into the clear air of the polluted afternoon. People were hurrying into the cheap Indian and Chinese restaurants. I went into a more expensive Italian restaurant, sat down and ordered the cheapest dinner available and then waited, listening to the constant rumor. Broken bits of language reached my ear and formed into meaningful ideas after my brain had structured, processed, parsed and analysed the phonetic symbols that had existed only for a short moment in the space and time dimension of the food-smelling room. I saw the girl sitting next to me, talking to the stranger who, in fact, was an idiot, everybody could see that: incapable of love, a masochistic egoist, unable to take responsibility for the life of others because he was not able to bear his own. But her open eyes were blind with hope, a sealed letter from the middle ages. She was hungry for love, nervous to fail and vulnerable in all her search for warmth in the arms of a selfish stranger. I knew she was ready to do anything he wanted after they would have left the restaurant and would have gone to his filthy apartment. She was one of the three people out there, in a small boat in the middle of the Pacific, with nothing to eat or drink, but all the salty water of the ocean beneath her feet. And after long days of sunshine and thirst, she would do anything for the small sip of water, the amount she just had drunken from her glass of cheap red wine there at her table. And I knew she would be nothing to him tomorrow, because it happened every day in all the restaurants, no matter where I went. After I finished eating, I went to the next bus stop and I felt how the temperature had fallen drastically within the last hour. It was really cold now and wind raged in the streets. Black clouds formed above the city and it looked like a storm. When I reached the bus stop, which was only five minutes away, the raindrops of the morning had been replaced by irregular lumps of ice. I watched them fall on the ground while I waited and after another five minutes there came the bus with no destination. I paid and went to the back row to sit down, looking out of the window. We headed out of the city. Slowly the storm began to rage and the bus drove on. The sun was extinguished. Earth and heaven began to become hung up in an argument without a point, again Thunder is destructive in its loud revolt without associations. Somewhere beyond the grey walls of
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clouds, which had sunken down onto the world, electricity materialised in form of flickering lights. Cars drove slowly, carefully. Mothers with children on their arms gave attention not to slip and fall. The bus drove onto the highway. I sat back and watched from my memory, corroded. Sore cries form the hard underground. The bus drove on, crawling like a nervous actor on shaking feet. I watched white balls and irregular lumps of ice falling on the earth. An informal collection of small bullets. I had seen the people days before, praying for rain. Now I saw their fear: excitement of the great expectation of the lighting that may strike everywhere and might hit you, but never will. Fools sat in the back of the bus, holding their head in their hands. An agony at heart, ambient noise in the mind, always there, audible only if you allow your ears to hear. Some years ago, there were people who called it: the Blues. A car overtook us. It was blue and much too fast. Suddenly the tires lost their grip. I turned away in shame, hearing noises of cracking metal. People shrieked with tragic surprise and stared with unwilling eyes. Instantly the bus stopped and the driver went out, his mobile phone pushed against his ear and talking. He did it with such quickness and without hesitation, a reflex carved into his spine. The blizzard rushed in with all its cold power through the open door open of the bus, leaving us defenseless. I turned my head and saw the heap of the crushed car, somewhere beneath it, the motor was still running, the headlights radiated a dim orange. A girl climbed out of the steel which formerly had possessed the form of an expensive Buick. I got ill with the sight. I have seen it too often. Then I stood up and walked back home through the clearing rain. A few minutes later it stopped; earth had won the argument by dumb resistance. And now, that I approach my flat again, there comes the thing I dont understand. I cant find it anymore. No matter where I go, it is gone and I cant remember where it is, because the city has strangely changed. Where my house should be, there is just this building here and after a time, I decided to go in. After I entered I saw you people sitting here, with tags where you scribbled your name on. And you looked at me. And he indicated me to sit down and be quiet. Then somebody told his story. I already knew it ? Yes, I did. Let me tell you: My problem is real. It is not just an invented fear or a helpless anxiety, it is not imaginative; it is reality and horror! the horror! the horror, the horror. Nature itself is the horror! Yeah, right Mr Kurtz
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How does he know? Because it is the same for me every day was that an answer? Yes, it is but how does he do it? And the point is that this is really making me crazy and mad What? That it is not just an idea in my head that might go away when I do therapy or am on medication, no. My problem will not go away because it is my reality. Wait, who is talking? Let me be mad! I cant! The man who came too late, the man with the androgynous face, the man with no name tag told how he dreamed that he came here, because he dreamed it, he had the dreams before, every night and he came here every day of his life. I spend my each days in repeat. He glimpsed at eternity and could not go mad; my mind stopped to work, right? Yes It dissolved. One laughing face. All the other people are gone. He knew the problems of all those people and knew the solutions but did not tell them because they would do the same mistake every day. There is no point in telling them the answer because they will do it again tomorrow and the I understood. I saw him there, alone floating in midair now. The chairs are empty. They have never been there, but will be there tomorrow when I wake up again and you wont remember me again, as you did today. He smiled. I smile. I begin to dissolve. It happens in this room. Every night. I can remember the panels on the wall and the colour of the floor. Even the damp coffee stains, their smell is creeping into my nose again. Everything is so clear, I can fell it now. There is the circle of aluminum chairs. People sit on them and stare at me with formless faces and then they vanish with blinded eyes. One of them told me to stand up and to tell my dreams and fears to the manlike cre atures. I did as h e said: I ros e from m y chair. Tha 0 t . w 0 01 a + , ? s th .;- e m o ? m en t whe n I ([{) w o ? !(] k |||} e ## ( $ , up.

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