Joshua Cohen - Four New Messages

I was tired of this, tired of inventing other worlds—“realms,” “dimensions,” I was exhausted by synonym, by quotationmarks too — tired of inventing alternate worlds while misunderstanding my own, yes, yes, but also I was starving.

I got up, left the house (apt.).

No more ambiguities. Imprecision renders nothing worthier, nothing universal.

The following writers have worked as advertising creatives: (fill this in later)

Nothing universal but, galaxies. Nothing universal but, the universe.

I walked — I mclive in Brooklyn, I mchave no car — to McDonald’s. There, there, walked, walked, a welfare visne, nobody has cars, there are barely buses. Gravesend’s what it’s called, the end of graves, the grave of graves (the British buried atop the Dutch). Cameras surrounded by barbedwire like they were gun installations, protecting. The parkinglot, empty, speckled with gums. Lines for the cars that were missing were black like grillmarks. The drivethru window everyone walkedthru was blacked too. When the shade was down you had to knock. I considered walkingthru myself and knocking, reconsidered. I had to force myself to full experience. “Full-Service”—a euphemism used only by callgirls and restaurants. This was not research but living, this was not living but life.

The location — the door sealing shut, leaving me a victim to airconditioning whose level was set, I believe, by corporate HQ — the physical plant. It smelled like grease, fat/soap/Our Lady of Guadalupe votive candle, acne ointment. I took a seat at a table. A table amid tile. I took out a pen and notebook with the intention of taking notes, wrote on the top of the first page, McDonald’s, then crossed it out and wrote the plural possessive, McDonalds’, then looked at the logo by the cash registers and crossed that out and wrote singularly again on the third line, McDonald’s, put the notebook back in my coat.

It was exactly as I’d imagined it, which is to say exactly as I hadn’t imagined it because I’d been imagining something imaginary to begin with — all down that sorry drain. Mopswishes, mopswishes on the floor, the fins of the mop, the mop’s knotted tentacles swish across the floor. A goldenarched pyramid — a sandwichboard — cautioning “Slippery When Wet,” and the sexual jokes that occasions, then that other phrase comes to mind, “on the clock,” and there’s a clock there, ticking shifts above the citations and mugshots: Employee of the Month wanted for armed robbery, nonsupport. Restroom coed but being cleaned, restroom coed but out of order.

Burger culled from asphalt, results in pothole. L(ettuce), t(omato), o(nion), mushroomcloud of sodafoam. I can make a noose with three straws, I can make a noose from two. A thirty minute seating limit, regularly enforced: a customer changing his seat every thirty minutes would take exactly how long to have occupied every seat (whatever’s in that booth doesn’t have to be homeless)?

Microphones foaming interjacent to the registers. Everything on the dollar menu costs a dollar. A dollar never includes tax. $1.08. $2.15. $3.23. $4.30 $5.38 $6.45. I was no longer so hungry, predictably. Thirst was more difficult. No soda would have been sufficiently large or sufficiently small. I had a medium thirst, a mediocre thirst. Only mediocrity would suffice and so becomes mediocre, preservative. A medium ensued. I sat, watched, listened. Big black and hispanic kids drinking blackcolored and hispaniccolored sodas. Fat old white man eating burger. The woman, his wife. Mashing pills into ketchup for fries. The climatized cold. The hard silence. A silence with edges. Open carton. Flip up top. Chew pen turning tongue graveyard dark. The old man drooled above his seconds. Wife still finishing her first. Big burgers for those bloodless bodies! Those big big big big burgers! (No more writing, nothing more intelligent than that.)

I helped build the Flatiron Building,though I’ve never been to New York — though Dem and I had never been before indulging our daughter Veri’s desire to visit New York University — on my one week off this year and Veri’s junior year springbreak — despite our hope that she, our only child, would choose to stay in-state.

The decision is hers — but we keep telling her, In-state was good enough for us.

After all, that’s where we met.

Dem and I had four classes together prior to applying to Professor Greener’s workshop — it was competitive certainly, but he accepted us both for what reasons we years ago came to terms with — this in the days when Dem was still doing poetry, not yet motherhood and the career of a freelance interior designer, the days when I was writing fiction as if literature were life.

And here was Veri, rebelling against our rebellion — she was bent on studying some profane concatenation of finance and psychology — she wanted to be employable, while all I wanted was to avoid the Flatiron.

And because I did, I insisted we do everything downtown: we’d sleep downtown at the Wall Street W (the hotel I’m writing from now, by midnight on W stationery with a W pen), we’d eat downtown (Dem an unreconstructed gastrophile when traveling, a compulsive cuisiniste who keeps files on restaurants, docs and.xls spreadsheets of what dishes and deals can be had on what days where) — we’d tour and enjoy exclusively downtown: historic-districting around Trinity Church, the Exchange, the new Trade Center being built, going up slowly, slowly, after a decade of stagnancy, SoHo art galleries and Village bebop she’bam clubs (Dem had downloaded discount admissions), struggling improvisational comedy cellars (she’d scanned vouchers for three late sets free), and, Wednesday, if we can fit it in, one or two interactive museums.

Downtown’s also where the school is, or rather the school is downtown, having taken everything over. The streets are the classrooms not in some ridiculously wistful sense but legitimately, or rather illegitimately — privately owned, zoned for children only.

Beat, footsore, inadequately caffeinated, Dem and I stood with our daughter at the front of the tour group led by a girl named like a corruption of a Dutch cheese — Goudla? Dougla? this cheerfully chubby checker of any survey’s Pacific Islander box, majoring in — I wasn’t paying attention — let’s say postcolonial beading or basketry as therapy. She was very kind to Veri, very patient and always touching — Dem and even me, with a bit to the cuticle fingernail graze of my elbow, a hennaed palm to my shoulder, tender but then she’d think nothing of reaching out with a surprisingly firm grip and turning Veri’s head to direct her attention: there the library, there the center for university life, here the freshman dorms (where you’ll be living next year — what a presumptuous girl) …

I told Dem I wasn’t impressed and she shushed me but I could tell from the side of her smile, she agreed. I’m saying the physical plant wasn’t much. Prefab. Incapacitated by its overcapacity. Smogged. Now I know no city can contain all the amenities you’d find at a place like our alma mater. A city university just doesn’t have the space, no matter how big the endowment, no matter what sums of R&D cash are banking around — Manhattan Island is only so large and it’s telling that about half of its lower half is landfill. Back home we have more chlorinated pools, more recreation facilities with more stationary bikes and stairmasters, treadmills and the latest in weight machinery — hell, we even have the Flatiron, if you want to forgo the elevators and walk up it — the Fauxiron, Professor Greener once called it, whose roof I laid about twenty years ago, with Veri turning 18 this September.