You’d Better Finish the Story

In which Travis sleeps, is rudely awakened, and thus contemplates his existence.

It is raining Thursday morning, quiet thunder in the distance. The sky the night before had a tension that Travis could feel in his skin when he went out riding. When he got back, he stood on the stoop to have one last cigarette before bed and watched the clouds sparkle with electricity in the darkness. Travis settled into bed very aware of the emptiness of the apartment. Absynthe took up a vigilance by his feet, a little black spot at the end of the bed that Travis could barely make out but for his purring. He was glad to have it, even given what the cost in the morning would be.

The Rock Star

In which Travis speaks to one of his idols.

After having dropped by DT’s for a check, Travis wanders in to 283 to avoid going home for a little while longer. 283 looks different with the daylight just barely managing to get past the first table before getting exhausted by the dark decor. It sits down and buys a drink. The rest of the place is pretty much empty except for Harris, the bartender, and a disheveled Rock Star. Travis does a double-take and is suddenly unsure if he should sit down at the bar or not. He acts casual—too casual, damn it. But finally he sits down two stools down from the famous and waits for the bartender. The Rock Star hasn’t even looked up.

“What do you know, Travis?”

“Not a lot.” Did he say that for the Rock Star? Would he normally say that?

“I don’t know why I bothered to ask.”

“Yee-aah.”

“Watchya’ havin’?”

Don’t look at him. Don’t look at him. “Uh, boy… I dunno.”

Then a gravelly voice without the tint of radio or tape—which is shocking to Travis—says, “Gin and tonic.”

Half Hoping That They Would Call After

In which Travis receives a postcard from Nick.

Hurling himself into the armchair, Travis bends back to make the old velor throne lean precariously back on its feet. The feeling of it almost tipping over makes him feel light for a moment and then the chair comes back to the floor with a disturbing “Thang” resonating from the springs.

He laughs, but sensing wetness, looks down at his hand. He has spilled his juice. “Damn it!” he says to his hand or the glass. “Look what you went and did!” He sets a bag of pretzels beside him in the chair and sets the glass on the floor, getting up to jog lightly into the kitchen for a paper towel or two. When he pulls on the roll over the sink, it wobbles and spins and four paper towels unwrap themselves, but do not rip at the perforation. Travis looks at the roll blankly for a moment and shrugs, defeated. Turning and walking out of the kitchen, a line of paper towels unravels behind him and settles to the floor. He wipes off the glass and looks at the paper towel trail leading back into the kitchen. He can’t care if he tried. He tells himself that he will care later. This, also, seems doubtful.

Hardly

In which Luna doubts but Noh raises the spirit of the troops.

Luna paces through the room, back and forth and back and forth, and the frustration builds from the bottom-up—the simple fact that Noh and no one else, none of the lieutenants or anyone seems to care about the loss of Garciá Marquez.

“You’re a bunch of hypocrites is what I think! And bastards! You’re gonna leave him behind!”

Noh is the only one to speak and she looks straight into Luna’s eyes, “We came to this movement knowing that there was a risk. I am sure that Garciá was on our side—he told me that much. If we can free him, if there is way that won’t kill us all then we will invest our total capacity to get him back; but God dammit, Luna, you also have to understand that we are the enemy of the State. What we do is wrong, and we cannot save everyone who chooses to fight with us.”

Choices?

In which Clarrisa and Jack discuss his situation (honestly) for the first time.

“I am so tired of this notion of choice.” But there is no weariness in his voice. Jack is resolute—absolute—and his complexion ruddy with frustration.

“Why tired?”

“Look at me! Look at me.”

“You look fine to me. Healthy. You have a nice life here.”

“Here. I can’t leave. I have a nice life in this little cell block that the state of Georgia thinks I’m safe in. Don’t you get it, Fleeting? I’m safe here, but only from myself. They have to protect everyone from me! You just don’t get that, you harmless… where is the choice, the decision? I’m insane! Written off. Put away. Done.”

“Jack, we both know you’re not insane.” She sets the notebook down, puts it aside. She leans across the desk—unorthodox, she knows. But in folding her fingers together, she convinces herself. The interlacing of digits is a physical contemplation. He sees for the first time that she is really on his side. “Somehow, you’re going to be okay.”

“I will kill again, Clarrisa. You and I both know that.”

“To be honest, Jack: I’m not so sure about that.”

Authority

In which New York City descends on one man: Eugene Copeland.

He wonders where his sense of anti-authority has gone.

You will not approve, but pay attention because this is how it goes: You will not agree, but then you are poor and desperate and should not be paying attention to this message to those who have money. You are poor; so why is your voice important? How many decades have assured of the fact of your poverty? Now you can, and only now can you STOP IT.

Obama is here to save you. You must believe.

Yes, We can.

Throwing himself into the armchair, Travis pushes his weight to make it lean precariously back. The feeling of it almost tipping over makes him feel light and then it comes back to the floor with a disturbing “Thang” that resonates from the springs. He laughs and looks at his hand. He has spilled his juice. “Damn it!” he says to his hand or the glass. “Look what you went and did!” He sets a bag of pretzels beside him in the chair and sets the glass on the floor, getting up to jog lightly into the kitchen for a paper towel or two. When he pulls on the roll over the sink, it wobbles and spins and four paper towels unwrap themselves, but do not rip at the perforation. Travis looks at the roll blankly for a moment and shrugs, defeated. Turning and walking out of the kitchen, a line of paper towels unravels behind him and settles to the floor. He wipes off the glass and looks at the paper towel trail leading back into the kitchen. He can’t care if he tried. He tells himself that he will care later. This also seems doubtful.

With the glass still on the floor, Travis thrusts himself harder into the old blue armchair. It leans back, keeping its balance for just a moment, until he kicks his legs out and it falls backwards to the floor. He hollers a “Woo hoo!” as it swoops back. When the chair lands with a thud, he feels the sensation in his spine and laughs. Then he shifts around and kicks like a beetle on its back. “Help me!” He sits still, his posture perfect but rolled back ninety degrees. Kicking again, he cries with futility “Somebody help me!” No one answers and disappointedly, he rolls off the chair to pick it back up.

Digging the remote out of the seat cushion, Travis sits back down, opens the pretzels and begins clicking through the television channels, announcing their content to the room as he goes. “News, soap opera, news, commercial.” He moves through the channels as quickly as he can, sounding all the while like an old elevator operator. “Game show, cooking show, music videos,” and then he stops. There is a moment of recognition in his face as he watches the image of two policemen approaching a car. From their tight, dated uniforms and the hues of the film, Travis is sure of what he is looking at. His mouth opens a little at the baked look of the highway in California and the circa 1980 vehicles that litter it.

True to form, one of the officers casually removes his sunglasses. “Yes!” Travis shouts like a roulette winner. “Chips!” He sinks down into the chair lazily. As Travis takes a pretzel out of the bag, the policeman makes an oh-so-casual joke about the speed that the attractive female driver had attained. “Ahhh. Eric Estraaaaada,” Travis cooes. “You’re the maaaan.” His eyes wander back to the trail of paper towels strewn across the floor. The scene is the epitome of drudgery, and he relishes it—mind-numbing drudgery. As he looks around he spies an empty space where once one of Nick’s paintings would have stared at him in horror. “Shut up,” he says to no one and turns the television up.

Travis roams from bad sitcom to to cheesy romance movie to game show for three hours. At one point in time, all the television channels conspire to show nothing but commercials for three or four minutes, and Travis is forced to give up his undisputed throne over the empire of mindlessness. He completes the cycle of channels, from two to fifty-two, because he has to—has to be absolutely sure that there is no amount of obscure, barely entertaining material he could be missing. And then, finally, he shuts the television off.

The room has darkened, the light low in the late afternoon, the blinds closed. Travis looks around blankly, as though he had just been placed there. He sits still and listens to the quiet. The refrigerator had ceased, the air conditioners on both sides of the apartment are off. Everything is quiet. Sitting up in the chair, he crosses his legs underneath him, closes his eyes and lets the silence leak into his head, lets his thoughts evaporate into it. He waits, breathing, knowing that the moment a certain part of his brain recognizes the silence, the music will come. The silence will end abruptly, stabbed by a rhythm or a note. But it doesn’t come.

When he opens his eyes after a minute, they are focused on the top of the television set and a letter from Nick that he’d been saving to read for just such an occasion. “Letter for me! Letter for me!” Travis shouts. He stands up and lifts the envelope off the television. The address is scrawled in Nick’s familiar scratchy handwriting. There is no denying the resemblance between Nick’s handwriting and his art. Over the years, in fact, Travis had watched as Nick’s handwriting had become more and more like his art, almost as though the bent, twisted images in Nick’s head were struggling to get out in any shape or form they could. The letters in the address look like bare winter twigs laid down to resemble an alphabet. The “T” in “Mr. Travis Fleeting” could have been two straight lines, but instead there is an wintry cross of ink tributaries, bent and warped. On the back of the envelope is scribbled “You’re fat!” And they’re were always good friends there.

Lounging on the big couch, Travis reads the letter twice. It is two and a half pages, and rather than fold it, Nick had simply crumpled the paper and jammed it into an envelope, smashing it flat with a blunt instrument, no doubt. The writing crawls across the wrinkled paper. The letter says that Nick is doing well in Pittsburgh (and is he?) and that Travis is fat.

Nick rather liked one particular bar that he and Jim had been to several times. Travis is “stoopid”. It looks promising that Nick would get to show his work in the gallery. The curator does seem impressed. And Travis is fat. For the most part, Nick is having a good time. And for the most part, Travis is fat, stupid and lazy. The last few sentences make Travis wince and then smile:

“I saw a chick in a bar the other night that would make an excellent specimen of a girlfriend for you. She even had a lazy eye! You can’t beat that! Looking forward to getting a beer with you when I get back.”

Heard Once

in which Reid understands Jacob for the first time.

And Jacob says, “…my soul, you know?”

“Your soul?” Reid takes a deep breath and clears his head, but the bizarre late night idea is still there.

“Yeah. My soul.”

Just near them, not two hundred yards off, is the Columbia medical unit specializing in neurosurgical repair. It is there where the brain is cut across and bilaterally that this question of the soul is coming to the knife.

“I don’t know, Reid. We’re networks of neurons, you know?”

“No. Not just that.”

Yes

“I hear you, Reid. You don’t think I can, but I do.”

Yes, I know

“I know you know, you bastard.”

Guitar Solo #4: The Song of Defeat

In which Travis plays to the heavens and hopes he can be heard.

The distance tonight to those silhouettes in chairs at tables with their wine glasses and other vessels, is eons and lifetimes. This solo has no garish thrashes or tearing or crying, Travis lets it lope. It’s a quiet room tonight, with special guests, a Rock Star and a Premonition among them, though he does not know it.

Did You Bring Enough For Everyone?

In which the party is winding down.

Nick comes down the stairs like a pimp with a woman under each of his arms. Travis immediately recognizes the blonde in the knee-high boots and they make eyes at one another, but he has never seen the other girl. She is wearing combat boots, a short leather skirt, and a blouse that accentuates her buxom chest. “Heeeey,” Nick says as he comes to the landing.

“Look what I found.”

Sandy detaches herself from Nick and latches onto Travis, leaning herself up on the railing of the landing. Travis puts an arm around her, and then notices she is just wearing a short dress with her shoulders bare. He stands her up for a moment, takes off his leather jacket and drapes it over her shoulders. She smiles and snuggles under his arm again. Travis is unnerved by the feeling of breath on his neck. He tries harder to keep his cool, but he can’t help wanting to attack her in a fury of passion.

“Hey,” Nick says again to the crowd on the landing. “This is Erica. Erica…” Nick pauses.

“This is everybody.”

“Hey everybody,” Erica says quietly.