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.