23 March 2005
Pirates
**note** this is my first stream of consciousness writing that I did in class today... never written in this style before... please comment!!**
She walks out of class. First, stopping to inform a student. And another one. Then, a pensive silence. I wonder what my brain can produce. A giggle, “this is ridiculous.” I wrote my first story when I was around 12. It was about Pepper, and my friend’s cat, Cookies. Pepper was a happy-go-lucky pirate, his tongue lolling and a grin always stretching to his floppy ears. Slobber flying along with his high spirits. Cookies. Cookies the sly sidekick with a French accent and advisor to an otherwise reckless pirate at sea. My mother complained that I never let her read it. I heard the dart of jealousy in her voice, because I let the little children of her friend read it. And her friend read it and said her children loved it. It’s gone now, I tell her. It’s a shame, says my mother – I’ve never read anything you’ve written. I’ve also never sung her a song, even though I used to sing in nightclubs. The trouble started when I was thirteen. That year I wrote a twenty page story about cockroaches and insanity. My father asked if I was on drugs. I wasn’t. My mother lay crying on the narrow bathroom floor of our pink seashell house on a hill in Almaty. What happened? Cold tiles answer. I drunk some vodka, she says. She never drinks. She weeps. I’ve never seen her weep before. My father sits, cross with the living room, dismissing me with folded arms. Later, I am to go away from home. I’m fourteen. I’m elated. My parents will be on the other side of the world. In Vietnam. My mother slapped me once. Then she ripped out the phone-line when I locked myself in my room. Then I was alone in Finland, in a two bedroom apartment in Westend. Pepper wasn’t happy with me. He shed hair all over the apartment. He was lonely when I went to school all day and howled until the neighbors complained. So I went to Hanoi to let Pepper be closer to my parents. He’d never been alone all his life. He always had a big garden to run in. My parents in Haiphong. Perhaps I missed them, too. But then I am stalked. I walk into my apartment, alone and everyday the phone rings at just that moment. I hate the screeching monkeys in the big cage just outside my kitchen window. They shriek and they piss and they smell bad and nobody cleans the cage very often. At night I am lonely so I go and sit with the guards of the compound. They teach me to smoke Vietnamese tobacco from a dragon-etched water-bong. A face of a smiling man on the clear packet of tobacco. And a phone number. When I walk into my apartment every day, a smirking voice with a thick accent. I know where you live. I know where you go to school. I will pick you up tomorrow. On the weekend my mother and Pepper come down from Haiphong. Mother cooks in the kitchen. There is a balcony from my room where I hide and smoke. I drop the cigarette but down onto excess roof-sheets that are red and waiting purpose in a pile two stories below me. My mother walks in thirty seconds after I walk in from the balcony. It smells like cigarettes in here she says. It must have gotten stuck in the aircon, I say. So bad – why did they smoke inside before? She frowns. I take care not to breathe in her direction. My dad picks me up from school one day. I see his face and I know that sometimes things shatter to pieces even when it wasn’t me that dropped them. We’d been gone for just one day on the weekend and left Pepper in the backyard in Haiphong. The scenery of the bay with green jutting rocks like rotten teeth from blue gums but beautiful and majestic with sea wind. I stood on the roof of the boat. When we got back, Pepper is sick. By the fourth day he is so so thin. He can’t move, even wagging his tail is an effort, but he drags himself across the floor and tries to fetch the tennis ball I gently roll two meters on the ground, but can not even stimulate his haunches to heave. He’s exhausted from the strain and I embrace him and he is too weak to whimper. My dad is standing outside my school on a Tuesday. Why isn’t he two hours away at work? The neighbors in Haiphong say a ghost called his spirit away so that the bones could be returned home because when we dug his grave we found a skeleton from the war. The soul was impatient, they say. The vet said rat poison. My dad joined me crying as we buried Pepper. I wept when I felt the stiffness of his ears. My mother was away in Thailand. I know you smoke he said, and offered me a cigarette. It’s been our secret ever since. I cried and cried and finally told my parents I need to get away from here, I told them I was stalked, I told them about the motorcyclist that sometimes drove past and knocked me over and how the guards just watched. They let me go. I’m not safe here I’m scared.
fon @ 9:54 pm link to post * *
Lucy Lang's version of events in 'The Lang Women' by Olga Masters + Exergesis
“What do you all do after tea?” Arthur asked.
I looked up at him, not comprehending why he was so insistent about coming over after tea and why he asked the question as though he thought ma and granny were doing something naughty.
I stared back at him a moment, and thinking of my doll, lying naked, discarded on the floor with the promise of a new one, I ran home.
“The three Lang Women,” he had said, “or are there four?” when he brought the quinces.
I discarded the image of the doll with the lacy collar that in my dreams so resembled ma. When I ran inside, I found my old doll, her remaining arm stiff with grime and age, unmovable, the white lace from ma’s collar and sleeves wound around her body, a python choking the prey.
I tugged at it frantically, willing it to come off, until I felt the tears welling up in the corners of my eyes. Ma came from the field, after what to me seemed too long. Seeing my distress at the lace which I’d managed to pull so that now it shackled the dolls feet, she picked me up and sat me up on the crumb-encrusted table. “Wait here,” she said, and left me there on my pedestal.
I looked around the kitchen, as though seeing it in a whole new light, noticing the dirt, the neglect, that surrounded the old stove and table long ago past the peeling of paint, but still retaining a few white streaks here and there. I felt exhilarated as I encountered these objects and more – all in an equally dilapidated condition, as though for the first time. They were our life.
When ma returned to the kitchen with a pair of scissors, I knew what to do with them. My eyes widened in effort as I slid the dull blade of the scissors under the tightly wound lace bond, and mustered my little strength to clamp the dull blades down on each other.
Granny, worrying what had happened, came in the door just as I finally managed to agitate the lace enough for it to slide off the dolls foot and into my grubby palm.
I slid down from the table, trailing some errant breadcrumbs to the floor, and turning to the stove, threw the lace into the fire.
*** *** *** ***
Lucy Lang is a child who reaches an epiphany at the end of the story, “The Lang Women”. I feel that this epiphany was reached well before the end of the story, but is not elaborated on – when Lucy feels the urge to protect her mother and grandmother from their nakedness against Arthur Mann. We are led from this scene directly into the scene at night, where the women are, for the first time Lucy can remember, not walking around naked, for the first time self-conscious. I think that before this, there is a scene where Lucy realises that she doesn’t want the doll after all, and at the same time, recognises the social stigmas that both keep them in poverty and liberate them. The original story is told by a limited omniscient narrator, who does touch upon the thoughts of each individual character, but only one at the time.
We are told some of Lucy’s thoughts, but not in depth. I am taking the opportunity to show, in more depth, the thought process of a six or seven year old child. The reader of this short story should be familiar with “The Lang Women.” However, the story can stand on its own, as it contains an introduction, a conflict and a resolution to the scene.
It is no accident that in the story, the surname “Mann” is chosen. I have not chosen to refer to him simply as ‘the man’ because at no point in the original story does Lucy receive a formal introduction to Arthur Mann, and engages in very little conversation with him throughout the short story. Arthur represents, in ‘The Lang Women’ the idea of a man, and is, in the end, bound by his mother, who, I would argue, represents the constraints of society that are imposed upon him. Lucy realises, in my narrative, where these boundaries lie, and in the process, chooses to return into her own constraints. In the end, when she tells him she knows why they can’t talk ‘because your mother won’t let you’, she is, in fact, referring to the fact that she knows that they are from different social settings, and by accepting his visits and his gifts, the three Langs may be jeopardising themselves. To show this, I am characterising ‘the man’ as a sleazy type, slinking around for his port of entry.
What I am showing with my passage is the change that occurs in Lucy – the realisation of social boundaries – coincides with the change that occurs within the two women. The two women, who previously were not perturbed by the town’s perceptions of them, realise the isolation that they have been drawn into, and take steps toward re-integrating with society. The original story shows that crossing one boundary only presents one with another, just as Lucy’s narrative shows that Lucy has seen, and chosen to accept the boundary that she is placed into, no longer yearning for the lacy doll, which she never dreamed of until the rich Arthur Mann entered the life of the Langs.
fon @ 7:34 pm link to post * *
16 March 2005
Collapse
An insistent rapping on the door of his 22nd floor apartment on 14th street failed to induce the longhaired Thai boy to roll over in his sleep. “Mmm” - and then silence. The white Venetian blinds heated up as the vigilant sun marched across the sky outside.
At four p.m., the young artist’s alarm clock sounds, a honking like a traffic jam. It doesn’t cause a stir in his languorous sleep. He stretches for a moment and wraps himself around his blanket, a bead of sweat forming on his forehead.
With the late afternoon sun seeping through the blinds, colouring the room in red, and with the alarm honking consistently, the studio apartment resembles an earthquake or war scene from a videogame. Paintings of anime characters and prim paintbrushes are propped haphazardly against the walls and large computer table. Smiling, angry, serious, fierce, scared and other faces of characters he has designed lay on pieces of white paper like bodies strewn across the carpet. They are motionless, waiting to be rescued and used in a new design for a game or cartoon series. The cord of an iron, extra long, runs across scattered official looking papers on the floor. A toppling pile of brochures props up a small Ikea ironing board, two legs missing.
At five p.m., the rapping on his door starts up again. The artist slowly opens his eyes.
“Wake up, man, the World Trade Centre is gone!”
He ignores this intrusion and glances at his alarm and only then realises it has been going off for the past hour. 5:02 p.m., Tuesday, September 11, 2001 – the time and date flash as he silences the honking of the alarm.
“Shit,” he mutters, and quickly springs out of bed and pulls on his wrinkled clothes from yesterday, and ties up his hair with a red rubber band that was around his wrist. He reaches for glasses, next to his mattress on the floor, placing them on his head. He scans the room until he encounters a clear artwork folder, “Character Design Assignment” scribbled on it in bold red. He shakes boxes of cigarettes littering his apartment until he encounters one that yields a cigarette. He lights it with a quick flick of his wrist and pockets the Zippo, rubbing one eye under his eyeglasses with the back of his middle finger as the cigarette dangles loosely from his mouth. A loud sucking sound fills the room as he draws his first breath.
He stands over his mattress to pull the blinds up, allowing a sickly yellow light to fill his studio.
The window transfixes him. “Fuck,” he says, and slowly places the large folder on the ground, and reaches for his mobile, quickly pressing a few keys, then, after repeatedly raising the phone to his ears, and repeating the process of pressing buttons, tosses the phone aside, too.
He stands, staring out at the window, ash falling to the ground from his cigarette. He takes another puff, and finds the overflowing ashtray from underneath a character like a warrior. Meticulously, he puts out his cigarette, then, slumps cross-legged onto his mattress.
**writer's note**
This story is roughly true. It's how I imagine the scene to have occurred when my brother found out the towers collapsed. But this is fiction. What happened is that after he said "Shit", he let his friend in, and he was told the building collapsed before he got a chance to look out his window.
Then, they went to play pool, since there wasn't any uni on that evening and they had nothing better to do.
Around three people from their circle of friends should have been in that building at 9 a.m. Fortunately, they were all artsy types and were, as usual, late for work.
fon @ 8:23 pm link to post * *
The beat goes on
You observe the pool of blood on the ground, feeling as though you are intruding on a scene you are not meant to witness.
The girl in white dances in front of you. You are mesmerised by her long black hair and startling green eyes, cold emeralds flashing as she glances at you, the strobe light and her mascara holding you captive. Her hair hangs down in daggers and frames a face punctuated by round ‘why’ lips. Her long sleeved white shirt clings tightly around a slender frame and loosely suggests feminine arms beneath flowing sleeves. Her skirt reaches to the ground and sways along with her body. She gives you the impression of being a cat disguised as an angel.
The hard beat carries her in a way that you can tell she is swept by the rhythm. She doesn’t think, she just moves. You are finding it hard to find the beat, intrigued as you are by the creature before you, pulsating to the beat coursing through the floor.
But you are happy. So happy you don’t mind the waves of nausea sweeping over you as you stagger, eyes half shut where you are on the dance floor. The interior is intimate in shades of clean white and cream, and the lights are soft. The smell is the clean smell of a venue that draws only the ‘right’ kinds of people, and maintains a well-polished pine floor. Your attention wanders for a moment to the wall that is a fish tank. Silver and gold fish move up and down amongst the bubbles, unaffected by the beats, and by the cocktail sippers leaning against the glass. Blues, greens and reds of diffused spotlights shine through and colour the crowd.
You turn back to see her staring straight at you – you wonder why. You smile at her, at a moment where the music swells and those on the floor can’t help but smile – at each other, or to themselves. She smiles back, and turns to face the DJ, who also smiles at her between tracks. They must know each other, judging by the way she makes faces at him and gestures to him.
Her eyes are open wide, and blood drips from her mouth and her nose, onto the cool pine floor. A moment ago, you say her turn around to survey the crowd behind her, and you saw her eyes roll into her head. You saw her legs twist around each other and turn to white flags as she lost consciousness. This all moved in a slow caricature, like a shot of a cat twisting around in mid-air preparing to land on all fours. Except from there, her head slammed into the ground in front of your feet. A halo of black hair floated on the floor, and you knelt down to turn her face away from the floor.
You are watching her, detached, now. The pool of blood grows at a slow pace, and you hardly noticed the music stopped. Silence fills the venue for a few startled minutes, as a crowd around her collectively observes, as you do. A clock passes a few stunned silences with resonating ticks. The trickle of blood becomes a pool, and you wonder if she is breathing.
The sound of sirens fills the venue. The girl is gone. The crimson stain has been erased. The fish-wall is an undisturbed green and red and blue. The beat fills the dance floor again. You turn and smile at the DJ. There is nothing between you and the beat now.
fon @ 2:15 am link to post * *
15 March 2005
ghosts
I am nine years old now and the ticking of the wall clock in the hall is preventing me from closing my eyes. My eyes are shut, but not really shut. My eyes could be shut for ten hours, yet I would not be able to sleep. Tick. I’m waiting for the electricity to return, or for sleep to release me from the darkness.
I am two years old, and I am put, grudgingly obedient, to bed – but in their bed. I am on my father’s side. I close my eyes for a second and when I open them it is light again, and I feel rested although I know that I didn’t sleep, and that daytime snuck around while my eyes were shut.
Sleep. The more I crave sleep, the more it eludes me – a waning moon that slices my palm as I try to grasp it.
The sickle in the sky dimply lights up, with the help of the streetlamps, my shutters, from the outside. I can sense them conspiring. I am fourteen years old. I have been living alone for two months now. I am a child, scared, woken in the middle of the night by the peeking moonlight. I am fully awake, but I can’t open my eyes. I can sense, but I cannot move my toes in the darkness. I can feel the tips of my fingers that have slipped out of the protection of my sheets as a cold winder draft curls around them. The wall clock ticks… ticks… ticks.
I spring from my bed, gasping for breath as I hurl myself towards the light switch on the other end of the dark room, tripping as my ears and eyes struggle to follow my racing body and heart. My mind. My mind worked from the moment I was awake, and yet had been unable to will any other part of my body into motion.
I am nine again. In five years I shall move away from home. My mother walks into my room and tosses a book onto my bed, then leaves, silently. I voraciously read through all I can lay my hands on. In this case, a book on the reproduction of living things, beginning with flowers, passing through bees, and ending in a pair of human beings. Later that evening, she collects it from my room as I sit listening to my brother tell stories of ghosts, paying special attention to the ways in which I could best escape them. “If you hear a strange sound – one you know should not be heard, or if you catch something from the corner of your eye – a sight that probably wasn’t natural – NEVER turn your head. Ignore it. Don’t let the ghosts know that you’ve acknowledged them. That’s how you’ll draw them to you.”
I’m two again. I’ll leave home in just 12 years. I howl and scream in front of the bathroom door, scared. So terrified. I stare, my eyes fixed on a door, visible from where I have my back pressed against the bathroom door. I’m begging my mother to let me into the safety of the bathroom, the safety of her company. She’s very practical about these things. I need to learn to be alone. But soon I won’t be alone. I know. And that’s why I howl and scream. I’m scared of that door and what it contains.
I’m 21. I’m at home. I put my parents to sleep. The familiar stairwell is dwarfed by time as I turn the brass doorknob to my room. My room. I haven’t seen it for fifteen years. We had moved away when I was six. To a land where I learned that black men do not live in trees, and where ghosts ceased to haunt me. The house – my room – doesn’t smell the way it did, of chilli, soy sauce, and musty pine when I was two. After 15 years of western tenants, the house smells of potatoes, dill, and raw salmon. It used to smell of my pet husky, too, if I sniffed around at corners carefully, where her hairs used to wander.
The little room without a door doesn’t smell of safety and incense under a serene statue of the lord Buddha anymore.
To the left, the door I once stood staring at is not there. It never was. It was a figment of my imagination. Although my mother remembers the night I howled outside the door of the bathroom well. There was never a trapdoor to the attic, either. Nor an attic for that matter, even though I had such distinct memories of seeing a man climb there once. I remember telling everyone we live in a four-storey house when I was young, because I counted the attic as one floor. I once even dreamed that I was that man in the attic, and I was with a woman there. We weren’t wearing any clothes.
I was found fast asleep on top of the washing machine in the basement-floor of the old house once, again, when I was about two. It was the last place they thought of looking, because the first closet I came across upon right at the foot of the stairs to the basement would send me hurtling back upstairs. That closet is there. But I still don’t know what is really in it. Back then, what was really in it was a dead body, to me, anyways. How I’d gotten past the closet in the middle of the dark night alone, when I never dared to even in the daytime chaperoned, was as large a mystery as how I had managed to open the forbidding metal door into the laundry room and still climb on to the top of the machine.
The brass doorknob turns gently, and I feel compelled to tiptoe into my old room, afraid to disturb the lingering memories. I leave my clothes in a pile on the ground and I watch a few slits of moonlight wrap my skin like silken bandages, falling across my eyes as a blindfold. I slip into the now dwarfed bed that had once threatened to engulf me.
Sleep creeps slowly up my nostrils from the closet-smelling sheets and fills my head, and it’s heavier and heavier. Then. Tick.
I am nine again. Being inside this house in my largest fear. This house has many ghosts. They didn’t follow me when I was two, or three. Or four, five or six. I always knew they were there. I never went anywhere in the house alone, even though they didn’t mind me. My nanny took me everywhere. I think she saw them, too. I am in my room alone, and the walk-in closet at the corner a moment ago, seemed innocuous – a small blue door with a handle of sticky metal. Now, it reached for me solemnly in the darkness. It was waiting for the moment to bend that protruding elbow of a doorknob and display to me all the concrete horrors of the past stored inside – unordered heaps accumulating grime.
I am two. I walk to the room of my sleeping mother and father, seeking to crawl between the sheets and find comfort in their gentle breathing. But I stop at the door. I am not looking up at the handle. I’m looking down.
This is ridiculous. I’m not nine. I’m not two. I’m twenty-one. My eyes are accustomed to the moonlight, and apprehensively, yet pretending to be angry with myself, I stumble my way to through the dark back into my room, feeling the blood rush to my head as the pace of my heart quickens and I open the closet door. The light switch is inside the door on the left, just as I remembered. Boxes. And a gorilla mask I was always more scared to wear than to see lay on top. Curious now, I opened a box, running my sharp fingernails down the aged plastic tape, which easily gave way. Dolls inside. I picked one up. A golden-curled baby with head, arm and legs attached to a cloth body. Her blue eyes always closed when she lay down. The doll stared back at me with her wide-open eyes. Then her head rolled off.
I’m fourteen again. I’ve never noticed my nanny was insane before. I was told that she became schizophrenic after we left the country. She got married when I was nine. We were gone most of the time, but came back for a month every year. She always seemed to know when we were back, and would call us before we called her.
I got lonely staying in my apartment alone, with my parents on the other side of the world. I sleep over at my former nanny’s place once. Just once. Her sons are big now – they are already 4 and 5. I sleep on the living room couch, quite soundly. In the middle of the night, a frantic muttering coming from the bent figure of P’Nim, huddled over the cassette deck, the digital numbers sending her into a frenzy, wakes me up. I sit on the ground next to her and she explains, “Khun Noo – this number – this is Jani’s birthday, and this – when it flashes - this is Janne’s. What are they trying to tell me? What are they trying to take now?” I try to tell her it’s ok – I try to say that she probably just needs a little sleep. But she refuses, saying she doesn’t sleep any more. “The voices keep my awake. I don’t sleep. Except when it gets bad and they send me to the hospital. When I come home, I sleep well for a few days. I don’t like being far from my family.” She looks at me.
Neither of us were born in this cold country. Neither of us like it here. She was only 19 when she became my nanny in Thailand. She was 21 when she came to Finland to continue her duties. We left the country – the government of Ethiopia would not allow for her to come with us, where the Finnish government had allowed her to enter as our employee. Why hadn’t we sent her back to Thailand?
I stand there with the doll in my hands, and before I can react, I hear the scream in my head. It’s so loud I can hear nothing else for it’s duration, and the scream ends in a sound like laughter, very faint.
I turn on all the lights on the way to my parent’s room. The closet is there again. The trapdoor had never been gone. For the first time in 15 years, I crawl between my parents and they are pleased and shocked to find me there in the morning.
fon @ 2:02 am link to post * *
04 March 2005
Epiphany
The mound of pillows engulfed the infant, always fearful of the wispy fingers of darkness, full of ghosts and historical remnants echoing in the sleeping household. She curled her blanket around her toes, protecting them from the intrusive dark air. She clutched her safety pillow between her legs and began struggling for breath beneath the tightly wrapped blanket, unable to sleep, but unable to uncover her face and dig her way from the tunnel her bed had become.
Even at the age of two, the child rationalised with herself, trying to convince herself that she would be safe as long as she remained under the sheets, convincing herself that as long as she was unable to see beyond her self-imposed wall of censorship, there could be nothing beyond that wall. She wanted desperately to understand the abnormalities occurring in the darkness surrounding her in the night, yet, was scared of anything she couldn't immediately fathom.
Her mind wandered for a moment, imagining in gruesome detail the flailing flight through the darkness that she would have in a desperate search for her mother and father should the sheets be torn from her clinging body. She wondered who she would find first, what language she would have to shout for help in - Finnish for her father, Thai for her mother. In the darkness, how would she know who was still tossing in half-sleep to hear her cries?
The phobias became claustrophobic in the darkness as they all jostled about, screaming to be heard, and the silence of the dark room was more than she could stand.
Her mother and father lay reading in bed, their night lamps casting a warm glow in the tranquillity of the bedroom. Her father turned a page of his newspaper and it rustled gently against the rainbow pattern on his white sheets. He thought, "Maybe she won't come running here in tears again tonight."
A little figure had entered the room silently, and stood grinning at finding both parents still awake, as though waiting for her arrival. She had found a bridge between two cultures, and uncovered the most closely guarded secret between her parents. "Hello." she said, "I speak English now".
fon @ 1:56 am link to post * *