Jay Fox - THE WALLS

I admittedly do not know which books belong to Vinati and which books belong to Natasha. I know that Vinati has read the three Vonnegut novels on the shelf because each one was referenced in conversation yesterday — she favors Cat's Cradle over Breakfast of Champions , my favorite. There are two novels by Kamala Markandaya, as well as two books about the novels of Kamala Markandaya. There is the Marx & Engels Reader , which just about every college student owns because, on top of being a book that one will eventually get around to reading, it makes a great flyswatter. There is a book by Wittgenstein, an often-ignored philosopher who would have enjoyed the previous sentence. There is a large section dedicated to bell hooks; there is some Fromm, two books by Joyce without creases in their spines, a lot of Hannah Arendt, what may be the complete collection of Susan Sontag's works, an illustrated manual entitled A Woman's Guide to the Kama Sutra , and a bunch of Penguin Classics that range from Aristotle to Zamyatin — All men naturally desire knowledge…because Reason must prevail.

It is only after fifteen minutes of examining the shelves of knowledge and the moments in time Natasha felt had to be preserved, enshrined, and shared, that I hear a soft beeping noise that means either I have missed a call or a text message is waiting for me. Vinati is still asleep, though she is now positioning herself into a more comfortable position on the bed. This means she will be awake soon.

I find my pants on top of her desk. They are there because throwing clothing is one of those bedroom idiosyncrasies that I've never been able to abandon. It's a combination of passion and joy, I suppose. Beneath my pants lay Vinati's skirt, which reads “2.” I don't think I've ever been with a woman so small. I gaze over to her sleeping quietly as I reach into my pocket, retrieve my phone, and find that I have missed two calls and that I now have two new voice mails. The first is from my parents, and from sometime last night. The second is from Willis Faxo. I just missed him.

The message from my parents is of generic stock — we miss you, get a job, call us when you get a chance (or job). They have been peripheral figures in my life ever since I left for New York. At least that's how I try to think of them, especially after not only reading about the Oedipal Complex, but having the dream (only once) that I killed my father. It's not that I am afraid that I may kill him or fuck my mother. It's not even that I want to disown them; rather, I want to egress from the past, from them, from every definition that is supposed to define someone with my background. I certainly don't want to go back to Baltimore. It is a city of animated ruins. An imperious boredom haunts the day. The summer is hot and humid, filled with days spent indoors and suffocating in the recirculated air. When it rains, it pours. The winter is plagued by dead trees and ashen skies, various shades of death amidst people in various stages of dying. There is some snow, but rarely enough to properly coat the jaundiced grass for more than a day or two.

My father, a militant Chicagoan, never tried to instill in me any sense of pride based on the history of the city or Maryland, let alone the South. My mother was not from there, either; she was a bookish girl from New England, who happened to capture my father's eye because she was reading Saul Bellows while waiting for a train. They took the train together that day, even if my father was supposed to be going in the other direction.

This is really the only sentimental story they seem to have about their relationship. They are a rather detached lot. She's detached because of books; he's detached because of medicine. Still, he does feel as though he has to constantly remind me where he came from, that he rose out of Chicago to have all of the things that his friends in Bridgeport and Hyde Park can only dream about — as most of them came back after being shipped off to Vietnam to work the same jobs their fathers had worked.

Faxo's message is succinct, polite, and inviting. He informs me that he has just returned from Japan, which means his sleep schedule is essentially backwards. Still, he is willing to meet with me anytime before two.

As I take down his address, I hear Vinati stirring. She is suddenly supine, though her eyes remain closed. “Did he actually call you back?” she asks. “Or is this some other lead you haven't told me about?” She is strangely coherent and lucid for someone just regaining consciousness.

“No, it's actually Faxo,” I respond as I look back to her. “He told me I can stop by anytime before two.” I am clearly too ecstatic for her at such an early hour. She groans. “So how ya' feeling this morning?”

“My muscles are sore,” she laughs as she pulls the sheets over her face. She quickly reappears. “I wasn’t expecting that.”

For the life of me I don't know how to respond to this without sounding corny, so I just smile, walk over to the bed, and bend down to kiss her. She turns her head away and ducks beneath the sheets again. “I can't,” she laughs. “My breath is terrible.” My head hovers above hers until she reemerges. She laughs again. “You aren't going to take no for an answer, are you?”

“Not when I know you can't give it.”

The Jefferson stop on the L train is, as of the mid-June of 2007, probably the premier spot to live in the city, provided one is both a recent graduate and desperately trying to mirror the bohemian image of generations past. It is one of the many regions of Brooklyn that will soon be home to an affluent population who will, paradoxically, lament the neighborhood's blunted edge. As of now, however, it is still too dangerous for a lot of people. Rapes happen. Stabbings happen. There is still a belief that white skin is logically antecedent to wealth, that the rapes and the robberies (typically concomitant with the stabbings) are romantic in the sense that they are revolutionary or grounded in the desire to fight against a power structure that is unjust at its very core; but the sad truth of the matter is that these are crimes, that these crimes are performed by sad people, that these crimes affect sad people, that there is no glory in fighting against the powerful by victimizing the powerless who happen to have that one very discernible resemblance to the majority of those in power.

Still, there are the nascent signs of gentrification sprouting up. Some factories have been converted into lofts. The ten-story condo buildings that look like something out of an aquarium, however, have yet to appear. Consequently, it is fairly safe to say that the domestic immigrants here are not the disguised trust-funders one finds on Avenue A or even Bedford; they, like the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans who have been here for at least two generations, work menial jobs, forage through the generic sections of the grocery store aisles, and feel a strong resentment for the participants of the eastern migration — only for them it's kind of like hating the mirror.

While no small percentage of this group comes to Brooklyn with the vain hope of beginning a career in the arts, there are those who, like earlier generations of immigrants, have come not so much to find fame as much as a decent job. True, many are attracted to fairly illustrious career paths, but they gravitate to this particular city because many other places in this country can offer little more than a cubicle job that cannot provide such things as health care, a living wage, or even dignity. Here you end up meeting quiet types from Iowa and Michigan, Montana and Idaho, engaged in a form of wage slavery that is more clement than the form of it they would have endured had they stayed home. They are the people who consider paying off student loans to be more important than going to trendy clubs and restaurants featured in those magazines dedicated to culture and the arts — with the exception of literature and poetry, as people are far too busy trying to be cultured to bother with books.