Mud Things

There are certain catalysts. Every city has its vagrants, its panhandlers, its thieves. Every city has men wearing white, humorless with celibacy, who try to stuff new testaments into your pockets as you walk by. Every city has the barefoot woman who sells hemp jewelry that she arrays on a hand-woven sarong from Taiwan. Every city has the man with periwinkle eyes and the mane of a lion who mutters dark, disorderly poetry to the pigeons.  

Every city has its pigeons.

There’s a park in my city that has all of these things, as well as few more unusual characters. There’s a man, for example, who is missing half of his right arm, but wears every day a sort of extravagant collar from which radiate eight purple octopus tentacles. When he walks they  bump against one another, as if they are trying to dance but don’t know how. Most of them children are afraid of him, but everyone once in a while one sits on his lap, while the mother purses her lips and wonders whether or not she has made a mistake. I think he his good man, if only because he smiled at me once when I sad. 

There's a woman here who sells things made of mud. But not pots or anything like that. Books of mud, whose words taste like mud in your mouth and speak secrets as old as the earth. Horses of mud. They move. They breath. I can't explain it. I think she's a relic from the times before science trumped magic. Her skin is like a wilted lettuce leaf and her hair like spanish moss. She has green eyes and cold hands, the latter of which I know because she doesn't understand that you aren't to touch strangers as if they are family, clapping their cheeks out of urgency or slapping their arms, not hard but not quite in jest, either. Maybe this is also because she comes from a forgotten time, when people had no manners and no morals and no clothes, but  only lust and intuition to guide them.

Once I saw her sell a Man of Mud. He was naked except for a gold chain that looked unholy and misplaced against his gray neck. There were roots climbing his body like veins, making patterns on all the most coveted parts of his body. They forked around his arms and his thighs and grasped his penis. They seemed possessive, somehow, as if they weren't a part of him and had no right to hold him like they did. 

The man who bought him had the meanest face I have ever seen. He was an art collector and wore a suit that not only compensated but overcompensated for the inevitable flaws of the human body, so that he appeared to be some sort of runaway, idealized sculpture. His hair was perfectly straight and the color of oatmeal. Everything about him was clean, too clean. He paid the woman with money that sparkled like freshly fallen snow. I can't say why exactly, but this made me suspicious, and I think it made the woman suspicious too, because for a long moment she held the coins in those cold, grabbing hands and stared at them. Her green eyes were so opaque that no one could have said what she was thinking.

Finally the man, who was visibly growing impatient, asked the woman if there was any special care advice she should give him to ensure that the "piece" lasted as long as possible.

The woman looked blank. "He's a mud thing," she said, "and isn't meant to last. If you want what's best for him, really, let him go with the rain as he'll want."

The man frowned. He did not like this one bit.

"I paid good money for this piece," he said, "And only now you inform me of his ephemeral nature?"

The woman looked disgusted. It was hard to say whether this disgust was directed at the man's syntax or selfishness or some other factor entirely. It may even have been simply the smell of his cologne, which reminded me of gun powder, although I have never smelled gun powder and on some rational level knew that it did not smell this way. 

At any rate, the woman told the man that she had given him the best advice she knew how to give, and that he must be very stupid indeed if he had not known what he was getting into the instant he set out to purchase a man of mud. Mud, she insisted, was something that everyone understands.

I don't think this is true, however; or else I did not know what she meant. I say this because, some weeks after the incident of Man of Mud, the woman was selling ten children of mud. Unlike the man, they were not naked, but rather wearing identical dresses (boys and girls alike) made of thatched straw. Three of the children sold within minutes, to a young couple. I overheard them exclaiming happily to one another that they would go very well on their new mantle. The rest sold with similar speed. All but one.

The One was the smallest of the lot, and the shabbiest. There was a hole in her dress around where her belly button might have been. One of her ears was missing, like Picasso. There was a crusty ridge of crumbling clay where this ear had once been. But now, nothing.

I don't know what made me do it. I felt like I had to, like it had already been written.

I bought the One and took her home with me. For the two weeks of her short existence, she troubled me constantly. Sometimes she looked at me with her eyes full of words, like she wanted to talk, but I think even had she been granted the faculty of speech, I would not have been able to grasp the sad complexities of what she might have said. I was sure, on the other hand, that she, like a cat, understood everything I said better than I did. I spoke to her often. I always made sure that I was speaking to the right side of her head, because it was the ear on the left that she was missing.

I could never tell if she was alive or not.

I'm not sure if she ever died, if she had to begin with that which is taken in death. But she left one night with the rain. I let her. Even though I knew it was the right thing to do-- the woman, after all, had said so-- I have never been able to completely forgive myself for allowing her to disintegrate the night of that shuddering storm.  When she was gone, I missed her. All the next day I grieved, until the sleeves of my only black blouse glittered with salt and my eyes were red and engorged like ripe berries.

After that I avoided the park. It was November anyway, and the whole world was slowing down like a river clogged with ice. The days of indolence and sunlight were passed. The park was full of dreaming trees. Sometimes they tossed and turned, restless, in their sleep.  On the rare occasions that I did go through the park, I felt like I had to walk softly, so as not to wake them. 

The Rushes 1

A chase scene.

Light-speed flashes of the world going by, and then everything jolts to the side and before you can sort out color into shapes you hit the ground.

If this were a movie it would be the unforgivable part where the heroine is in the forest running for--

(Motive: To escape her pursuer, who is that lip-corner-twitching type of evil that makes your stomach feel so peach-pit hard and contorted that sometimes during his monologues you look away from the screen and try to memorize the fraying patches of the living room rug.

Yeah. But.

Alternative Motive: Just to see her legs move like that.)

For one reason or another.

And then there’s this root, dark and crooked like a beckoning thumb. It grabs the heroine’s foot and inevitably, she falls. After all, what was she thinking, those shoes? 

Here the cameramen indulge some perverse fascination with fear. They close-up click on her wide quivering eyes and feverishly breathing breast and the mud on her cheeks. And.

But I can’t bear to watch her squirm. Besides, how gruesomely cliché: the damsel in distress.

Fuck that.

Honey, take off your shoes. 

Tear the slit in your skirt up higher, past your thighs to the smooth plane of secret skin just below your pelvic bone.

But don’t just stand there.

Run.

Run like you traded your soul to the devil for those lean cross country calves. Run until the wind is harsh and honed like a sharpened blade, until it makes stars go through your lungs. Run until your legs have the motion stuck inside of them like seasick. Run until there is nothing left, until everything has been taken from you, until the only thought you are capable of is the contemplation of the tidal force of your own breath.

Running is elemental. It is earth, air, fire, water. It is the intimate pounding of the earth against your feet, the air you are desperately swallowing, the wildfire scorching through every muscle in your body, and it is that unimaginable lust for water.

If you go long enough you reach a point where you can go forever.  Sometimes I want to run until I reach the end of this flat earth.

And then?

Keep going.

There’s a certain glamor to the chase scene. Tried and true, the survival imperative. A gazelle and a wild cat in the deep gold grasses of the serenghetti. A voiceover of a man with an Australian accent as smooth and sweet as molassas, the kind of nature show voice that makes even the grisliest narratives of death sound as gentle as a lullaby.

Or a different take, cars with getaway music blaring, open windows, men with dark glasses and stubble sharp as shrapnel swerving as they turn recklessly to look over their shoulder at the whirling wailing lights of a cop car with a bullet wound spider-webbed across the front wind shield.

And meanwhile your heartbeat-- and same the heartbeat of anyone watching-- is loud and erratic like stomped morse code, as if your own body is trying to tell you what to do, how to move, only for the life of you, you don’t know, you don’t know, you don’t know--

A single thing. Except:

The Fear.

The Rush.

The Run.

Pause.

It wasn’t always like this. 

I grew up in a Charlie Chaplin film, all hat tricks and innocence. Then somewhere along the way, the genre changed. To Coming of Age, first. I fell in love with a boy named Jake who could light a match off the fly of his jeans, and he smoked me up from a hollowed apple in the rushes by the pond a block from school. I liked it there. There being, yes, the rushes. What I liked best was the smell of the mud. It was rank and intoxicating like sex and life and death all in one, turning and churning one to the other, microbes multiplying, fishbones frying, lovers like quicksand pulling and sucking and sinking and sighing. All of this was somehow there in the mud, and not secretly either. You could tell. Like I said, you could smell it. You could feel it, too. If you closed your eyes, you could even see it. Everything, that is.

It wasn’t just the mud, though; there were other reasons to love that place. Like the way the grasses whispered conspiratorily to one another, or the way the sky always seemed more open there than anywhere else. Unabashedly naked, and blue like the beginning of the world, when all there was was a sphere of ocean restless with storm.

Like that.

And, yes, I liked it there, there being the rushes, there being the place I got to when the smoke rushed all up in my sinuses. There being: No Man’s land, Never-Never-land, and did you know that shit is legal in the Netherlands? The rushes were a liminal land, a floating island, an underwater mansion, a field of flowers on a planet whose atmosphere should never have supported such lush, such green, such dreams.

And then just when I started to feel like I could sink down into the mud and float there for the rest of eternity, as if even quicksand would move slower with the weed in my lungs, something terrible happened.

Something terrible happened.

All the symbols of my youth shattered at my feet.

I woke up. Sobered up.

The genre changed again.

And there we were, in a full-fledged film noir. There were down-and-out men and femme fatales and renegade hijinks on the tops of train cars. I'm not kidding. This all happened. Everything I'm about to tell you is true. Or at least the truth is there. Like if you took this story and ran it under boiling water for a while, eventually everything would be burnt away except the part that, whether or not anyone wants to admit it, is as real as a mockingbird egg is false.

The hard boiled facts. The hard boiled men.

Too easy, I know. And I apologize. But things won't stay this simple for long.

They never do.

Not in the rushes. And not in the real world either, not when everything starts to rush by anyway. Think: Kinetic Energy. Think: Objects in motion stay in motion. Think: hold on tight.

Think: Hold your breath and count to three.

And then.

Go.

Play

And we're back. A chase scene. 

Reading things I know I wrote but can't remember feels like flashbacks from a past life, that distant, that bewildering, that fascinating (morbidly or otherwise).