:: Eugene Lim

Three Flashes of Character, from Fog & Car

1.


Jim Fog had convinced himself that he had painted on top of nothing. So that he remembered Judy came to him as he was leaving the party, saying, The house looks great, and he, not understanding, not remembering, because the house not connected to his labor.

To relieve him, she said, The paint job. It looks fine.

He was woozy from the drink, stepped through the door and she followed. Thank you, he finally said.

She was at the far end of the porch by then, and answered, Let´s go for a walk.

I was going home.

Oh. Alright.

No, I didn´t mean, it was just, it hadn´t occurred to me to do it differently. I, I didn´t . . . yes. Yes, I would.

Good.

She led him out to the lake, she leading him to the places he had known so well in the former season, using his environs to map himself, failing utterly. They rounded it; he found the lake shrunken from spring, and it surprised him. He laughed.

Answering her look, he said, I´ve been so wrapped up in myself, it´s silly, but the fact that, this lake I walked around every day, several times a day. And it´s, now it´s, and now it´s smaller. It´s shrunken. By August I guess it´ll be gone.

Yes, she said, and he didn´t feel ridiculed. His statement was allowed and he knew they were flirting.

She led him further, the path closing into the wood. Do you know where this goes? Yes, I´ve taken it many times. You should lead then. No, I enjoy following. They were both warm with drink. She took his hand and they continued silently. Then she stopped and sat on the ground. He sat also and looked up. A negative of some childhood memory was in front of him, confirming that he was not there, not anymore there; instead it was night.

She took his hand and led him to a tree, which she turned from to face him. She told him to make love to her, which he did obscenely.



2.


Fat Frank Exit gave name to these three, as if, by naming, specific and full account was given of his constant gropings. He woke to loneliness, jealousy, and need. Principally those three. If he was aware of his dreams, he´d say they accompanied him there also, if only as that which he escaped from. But when he was conscious, their fact was always. He was aware of these emotions and for knowing his misery, was slightly less miserable. Because Frank´s defeat was surprisingly thus partial, his smugness offered a thin (and waning) barrier against all out depression and he lived--scurrying for an answer before this final vestige was gone and he was left in a forever dark and heartless chamber.

Summer, for instance, was relentless. He would frequently go to spectacles--that was the only word for them--to bathe himself in a wash of forever concluded desire. A movie, a baseball game or, best, a fight. The aching temporarily relieved by a sweaty muscle sweeping air, on the way to contact. Lotus-breath sugaring his tongue, there was again, always, the crowd. He´d sit far from the given action so that the allowance was thus greatest, and scope. Too early, never bored, pathetically and visibly eager.

He made sure, by some miraculously present instinct for survival, that his looking--his prowl--was only done away from the office. That was the extent of his shame, or, the extent to which it held sway against his other desires. A concert in the park. There, a man or woman, forehead oily, eyes attractively bright, all--for Frank--potential! Loitering outside the theater, leaning his bulk against the building, a cigarette toked upon as if to hide his fat self behind smoke, eyes watching. The exact possibility unclear but he was sure it was in the next moment, accident, contact . . . but--nothing. Still he looked. The car´s window rolled down, a hot breeze came across the shopping center´s parking lot. For twenty minutes he sat in the heat, pooling sweat, watching the crowd come in at the end of a workday; the kids already there doing as much as he was--with much more reason. Men and women nauseatingly fresh. Clothes without wrinkles walked toward their advertised progeny. To be so confident, he thought, to be so unquestionably of, but --the complications! She didn´t love him, they were bored with their children, he wouldn´t take his medication, he was really bankrupt, she couldn´t understand why he wanted to, he didn´t love him. But to Frank, this was all relative to the fact that she spoke so casually to the man in line next to her.

He levered himself out of his car, backside drenched, and waddled his way to the food court. He ordered a fried wonton and a coke, threw a penny into the indoor fountain, sat on its edge. Since there was a woman across the marble plaza, and--since, though her face was out of focus he could still guess her sleeveless blouse´s material--he fell in love. And when she left, the young mother with stroller, beautifully proven sexual, was the next. For variation, the loud voice and overheard (not stupid) joke was his friend to death. In plain moment, the landscape became a glossy magazine and he dutifully and ecstatically fucked.

And yet and so, when the viewing wasn´t enough, the dead void took him to deeper needs. He wanted just contact, to be next to the running city, enveloped, standing at point, in the field´s rush. He drank at a bar in the airport. There, among the melodrama of hellos goodbyes and anxious lateness, he sat--not waiting--among all who most assuredly were just. He wore a moderately expensive suit and had several stories ready for the barkeep, who never asked. He told himself he went just to look, and acted, he thought to himself, to not be seen. He pantomimed a delayed businessman with casual but frequent looks at the clock. Silent sighs while tamping his cigarette. He fretted over the details of this theater of the invisible, but lied to his consciousness and--sabotaged every performance. For so open was his need, so blind was he to himself, in these safaris, that all who were watched by him, all who noticed him, were compelled, without exception, to deny him. And Frank, thinking he was unseen when in fact his eyeball and brain were only too evident, tragically misread his environment.

Eventually, after several hours, he got up, paid his bill, took a walk past the baggage claim, found his car, looked expectantly at the woman who took his parking stub, and drove home. For a while, he sobbed into his hands. He then fell asleep--quieted and dreaming.



3.


What Sarah Car could say, she did, however little that was. She wanted to make an effort, at least that, at last that. Out the window she could see the heat solid in the air and later would be out directly in it. Summer threatened her with ending, by beginning, and she felt her inefficiency up to then was an increasing liability. But thinking so, she found, did not change things.

The square of her window, cut again into four, showed straight into an inscrutable whiteness. So she stood up, looked instead onto the street which, peopled, allowed her to flatter her powers of understanding. She was about to go out into it, but didn´t. She kept looking around for something, felt sweat accumulating, and went to open the window. Travelling! That would ease this mindlock. Or keep changing the view from the window so that it would seem... that was it always, she understood. And the feeling of the trap which she had been born into and which age had only allowed her to perceive ... was but one context she used.

She got a glass from the cupboard and filled it with ice and water. It stood on the table in front of her, a cylindrical mimic of the window, sweating. She placed it against her closed eye, first one then the other. She cleaned the glass of its condensation and peered through it to her distended world. As she put it down, she listened to her environment become static and she involuntarily lifted her shoulder to wipe sweat from the side of her neck.

Searching for some release she moved the glass of ice water to the edge of the table. For a moment the potential for crashing it to the floor held her rapt.

She had not opened the window, though she remembered she had moved toward it to do so. She approached it again and in so doing, knocked the glass over onto the table. She watched the water slipping to the sides of the table, curve down its edge, then drip to the floor. Seeing the ice cube gently skid a short path, she thinks of apple bobbing.

She puts her hands behind her back and without thought, judges her height to position herself. She leans over the table, mouth agape, and aims for the ice cube which, frictionless, pops from her lips and skitters away. She nudges it with her nose to a more central position, its volume diminishing; on her noseskin a single bead as legacy. She goes for it again, small enough now to be subjected to the vacuum of her mouth, then, in the trap of her teeth the sound of a single crunch--a testament to victory but so small! But one crunch sound!

From the freezer a complete--new--cube is brought to the table. As Sarah positions herself she realizes she has never questioned the dimensional lie in "cube." And by what right would she? she thinks on her way down and when her mouth touches the ice, the proposition is forgotten forever. The previous attempt had taught her caution and hypotheses of position, which, testing, she proves successful but not without a satisfying difficulty. The ice cube is in her mouth. Not one, nor even two, but three! sold crunches of the primary variety followed by the numberless fade out of secondaries.

She sat down, the cold painful to her gums. The window still was closed and the coolness in her throat was soon gone. Around her, the heat oppressed. Something stopped her from going to the window yet a third time. All was done was a looking up, again through the window, to the sun--which now in position of her sight--sanded the sky to a hard color. The room was filled with it, and as her eyes scanned the details shown, all seemed, by their retreating shadows, prostrate to the heat.

The refrigerator within distance, she stretched her leg out and nudged open the door. The cold sank to her naked foot and the food gave off a numbed smell which did not counter nor increase her appetite. She closed the door, retracted her leg and then for several moments did not move at all. She felt, if she willed it, the company of her surroundings--by not seeing, feeling or hearing them, it--would leave her and she would find an utterly complete solitude.

She brought a hand from her lap and patted the water left on the table.

The night previous she had gone to a bar. She had gotten drunk without conversation, gotten home without incident, and yet still woke embarrassed. She sat for a long time more and the only thought which repeated was that she had felt for some time now unable to bathe to refreshment.




© Eugene Lim 2005

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