Conversations With Andrew

These are part of a larger series of things I'm currently working on with one of my friends. When they're all together, it'll be a lot more fun to read. For now though, this is to keep me honest.

This page will be updated, hopefully often. The Andrew I'm talking about here is this Andrew, not this Andrew, but I love both of these Andrews.

Such A Heavy Arm

There are two ducks floating next to each other in the river in front of him. He has never hated birds and he has never been jealous of them. Despite everything that's happened over the last nine weeks he's still confident that he's not going to take the fall for it. It was never his fault to begin with, of this he is quite sure.

It's cold out, but that's no surprise and he's got his daughter's Burberry scarf wrapped round his hands. He had taken it by mistake as he was walking out the door in his black shoes to unlock his black car and he could feel the scratching of the wool on his wrist. When he was younger he didn't understand the difference between plaster and concrete, and when he was six and broke his arm, cried more at the prospect of such a heavy arm weighing him down.

What's the difference between an arms dealer and a doctor? Nothing. What's the difference between a sunset and a couch in a bonfire? Nothing. What's the difference between six weeks and fourteen years, locked down into the same goddamned frequency, tuned to the same goddamned channel, writing the same goddamned jokes on the back of the same business cards and napkins and paper menus.

When he thought about how he should act, a man his age, he didn't really have an answer. He didn't care about the difference between analog and digital. He thought prices were reasonable, given the rate of inflation and the quality of living. He didn't care much for politics, and he never really followed films all that closely. As a matter of fact, he couldn't think about much of anything, other than that feeling he felt when he thought he'd never go swimming again and those two goddamned ducks.

 

Cotton

When we wake up in the morning we’ll wrap the stinking cotton between our fingers, and say “yes.” We’ll say, “yes,” because triumph is beauty and beauty is simplicity and simplicity is routine and routine is wrapping the cotton, changing our bandages and deeply breathing as we watch our chests, shirtless in the mirror. The sunlight will elbow gently through the window unassuming and pool, two dimensionally on our tiles while the steam from our showers will parade and chat casually, gnostically sipping at our shoulders. We will wish we had a camera. We will know then what we have already known, that in a moment we cannot know truth as truth can only be believed in retrospect, and all memories are at least half lies, and scraping our dead skin, caught lingering, we will know uncertainty and placation. We will close our eyes and open our eyes to our own faces and we will command ourselves to smile, and before we do, or we don’t, we will forget because much more than we are nothing, we are forgetful.

 Physiology

 Once we had teeth the size of beach balls and jaws that would unhinge like soccer stadiums and eyes that would fill with blood that were gas gauges for the soul. In the past, blood would measure the soul, but we had to stop once arguments were settled by measuring and causalities clogged the wheels of carriages on the street, particularly on Saturday nights but especially Sunday mornings. Once we had claws we would put up for predators, broken porcelain sharp and grey with the passage of time but we discovered love, and once again, casualties clogged. We thought we had discovered hesitancy, but like America, when we were told we were confused, we changed the name and pretended like it was a master plan. At this time we still had plans. Once we had songs we sang in place of words, and our names were calls on pitch and our adjectives drumbeats and our greetings coarse blasts of brass that would rip through the morning but we found after so many trials, too many songs would make the eyes burst, and the soul pour out sickly syrupy on the streets, and we’d splash and complain in our heirloom jackets and the gutters overflowed and stained our pathways with burgundy, which looked lovely next to a gold railing but felt wrong to walk on, and most of all, it was simply too difficult to initiate a public transportation infrastructure with all that goddamned blood everywhere.

 

Strangle

She is four drinks in and she has been waiting to say this for a week. With this remark she will bisect her friends, pull them in twain with glib reflection and a surgical execution and she will leave them, leave this place forever with its goddamned dark wood and low ceilings and ornamental gas fireplace. Her glass is heavy and is only lime and ice and melted ice and she thinks briefly about whether or not the ice is jealous of the alcohol like a second stringer on the bench watching the fourth quarter die without fanfare. She wonders if the ice is jealous, like that whore Kelly who only keeps saying that ish because she once accidentally let it slip at a party what she’d done for extra credit, which was commonly known anyway, it’s not like she was delivering any new information or anything. Behind her a group of rugby players are drinking out of a shoe and pounding the table and she puts the tumbler on that stupid mahogany and opens her mouth, finally about to be rid of them. When she starts to speak, she notices all of her friends are talking to the goddamned waiter and without a second thought manoeuvres her bottom lip between her teeth and bites it without as much as a nod towards preservation.

 

Forests

There are close to 100,000 species of tree currently in existence. There are approximately 60 trees per person. It is reasonable then, to assume, if the ratio of people to trees was, by a sorcerer, instantly inversed we would immediately begin 100,000 simultaneous, irrational and unpublicized wars, after which we would all probably just suffocate, especially if we still felt the need to build lawn furniture.

 

Mexico

He is sticking the severed heads of strike anywhere matches into a tennis ball because he is angry at the government and what those bastards have done. He feels like a cliché even though this act has never happened, in this particular way, ever throughout all of history. He feels this way, primarily because of his open linen shirt, open for comfort in the hot windless night but how it could be mistaken for brazen narcissism and posturing. The shirt is of so poor quality, it is practically gauze and it brings him shame that he counts it among his nicest, when one day, far behind him he used to arrive to work (in a car! not on a bus!) in a suit, despite the heat and while it was brutal and vulgar, he wore his sweat as a medal. It spoke to those around him and he would nod as they nodded, nodded at his productivity and his values and commitment. When he was let go, he went outside in the parking lot and stared into the sun for an hour, blinking as infrequently as possible and clenching his fists so tight his fingers bit the meat of his palms and scabbed over later that night.

He whistles as he pushes the nail through the sullen skin of the ball, past the neon felt and into the hollow nothing, and smiles because he knows when he bowls it aggressively, across the lot, into the puddle of gasoline, surrounding the loading dock he will soon pour, the match heads will massage the pavement and sound a deep, hoarse throated gasp when they crumble, break and ignite in a rolling banshee of retribution. It would be symbolic if fire was a symbol of anger, which it is not.

When he is finished the ball he slowly descends to his knees and feels the ground with his thumbs, still porous and warm and soft from the day’s merciless sun. He crouches lower again, and feels his cheek on the ground and smells the tar and rubber and rust. He thinks long and hard about his family and consequences and what it will all mean in the end, and decides that his decision, made in the middle of a veritable fit is somehow more pure than reason, and more genuine than calculated logic. He knows what has to be done and has no misgivings any longer. He misses his family.

The worst thing, he regrets, is that though the papers will brand him a inciter and rebel and purveyor of lawlessness, ever since leaving his job in human resources, every night he has dreamt of florescent lights, circulated air and the plush half-comfort of responsibility. He wants nothing more than a life of mediocrity and tepid stability, and for this, seventy three innocent people will die.

 

Oiseaux Amers

There was this girl who used to work with a guy, and now she worked with his sister and he was now dead and had been for seven months. She was twenty three and had taken a job as a receptionist for an architecture firm that primarily designed animal processing plants. She used to wring her hands constantly, except when holding a cup of coffee, three of which she drank every morning before noon. She had done the same the day of the funeral of the aforementioned guy, and thought frequently of how she should have drank coffee with him more often than she did, though she had quite a bit. Once he had driven her to the airport as a favour, and she once sat back and imagined what it would be like if his sister knew.

“I know what you did, you thanked him,” she’d say, and because the sister knew was thankful and being thankful she felt weak and empty and thought others assumed attempted to fill her shortcomings with the powers of others. She went home and cried and cried and cried for five days until six million microscopic birds flew from her eyes and begun swirling around her home, opening cupboards and unplugging the vacuum cleaner and murdering her parents while they slept. At this point, there is no reason not to believe her because becoming embarrassed is a tragic and haunting thing.

 

Bodies

In the very near future body modification will experience drastic overhauls. Most of these innovations will be pushed forward by German scientists, who coincidentally enough have one of the lowest rates of body modification in the world. There will be many changes. There will be metal discs that will be sewn into the skin. There will be hunks of metal, like cookie cutters in which acid will be poured and the scars will be smooth and shiny and remind those that do not have them of gelatine, translucent and profane.

Then there are the people who shop at normal stores, wear seasonal fashions, purchase music on a regular basis and smile for photographs. These people will have no distinguishing marks whatsoever. It will be hard for them, but they will prevail, and drive SUVs and watch network television and make bunny ears on each other in photographs. On the surface there will be nothing different about these people, and inside they will know that they do what they do, not just for the material comforts, but for the outright disgust it brings their peers for being exactly what they thought they knew they would be.

 

What Part Of Di Di Mau Didn't You Understand?

In six days it will all be over and it will feel like walking into the cold basement on a blistering summer’s day. When it comes it will feel like a can of beer pressed firmly against a warm thigh and the leaves will shudder and the waves will make love to the beach and the sand will sigh, yeah, yeah, you know how to do it, this is why we never leave, this is why we'll never leave you, and the ocean will sigh and while now it is bored it will think back at the time when it was never bored, when it licked each grain gracefully and held it and embraced when the moon pulled them closer together. Yes, yes, the ocean will say, lacking sincerity but brooding in it's own understanding.

In six days it will all be over and it will feel like a trained player hammering the high notes with intentional dissonance, and we, drunk from a fruity mixture will sigh and stare up at the night sky and realize that it's not really as bad as we thought it would be, that it's really quite nice, and while it's not quite comforting it's not really the shock we were expecting. We have been prepared. We have been prepared this entire time, and it took the end to teach us.

In six days it will all be over and it will feel entirely like a new beginning, which is not how everyone remembers a new beginning. We will not feel instantly at peace. We will stumble half-blind and nervous, clamouring for our lockers and begging our exerted minds to retain the combination, and our palms are so sweaty they've turned the ink black ocean deep blue, running through the series of desert pink canyons made up of thousands of caves that give birth to our hands, from further away.

In six days it will all be over and we will cease to be impatient. Will will sit, in the waiting room, understanding and compassionate and turn to each other and smile politely, shuffle the winter salt from our boots and point to the magazines on the table and say “This one has a great article about dolphins. They have their own language.” When we say this, we will be impressed, oblivious to the fact that we have taken for granted that we are speaking our own.