She never saw him crawling from her nose. One hand over the other, like a spelunker out of a new tract, easily enough, out he came. Not every night, and not always from her nose. She never saw him. But she believed in him. And that night, he only came out for no reason other than to look at the moon hanging out in space, through her open window, framed by the purple curtains her mother made her when she was a child. And she still believed.
Slowly, once he took the moon in (that night he thought, “That bastard did make that piece of rock damn beautiful from down here.”) - almost as if he needed to breathe it in through his eyes – he went back inside her. Yes through her nose.
He didn’t have the shape of a man. Not that sort of form. “One hand over the other, like a spelunker,” is just a cliché to describe what’s indescribable. So what did he look like, and what would she have seen had she ever awakened when he was looking at the moon? The answer is this: nothing.
Back he was, inside her stomach, settling back into his favorite chair that was inside his mansion that really didn’t exist as either a chair or a mansion other than in the describing of both things. And it really wasn’t his mansion: he shared it with someone else (that bastard who made the damn moon), but there was enough room for each and their own armies. The strange tesseract of faith.
He settled in and lit a fire and wished himself a hot cup of chocolate the way the old Aztecs would drink, and it appeared in his hand. Everywhere he looked it was night time because that’s what would be his vision worked. He sighed and non-existent sigh and suddenly felt so old. But how can he feel old? How can the Devil feel old since he’s always existed? He drank his chocolate and remembered something that wasn’t solid in his mind, but made him feel better.
God wasn’t really trying to make everything the right way. But he made it anyway, more by touch the way a blind person feels your face so he can imagine what you look like. If something felt finished, it was. God isn’t an artist but this is the feeling an artist feels whenever she said, “Fuck it: it’s done.”
There wasn’t a single thing he’d made in thousands of years. Nothing new existed anymore, and nothing else was being made. God was a car plant that stopped making Renaults but still didn’t close its doors. God wasn’t progress. He decided to retire so long ago from making things. Long before the first man ever walked upright, God’s long-term plan was already in motion and he already saw himself spending the rest of existence doing nothing. Existence was always open to him of course, so he already knew everything and didn’t really care that when things began to evolve on their own nothing and no one would ever need him again. Fine by him.
When the Devil told him he wanted to go and see the moon, God couldn’t even remember making it other than thinking, “Fuck it: it’s done,” but he always said that.
The moon’s craters weren’t meant to look like anything. God remembered the Aztec stories about the rabbit and the serpent. He knows everything.
The Devil went to look at the moon and God did not: their story is everywhere and in everything and in everyone.
After a while, God felt the Devil return to the mansion and make himself Aztec chocolate and God felt young for the first time this century. Whatever young meant to the Devil, for God it meant he was satisfied with the Devil feeling old. But God, right then, didn’t want the Devil to feel old, so he walked across the vastness of the mansion inside the woman’s stomach so he could talk with the Devil.
It was so bright out when she finally woke up. Not a cloud in sight and so she again reaffirmed her disbelief in the weatherman from the local news. That guy was always wrong she said when idle chat with people turned to the local news. “Except when he’s right,” she always thought during these conversations.
She always thanked God when she woke up. When she was small, her mother said she always thanked God for every new morning and so should her daughter. She was thirty-four that morning and she thanked God for it.
After breakfast and a quick email check on her phone, she drove to work and thought how winter was too short this year; it’d seemed short. “Winter is always the same length,” she thought, “so why does it seem longer some years and shorter in others? Who knows this? Why am I thinking this? Has everyone had this thought before? If it was still cold out I cold have worn the new scarf mother sent me.” During her drives to and from work, these were her thoughts: some deep and some not, but all quickly forgotten and never thought again until the very next year, during the very exact day and time as we measure them.
At lunch that day, the guy who trained her last year, when she was new there, Miguel, saw her sitting on a bench outside and sat next to her and chatted her up. She always thought it was unfortunate someone as handsome as Miguel was (he’s dead now) was married so young. He was almost ten years younger than she, and would always be. She had developed an attraction to him that sometimes made her ache, but was, too, forgotten over the time frames during which he wasn’t around. She didn’t pine for him, or wanted him until she saw him. Every time. She’d be embarrassed to ever tell him, of course, she was attracted to him. She didn’t hate very much in life, but as close as she would ever get up until that point in her life was extremely disliking Miguel’s wife, whom she’d not met nor would she ever.
Miguel sat and they talked about the new turn cycle, the new groups being formed, the old co-worker who was about to stand trial for killing his girlfriend’s brother while driving drunk. Work talk and gossip wasn’t something to build a relationship on, she thought. She also thought that day if Miguel thought the same thing. They also talked about going to each other’s church service one day. Their conversations were mere segueways and not destinations. Finally, Miguel walked off and she sighed a sigh she didn’t realize existed.
At night was when she prayed. She thanked God for the day and for her family’s well-being. She prayed for continued health. She prayed for her friends. She even prayed for a new longer winter next year so she could maybe wear a new scarf, but she didn’t know then that next year she’d forgotten all about it. But she prayed anyway because she never imagined the future.
Her mother once told her, after that night’s prayers of course, that Heaven was in side all of us. Hell too. Her mother never told her to pray for either: “Heaven is here, inside all of us, and Hell too,” her mother said, and with her hand touched her on her belly. “Sweetie, people who pray to stay out of Hell or get into Heaven are just the sort of people who don’t know we all have both in here,” her mother said, now using the same hand and pointing to her stomach. And that night she imagined Heaven inside her (not Hell, not really), and thought that was a strange thing. But as an adult now, she still thought about it from time to time, her mother’s little anecdote. And what if mother was right? Silly things a parent says.
She lingered for an hour in bed, looking out her window, out into the night sky, not restless or bothered. She wanted to look hard enough at the moon that night, try to see if the shadows cast by the moon’s craters so many miles away, could ever resemble a rabbit and a serpent entwined. She slept not getting a satisfactory answer from the moon and its shadows.
[this is my 3000th tumblr post. this story i dedicate to ms mlleghoul for the inspiration.]
Instead, let me tell you what happens when you get booked after being arrested because you set off a fire alarm in a big downtown hotel in the middle of the night because you were drunk and high on your own prescribed meds, and also you broke things in the hallways of the hotel:
The short drive to One Police Plaza in the back of a police car, handcuffed, isn’t the worst of it. At least you see the sun rise. They sit you cuffed to the chain around the waist and sit you down until the arresting officer finishes writing his report at a desk nearby. There is lots of waiting. You get your bearings and the situation becomes very clear and hours go by sad you wait for the phone call you get to make - this part is true.
You see all the drunks and prostitutes and , if you’re lucky, maybe a violent gang member who’s spouting on about how that “bitch had it coming.”
Cop takes you in front of the camera guy, he catalogues everything you had on you when arrested you. He asks you if you need to get a number from your cell phone so you know he’s not an asshole; you write it on your hand with the cop’s pen.
Mugshot one. Profile. Cop puts on latex gloves and lifts up your shirt, camera cop records your scars and tattoos. Next are your fingerprints. Next is the medical questionnaires and infectious disease checks, the medical questions in front of dozens in this holding area. Your DNA in the system. Like a clinic in the ghetto, everyone’s afflicted with something. You hear someone say he has an allergy. Someone else has AIDS. Some else has a pacemaker. All of this happens in the span of the morning and early afternoon. So much wasted time.
You sit in a hard plastic chair, the cuffs tightening every step and you just want water and a camera. Probably, the camera more. Across the room is a bank of phones and you go wait your turn. Swear, everyone knows what to say except I to a county PD phone. You wait your turn and notice a young latin guy nearly in tears. You notice the sexiness of petty criminals. The guy with the pacemaker in a nice shirt and pants, a tourist. You make your call and leave a voice mail because respectable people are at work right now.
(I didn’t call him.)
You wait more and you start to meet people, you get to build an chain wherein no one says why they’re there. You feel inadequate about your arrest and imagine if one these guys would try to rape you. You wait. The room fills and randomly, people begging to be taken down a hallway and don’t return. Where’s the next stop?
A holding cell: a metal primetime a corner, a water fountain, two slabs of concrete as benches, ten guys, a t e television in a wire cage hanging from the wall. You want a thousand cigarettes. No one has belts or shoelaces. Some one shuts in the toilet filling the room with a everyone notices but also not. An edited action movie in the screen. You try to sleep because it’s so tiring, all of this waiting and the lack of water and nicotine. They bring you all jail food that tastes like heaven. A tray of jell-o, a cold and dry sandwich, an orange, potato puree, a little carton of milk. Everyone eats. The trays reflected fifteen minutes later.
You don’t pray. You barely think. The sex of it all wears off.
You and four others are taken to what lookalike a high school gym. You line up facing the wall and are handed a plastic sack I to which you’ll put your clothes. Your shoes and underwear. Movie aren’t like this but you’re glad the cuffs are off so you can see the gnarly bruises and cuts on your wrists and hands. Naked. You, of course, look at everyone else. No one wants to be the guy who covers himself because that’s a sign of weakness?
Orange is no one’s color but fresh clothes.
You’re split up and assigned a bed after you set your plastic sack before you because you’re now a number. You’re assigned a bed surrealistic bracelet is heat sealed around your wrist. It has your picture and numbers and a chip that tracks you everywhere you go in here. You’re assigned a bed and you’re given a duffel with your bedding things, a toothbrush, paperwork. A pamphlet telling you what to do if you’re attacked while at the “detention center.” You realize the many types of attacks you may be subjected to.
Lay out on the thin mattress, and you cover yourself with a threadbare blanket. So tired. But even in the darkness, you see everyone in the converted basketball court reading, you hear them talking, someone masturbating. You sleep as you wonder some more about how you knew you shouldn’t have taken those pills after all.
Another thing that happened/will happen/is happening:
At the job I have somewhere down the line (don’t ask) I meet a woman and she’s incredibly pretty. Impossibly, even. If you were so inclined, you could say she was beautiful, but you don’t know her, so you can’t make that call.
(That’s one of the things that have always bothered me all my life, calling someone or something beautiful because it is physically attractive. I think that’s a cop out. It isn’t accurate. Something pretty (someone pretty?) is nice and everything, but if all you’re looking at is the surface of it, you’re kind of missing the point, aren’t you? This my weird idea: someone is beautiful because, sure, they’re pleasing to your eye - attractive - but there’s more to it than that. A beautiful person is that, but also considerate, honest and caring, and will tell you to fuck off when he needs to. Someone who’s beautiful, there isn’t even a hint of phoniness about them, and they’re not erratically and unexpectedly mean and evil. A beautiful person - I don’t know, man - he has this confidence about him that allows him to own his sadness and kick your fucking ass at the same time. I don’t know if I’m making sense. I’m not this beautiful a person, but I think you already knew that.)
So this woman and I, we become friends and she jokes with me about how we’re work “BFF’s” although I hate that term, but never tell her.
Weeks pass and we invite each other out, and we listen to records (she own a turn table!), and it’s like being in school only it’s summer break and you get to vacation with your best buddy all day, everyday. We become friends, right?
But she’s heartbroken. All of the time.
Every date is a problem. Every morning after is a disaster. Every few weeks of seeing someone new it’s planning a wedding. Every being dumped because she’s too clingy is a drunken stupor. How do you handle someone like that? I never imagined my thirties also sounding like summer break from school and talking about how mean boys are. Another of these bits of life no one ever tells you will never change.
And I’ll get back to that.
I don’t remember my point, why I was telling you about her. Her name was Emily, of course. I think girls named Emily are probably all the same, incredibly pretty and sad, always. And I was telling you about her and I get to thinking why do I care so much others care more about that than I do? I’m no different - all meat and fat and blood here, too. I don’t know.
I didn’t even share the dream I wanted to share, and if I started now, it would seem so contrived. But, no: I just plain forgot. Just like right now. My head does that a lot more as I get older. I wonder why? When life is more knowable to me, why is it my body’s fighting me all along the way? Stupid meat and fat and blood.
Incidentally, Emily and I are still friends. And we’ll remain so because it gets harder to start over and over. But I think I already said that, didn’t I?
Here’s something - I come out of everything okay. No long-lasting damage of any sort. And I don’t mean just this small phase of my life, I mean everything. And yet I can moan about everything. Because there’s not future except what’s happening right now. It’s a matter of perspective. Sure, everything works out in the end for me - relatively speaking, of course. But when you’re in the moment, everything lasts forever, and there isn’t that proverbial light at the end of the tunnel nonsense. There is no tunnel I guess is what I’m saying.
Might as well get on with it: I never go to Europe. That’s a bummer, but how can you miss something you didn’t have? You can long for something, I suppose, but that gets tiring and then you move onto something else, and before you even realize you stopped thinking about Europe, you come see you’re now longing for a new set of designer sneakers. We’re fickle in long swaths of time.
I never finish that tattoo across my rib cage. I started with that particular waste of time and money when tattoos meant something seedier, dirtier than they eventually become. But I never really went into it really wanting it. Tattooing really is just something you do while you see the days change. For me anyway. I can generalize everything so you feel included, but, nah, fuck you, tell your own story.
When I was a kid, the one thing that I never get to do in life, but somehow becomes okay, is never seeing the earth from space. I don’t know what ever made me want to do that. I read somewhere when someone - a fictional someone - once flew high enough to see the curvature of the planet, and that idea seared itself in me and it never left. Of all things that were at one point “in the future” this is the one that will forever get away. It’s a romantic way of describing life, but I’m talking about space travel when he would, for instance, talk about reality television shows.
And even though I get to be old and fat for a while, there’s a remaining sense of everything I ever cared for. This isn’t a bad thing and I’m sure at some point before the end, I’ll be glad for it. Not necessarily memories, but those parts of other people’s lives that stay with us in some sort of cellular level, like the color of your eyes.
And call me sappy but I’m glad I fell in love so many times I’ve forgotten the names of everyone I’ve ever loved and who loved me.
When I left the house for the final time, I didn’t really want to leave it. I was child being taken away from the toy store and I hadn’t played with all of the toys I wanted. But I left because reality sinks in and you have to leave. At some point or another, in various forms, you always have to leave. But the reason why that entire time of my life stays with me is feeling like I was trying to tread water without even knowing how to swim. This feeling that isn’t just mine. It’s so vivid, as if it all happened yesterday. But I left and that part of my time could never be revisited.
And I’m sure I’ll get to more from then. But I think I just wanted to tell you I’ll be okay. That thing about a matter of perspective I mentioned earlier: even the horrible parts are only horrible without seeing the bigger picture. Kind of like being God and the Bible or some shit like that. Only, you know, real.
But this is getting boring. Thinking about what I’ll have to do to get back into some semblance of normalcy. When things in life aren’t going the way we want, why do we tend to cling to the way we feel at the time? Isn’t that dumb? Hey, I have no job and no place to live and no money and I feel bad…so let me stay in this spot. Of course I’ve an on/off switch you don’t, and I can easily be centered and feeling alright just like that. I’m a robot, you see.
I’m not. Just kidding. Wanted to see if you’re still paying attention.
(Although, when I was a kid, I never thought about going to space or flying cars. No, when I was a kid and I thought about the future, I always imagined I’d be able to switch my parts for robot ones. Like a cyborg. I wanted mechanical arms and cool red Terminator-like eyes. Not enough comics, too much television growing up.)
Anyway. Later, a few weeks after everything’s more or less settled, and I’m living at my brothers, I watch lots of television while applying online for work. Imagine a few times that this is what’ll I’ll be doing for months if not years, and that’s just dispiriting.
My brother’s house is nice enough, in a neighborhood nice enough, in a nice enough part of the Harbor, which is a ridiculous name for this neighborhood because there’s isn’t a harbor nor anywhere close.
During afternoons I’ll help my nephew with his homework, and that’s fun, I guess. After a few weeks of nothing productive to show for myself, my nephew’s a good distraction. At dinner, he sits by me and asks me loads of questions about things he’s learning and I wonder if that’s a good thing. My sister in law’s glad to have some help around the house.
All of this domesticity is nice and helps me from going insane. It helps to keep my brain working on things other than my negative-balance bank account, the ex, all of that. But when you’re sleeping in a borrowed sofa for longer than a weekend, you begin to doubt yourself as a valid modern person. What am I contributing to the world, that sort of thing, you know?
But you know what? If I kept this up, you’d really want to read about me being a robot because this all a lot of the mundane stuff that makes up our lives. We all know it too intimately to possibly be interested in it happening to someone else. This is why sci-fi movies, even the terrible ones, make tons of money: there is nothing mundane about the Nostromo to us. But what if that was all you got, hearing me complain and be sad and all that about the things that happen daily to each of us? Would I like to be told this story? I can tell you I wouldn’t. So why have I already wasted so much of your time with my dry bit of life?
Honestly, I’m not sure. It’s because, again, like we all are doing, I’m making things up as I go along. Not the story bits, but how I’m telling it. Everything is real, after all.
Whenever I read books or watched movies wherein the narrator already knew everything that was unfolding, those are my favorite kinds of stories. Not that third person narration, but the first person thing. Because since as far back as I can remember, it was always comforting to know that someone in any sort of situation, real or imagined, remained at the end to tells us how he got there.
Kind of like the Bible. But not really.
I’m telling you everything because it’s all happening and it’s already happened and it will happen. There’s no wrong way to tell your story because in the end, you’ll get there. I’ll get there, to the end. Don’t be too surprised if you know what you’ll do tomorrow today because you did it yesterday. That kind of thing. I don’t know if that is a thing or if my being on my brother’s sofa in the middle of night right now is making me dream all of this.
Speaking of which, let me tell you about a dream I used to have…
It’s his mother’s fault for telling me she doesn’t know where he is either. She says this and I can feel myself in a movie, talking to people I don’t know. Going places I only hear of, barely are aware of, asking if anyone’s seen this man while I hold up an 8 by 10 of him. A cliche movie. I’m in danger of turning this into the kind of story that turns out to be me, out in the city looking for him. It’s her fault.
But I’m not going to tell you more about that. The what happened immediately after that, what I did when I found out even his mother had no idea he was MIA.
Let me tell you about her: I don’t think she ever liked me. And remember, this is me not wanting to be a cliche. But she didn’t. She never said so, and she was always polite and everything. But I always felt that something was there, just under the surface - in her eyes - that radiated so much distaste whenever I was present. This is the same feeling I think I always feel when I’m in a crowded strange room. Being around his mother, I always felt the same way whenever I walked into a bar in a city I didn’t know.
You can tell she was very pretty when she was younger. But consider this that tired line about time has taken a toll on her looks.
In my former kitchen, she isn’t crying but she tells me what little she knows. She doesn’t touch upon the fact her son and I are done and I’m leaving; there are boxes all over already. She doesn’t say she’s worried and I wonder for a moment if this is because when her son was younger, this is probably what he made her go through while he was using and getting fucked by rich strangers in their kitchens while being filmed.
She does ask me to let her know when I hear from him. She’d appreciate it. Please. But she says all of this without emotion. The way a teacher in grade school tells you about George Washington’s wooden teeth. I don’t know what to say but I nod. She leaves ten minutes after I come in the house. She doesn’t close the door when she leaves.
What will happen I will tell you: I see her again a couple of years later, but she and I don’t speak. Somewhere in Los Angeles city they’ll eventually build another outdoor mall and I’ll be waiting in line to buy movie tickets and I look over to where the benches sit, lining around a metal post-modern monstrosity that doubles a fountain, and she’ll be sitting there. She’ll look old and beaten, but not sad and alone. She and I do make eye contact and I make the conscious effort to smile a polite and bland smile but it won’t come. She won’t smile at me, and I’ll think about that later that night. I never see him again. But I wonder if she did. If she will.
And I’m too scared to ask where he’s been because I’m certain he’ll tell me, and I just don’t want to have to deal with that. He’s honest. To a fault? I don’t know about that, but he says things about him I never really wanted to know. He says things I hadn’t even imagined he’d know of so. Yeah.
One thing he told me once while at lunch at a bad Thai place on Fountain was about the time someone from up the Hollywood Hills he knew sent a car to pick him up from the shitty place he lived in at the time, behind where there used to be Gower Studios. It was maybe the fourth time we’d gone out. He said this to me in the same kind of detail TMZ uses to report on some pop idol. He said this man invited him over because he wanted to fuck. He said, “He wanted me to get high so he could fuck me.” I remember looking down at my plate because I felt embarrassed for him. Like when you see someone fall in the street and you don’t want to embarrass that person more by offering help and revealing you saw them fall. He said when he went into the house this man, he already had the lines cut on some Taschen coffee table book for him and was naked (“He was very handsome,” he said describing his top; an ersatz prince) and had a camera mounted on a tripod and there was someone else…
You know what? I’ve made myself sad retelling this story. Fuck that story. Fuck all his stories. I never asked him how he knew this man, but that’s because I’m not always an idiot.
Anyway, I’m up the hill, waiting for the sun to come, and I’m sure he’s out there doing something that will become a graphic story of how much more stupid he is than I am.
Well. Not really. Stupidity is relative, I mean.
Walk back down the hill on the other side, onto a heavy trafficked street. In the strip mall at the corner is a Ralph’s grocery store and I buy a can of Red Bull and a liter of water and I walk back home. They have those self-check out machines and I use one, and instead of thinking about how even at the grocery we’re getting further away from each other as people, I think I’ve just spent five dollars that I’ll literally piss away in an hour or so. It’s hard trying not to think about the things that need doing when all you have is free time. So, of course, when I get home a bit later, it isn’t him who’s there, smoking a cigarette in the kitchen, but his mother.
The walk up Hill Street is only a mile, but it is going uphill. City planning cleverness, but the view of the city and the port ten miles away is worth the sore calves and aching thighs. It’s easier, this walk in thirty-something degree winter, if you don’t smoke at the same time. It’s that sort of morning. Sunrise is in another half hour.
The house is sold and we’re to move out by month’s end and I’m going to move in with my older brother and his family. Starting over, it loses its charm at thirty. Ever think you’ll have to start fresh every five years or so?
I was in county jail for a week and I lost my job in the meanwhile. Sure, my boss sympathized, she said, but I should really just resign because she didn’t want to fire me. No, she didn’t say “fire.” She said she didn’t want to “let me go.” So I did. First night in county, asleep after twelve hours of booking and in a holding tank and lining up naked to be given jail clothes and shoes, I am woken by two guys fighting. The guy who falls on me, his jail pants are off.
At the top of the hill are expensive condos and a park and some sort of communications tower that’s painted red and white and has those red flashing lights so planes and helicopters don’t crash into it. But you look west and you can see downtown and the beach and, a bit further on, the ocean. On a clear afternoon, you can see the Los Angeles port. I first came up here when I was thirteen.
When I was out of jail, my older brother picked me up and he didn’t say much after he said, “I hope it was worth it,” and asked when my court date was. At my house, my clothes were on my bed in a pile and he wasn’t home. It was time for me to leave in more ways than the obvious. I packed and went for a walk after. The same walk I’m taking now. I thought about just leaving that day and just leaving a note for him saying he could trash everything I was leaving behind. I’m not subtle.
A week after, here I am, up the hill, alone but for the city in the distance, breathing smoke. Again.
I don’t know where he’s been these last few days and I’m scared to ask.
“Yeah, sometimes I miss you, don’t you? I do that thing where I’m in one of those moods, you know, and I wonder what you’re doing, and I think about what we would be doing if things were different. And I look at my phone and realize how easy I could just pick it up (sometimes I do) and just call and I wonder - you’re going to think it’s so dumb! - if my picture will come up, you know, the one you took of me in, what was it? 2003? Yeah, I wonder, your phone will ring and you’ll see my picture, you know, and you’ll think for a moment whether or not you should answer it. I mean, I would if I saw your name on the caller ID. But you do answer, and I can’t hang up because you’ve seen who’s calling, and all I’ll be able to say is hi and how are you and can we talk…that sort of bullshit. And you’ll be great, and you’ll ask me things that I’ll answer and we’ll laugh - that’s the best! We’ll laugh and we’ll leave off saying things like we ought to get together and we should maybe see a film and get coffee and things we criticize people for saying because they don’t mean it because we don’t mean it, and we’ll each go back to our lives, thinking and feeling good things, but imagining we’re each better off without the other, still glad one of us reached out, and go and forget all about it in a few days or so. Anyway, that’s what I think. And I saw you walking across the Boulevard the other day (my god, I should’ve said something to you that day!). I don’t know where you were going. You had your headset on and you were fiddling around with your ipod. But I didn’t say anything to you and you were just across the way, and now, here I am, telling you I’ve been thinking about you since then and I feel a little dumb. But I guess that’s part of it, isn’t it, feeling dumb and stupid for missing a person? Sort of comes with it, I guess. Did you ever have the same feeling? Jesus, listen to me, going on and on. I’m nervous, what can I do. It’s been a while and you have this way of making me feel like I’m a thirteen year old boy at a dance: awkward and strange.”
He says, “You know, if you untie me, this would be a lot easier.”
I was saving up for a new brain but, man, try and get a loan for one of those.
My old brain started failing me. I would forget things. But I’d know I’d forget them. That’s the thing: I’d see a pen and I knew what it was, what I’d used it for before, but I couldn’t get my brain to remember. It was so frustrating.
Out in the street one time, a woman came running up to me and asked me how I was doing, and wasn’t it a long time since we’ve seen each other, things like that, but I couldn’t place her face. I think I remembered her hair color, and when I meandered my way through some nondescript answers, she went away, confused and probably offended. Hope it wasn’t anyone I cared about.
And it wasn’t just my memory, no. I think my brain stopped sending signals to the rest of my body at times. Like a hiccup and suddenly, after peeing, my brain would forget to tell me I was done, and there I’d stand for a while, dick in one hand, strangers thinking me a pervert on the other…figuratively.
Went up a several flights of stairs when my apartment building’s elevator stopped working for a while and at the landing for my floor, my legs stopped. I wanted to get going, I knew where I needed to go, but my brain wouldn’t tell my legs to do anything. It was really annoying.
If my brother were still alive, he’d lend me the money for the new brain. I know he would, even if I can’t remember his face right now. But my whole family’s gone. My mother also needed a new brain but died with her old original one in her head. We never knew our father, my brother and me, and I think he’s the reason why our bodies are falling apart. My brother, he died when his off brand legs broke and he fell onto the subway tracks. His legs made him heavier than people thought and he died when the train ran him over. His wife got all of his money and she doesn’t speak to me.
Whoever our father was, he was a cheapskate. That’s obvious by just looking at my mother and brother and me: we should’ve lasted a thousand years. We’re not robots or anything, but whoever married my mother, he was supposed to make sure our parts were maintained, and our original bodies were replaced as necessary. You hear about guys like him more and more: they literally build a family and then leave it when they figure out how to build a newer model.
Been saving up for years and I think by this time next month I’ll have enough for additional brain memory and a back up. But that isn’t the same as a new brain. A new brain means full functionality. A back up is just that because you’re anticipating the end. But at least I’m a wi-fi hotspot and it’ll take me a little while, but if we run into each other in the street, I’ll remember your face.
