Beer

Holidays. Everything is on a kind of pause. There's no one around these days and I've been in a sort of slump. I'm having a hard time making definitive statements. Like: "I like this" or "I don't like that" or "I am this" and "I am not that." And I know I'm avoiding finishing my story. The one about mom and me and Eli. I know you (invisible you) are getting pissed.

 I know I should be happy that I'm out of bars, but it was like my mind was running faster in there. It's slowed down a bit out here, on the Midway, which isn't a good thing, considering the kind of work I have to do. We have to do. Me and Sue. And Tobe (which rhymes with homie). Homie Tobe, who hasn't been around in six months. He'll be back on the 31st. After that it will be straight strategy. I'm looking forward to it.

Yesterday after a long walk -- me and Sue, we walked and talked for two hours -- we were thirsty and dirty. So we took two Heineken's into the shower. God, they were good. Water pouring down us and the beer getting wet, but it didn't matter, it still fizzled and lingered on our tongues, the lick of fermenting yeast still reaching out its kick. 

Mom is arriving in two days for a visit from the colony. On the 22nd. She'll have good stories.

True Sue

Sometimes when I see Sue in her old-school camouflage, I wonder what it must have been like for her. And I remember how we met, and what that meant. She still wears her uniform sometimes, when she feels like getting into that mode, that old West Point mode, that stiff, commandeering mode, outdated now, like her uniform. And when she's like that, especially when her nose bleeds, because her nose bleeds all the time, and she has to put two tissues in her nostrils like torpedoes -- when she's pacing our bedroom like that, barefoot, it's all I can do from jumping her and entering her from behind, no matter what kind of work she's brewing up in her head, what kind of plans. All I want to do is push her down, not even on the bed, but on the ground, on the dirty carpet, and make her mine. I shouldn't have these feelings, violent feelings, I know. Me, who used to have porcelain fingers, whose mother is a god damn writer of all things -- sensitive boy that I am, the one who can name a Bartok symphony seconds in. But it doesn't matter, not any of it, not when I see her like that. What rises within me is more real and sometimes it wins out, and sometimes Sue really likes it. She likes it when I'm tough with her and tells me: don't be afraid, Mo, be as rough as you wanna be, I'm yours. She says this panting into my ear, and it echoes for days.

I always (always) spend the next day wondering what she means by that: I'm yours. I know she doesn't really think that. So why does she say it.

"Why do you say it, Sue? Why do you tell me, sometimes, when we're fucking, why do you tell me: I'm yours," I asked her once, as I was sitting near the bathroom sink, watching her brush her teeth, her hair let loose from the tight bun it's usually in.

"Because. Because in those few moments it's true," she said.

True. True Sue. I can't wait until my bones and torn tendons heal so I can ride you and you can pant in my ear: I'm yours, Mo, I'm yours. And for those few seconds make you something I can touch, and hold, and keep, and not be afraid of losing.

Smoking

A week ago they took me out of my cell and into an adobe-walled room with cold soil at my feet and the smell of mud all around, wet and hard to absorb. In this room were several men, men who for me still have no names or faces. Cowards.

Today, I'm limping, walking, bruised as an old boxer, to and fro impatiently, smoking cigarettes, of all things -- those antiquated, nostalgic slips of chemical and ash. And yet, here I am puffing away; the crinkling of the paper Sue has used to wrap them in -- a sonic massage, easing me into calm, aiding messages from one synapse to another with the particular buzz of nicotine. It's quick and rhythmic because it's been so long since I've dragged out an afternoon on one of these. Like when I sit down at a Piano, after months at a time, more time than that sometimes. Funny how something so deeply imbedded in your life can disappear. Like music did for me.

                                  

And because I can't talk about what happened these past few days. Not yet. I will finish the story I started. The story of  my mother and me, in that car with Eli in Lagos.   

We were on our way to meet my father, who we hadn't seen in a long time, who was staying at the Sheraton, after he drilled deep and struck it rich. I wondered whether I'd recognize him. He'd been around for the first three years, and so I had these infantile memories. Except I didn't know how many were actual memories or just old photographs mom had lying around in files. Whatever they were, and are, they're crisp color images of enormous gifts -- a stuffed giraffe and an elephant named Xanadu from FAO Schwartz, an elephant I still had at the time of the trip. It's ears were twice the size of my face when my father gave Xanadu to me.

"You'll never have to worry about Samuel. He will go the best schools; he will always be cared for," he'd said to mom. And then, one day, he disappeared. Seven years later, mom got a letter from dad's mother, my grandmother, who had seen me in the paper. I'd been the youngest kid to have been accepted into the Peabody Conservatory. Papers all had made a fuss and called me Little Mozie.

Anyway, the letter from my grandmother, who I hadn't seen since I was a baby and wouldn't recognize with a DNA test in-hand, said: He hasn't returned for many years. I think we may have lost him. But he still has a responsibility to that boy. She then went on to list the address my father was at -- The Sheraton Hotel in Lagos, Nigeria.

I don't know what made my grandmother do it, or what made my mother, four days later, get on a plane with me. But off we were to ask for a quick dose of cash -- not even for child-support, nothing as consistent as that, my mother didn't care about that. All she wanted was the tuition money so I could go to the Peabody.

...More tomorrow. My left rib aches like it had an ice-pick permanently puncturing it. More tomorrow...

Sue, if you can read this, I can't connect. I've been trying to connect and can't. Don't know if it's been hours or days. Or how many hours and if those hours are days yet. Try and get through, try and get them to tell you where I am, to bring you to me, to get me out of here.

The Making of Me: Hard as Egusi

L, from what I understand, was nothing like my father. L could have been my father, and, sometimes, when mom stares at my eyes and calls me her Siamese Cat, I swear it's possible. That something happened between them although she says the relationship was platonic and that that was precisely the great tragedy of that time in her life, the lack of touch that existed in it. I don't know; I really don't know. I've never seen a picture of L.

This is how I imagine what happened after L, what happened with Roger, my father:

Four consecutive months ravaging one hotel room after another, right after she was back from Africa with L -- trying to ignore her heart, tricking it into adventure and keeping it from aching. Mom had met Roger at a bar, had told him, over a glass of cheap champagne, the only one she could afford, that she had just returned from West Africa. He said he traveled there often, and so she went home with him. Or, to a hotel, rather. She didn't see his house for five months. In a dimly lit luxury-hotel room with chocolates carefully lain on their pillows, they drank champagne priced ten times higher than the one she'd sipped from at the bar. How many circles life can take, she'd thought. How if you don't hang on to the horns of the bull, you better say goodbye because it'll butt you right off.

Roger was the kind of person that made promises, and you believed him. There was no subtext to anything he said, everything was right there, out in the open. Except everything was a lie. "I love you. You're a jewel, a gem, I want you in my bed, in my life." She let him have her. For nothing. Four months of exorcism, sex; a grinding, rough patting and eating of each other, and six months after the whole affair was over, her belly was almost as hard as Egusi, protecting me, protecting me.

Heartbreak



Mom

 Mom had been to Africa before the trip we took together, before she had me. Right before she met my father. She had started out in Nigeria also, but made her way further west on that trip, to Accra and then Cape Coast, where bats hung from trees and the soil was mineral-rich-red.  

The first time was a very different story than our trip; it took her a long time to tell me about it. I was twenty when she first mentioned it, about to leave Doddie's house on my way to South America for a while, I hadn't decided how long, when she caught me packing and snuggled onto my bed, taking my pillow between her arms and chest. I watched her from above, peripherally, as I slowly gathered everything I thought I might need. It was going to be the longest trip I'd ever taken alone. I wanted to be prepared.  "You and your Siamese eyes," she said, giggling. "You excited?"

"Sort of nervous," I told her. My hands had started to sweat in bed the night before when I imagined myself alone, in a new place, lost, without mom, without Doddie. I knew what could happen in new places. But I had to do it, I had to leave and go somewhere on my own, know that I could lose my fear of landing on distant shores, and not so distant shores. I hadn't left Key West in nearly 10 years and I thought I might be ready. In fact, I felt a little like I was drowning, sinking slowly with the Florida Keys. But I was scared. I was scared shitless. Imagine being that scared. No matter how many prunes you eat, you just can't shit, not for days. Your stomach hollow like a taught drum, spasms cricketing along the lines of your intestines with no release.

"I was twenty-two when I took my first real trip," mom said. "You've already been places, Mo, but this is going to mean something for you, it always does when you're your age. I was so awake, so wide-eyed."

"Where did you go?" I asked her, folding boxers and socks into the corners of my single bag, "You've never told me this."

"That was the first time I went to Africa; my first heartbreak. It's funny, both times I went to Africa, I was heartbroken. Well, not really "funny." But, well, appropriate, I guess," she said.

I knew what she meant -- it was a place you could seep into, bleed into it's beautiful chaos; feel a sudden bust in the gut, a deep pulling of muscle; and impending rupture -- and all of it was appropriate.

That first time she went because of L. Who also, she said, had eyes like the Siamese slants of cats.  

L, who broke her heart, who made her curl up in a squeaky bed near Cape Coast where slaves had once been shackled and shipped off; where America had begun its strange journey into its own heart of darkness, and where later cocaine and heroin seeped through porous ports, inflicting the population on its way to Europe.

Mom was L's protégé. I guess that's what you would call it -- she never said that, but that's what it sounded like. She also loved him.

The Abandoned House

Thinking of Doddie's garden for so long yesterday, trying to remember the pattern, they lay of the land, but slipping up in places. I know it looked like a Bonnard, that much I know. Doddie's garden  was where mom stopped taking pictures of everything for a while, so I don't have proof of what it looked like,  just a feeling.

 Mom had really lost it after we came back. There had been alot of time between Lagos and Doddie when we were just wandering. Sometimes we'd walk places and we'd find somewhere, abandoned. That was the first time I realized that not all land was someone's property, that there were these breaths of communal space that existed with the shadows of other lives inscribed in the air around the place, like Freud's mystic writing pad. Sometimes places just lost their way. Sometimes their owners had died, inside, alone, and disappeared into the ground.

Once, we found a place where the sun shone sharp, this was maybe in Georgia, or Alabama somewhere. Mom had a pair of gold-colored flip-flops on and a summer dress that always made her seem like something you could slip under with a flashlight, light-up from within, project spring.

The place  we found that day was a house, where the grass outside was growing to the doorknob. That was grass you could vanish into. Almost. We'd walked up to the door and it seemed impossibly sealed, like someone had welded it shut. But that wasn't the truth. Which is another thing I learned in that in-between time before Doddie-- that the truth isn't always what you think it is. The truth was that all you had to do was push the door hard enough and you were inside. No furniture; just nature overgrown, light pouring down from the holes in the ceiling making idiosyncratic patterns. Mom blended right in, her mossy heart, so soft and easily punctured. For a long time I thought of my mother as moss and my father as fire.

"Mozie, baby, we can't live like this anymore," mom said, that day, whispering close, as we stood there in the center of that old house. "Let's go home."

"Where's home?" I asked.

"Your grandfather's house."

And that was that.

The Unbearable Heaviness of Loneliness

Sometimes I long for those days when you had to at least go to a physical machine, a computer, and then a neutrino, in order to log on. At least it was closer to writing, that act of putting pen to paper and tracing out thoughts, translating, recording. Nostalgia is stupid, I know. And it's not that I can't use the trace of my fingers to draw out and color these invisibly recorded cave paintings I've been revving up here. Though not today. 

Here, right now, even in this place, I can do almost anything I want, despite being bear-like and clumsy, stiff, in a cave. Except eating. I can't eat what I want. Maybe that's the only thing -- a glass of wine, a cracker smeared with Roquefort and jam.

The problem, the loneliness, comes in that  it's everywhere, ubiquitous -- everything is everywhere. Free will and choice, it's so much heavier now. Sometimes I fear I'm breathing in so much virtual dust I might die and then I realize I might be so accustomed to it that if it all got taken away, it's only then that I would actually die.  The disappearance of the virtual noose creating the true noose. Listen to me, I sound like Plato, that ancient fool. I know this has all been said in op-ed piece after op-ed piece, especially since the opening of The New World's Fair, but, I don't know.

My purpose for being in here. The reason I got myself locked up to begin with, why I came down here. It's taking too long.  All of these phases -- solitary confinement, then one visitor allowed, and then now what? I don't know what. I think they've changed the rules just for me. It's not like how it was for Joe.

 I also didn't realize that they might block me off to the rest of the Midway and outside, on the GGW  I mean. Virtually; censor me.  I still don't know if they've blocked me off though. Sue getting through doesn't mean anything. She's a hacker extraordinaire, all that time in the military was good for more than just a limp. And Joe, well, let's not even get into Joe. How stupid I was, to have thought I might be able to speak freely. That people could hear me, write back, that I'd be able to...

So, what does this become then, these daily entries? A personal diary? Or a note to The Controllers? Or maybe they should watch out. You hear me C-team? You should watch out because...Well, let's not give it away.

If the Genie came to me this morning and said: Motzie, dear Motzie, you have yourself three wishes. What would I wish?

I would wish the National Archive was still a building and that it'd never merged with the World Archive. And that would count as one wish not two, because it happened at the same time, the merger and the tearing down of the buidling. I would argue this with the Genie, and in the end we would agree. One wish down, two to go. Then I'd wish we still had boundaries and oceans that actually served to slow us down instead of sift through and over.

 How cool it was, when it first appeared, the GGW, how obsolete it rendered the WWW. Connecting everyone with that slight imperceptible pull at the air, holograms of stored information; so much stored information. It just makes me sad.

"You have one more wish, " the Genie would say. And I would think long and hard, and I would say. "Genie,  do my first wishes have to count? I wish they didn't." And if he were a wicked Genie, he would count that as my third wish, and I would end up with nothing. When what I really meant was that I wanted to start over. That I wished to start over.

And because he wouldn't be a wicked Genie, he'd be the kind that played with choice, he'd say: "I'll come back tomorrow, you think long and hard and we'll start over. " And what would I wish for after thinking long and hard? I would wish for Key West, long after Lagos, when I practically lived in doddie's garden, planting one thing after another. He had such a green thumb. And mom, regaining her strength. But that time would have to battle out Managua with Sophia. Or, maybe Managua with Sophia could be my second wish.

Rear Window Egusi

Eli, the driver with the red handkerchief around his neck, kept telling mom to be careful because mom kept unzipping the contraption at the window that was made for in-transit transactions. On the side of the road and in between traffic there was a real smorgasbord of stuff for sale. Fake Rolexes, giant clocks, socks, old shoes, new shoes, shoe strings, fruit, meat, you name it. And, Egusi. The Egusi was what mom kept opening the zipper to buy, as the car moved slow as a snail through that quagmire of metal. Eli would call out to her from the front: "You like that Egusi too much." And when she ignored him: "Be careful," he'd repeat, the Egusi vendor nearing the window by now. "In the old days," Eli would say, "they used to chop off your hand just for your mobile. You should take off your watch." Mom would nod her head and stick her naked, spindly hand out of the car with whatever amount of naira it was those things cost back then.  And then she'd zip up the window inside the window and she'd open the plastic bag ravenously and bite into the rock-hard, fried melon seeds, oily and dripping. "These things'll crack my teeth before we get back," she'd  tell me, imagining, I'm sure, a series of painful dental visits, wondering why she succumbed to the fried melon seeds over and over again. Dental visits that never happened. Never happened because when we got back to the States we were too busy mourning what could-have-been; deciphering the actuality of what-was.

Back to the Backseat/Back to Lagos.

That day in Lagos, the day I was mentioning before, when I was 10.

We'd spent most of the day in the car; nowhere to look but out the car window. Mounds of trash washing up on the island everywhere, the sun trying desperately to reflect off something, even if it was against the aluminum of a shredded can of Coca-Cola. The water was musty; the sky was color-less, a blank slate waiting to be puffed with the day's smoke; everywhere the rank smell of gasoline pervading, making the city feel as though it might ignite at any moment through a misled spark. And there we were, me and mom, stuck in traffic, in this love-hungry city, amid love-for sale roads on our way to the Sheraton and its 1,000-American-Dollar-a-night rooms. The cheap ones, anyway.  Not because that's where we were staying, but because of who we were meeting there, which is at the center of all of this. But I don't want to talk about him yet.

We'd heard that in Lagos you walked in barefoot and you left in a Mercedes. Mom told me later that while we were sitting there, stuck to our leather seats, that she kept thinking whether the opposite couldn't also be true. At least for me and her -- and that wasn't even our Mercedes we were riding in -- it belonged to someone else all together, to a company, actually. My father's company.  And there it is, the beginnings of the center.   

The Billboard reads "Rule Your World"

RIP

Twit

"Twit's dead," Sue said, whispering into my ear. The guard thought we were exchanging codes, but that wasn't it at all. Poor Sue. She came in with her slight little limp, the way she always enters a room, semi-disheveled but lovely, eyes blue as summer sky sitting low under that sheer halo of downy brown hair. She walked over to me,  first visitor in over a month, the first allowance of human contact in 44 days. I didn't find out I would have a visitor until this morning. Had no way to prepare.

 Sitting in the cell just before, waiting for her, I thought that when I saw her desire would overtake me, that I wouldn't be able to restrain myself. But somehow it wasn't like that at all. I was so tired, and she was so sad.  It was something else all together, just as weighty as desire, just as grappling, but it wasn't me wanting to push my way inside her, it was more about the simple pleasure of being beside her. And what 44 days had done to my capacity to do that simply.

She came in, she held my hands and my stomach sank like an enormous bubble with so much heavy air inside that bubble that it dug down to my feet, pulling all the puppet heartstrings attached to my heart with it. Everything inside me was shifting places, organs fighting to get back into their proper spot so that I could keep on living, breathing, talking to Sue. "Twit's dead," she said. I could tell she had been crying.

She'd had Twit for years, had even hid him once from her ex-husband, for at least eight months before he found out. He was always away anyway. She'd told me she used to fill the bathtub with water and have Twit float, trying to trick Twit into thinking he was on a tiny lake. One day, her husband came home unannounced, one of those time-glitches in travel. He went straight to the bathroom to take a long-awaited piss before even putting down his bag, before even seeing where Sue was -- this was a piss that had been knife-piercing him throughout the long bumpy road his taxi took. And then, just as he was about to release, a sound from behind him: Quack, Quack...Quack. "What the fuck is that?" Sue was still sleeping in the other room. He ran to her, towel in hand, piss still trickling from his penis: "What the fuck is a duck doing in our bathroom, Sue? Get the fuck rid of it!"

"Well, good morning to you too, Asshole." That's what Sue said she said. Because really, it was no use. There was no way around it. Twit and Sue were like two twin cherries, never to be parted.  Twit was a spoil of war, after all, and there's no way Sidewalk Sue was gonna part with her bird.

  

Catching

Last night, I dreamt in red. The whole thing was tinted over, like in a photo lab, the old kind, even before everyone went digital and everything that came after, when we had to shut ourselves away to develop the images we'd caught in a box. It made sense, you know, how the process mirrored what you were doing. You were catching images in the camera, which was a box of sorts, and then there you were in another black box developing the images  you'd caught with the help of chemicals, but this time the images were catching you.  

I remember having that smell on my hands when I first learned to print, because I used to do it gloveless, and  then later bringing my hands up to my nose and smelling them as the day passed, once I was back outside in the world, and it, the smell, changing as the hours went by because bits of the chemicals had sunk in my skin while others evaporated in the world around me, which morphed everything. But it was a harsher red in the dream;  it hurt my eyes and I had to squint the whole time.

It's the first time I've woken up in this place and have been happy to find myself confined to these four walls. Usually it's the opposite. The night before I dreamt of Sue, trotting down the road with her duck. That was  good dream. It was also a good road. Clean, and Kansas-like, wheat and corn growing high at her sides, wildflowers springing in places out of the asphalt.  I miss Sue.

And, it also made me think, the red dream did, of where that red comes from, so recurring. Like about at what point -- that specific point (if it's specific) -- we construct who we are, our identities. Or begin to.  Because I know exactly where that red comes from, what it trails back to.  

It comes from Lagos, Nigeria, 2008. I can recall it faster than any image, it just springs up whole and fast and moving. My mother was on a mission, and Eli, the man driving us had a red handkerchief around his neck...

 Driving in Lagos was like driving in a Bosch painting -- fast and hot-rodded to metal; balmy. The cars were impossibly close to one another. Hunks of un-nameable rusted iron passing for automobiles and mixing with beamers, side by side. They fucked, those cars, they didn't make love in all their touching of one another -- they crashed into each other, were motors, desperate to feel the rough skin of tin to cool their engines. It wasn't like later, not like my hand on the stick of a Porsche down an interstate in California, or like the smooth leather of a Maserati shouting through a clean paved road: I, my dear, my love, I am elegance. No, that there, that was a fuck-fest, it was desperation and desire gone awry. That was Lagos. I was ten years old, and I was in the back seat with mom, sticking to the leather.

 

Dragonflies

I have a tiny window here, very small. I imagine both of my arms could fit through it if I smashed the glass, but the glass is tough and sound proof. It's funny what your brain does when things are soundless, because there isn't really such a thing. Even lack of sound has a particular buzz. Light has a buzz and there is light here, and the buzz is driving around me, motoring me into a particular kind of madness.

This morning a dragonfly was pressing at my window like an Orthodox Jew at prayer and I swear I could hear it, tapping. Which of course, I couldn't. Which made wonder if sound really exists, and if it does, whether it's different for everyone, being a creation of each of our particular brains. And, you know, that old question, of whether a tree that falls in a forest makes a sound if there's no one there to hear it.  In any case, that dragonfly made me long for the sound  that's probably emanating from the new Center by now, the hum and desperate song of plea and appeal. We'll see how that all works out, putting Jews, Muslims, and Christians to worship all in the same building, separated only by floor and ceiling, one from the other. I wonder if they fought over who got the penthouse.

 I've been in here too long.

 If it were up to me, I'd have had them  play musical floors, each of the sects, so that they each were constantly fluctuating between a view from the top, the intermediary pressure of being sandwiched in the middle, and the grizzly heat of basement vespers ; Kabbalat Shabbat; Hayya 'alas-salaah; Hayya 'alal falah...

An Introduction of Sorts

My name. Do I really have to tell it to you? Do you really need to know? Mozie. It's Mozie. Phonetically, it goes something like Mōtzie, you have to sound out that t. It rhymes with goat-c (as in some sort of vitamin C that comes from eating goat; or a goat that drinks alot of OJ). It has the sound of Salzburg in it, though I'm really just an American (for better or for worse), whose mother had a wild imagination. Has a wild imagination. I'll tell you how I got my name some other time, it's a long story, as all stories of origins are, I guess. But you've got the surface for now. We'll dig later.

As things are it seems I'm faced with a bout of solitary confinement. Although how solitary are you, really, if you have the internet for company?  But still, I find myself needing a conversation, that trace of human touch/tongue, the beats of language pouncing off one another, touching swords and fencing. So, if you like, give me your  hands (or typing fingers) and we'll be friends. Lend me your name for a while, ask me questions. I'll do the same.

I'll try and write everyday. Sometimes circumstances here, where I am, may prevent me, but I'll write as often as  I can.