I give you fair warning; this is a story told by a fool. Not one of Dostoeveski's idiots, a boorish intellectual, but a fool whose sole purpose in life is to spread foolishness and confusion. Idiocy is far too common; I leave that to anarchists and idealists. I am the excrescence that fills the void, the otherness to the reality you feel, hear, touch, taste, fuck and shit out of all the holes that you lay claim to. I am no idiot, but a foolish man with little patience or tolerance for fools. I tolerate myself, but only out of shear necessity, a necessity to strike a balance in the imbalance of my life. All other necessities are meaningless.
I remember riding my bicycle in the warm summer rain, splashguards removed and hidden in the clutter of the garage where my father couldn’t find them. Face pushed full throttle into the wind; eyes cutting holes into the late evening sun setting over the houses and rooftops that a Frenchman built from memory and plumb rule. The suburbs, a hideaway for child molesters, incurable alcoholics with beat-in noses and foul breath, nicotine yellow fingers, unkempt hair, yelping children and sad, pathetic wives. And me on my ten speed, hockey cards clacking in the wick of my spokes, some long forgotten Montreal Canadian’s face unrecognizable but for a few missing teeth and a puck scar. Chousing dead leaves with my foot up against the sidewalk, one eye kept on the front lawns of the neighbors to see if they were sleeping, or beating they’re children blue and weightless. The real alcoholics whet their thirsts in damp basements or in the privacy of dark sinkholes where the man who made the hockey rink ice drank, three fingers missing from each hand, poor, pathetic bastard. He spent more time trying to tame the icemaker’s hose, stooped off balance, but unable to hold onto the boards with one finger and a thumb on either hand, than making hard ice. The alcohol in his guts all that kept him from keeling over and freezing to death in the snow bank on the other side of the boards. They never honored him with a hockey card, face varicose and pox scarred, spurs of icy tears bridging the gap between blood red eyes. Sad, pathetic bastard, two drinks away from a breakdown or an early grave. And me on my bicycle, dodging sinkholes and tire rubber, thinking not of a future, but of a past that wouldn’t go away. My father’s poorly made beer, fermented in clay barrels and stopped in reusable bottles he’d forged from new ones. Always that first eruption of foam, bitter and lye tasting that split the end of my tongue. A numbness like a headlock gone too far, souring the insides of my mouth, dizziness like falling, purging me off balance and upended. But I drank it, greedily, to ward off remembering and giving things a second thought
She often awakens to pain. Like a burning sensation or an itching, the result of too much of everything and nothing at all. Too much of this, too little of that. Not enough sleep, too much catnapping in between. Too many nights spent in a sweat, eyes pressed tight, ears thudding with footsteps and doors creaking open. A seam of hallway light, faint and yellow, illuminating the foot of her bed, hands groping and foraging for a scallop of skin, a hint of fear. She crouches, cowered, under the volcano: Popocatepetl, Ixtaccihuatl, and Quauhnahuac. All mothers, yet harbingers of death and short lives. The holes in mother earth, dug by suspect hands. Here she will cower, knees pulled in tight to her chest, heaving and galloping with fear. It is here, beneath these behemoths, that she will find her comfort, her distance from the pain and horror of childhood. I think of her often, her hair braided in rows, corn silk and muslin, eyes bluer than the bluest sky, somehow bluer. Of her cowering, legs knocking against each other, tether marks still burning where he lashed her to his perversion. I remember her eyes, eyes that filled a room, a place, a moment, with sadness and fear, a child’s eyes of lost innocence, innocence never had. Only fear and trembling knees, a heart galloping and heaving with fear and suspect hands. She will never forget one tooth mark, one scratch on the milk of her thighs. Eyes pressed tight into the furrow of her brow, thoughts receding into the illusion of time and place. I am someone else, she would say, someone not here, not now, not this, not again. Not him, not me, but here, someone else, but not me, never me, never again. These images never fade; never recede into the landscape of her thoughts, where hornets and bees, gods’ winged furies, tend garden flowers and honeysuckle. I, too, will never forget, as much as I try. She is with me, her breath crushed against my cheek, her eyes heavy with sleep, yet unable to close whenever I awaken in fright. I have never told her, but suspect she always knew, how when she had finally given into sleep I would listening for footsteps, look for a stitch of yellow under the door, my own eyes heavy with sleep and volcanoes. Memories are like thieves, robbing us of the gift of forgetting, yet staying the capacity to remember that which we struggle to forget. I have had more than enough memories, more than one person need remember, yet never forget.
If I were to tell you, tell you how it is, you wouldn’t believe me. I am not what I appear be, what I seem to be, but the difference between the two, what is seen and what is appearance. The two, the seen and the appearance, are often the same, yet different, indifferent to being seen as the same. What is seen is often not what appears, or what it appears to be, seen. Being seen, and being the appearance of what is seen, the seen, depends on the other for the appearance of being and being seen. The two, in this manner, are interdependent yet dependent of one another; they are seen as being seen as the appearance of what is seen, or appears to be seen as seen. If I were to tell you (which I won’t) you would only see what you want to see, the appearance of what is seen as seen, nothing more. I am the appearance that is never seen but appears to be seen, the difference between the two. I am the tissue connecting the two, the seen and the appearance of the seen, or what appears to be seen, yet never is. When you see me, the appearance of me, the seen of me, what you are seeing is not me, but the appearance of what is seen as seen; the difference between the two, what lies in between the seen and the appearance of what is seen as seen. As I said, I am not what I appear to be, the appearance of what is seen as seen, yet never seen at all, but the seen as seen as the appearance of being seen as seen, the appearance of seen, the illusion of appearance and being seen. I told you, you wouldn’t believe me, see me for what I am, what is seen and appears to be seen, the seen of appearance, the illusion of the seen and the appearance of what is seen as seen. The rectory parasite saw me for what I was; a frightened, confused boy, the appearance of someone, a being that was never there to begin with, but was seen just the same. It is the illusion of being seen, of being an appearance of the seen, that, and that alone, is what appearance and being seen are, nothing more. Sometimes, so I have learned, it is better to be seen as an appearance of being seen, a not seen, than being seen at all. Perceptions are like that, appearances seen as memories one has remembered to forget. What is seen is seen backwards, from the illusion and appearance of the present seen in the past. What is seen is never seen, but remembered, the appearance of what was seen but never was. Now you see what I have seen yet never seen: the illusion of being seen, but never being seen at all. It is the appearance of being seen that is seen, nothing more.
