o fallow utopia
07-15-2013, 06:59 PM
It's the eve of my 25th birthday. I thought it was time to open myself up to criticism. Here is the first chapter of a novel I contracted into a short story.
It was a Tuesday night, and it began with a dance.
It wasn’t the dance of an adult: scrupulous, affected, self-conscious. It was the dance of a little girl: freeform, sincere, untroubled by herself; improvising under the glare of the spotlight with the bearing of a teenager trying to prove her ascension into adulthood by attempting the seduction of a much older man.
The much older man was her father.
She was dancing around him in a little red dress cut off at the ankle, her small hands clasped in a carefree grip that kept them pulled up at the thighs so the hem was free to twirl in a metronomic pendulum of frills and satin beneath them.
Her name was Angelica, and she was ten years old and fourteen years old, both and neither, though she would stop her father indignantly to protest “I’m fourteen and three-quarters!” when he talked to strangers of his daughter, the ‘three-quarters’ most persuasively betraying the outlook of a little girl.
It showed in her dancing as well as she sought the reassurance of her father’s eyes with a delay at the snap of the head on completing full rotations of each pirouette, falling free from the orbit of diminishing circles and spinning away across the room with the force of a reel of cotton being unwound into space while a finger held on to a thread high above.
Sat out in the gloom watching her, Tom had set his hat carefully upon the table.
His hair was a mess of curls made ill-defined by a pallid frizz and the spots of white and grey that speckled it in patches like the down of a duckling. There was no hint of what colour it may once have been. No intimation of colour in the face either except the hazel eyes blinking and squinting as he tried to remain focussed on his daughter.
She had stopped on the opposite side of the room at the foot of the piano and was following something abstractly through the air, her head zigzagging back and forth; disappearing and reappearing in the glare of the spotlight until her eyes fell over her father’s face in the background and dropped out of that deep middle focus with a rush of self-consciousness at being watched.
He brushed a moth off his jacket and turned, rubbing loosely at watering eyes between dry fingers.
Tom was an old man now. Worn to his last. A couple of years ago it had been one of the few restful pleasures left in his life to skip through the sequence of obstacles that presented themselves on entering that vivid dimension between hallucination and reality that divided him from his daughter.
Now it was a torture. A pain for a willing mind unable to compensate for the speed at which they tired when trying to look at her for any length of time.
He let his arms fall back over the bar and his eyes to the background hum of reality.
It was one of those places that provided visual respite for weary human eyes. No flashing neon beer signs. No mirrors where you saw your face reflected in the logo of a soda company or cigarette brand. No pool table or games machines. A welcome refuge for those that liked their minds uncluttered, their panoramas barren, their company more so.
There was a whiskery old bald man serving whisky behind the bar, and a whiskery old woman with him whom he took automatically for his wife, splitting and joining in the unconscious ballet of two people who’ve worked for a long time in close proximity and are unaware of the complexity of the shapes and angles they are creating without any threat of collision.
Tom didn’t try to get their attention. He had never been much good at getting attention. He had a face like a ghost and a presence not far off. There was an irony in there somewhere.
He stood and stared instead into the bottles of stale liquor as people jostled and drummed their fingers either side, waiting until the bar had emptied completely of life and a ghost had more chance of being noticed.
The barman shuffled over, wiping his hand on his jacket.
“Yes sir, what can I get you?”
“Are you the owner?”
“Yes sir.”
Tom took a picture out of his pocket. It was wrinkled by folds of various ages; white forking lightning strikes branching out across the over-flexed surface and constantly reshaped by the carelessness with which he shoved it in and out of his coat. He straightened it against the bar with the back of his hand and held it up into the light.
“Recognise this face?” he said.
The barman, a docile oddity with a huge head and a moustache identical to his eyebrows blown up fifteen times, shook his head morosely.
“Don’t think so. Nothing ringing for me.” He continued to think slowly, turning over tiny ideas in that great head, sparks pinging off the inside of his brain like radiant yellow dots in a great game of pong, meeting after travelling huge distances at odds of a thousand to one and crashing together to terminate with a flash and the sprig of an idea. He looked up from the dark oiled surface of the bar where he’d been staring, where he always stared when he was trying to think. It was like looking into infinity. “He missing or something?” he finally said.
“My understanding is a man of his description rested up down here a couple of weeks ago” said Tom. “Goes by the name of Truman? He’s about 4 years older now than when the photo was taken.”
The barman shook his head then threw it halfway sideways.
“Margarite!”
The woman bustled over.
“You recognise this man’s face?”
She took the photo and held it up and shoved the glasses down off her forehead.
“Here a couple weeks ago the man says. Four years older than the photo.”
“What was the name?”
“Truman” the barman jumped in as if long in possession of the knowledge.
She rolled her lips and shook her head.
“Haven’t seen him here” she said. “Not a couple weeks ago nor anytime. Didn’t stay here, pretty sure of that.”
Tom turned the photo over between his fingers.
“Sorry” the barman said, his doleful eyebrows sinking.
“Well, thanks anyway now.”
“No trouble. Good luck” the barman said, perking up with jarring bathos as he turned to the next customer.
Tom rolled his hat over in his hands then shoved the picture carelessly back into his pocket, a new white strike forking out across the back.
It had taken him 4 years to move on from the loss of his daughter. 4 years to advance. To find somewhere within him the power of forgiveness for his oldest friend and set out on a path to find him.
It was an aimless path in reality. A path without a real end in sight designed to delude his mind and body into thinking they still had some sort of purpose.
He’d been performing the routine almost a year now. Random bars. Random people. Random places. Justifying interaction and continued existence. Projecting a sense of external purpose to try and deceive the sense of futility he felt inside.
Strange we should spend our lives trying to find freedom from the monotony of the everyday in the shape of some pinprick of light, some vision of a better tomorrow to aim for and give our lives a sense of meaning, only to be driven to try and free ourselves from that meaning by bringing it to an end.
He wondered what he’d feel if he ever found that freedom. If he ever found Truman and the chance to offer him forgiveness. Would he feel complete or instead be left empty with no sense of purpose remaining in his life?
In the spotlight, Angelica had clambered onto the piano, and must have noticed he wasn’t watching since she was dancing with wild, attention seeking abandon, throwing her legs and arms inelegantly around, playing in counterpoise to the sullen pianist beneath her, her like life and him like death. There was an irony in there somewhere.
The proprietor suddenly sprang forward to join her, all his life concentrated into those deeply expressive eyebrows.
“Hey not that one again Marcus” he called out to him. “Come on now. Play us one we know.”
The pianist paused briefly before launching into something jauntier, an old timer, his hands hopping mechanically beneath the gaunt, expressionless face.
Tom sunk down into the hard oak seat and stared unseeing out the window.
He just wanted to escape it all. Open out his wings. Fly across America. Across the sandy crenulations of the Nevada landscape. Above the mountains of Montana. Over the great lonely cities of the Midwest. Feel the weight of life lifted off his shoulders.
He watched his daughter set out on some improvised dance that had come out of the change of tempo. A flamenco he thought, like her mother used to do.
He just wanted to be able to see her plainly and hold her in his arms. He only had a few clear elements of her left. The arc of the chin. The naked teeth. The eyes burning a mosaic of vigour and light.
He blinked at the base of the dress, where the waves of material were hanging in space as if temporarily unaware of each snap of the body and feeling blindly on into the darkness.
He had no-one left now. After he lost Angelica he had no-one left but Truman and when Truman ran away he had no-one left but himself, and he was no good company for anyone now.
He pined for human comfort. He pined for conversation and understanding and emotional connection. He pined for all these things because he was still human at core but the part of him that died with the loss of his daughter had left him too outwardly inhuman for anyone to reach what was left inside.
“Hey Papa!” Angelica had stopped, and was looking down at him and smiling with her arms thrown in the air. “Papa! Finisterra la danza del fuego!”
She let her hands drop to her waist and started to laugh, her head shaking from side to side, the laughter of a little girl, free and sincere and untroubled by herself.
He thought every day of the future she’d been denied. Felt more keenly with each passing second the pain of that stolen reality magnified as he was forced to live on in the life they should have shared, beaten forward by time into the insurmountable emptiness of the future left behind by the carelessness of a friend and the unseen evil that entered like a flash from the shadows to steal her away.
When he lifted his head again, and her eyes came to rest deeply in his, it all came back to him with as much violence as it had before; all the warmth and bitterness and love and hatred and anger and bile and helplessness and impotence. Impotence above all. That was what he always felt when her eyes penetrated his like that. Shattering, withering impotence. There was an irony in there somewhere.
He moved over to the window and opened it up and closed his eyes to the buttery glare of the streetlamp. His pallid hair was shaking in the breeze and he reset his hat on his head until it was stilled.
He was thinking of the Nevada landscape and the mountains of Montana and the lonely cities of the Midwest from above.
It was a Tuesday night, and it began with a dance.
It wasn’t the dance of an adult: scrupulous, affected, self-conscious. It was the dance of a little girl: freeform, sincere, untroubled by herself; improvising under the glare of the spotlight with the bearing of a teenager trying to prove her ascension into adulthood by attempting the seduction of a much older man.
The much older man was her father.
She was dancing around him in a little red dress cut off at the ankle, her small hands clasped in a carefree grip that kept them pulled up at the thighs so the hem was free to twirl in a metronomic pendulum of frills and satin beneath them.
Her name was Angelica, and she was ten years old and fourteen years old, both and neither, though she would stop her father indignantly to protest “I’m fourteen and three-quarters!” when he talked to strangers of his daughter, the ‘three-quarters’ most persuasively betraying the outlook of a little girl.
It showed in her dancing as well as she sought the reassurance of her father’s eyes with a delay at the snap of the head on completing full rotations of each pirouette, falling free from the orbit of diminishing circles and spinning away across the room with the force of a reel of cotton being unwound into space while a finger held on to a thread high above.
Sat out in the gloom watching her, Tom had set his hat carefully upon the table.
His hair was a mess of curls made ill-defined by a pallid frizz and the spots of white and grey that speckled it in patches like the down of a duckling. There was no hint of what colour it may once have been. No intimation of colour in the face either except the hazel eyes blinking and squinting as he tried to remain focussed on his daughter.
She had stopped on the opposite side of the room at the foot of the piano and was following something abstractly through the air, her head zigzagging back and forth; disappearing and reappearing in the glare of the spotlight until her eyes fell over her father’s face in the background and dropped out of that deep middle focus with a rush of self-consciousness at being watched.
He brushed a moth off his jacket and turned, rubbing loosely at watering eyes between dry fingers.
Tom was an old man now. Worn to his last. A couple of years ago it had been one of the few restful pleasures left in his life to skip through the sequence of obstacles that presented themselves on entering that vivid dimension between hallucination and reality that divided him from his daughter.
Now it was a torture. A pain for a willing mind unable to compensate for the speed at which they tired when trying to look at her for any length of time.
He let his arms fall back over the bar and his eyes to the background hum of reality.
It was one of those places that provided visual respite for weary human eyes. No flashing neon beer signs. No mirrors where you saw your face reflected in the logo of a soda company or cigarette brand. No pool table or games machines. A welcome refuge for those that liked their minds uncluttered, their panoramas barren, their company more so.
There was a whiskery old bald man serving whisky behind the bar, and a whiskery old woman with him whom he took automatically for his wife, splitting and joining in the unconscious ballet of two people who’ve worked for a long time in close proximity and are unaware of the complexity of the shapes and angles they are creating without any threat of collision.
Tom didn’t try to get their attention. He had never been much good at getting attention. He had a face like a ghost and a presence not far off. There was an irony in there somewhere.
He stood and stared instead into the bottles of stale liquor as people jostled and drummed their fingers either side, waiting until the bar had emptied completely of life and a ghost had more chance of being noticed.
The barman shuffled over, wiping his hand on his jacket.
“Yes sir, what can I get you?”
“Are you the owner?”
“Yes sir.”
Tom took a picture out of his pocket. It was wrinkled by folds of various ages; white forking lightning strikes branching out across the over-flexed surface and constantly reshaped by the carelessness with which he shoved it in and out of his coat. He straightened it against the bar with the back of his hand and held it up into the light.
“Recognise this face?” he said.
The barman, a docile oddity with a huge head and a moustache identical to his eyebrows blown up fifteen times, shook his head morosely.
“Don’t think so. Nothing ringing for me.” He continued to think slowly, turning over tiny ideas in that great head, sparks pinging off the inside of his brain like radiant yellow dots in a great game of pong, meeting after travelling huge distances at odds of a thousand to one and crashing together to terminate with a flash and the sprig of an idea. He looked up from the dark oiled surface of the bar where he’d been staring, where he always stared when he was trying to think. It was like looking into infinity. “He missing or something?” he finally said.
“My understanding is a man of his description rested up down here a couple of weeks ago” said Tom. “Goes by the name of Truman? He’s about 4 years older now than when the photo was taken.”
The barman shook his head then threw it halfway sideways.
“Margarite!”
The woman bustled over.
“You recognise this man’s face?”
She took the photo and held it up and shoved the glasses down off her forehead.
“Here a couple weeks ago the man says. Four years older than the photo.”
“What was the name?”
“Truman” the barman jumped in as if long in possession of the knowledge.
She rolled her lips and shook her head.
“Haven’t seen him here” she said. “Not a couple weeks ago nor anytime. Didn’t stay here, pretty sure of that.”
Tom turned the photo over between his fingers.
“Sorry” the barman said, his doleful eyebrows sinking.
“Well, thanks anyway now.”
“No trouble. Good luck” the barman said, perking up with jarring bathos as he turned to the next customer.
Tom rolled his hat over in his hands then shoved the picture carelessly back into his pocket, a new white strike forking out across the back.
It had taken him 4 years to move on from the loss of his daughter. 4 years to advance. To find somewhere within him the power of forgiveness for his oldest friend and set out on a path to find him.
It was an aimless path in reality. A path without a real end in sight designed to delude his mind and body into thinking they still had some sort of purpose.
He’d been performing the routine almost a year now. Random bars. Random people. Random places. Justifying interaction and continued existence. Projecting a sense of external purpose to try and deceive the sense of futility he felt inside.
Strange we should spend our lives trying to find freedom from the monotony of the everyday in the shape of some pinprick of light, some vision of a better tomorrow to aim for and give our lives a sense of meaning, only to be driven to try and free ourselves from that meaning by bringing it to an end.
He wondered what he’d feel if he ever found that freedom. If he ever found Truman and the chance to offer him forgiveness. Would he feel complete or instead be left empty with no sense of purpose remaining in his life?
In the spotlight, Angelica had clambered onto the piano, and must have noticed he wasn’t watching since she was dancing with wild, attention seeking abandon, throwing her legs and arms inelegantly around, playing in counterpoise to the sullen pianist beneath her, her like life and him like death. There was an irony in there somewhere.
The proprietor suddenly sprang forward to join her, all his life concentrated into those deeply expressive eyebrows.
“Hey not that one again Marcus” he called out to him. “Come on now. Play us one we know.”
The pianist paused briefly before launching into something jauntier, an old timer, his hands hopping mechanically beneath the gaunt, expressionless face.
Tom sunk down into the hard oak seat and stared unseeing out the window.
He just wanted to escape it all. Open out his wings. Fly across America. Across the sandy crenulations of the Nevada landscape. Above the mountains of Montana. Over the great lonely cities of the Midwest. Feel the weight of life lifted off his shoulders.
He watched his daughter set out on some improvised dance that had come out of the change of tempo. A flamenco he thought, like her mother used to do.
He just wanted to be able to see her plainly and hold her in his arms. He only had a few clear elements of her left. The arc of the chin. The naked teeth. The eyes burning a mosaic of vigour and light.
He blinked at the base of the dress, where the waves of material were hanging in space as if temporarily unaware of each snap of the body and feeling blindly on into the darkness.
He had no-one left now. After he lost Angelica he had no-one left but Truman and when Truman ran away he had no-one left but himself, and he was no good company for anyone now.
He pined for human comfort. He pined for conversation and understanding and emotional connection. He pined for all these things because he was still human at core but the part of him that died with the loss of his daughter had left him too outwardly inhuman for anyone to reach what was left inside.
“Hey Papa!” Angelica had stopped, and was looking down at him and smiling with her arms thrown in the air. “Papa! Finisterra la danza del fuego!”
She let her hands drop to her waist and started to laugh, her head shaking from side to side, the laughter of a little girl, free and sincere and untroubled by herself.
He thought every day of the future she’d been denied. Felt more keenly with each passing second the pain of that stolen reality magnified as he was forced to live on in the life they should have shared, beaten forward by time into the insurmountable emptiness of the future left behind by the carelessness of a friend and the unseen evil that entered like a flash from the shadows to steal her away.
When he lifted his head again, and her eyes came to rest deeply in his, it all came back to him with as much violence as it had before; all the warmth and bitterness and love and hatred and anger and bile and helplessness and impotence. Impotence above all. That was what he always felt when her eyes penetrated his like that. Shattering, withering impotence. There was an irony in there somewhere.
He moved over to the window and opened it up and closed his eyes to the buttery glare of the streetlamp. His pallid hair was shaking in the breeze and he reset his hat on his head until it was stilled.
He was thinking of the Nevada landscape and the mountains of Montana and the lonely cities of the Midwest from above.