Jay Fox - THE WALLS

“I guess. They don't mean the same thing, though.”

“To a man or a woman, an adult, they very often do.”

“…”

“Is this troubling to you?”

“Yes.”

“Do you understand how this relates to all things being permissible?”

“Yes.”

“You see that you have freedom. You know that you ought to approach the situation, not with timidity or criminality, but with joy and creative will — with integrity. As opposed to abnegating his responsibility, seeing it only as cumbersome, man must establish the conditions for law, for happiness, for both himself and his peers. And it is in his freedom that he creates it; and it is only with his integrity that he can remain subject to it, to justice. If everything is permissible, only man can create and enforce his limitations, which he must do because the only thing in which he can take recourse is his integrity.”

“This sounds like an impossible task.”

“But will you walk with those who have borne this responsibility, not as their subordinate, but as their equal?”

“I will.”

“Then you will walk among the eidolons.”

15.3

“Hey, wake up. We're home. Help me with Tomas.”

“Porky.” What the hell does that mean?

Toilets are not particularly well known for their comfort, and the one upon which I find myself is no exception. Tomas is supine in the tub, his eyes shielded from the painfully bright lights of the vanity mirror with a washcloth. The washcloth is cream colored and stained in a number of places with a rust colored substance that is probably dried blood. Hopefully dried blood. He breathes with effort. They are shallow breaths, truncated as if his diaphragm has been punctured.

“The Novel of the Future.” How come I never know the literature references?

The time is four in the morning. Perhaps a little later. I can't tell if it's still drizzling outside because there are no windows in here, which is something of a common feature in loft bathrooms. Still, I can feel the moisture in the air, and the smell of wet cement faintly saturates the whole apartment with a comforting aroma. Aberdeen has gone to sleep. He stayed up for one beer once we returned to their place. He ate an apple with cinnamon. He would sprinkle it on the flesh of the fruit right where he planned to bite. My father used to do the same, only with salt.

Aberdeen candidly spoke of Tomas, as he, Tomas, passed out pretty quickly after being transported from the cab to the tub. Aberdeen seems to think that Tomas' drinking problem has exacerbated since the publication of his book. On the plus side, with the exception of a few hours ago, he hasn't purchased a bag of cocaine in over a week, which is apparently the longest Tomas has gone without doing so in a number of months. He adds that Tomas knows that I look down upon those who use the drug (and I do). “He doesn't want to disappoint you. Kind of funny, right? I don't mean to sound silly, but he really values your opinion.” I asked if there is a history of alcohol abuse in Tomas' family, and received a hesitant and circumlocutionary response that I easily distilled down to a very potent yes. Tomas' grandfather, known only as the Czech, poisoned himself by drinking his less-than-loving wife's perfume. While the act certainly could have been taken as a mad and operatic gesture (if it were, say, a Russian short-story from the fin de siècle ), the truth of the matter was that the Czech was only thinking about the fact that perfume is on par with moonshine in terms of alcohol content. So the romantic element was the accidental in the story — the Czech just needed a fix, and it ended up costing him his life. He was forty-two.

Tomas never had the opportunity to meet the Czech; he only observed the man's legacy by witnessing his mother's behavior, which was predictably antipodal to that of her father. She was open with her rancor, as she had seen her mother widowed while still in adolescence. And while she may have been more than willing to express her rage and bitterness over the events that transpired, she evenly distributed the blame. She resented her mother for being a frigid authoritarian, and despised her father for his lack of will power. He was a rather miserable man, too: Chronically unemployed, perhaps even unemployable; stubborn when it didn't matter, passive when it did. Aberdeen could not remember if the Czech had fallen from grace, if he was simply harboring at rock bottom, or if he had always been there, a permanent fixture, a pitiful yardstick by which the rest of the community could measure their good fortune.

So she had to overcompensate for their failures — what came as a consequence of the joyless tyranny of the mother, the gluttonous lassitude of the father. She was an odd amalgam of refined comportment and liberalism, a woman for whom civility was sacrosanct. She granted freedoms, but only did so because she was under the impression that such freedoms would never be utilized or expressed. And Tomas did not disappoint so long as he lived in her home (and it was her home; the man who had knocked her up was removed from history, just like Tiberius Iulius Abdes Pantera). He was never much of a drinker, never much of a party-goer, never much of a lady's man in high school. He was more or less a nonentity, a bulb in a strand of lights upon a grandmother's Christmas tree — one that finds its home in the corner of the basement; one that is covered by an ugly blanket and left idle except for that one day out of the year when it was revealed and illuminated for the whole family as they gather in the unfinished basement that may have been able to fit one generation, but not two, and certainly not three; one that could have featured any number of burned out bulbs, but no one really knew or paid any attention to the tree, just as no one bothers examining the smiles of hockey players while the puck is in play. Even during college he rarely came out of his shell. He had one girlfriend during that time (the bulimic), and she was just about the only entry that he could have put on his sexual resume with the exception of one ephemeral relationship during high school, which never went further than a few sloppy hand-jobs and one or two bare-titted grope sessions, and the girl to whom he had lost his virginity while visiting Brown during his senior year of high school. She had no name, barely a face. Aberdeen is fairly sure that the event took place at a fraternity party (though I can't imagine a place like Brown having fraternities), but can't say with complete certainty because Tomas refuses to speak of the incident in much detail. Tomas evidently still considers himself a college student, which is why, Aberdeen believes, he has taken such a shine to me. “He's typically very confrontational and disdainful of men with whom he is not familiar.” He walked away shortly after saying this, evidently to take a call from Lindsay. A few minutes later he returned to inform me that she had gone to her boyfriend's apartment. He then went to bed.

Forty-eight down is ENSE. That means this here is probably ASONE. How would a Jenny Craig testimonial begin? Losing weight obviously has something to do with it. What about ILOST? Well it fits with the one letter I have. What about this? Blank-E-T-Blank for “Coat Hanger.” Abortion. Why does abortion come to mind? Am I really that perverse? Wait…it's “Court Hangers.” Okay, it has to be plural. Court hanger. Flags hang in courts. Juries sometimes hang. What does that mean anyway? Hung jury. Is there another word for flag that could fit? Banner? Tapestry? What about another court? Tennis. Basketball. Hoops. NETS.

I've been assigned the duty of making sure Tomas doesn't die. True, the fear seems a bit melodramatic, but I guess it's better to be safe in situations such as these. He hasn't been lucid since we got him in the tub about three hours ago. The sight of him is rather pathetic: a boxer-clad and pallid lump of flesh coated in sweat and small fragments of partially digested food. He smells like feet and grain alcohol. The rest of the bathroom is redolent with either vomit or disinfectant, though the potency of either one of these components depends upon your location in the room.