Afterthoughts of a Dead Man

[miyako73]

I've been free-writing this autobiographical fiction in a form of a novel about a prisoner abandoned as a child who now traces his roots full of tragedy and mysticism--American gangsterism meets Eastern culture. I don't know if this has a potential or if it's better to shelve this while I'm still learning how to write fiction. Your comments, constructive or not, will be appreciated. I'm thick-skinned now. Thanks.

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I


San Quentin is now a home, and it is not the dreamed or the promised one. It is a human cage where I could neither flap my wings nor sing. I am not free. Regrets have trifled my days, and denials, harrowed my nights since I got in. Thoughts about my rimy past and bleary existence have preoccupied me every humdrum moment inside the stodgy joint, where everyone is consumed by anything exhausting and troubled by anyone haunting him.

I have lived a tenebrous life that has never been fully revealed, nor has it been openly explained. The only thing people have always made known to me is that I am someone’s bastard son--abandoned and forgotten to languish in a sooty jail.

Trying to know about myself, trace back where I came from, and ponder what will become of me keeps my waning vim going. It is simply my desire to get through with new ardor for a different kind of living--free of stress from privation and passion for petulance and full of zest to live a simple life and ebullience to make it a meaningful one.

To move on, I should know my past still, so I would understand what I have to, but I must put it behind afterwards. Piecing together my shattered life is the reason why I have not given up yet. Indeed, the feeble birr left in me has found its sanguine focus: though I was born a loser, I beg off to die the same.

I stand pat and bent on on my quest to find out every detail of my origin as baffling as an abstruse, unsigned abstract painting, whose provenance is surreptitious and unknown. I am a chaotic man idly walking left and right and tritely moving back and forth.

I really need to understand why I had ended up in my current vicissitude and state of being, so I can totally accept and live with the tough, galling circumstances I am facing and map out how I will move on from squalor and asperity and envisage my future after serving my time.

I have never fancied myself a bad guy or coveted to be one. If only I could go back, knowing now how I have turned out to be, I would refuse to ooze out alive from my mother’s womb. The life of the unwanted is the worst kind to live.

Luck, since I knew it, has never been on my side, and fate has been cruel to me ever since. I have now come to a point where I have to make a challenge against my destiny to redeem its pledge, which was promised to me at birth, that what I have had to live is life.

I have suffered enough; pain has had enough of me; and the time, not for more struggle and harsher punishment, has finally arrived. I must reform, reinvent, and rediscover myself if I want to go on living and continue looking for the gift of existence--happiness.

I have no idea why I have been agonizing so much since birth--it is my incomprehensible karma, as everyone usually says, I guess. I am not a Buddhist, but there is no other reason that could indubitably explain to me why of all, it is I who have been chosen to endure, punished to writhe, and destined to languish.

I have struggled enormously amid so much hurt and parlous pain, and time, which is velocious and unforgiving, has made my suffering unbearable. It seems I have lost most of my years watching myself being wasted around.

Where I had been was no heaven but hell, which I could never forget no matter how hard I would try, and what I had gone through was not life but worse than death, which I have refused to relive all over again. Thus, I am now kicking off my habit of being spontaneous, tempering my free-spirited nature, and living the rest of my years in a deviating moira, in a disparate pace, and in my own terms. Change is never too late, and everyone metamorphoses after a severe storm.

There must be a reason why my exorable life and glum existence has been a survival full of restitutions and filled with punishments. I always think what could have been had I not freed myself from the wretchedness in the foster home that had been my jail for years or if I had not been left and imprisoned in the hell house where emptiness plagued the walls, nothingness covered the ceilings, and stillness possessed the unturned knobs of the padlocked doors.

I grew up in misery. I still wonder why where I used to live was even called a home, and if the people I was forced to live with had really fostered something that was supposed to take care of me and make me a good, happy person. Instead, I had been pained and wounded, and the cruelty of their greed, monstrosity, and turpitude had left me broken, bitter, and incomplete.

During the important years of my childhood--when growing up should have been all learning, playing, and fun--affections that remotely resembled to care, love, friendship, and the likes seemed to me were already great ideas, yet I could not even promise myself to have even just a bit of such light affectations and feel the same even just for a fraction of a minute. I had become wishful, desperate, and pessimistic.

Anything I had thought but not felt was unearthly, schmaltzy, and nonexistent. It was nothing but a fool man’s absurd illusion. I had made up my own paradise, so bitterness would not pester every nerve still pulsating, and hopelessness, not plague every bone still cracking.

I still wonder nowadays, how I have even survived since I was born. It is just hard to fathom my unfortunate past. No words could fully describe it, and all adjectives I could find and peruse seem weak, inappropriate, and wanting.

Only my face that has aged prematurely could really tell how the cruel world has turned on me and how I have turned myself out to become part of its harsh reality. I have become what I have never wished to be. I have repented day and night, but nobody has really heard my penance and attrition, I assume, not even God.


II


My foster parents had locked me up to rot in the black hole of a dingy coop, where I innocently befriended and spoke with the nameless strangers in my hallucinations. I thought they would empathize with me and eventually save me from my executioners--the killers of my soul.

I desperately placed my trust and pinned my hope in the benevolence and compassion of the vague faces in my magical dreams. I thought they would do something for my deplorable nightmare. I forced myself to learn how to be brave and not to get scared in the dark where I could not see my gaunt face, bony limbs, and malnourished body.

Even a lost ray of the mid-afternoon sun had never beamed on me. Lurking in a tunnel where either its dead end or even a soft hint of light did not exist, I smelled deterioration and death everywhere, and I was inhaling my own stench and demise. I had experienced hell not outside of this world or beyond mortality, but in my damned, accursed room, where I had lived and struggled to survive, and it was not that I had sinned.

Shaking and feverish, I held my cold, freezing feet to cover and move my numbing toes and blew on them with my warmest breaths to warm up my soles. I had nothing for mending my worn beat up socks--loose, darkly soiled, and dappled with clusters of different-sized holes. I could see the broken, thin strands of rubber that waggled and wiggled like worms. I pulled, stretched, and played them when I was spaced out and blasé.

To make my decrepit socks stick on my legs and to tighten them so they would not fall down, I would usually tie a couple of knots around the worn out elastic rim until they would perfectly fit. I understood patience and diligence through trial and error.

For trimming my curls or cutting my shoulder-length hair, I used the scantly jagged edges of the opened lid of the dog food can I found under my bed. They must have placed it there, thinking I would use its lid waiting to be pulled up to slit my large-veined wrists.

I was too young to know how to murder myself and understand why I should do it, and it had never occurred to me that I must die in my own hands. While staying with the sisters at the orphanage, I was taught, and already knew then that I should not be cruel to the innocent ones. Besides, the metal was crookedly cut, wavy, and dull. I knew art--the sisters used to make us cut papers to make dolls, birds, and butterflies.

After months of using the tin lid I bent back and forth until it heated up and softened, twisted, and pulled from its can, its edges could no longer cut even my soft, sagging skin. To make it useful again, I folded it into two halves and used its pointy ends to dig a hole on the middle of the single-plywood ceiling, so the rain from the roof would drip straight into the glass waiting on the floor to catch every drop of dust-colored, ash-tasting water, which sustained me when it rained and when nobody would show up to bring me my weekly supply.

“This piece of metal is not meant for killing. Death is already cruel. Why would someone make it cruder and uglier?” I muttered to myself after biting all my long nails short. The tips of my fingers tasted salty, I thought, from the tears they touched and wiped. I sipped my tears that wet my lips several times before, and they did not quench my thirst.

One boringly tedious afternoon, after I suddenly stopped and gave up counting numbers that seemed endless yet still far from infinity, I probed and looked at the paper glued on the can. It said “ALPO Classic Ground.” I could read and write.

I was weaned by the highly educated Charity sisters who were mostly South Indian but their English was British-accented. I grew up with them learning and knowing ABC’s and 123’s besides God and religion. They had home-schooled me until their orphanage closed down.

What I saw and read on the cherry-red label made me think that Sputnik, the Labrador in the house, was a lucky dog because of the beef from its masters, who had force-fed me to become vegetarian without veggies. They had obtruded on me the idea that rice and cereals were the only food. I had nearly come to accept it.

If lucky, I would get bread and broth, but the piece of bread they gave me was usually rock-hard, if not gummy, and stale-sour, and had molds, and the murky broth looked like puke and, if not at least a week-old, smelled and tasted like one.

I would usually break the bread and scrape the middle part that was soft to eat and sculpt the rest, which crumbled easily from the rubbing of my fingers like sandcastles, into different figures and faces. The broth usually ended up flushed in the potty, since I could not stomach by just looking at it.

I thought they had really wanted me to succumb to food poisoning, the best way to kill me that was natural, hard to trace, and guilt-free; if found out, they could just say “natural causes” or “his internal organs just gave up.

They were never really a health-conscious couple, rather greedy, paunchy, and porcine, besides being torturously selfish. Their understanding of vitamins and notion of nutrients were loosely based on the back wrappers of Hohos, Twinkies, and Ding Dongs they ate every day. No wonder they were diabetic and morbidly obese.

After peeling the paper off the can, I then folded it repeatedly to make a hefty, pointy triangle and used it to dig out the sticky dirt under my fingernails. It must have been my skin from too much scratching that had made me realize the virtue of resourcefulness and the genius of innovation.

I used the bottom of the can after breathing on it and using my shirt to wipe the cloudy mist, sometimes with a sprinkle of my spit, in a fast, repeated sliding motion and make it granite-shiny.

Every time they opened the door and let go the chain halfway that only happened once or twice a month when I had to clean my fusty room that needed some airing, it was my chance to see the shadowy reflection of my emaciated face on the turned-over can.

The faint gleam of light from the incandescent bulb of the floor lamp, standing between the living room and the kitchen and dining area, they never turned off was usually ample enough for the shined bottom of the tin can to mirror back the silhouette and contour of my face. I did not shave. I was still a child.

[miyako73]

III


Inside my room, they mounted the old, yellowish porcelain toilet bowl without a seat I could pull up or put down they salvaged from a demolished building in the neighborhood. I helped them carry before the rusty pipes, as big as my arms, the building owner trashed. The cubic basin nut-and-bolted above and on the backmost of the bowl, large enough for my mid-back to lean on, had no lid for covering on top and no handle for flushing attached. It was both my latrine and lavatory completed with cold, clear water; piped from the kitchen plumbing; and installed with the toilet rubber valve I lifted after every use to flush load and excretion. The water from the toilet potty seemed cleaner and more potable than the water they usually gave me for drinking. I had always kept it clean; the water I scooped from it seemed safer than the one they bottled for me. It was hard to trust vicious people.

The potty water was what I used also when I freshened up and washed my laundry. They had supplied me bars of cheap detergent soap from a ninety-nine cent-store for my soiled clothes which were more like dusty than dirty; my hair that stuck together, giving me thick weaves, and resembled to a Rastafarian’s dreadlocks; and my body thickened and layered by dirt that looked like dry, powdered ink all over my skin. Every time I touched myself, I could see my fingerprints like visible grips and grasps of the puckish, impish ghosts; the dust, most of the time, blinded my eyes and made them sore red and teary, besides irritating my skin and making it bumpy, itchy, and blistery; it felt good every time I scratched it, but afterwards, what remained just looked bloody, ugly, and gangrenous.

Later, instead of scratching something on my skin, I would push, tap, and massage it, thinking it would sink into my skin, disappear or go away. After years of constantly plaguing my body, hives, rashes, and other breakouts had seemed normal to me, and I had learned to live with them and just left them alone until they had had enough of me. A day without them appearing all over my skin seldom happened, and even my only known remedy of washing them repeatedly was, oftentimes, futile; it was just a waste of the water I scooped from the potty using the can, which I had kept free of rusts by turning it upside down to dry. I had learned conserving and maximizing the use of the limited resources inside my fallow, barren dungeon.

In a corner sat the trashcan that I had moved often, so there would be a salient change, even slight, in the dusky, stinky room; it was too small for myself- from head to toes, I was garbage. My face, neck, and extremities had become geographies of dust and dirt, bumps and warts, fresh wounds and keloid scars, and white scratches and red rashes; it was just too cold sometimes to even wash my bottom when it was freezing outside. Even my toes and fingers turned pale, wrinkled, and quivered as if they were soaking wet; the grim of winter turned my room into half-purgatory of flagrant gloom and unknown uncertainty and half-inferno, silent, fireless, and without other fallen angels but me, when I spent my days in abyss and rest my nights in perdition.

When it was too cold and my blanket was not enough to warm me up, I would wear multiple shirts and pants- I scavenged and picked up most of them in the neighborhood’s garbage bins- and warmly sleep inside the empty closet, which closed tight like the magnetized door of a refrigerator, sitting down, curling my legs, and leaning my back on the hard, rough, unpainted cement wall; it was not easy and comfortable, but the frost of winter was too much for my body bereft of protective, energy-storing adipose tissue or fat that could have been my cushion for hard surfaces and insulation for the cold, icy months. “I am no demon, but why has God abandoned me?” I asked when I felt beat up and fagged out, and could not sleep, as if there was someone who would actually listen. My voice, inside the shut closet, would just echo the same question back to me; I could not answer, and, oftentimes, I just remained quiet and mum, feeling helplessly dumb and thinking why I had ended up inside the empty box, where, it seemed, the desolate darkness of the night was stored and closeted.


IV



The usual food my foster parents sloppily splattered on reused paper plates and slid on the floor towards me- as if I had a highly contagious disease or infection or some cooties they were scared to catch- was gross and humiliating; since they locked me up inside the room, I had not seen their faces but portions of their arms when they fed me. If what they usually threw at me had a flavor, its nasty taste was as bitter as grody bile. I had fed myself with illusions and wishes without a spoon; I thought of palatable relish, sapid savor, and delicious aroma every time my hand filled my mouth with something bland and vapid. I chewed and swallowed just about anything disgusting and insipid because I had to live; I must survive since I wished to be free. Revenge in my mind became my usual dessert every after meal, and day after day, and I was full with that thought; it became a habit.

I ate leftover rice or hard oatmeal, the staple of my dire need and hardship, one by one, so I had something to do, and I would be assiduously busy and intensely involved. Although what I was doing seemed purposeless and crazy, it remedied my boredom that was wearing me out; the most difficult thing to do was when I did nothing, and was idle as if I waited for a miracle I knew would not happen. Sometimes, I lined and formed the grains to spell “FRIDOM,” so I would never forget and be reminded often why I had to bear and wait; patience was the hardest one to learn and imbibe. I played with just about anything that helped me instill in my mind that I was a child prisoner, whose only sin was to have been born; I was an unwanted son. I knew then that I needed my memory, no matter how tormenting it was, to nurture rancor and acerbity to get even, if not to mete out and inflict more pangs and twinges of the anger inside waiting for its moment to shoot, rack, and blow up. “Each one of them will suffer when it’s my time to explode,” I had always promised myself to inure and toughen every coward bone in me.

In my desolation, water was a blessing. It was filling when I had nothing for my stomach, and I felt hugged and touched every time I sprinkled my face, neck, and shoulder; months of summer were dry, hot, and brutal. I tasted my own sweat to keep my peeling lips moist. On my cheeks, it was hard to apperceive my tears and ascertain the sweat drops falling from my brow like colorless rice grains; they seemed the same- vexatious and hurtful. It was tough sometimes to force myself to be stubborn to what I had felt and to hold what had bothered me at bay. Pain was deaf-mute-blind; it came like a thief, and had stayed like a glutton and devoured me whole. One time, while blowing the termite dust to the sides in a half-filled rim-cracked glass, my eyes welled tears I did not notice, and I could not control their fall and flow; they dropped into the glass and mixed with the stale, brownish water- it was my dinner.

I so desired to be set free and wanted to see what I had been hearing from outside for quite some time. The fading music accompanying the ageing ballerina, whose retirement was in slow pas de deux and tired tiptoes, weak jumps, low leaps, and spastic turns were deprived of youthful grace, slipped out through the old, broken mirror-paned window of the empty dance studio nearby. It uncurled and prodded my fingers to tap on my rocklike bed, tiptoed on my bare lap, and slid on my scarred arms in cute battements; and nudged, goaded, and slowly pushed my toes, which resuscitated dead, jaundiced nails, to turn in baby pirouettes, while leaning my scabbing calloused heels on the hardwood floor that had seen better, shiny days. Her morning rituals also became mine. They began just after dawn until she took off and hanged her pointe shoes and rested on her creaking rocking chair, whose screws were loose, and would give up soon like her long, deep breathing, when I was already on my uncovered bed staring at any surfaces and waiting for shadows to stare back at me. Every corner I glanced at was undisturbed, dead, and quiet; I had seen the worst kind of emptiness- it had no colors.

The dulcet, faint rhythm of a distant saxophone, which I later traced back from the house of the jazz musician who had been weakened by his grief, was a sorrowful lament at dusk; he had forlornly mourned through his dolorous wind notes because of the sudden passing of a loved one. His bereavement was heart-rending, and it seemed his music would not end unless his woodwind instrument would mute itself. When tired, he stopped and placed his sax on his chest, so it would be near his heart, whose erratic, faltering beats were like pregnant halts, pauses, and stops of a forgetful poet trying to remember his old poem; his fingers, numb; and his lips and tongue, sore from seemingly endless playing and blowing. It was a dallying funeral march of a somber, comfortless man for himself; he wished to go because he had nothing left to live for- sometimes, he cried screaming “Lucinda!”

I envied the man whose breaths and whispers were songs; he could scream, and I could hear his cries, while I could not even yell a word; my throat was swollen and scratchy, and my mouth, sticky and dry. Besides, nobody could really hear me because windows, cracks, and holes were stuffed with plastic scraps, lined with synthetic foams, covered with wood panels, and sealed with duct tapes. If there were, they would not bother to listen; it would be easy to dismiss me as a loud, unruly kid senselessly crying “wolf!” because my foster parents seemed credible and looked believable. They had convinced and fooled the Child Services before when the sisters of Charity gave me up for foster care since nobody had adopted me, and they had to move away after they closed their orphanage; I was around seven then when I was given up to the evil couple who had lied and tortured me.

The saxophone man and I were an opposite contrast in a plane of hopelessness and despair; I wanted to live; he did not. His days were of ill-fated dejection, while mine were of despondency, but I still hoped. He made me promise myself that I would never cry again, and that my ordeal would be over soon- a year or two would not be too long. Like my pain, his would cease to smite and beset him. His crying would dry up all his tears; his ululating, crush and pierce every inch of his heart; and his sax-playing, finish all the music in his mind. “Nobody has suffered forever,” I assured myself. I felt his heartache, and I could relate to his dole; I believed that to be alone and left or abandoned was the greatest human suffering- I was not sure whom to really rue for: the one who was miserable, and in pain or those who left, and were gone.

The melodious tweeting of birds sweetly celebrating birth and their two hatchlings arduously trying to learn flight beyond their nest of willowy twigs, shredded barks, and dried leaves reminded me of a father, a mother, and a sibling I did not have; maybe I had had before but lost them all. I felt so alone, lorn, and deserted. Not even God showed me his discernible presence- maybe He was there watching me suffer or silently cheering me up when I was down, or maybe He did not come to my aid because I knew no prayers to mutter- I had already forgotten what I had learned from the sisters after I left the orphanage- and I did not know whom to pray; thus I could not ask help from Him- what a childish thought! In my darkest hour, I was solo in the midst of misery; it was dark in my dungeon, where I even wished to see playful ghosts to comfort me. My heart was not numb, and my mind, not blank; my eyes could still see, but there was nothing, and I saw nobody. I was very sensitive to anything I hear and imagine. My senses were awake even when I was asleep because of my hope for dreams, where I could see what it was like outside; I set aside my tedious daytime for dreaming freedom.

Even the swooping breeze, disturbing the branches of fire-colored maple leaves, which danced and swayed as free as the white clouds like giant puffed cottons or dense blossoms of hyacinths hovering above, had reminded me in a rushed whisper that my childhood should have been full of cheer and play; I had felt sorry for myself. I could not laugh because I did not even know how to really smile. My face, when in pain, could not express even the simplest joy of watching a mouse, just beneath my raised up legs, that playfully tumbled without fear and hesitation like an earnest jester that persistently tried to charm and cheer. Two cockroaches kissing and back riding on each other were fun to watch, but I could not giggle; they were happy and carefree, and I was sad and heavyhearted. In those days of difficulty and discontent and nights of torment and restlessness, I found solace in my allaying imaginations that soothed, succored, and enlivened me when I had nobody to talk to but the mouse, the cockroaches, the empty room, and myself. I had refused to lose my mind; I did not drink my urine, nor did I eat my feces.