Ten Dawns

A geriatric portrait of Neddie at twenty-six: persistent and growing inability to “chill out”, to hold down a job, to watch television, go to dinner parties, be social. Overarching tendency to mock and satirize the issues, to intellectualize and put things in categories, to traffic in ideas and abstractions rather than love and happiness. Growing inability to have ‘a good time’, to ‘laugh it off’, to take things lightly, to not feel strongly about ‘the issues’—empathy waning, sympathy and tolerance for fools noticeably diminished. A newfound vigilance against the unnoticed and seemingly innocuous crime of wasting time. Against practically everything: government, love, the organic food industry and anyone who wants to rob her of her lifeblood. Neddie: like a sick girl isolating herself in a clean room, weakened social immune system, solitary world-dweller unable to tolerate any human interactions save brief, periodic visits from me.

***

I’m the one who’s actually sick. I like the way I look since I’ve been diagnosed--a weight added to the spirit. Strangers pass on the street and seem to look at me differently now. They look, rather than averting their eyes. Perhaps its the blue vein poking out from the spring-roll-translucent baby-soft skin just below my eye, or the darkness gathered on my cheeks like rouge, that slightly vampiric pallor. All interactions take on a certain weight now: value added to each one from the understanding that it could be the last ‘Goodbye’, the last time I pet an animal. But I’m happier than I’ve ever been. Magnetized by life, by human conversation. When I speak: the person I’m speaking to is the most important person in the world.

***

I've stopped communicating so much with friends--the constant chitter-chatter updates, how are you doing, how are they doing, an update on the status of our mutual friends, what are our life problems, what we are "working on" what are our evening plans, which bar. The world, it turns out, is a more interesting companion. The sting of cold air on the skin at every sunrise and sunset. The blank canvas stares back— the empty streets and ghosts of possibilities that are always lurking around but never materialize. The dead of winter is the best: the flush of air, the moon cold and clear and bright, and sunset, as the blue sky turns ultramarine, with little wafty tufts of pink floating through it, and big, glass ball moon above. The lonely sound of a train in the distance. Music playing from hidden speakers in the parking lots of incandescent, empty Shell and BP gas stations. The roar of cheering crowds at high school football games, the drums of a marching band like the galloping of a thousand horses.

***

When dawn comes, it’s like a bow playing the low note on a stand-up bass…a quivering…and then the thin gash ripping its way across the horizon. Light, heat, a twilight cerulean, the daylight a little shaky at first as if it might at the last minute slump back into night before suddenly turning, omnipresent splendor, like a wash of paint in the early Technicolor cartoons--ozone whisps around on the asphalt, and the street lamps still on, always humming—a white van delivers the papers—sick men like me gingerly down our driveways with big mugs of coffee to get the paper, happy to still be engaging in the antiquated act of "walking down the driveway to get the newspaper" in these vaporous, digital times. Almost thirty years ago, Beard predicted that in this century all our printed objects would start to become obsolete—the great variance of touch and smell that one can experience, layers of oil paint, fingerprints on glossy magazines, marble sculptures, tactile sensations one by one replaced with a thin piece of plastic, manufactured like a rounded stone, worn down by millennia of weather. No more sensing, no more interacting, no more touching, Beard wrote. No more ink, no more bodies, no more sweat, it was written, his handwriting becoming shaky.

***

In 1998, Beard wrote, "People move to the metropolis because they are unimaginative. They can no longer find ways to entertain themselves with the sunrise-watching, the steady fucking and the trance-inducing, dervish like dancing. So they opt out for the prefab life. The easy way out, where all interactions become predictable and accounted for. They move into buildings on top of each other, and pump away at a life of homogenous sensations—the routine of work, of public transit, of exchanging goods, of the social. They can’t stand having responsibility for their own time. So they linger on in the graveyard. In that garden of sensual pleasures, where, child-like, they will sell away their time for seeming pleasure.”

***

Neddie holds me at night. She cries and I rub her back. We are in love. The cat lays between us in bed, and pokes its head out of the covers. I contort so she doesn't rub the bruised spot on my back, the source of the malignance that’s slowly making its way through my lymph nodes, like neon dye through the veins of a flower. When the doctor tells me I’ve got to do more chemo, that we’ve got to pump poison into the veins, a Metallica song comes to mind: Fight fire with fire. The living—they cope with absence, but never actually have to go through anything—darkness, sulfur, white heat. Neddie and I wake up with the sun pouring in the window, and give each other kisses, ‘Good morning, my sweet’. I make coffee and she makes the toast, a thin film of margarine and marmalade, two sugars two creams, my dear. We live together in a photograph of time. It’s more than anyone could ever ask for in this life. I am proud that the end will come before our bones have ossified. Our dicks and breasts still hold their heads up high. I hold Neddie tight. Our sheets are clean and white. The bed seems to always be made.

***

Beard spoke of New York through his description of Salt Lake City on his astral road trip through America, writing, “Everywhere marble: flawless, funereal…The Empire State in New York has something of this same funereal Puritanism raised to the nth power.”

Like a metal-detector prophet driven across the country in search of dark vibrations, Beard seemed to tap into certain truths and feelings hidden barely under the surface of life in America, foretelling the story of the simulacrum-woven city and humanity’s final slouch into symbiotic dependency with machines. Beard’s book Amerikka was printed in 1986, which means that he had to scribble his metaphysical prophecies in 1985 or earlier, an astonishingly early date for the technocratic prophecy gleaned within. Beard has been dead now for two years, and his books seem destined for occasional reprint in smart set obsolescence by the American and French post-Marxist press. It seems that his fate in death as in life will be both known and unknown, relevant and irrelevant all at the same time, like a shadow, a fun-house reflection of himself. Dead, the work continues to haunt me with its fragmented revelation; his Reagan-era tongue lashing my pitiful, fractured twenty-first century frame. In his book, faced with the wonder, the wonder that is America, he wrote like one crumpled on his knees in reverence, all analysis failing, like a convert before the colossal scale of our utopian American project. The funereal Puritanism of the Empire State--There’s no debating the linear perfection of the Verrazano Bridge, stretching across the New York Bay. It is a line manifested, a supreme and unnecessary act of willpower. Without the Bridge, boats would have continued to ferry people across the rivers. The draping horizontality stretches from Bay Ridge to Staten Island, its perfectly vertical wires like pikes suspending its sleek frame above the icy waters of the frozen Bay—efforts on the measure of the Verrazano, like the undertakings of the past--the Pyramids, Stonehenge, and the Great Malls of our country, are non-negotiable. Even the most committed luddite can only grin stupidly at its prettiness, unable to deconstruct or imagine the ruins of this act of consummated will, this fantastic dream of dust.

***

I've been waking up at the first light of day, as if the physiology has been soldered and perfectly aligned to Earth's slow tilt around the great burning SUN...6:47 AM...6:46 AM...6:45 AM...the sound of galaxies and time passing. Wake up with a start from a dream you can’t remember… the sound of a slow rumble, like a giant boulder moving open to reveal a trapdoor in an Indiana Jones movie. Planets moving, titanic celestial vessels, lives shifting in and out of bounds…all in these first moments. In an attempt to try to squeeze the last waning moments from this wasted life, I’m sleeping very little...how many more sunrises, Beard? How many more going to beds, Beard? Two hundred? Nine hundred more? When the end comes, at least I rose at dawn and saw the sun, felt the cold, ate hot food, fucked hot fuck, and endured real feeling. I jumped out of bed every morning into the still-dark bedroom...a couple of minutes to get the coffee pot brewing, alone like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia...and then a Folgers moment, the play of colors in the sky, entertainment beyond any man-made reproduction.

***

In the first pages of Beard's 2006 tract Aphasia, he wrote: "People like squinty moles in the office buildings across the world, living primarily in darkness. They get to work and log onto their laptops to spend a large portion of their workday ‘chatting’ with friends who are in other offices doing the same thing, caged animals communicating with howls across the expanse of some vast social prison. Millions of people living into their loneliness occasionally prodded on by some kind of genetic social impulse to reach out to others for a temporary reprieve with small talk. “Hi, how are you?” “Oh my—what a beautiful dog you have!” “I’m so hung over this morning!” “Did you get my message?” Other more maladjusted souls delve deeper, hoping that their lonely work could bring them out on the other side, like digging a hole to China. Without their social networking tools, we’re “not in the conversation” and are slowly being phased out of the social circus. Careers and relationships are being made and broken, names and brands are gaining and losing credibility, bands are getting their start. And we could care less. Those who are missing can be presumed dead.”

***

Highways, hopelessly tangled across the states. What will become of all of them? Return to dust? Poor Beard. Poor me, dead at twenty-eight years old--green shoots will one day tear through the asphalt and the cities will lie in ruins, but sometime soon she will be asked to step to the back of the funeral home and identify my body. Snow whisping across the streets like sands in the desert. Like on the steppe in Russia, and the cars, like a warm set of hands, always rubbing the road, cradling it in their arms, trying to keep it above freezing. The alien landscape in the morning--tufts of lavender clouds, trees like out of a Dr. Seuss book. Empty town, like a model that some kid built for his Lionel train set to go around—perfectly bleached warehouses and factories, pine trees, empty streets, authentic barber shops, and modest skyscrapers. A flickering picture, as if the tropical fruits of hyper-capitalism that have blossomed so vibrantly elsewhere just haven’t been able to take root in the tough red soil.  The austere, institutional businesses here seem almost state-owned, peppering the streets with modest signs stating their social function—Soap Company, Educational Supply Warehouse, Auto Repair, Brick and Mortar, Public High School. A skeletal infrastructure of a city with all the necessary products and services to survive, but with none of the decorative flair.  A city built by IKEA, dedicated to stark, Scandinavian simplicity. All the elements of life, without any of the feeling of it.