Jay Fox - THE WALLS

There was nothing more terrifying than the possibility that I was losing the ability to absorb what was right in front of my eyes, a myopia less complete than the ambiguation of color or shape, though no less debilitating to me, a supposed scholar, a student, a man who would take the time to read and analyze the mission statement on a bag of potato chips if I happened to be eating them while on the can. So I would go over it again and again and again. I would vocalize the words with the vain hope of bringing the meaning back. But to no avail: the longer I spent processing the passage, the more convoluted it became. A roommate would eventually wake me without having to say a word; all that was required were his eyes — drowsy, irritated, maybe even somewhat amused — looking down upon me for no more than a few seconds. I could feel the presence. I would remember that you couldn’t read with your eyes closed; I would recognize my closed eyes; I would form a conclusion by means of syllogism. — You're talking in your sleep again , once my eyes met the glare. — Did I say anything good? — No , back turned, unsteady legs already in somnolent transit back to the bed to enjoy the last few minutes of peace, before the snooze button began demanding no less attention than a teething child.

I was happy not to be dealing with feelings of alienation from the written word. Whereas the previous dreams of aphasia tended to create a cloud of anxiety that shadowed me for at least the duration of the morning shower, the inability to remember fictitious items or events was something that I shook off rather quickly.

I would typically leave to get my morning coffee before noon. Some days I picked up a paper, too. Most of the places in my neighborhood do not carry the Times (nor do they have dental floss, which is a very difficult item to explain or accurately charade to someone with virtually no knowledge of the English language). Consequently, I found myself reaching for papers that are just that (papers), because applying the prefix “news-” to the rags would be more supercilious than accurate. I never read more than an article or two. On the plus side, I did manage to complete every crossword puzzle with which I was confronted.

The heat was beginning to swallow up what little relief the night sought to provide, and by Thursday I found myself sleeping on the couch to avoid the sunlight that invaded my room as early as seven in the morning. It rained only once that week, during the early hours of Sunday afternoon. The concrete coughed thick clouds as I stayed inside contemplating the best way to go about finding Coprolalia while feigning interest in a bad comedy I had seen many times before.

I had a drink with a girl I had known from class on Monday. I hadn't planned it or anything; we just happened to run into each other on the corner of Greenpoint and 43 rd. She was staying at her sister's place, which was right around the corner. “Temporarily,” she assured me with a severe tilt of the head, a quick motion that supported a tone too grave to be awarded complete credence. “I just can't go back to Merrick with all of the interviews that I have lined up.” She expressed an edacious desire to continue her education, and seemed to already look upon her potential employers as Penelope, mother of Telemachus, looked upon the faces of her suitors.

It was clear that she had recently had an interview; her outfit was not the type of thing a twenty-two-year-old girl in Queens just happens to wear as she goes out to get milk or cigarettes or whatever commodity is needed down at the corner store. Her skirt was blunt: black and short. It covered thighs that seemed to be too pudgy to be connected to her narrow hips or her slender torso. She had loosened a few buttons on her white blouse to present a tasteful bounty of cleavage, enough so that you knew that she was not frigid, but not enough to be distracting. It was an outfit that engendered that limbo between the career you have and the one you want — what one wears as they wade through the River Heraclitus — as it was professional and modest, sophisticated and banal.

She was clearly anxious about her future. A certain intensity emulated from her, and dominated the conversation as the latter half of A Ghost is Born accompanied our time in the bar. Her eyes were of that formidable sort: embers as tenacious as anthracite. Furious, too. It was a passion that was both intractable and somehow forlorn: a desire without direction, just a steady imperative that traveled like an echo — a resonant wave that was strong enough so that it stopped mattering exactly where it originated or where it would eventually find its terminus. Besides her eyes, fulgurant and petulant in the most positive sense of the word, there was a drive inherent in her words even if they burst forth from a small mouth framed by thin lips more cedar than pink, more an extension of skin instead of a supple feature to be admired for its own sake. The drive was founded upon either consternation or ambition — and not just naked ambition, but an ambition adjunctive to integrity, and not an integrity in conjunction with vanity or even apposite to pride (because vanity and pride are integral only to the foolish and the resentful), but an integrity anchored in a mire of naivety that eventually dissipates once one has spent enough time in that “real world” to which Gen-Xers and Gen-Meers and former hippies adhere and even defend on account of their complete and total moral incontinence.

So that was the ambition side of it: the desire to refuse to relinquish what, to her, was the only thing that no adult should ever surrender — integrity. One could even say that this ambition was there to help her avoid the greed that is so often identified as ambition.

I understood it — the ambition she held: a vague quixotry that for so many performs its swan song in concert with “Pomp and Circumstance.” Yet at the same time I understood why she was plagued by consternation. Like me, she knew what the world would eventually demand of her: that demand that has served as the most potent catalyst for the crisis of identity to which every sophist armed with a suspect Ph.D. or a pulpit has produced a specious solution; and she knew that she could do nothing but stare with grim recognition to the hand from which she would eventually eat, the same hand that she now realizes long ago subsumed the hand from which she had been taking by birthright, that same hand whose handiwork was inalienable from all but the last enclaves of humanity trapped (or cushioned, depending whom you ask) by the intractable face of pure wilderness, those inhabitants living at the horizon of oblivion.

So it wasn't really ambition at all, at least not the ambition that is often venerated by the Babbitts of the world — those rapacious fools whose greed is stifled by nothing less than their own stupidity. Instead, she venerated the ideals to which she had ascribed and those to which still did ascribe to some degree; but she knew that they were beginning to falter, to stumble. Soon they would be gone. So this was her elegy (perhaps a bit of a premature one) for her integrity (but only in the acrostic sense — for she never did say what it was she wanted to say, and maybe that's why I'm filling in the gaps for her). Because I understood it, and I knew that she understood it; and that's why it was never said. Maybe that was why we exchanged numbers after the beer, both because she hoped that her eventual capitulation would not be out of the ordinary and as though to say —If you can find a way to escape it, please send for me . Because there was a shared despondency there, a shared discernment of how things would progress if either one of us made that first bow, that first sacrifice. One sacrifice would beget two, and two would beget three, and so on and so forth. Money would become more important, and its importance would swell not because of cupidity (because true cupidity only exists in the hearts of one-dimensional antagonists found in jejune fictions and the schemes of the They so often featured in the nightmares (and daymares) of the schizophrenic), but rather out of specious necessity. And it would eventually become apparent that the problem wasn't the lack of anything; instead, it was the profusion of luxury, vacuous luxury, luxury without purpose or even as a way of being ignorant, comfortably — just luxury for luxury's sake, which is perhaps its purest form. And then we would long for the past, the past not as it had been exactly, but in the way we imagined it had been (joyous and resplendent, without the quagmire of depression and self-doubt that characterizes virtually all of the “best years” of our lives); and yet it would be too late by that point. We would be left with what we didn't want even though we were not only used to it by then; no, it would be fare worse: we would be unable to live without it. And the young, the cool, the hip, would be able to tell. We would try to come back to them, no less tainted and eschewed — maybe even feared — than escaped lepers running amok through the streets of Midtown (and the middle of Midtown, too). We would be the old people, the people so often mocked for thinking they can somehow transcend generations. And so, defeated, we would have to return to our suburban colony to live vicariously through what we read in magazines and what we saw on television, disappointed but at the same time respectful — although seething with jealously — of the institutions guarded by Janus or St. Peter or Uriel. So maybe it is best never to abandon the ascetic life — ascetic not in the sense of willed poverty or the abnegation of the material world, but ascetic in relation to what that first sacrifice promises — ascetic in the sense that sometimes it is better not to have.