The Untold Story
The room in which he sits is a box with no visible doors. There is light, but the source of the light is subtle, maybe obscure. Around the walls there are pictures posted:
-Charles Ives: An insurance salesman whom the business world would not allow to explore the microcosmic cracks of hickory bark, the distant déjà vu scents carried on the noiseless wind.
-Piet Mondrian: The big, blue lost square. Master-mong; other-indifferent
From the mouth of Neal comes an automatic orgasm, a scream for Piet, an icon for Ives.
-Josef Stalin: Perhaps the least understood man in history.
And on the floor are many pictures and shapes cut from newspapers, and pages on which to paste them.
As the lone captain in a lone spaceship zipping nowhere in the alone universe, he sits on the floor with these pages all around him like control panels in the cockpit. This is his method of flying: he holds one scrap up and looks for the page with the most fitting or most complementary personality. As far as personalities go, he is considered an objective observer, hence qualified for such cutting and pasting.
“It’s a cut-and-paste kind of life,” he says to the washing machine he now holds in his hands. Then he tapes it off to the side of the large car poster. The washing machine belongs off to the side. It’s a necessity. I don’t mean that it’s a necessity to put the washing machine off to the side, but the washing machine itself is a necessity and necessities belong off to the side. Pasta in the cabinet, electrical wires behind the appliance. Only art out in the open, paintings hanging on the wall like dirty clothes on the line. Clean clothes—excuse me. Just washed, that’s why they’re on the line.
Then he picks up the cat he’s been thinking about for a while but hasn’t been able to do anything with. It came from a kitty box ad and it’s facing away as if it’s climbing. He keeps checking to see if it fits into any new collage environment, but not yet. And another thing about this cat is that it reminds him of Garfield and it really annoys him that he can’t think of the cat’s name—all he can come up with is George.
“George, I never told you about the time I. . .” was there another cartoon cat named George? Maybe I’m thinking of Marmaduke.
“But then you never asked.”
“This set of curtains, here.” He laid them down.
“And this spoonful of soup I’m quite serious about. I keep looking for a reminder of the same message I woke up to every morning for three years up to five years ago. Yikes that’s a long time. My seriousness is now like a damp, stale hangover or the feeling of waking up with the first impact of an anvil-striking flu, though dreams just seconds past spoke of the illness as if it had been with me since birth.
“Your seriousness is like. . . Well, you don’t have any seriousness. You only have two moods, horny and offended. Your seriousness is the nuisance that has replaced my constant message. Now instead of saliva I have an empty cough like a blank page in front of me suffering from artists’ block.
“The page suffers; I don’t suffer from the block. The block keeps me going, if barely.”
Ives,
you were there for me. If you bend your
head close to my puffing lips asleep, I’ll whisper the answer to your
question--if your weary mind can still care.
Now you’re no more than a weak, wasted supastar lying helpless like a
vandalized headstone.
Let me
look inside my box, Mondrian, I think I have a circle for you.
In this
box is where I keep my real friends.
I have a thousand old stories for you. From when I was in high school, from when I laid insomniac in my crib. A has-been, you say? Washed up? No more stories to tell? I have one in which I keep seeing a ghost of myself in another gender and I called it over whenever I needed it and. . .”George, look at me when I’m paying attention to you. You don’t really care about any of these tales, do you?”
He gets up and looks at the wall over a cabinet at the picture of Stalin.
“You should know, Josef. Should I go on telling my stories even if no one listens? Even if no one needs to hear them?
(Stalin stares back with a blank, heartbroken gaze.)
“Where the heck is the door out of this room?”