Name (6)

-6-

Name

 

Scars are souvenirs you never lose
The past is never far
Did you lose yourself somewhere out there
Did you get to be a star
And don't it make you sad to know that life
Is more than who we are

-Goo Goo Dolls

 

                “Where go?”  Asked the taxi driver as he slicked his carpet mustache with flat fingers.

                “Sungseo.”

                “Seongseo?” The driver repeated with all the proper bends absent in Aden’s tow-line Korean.

                “Sungseo, nay.” He tried again, punching out all the syllables as best he could.  There were two districts with a similar ring, Sungseo and Seongseo, and last time he got in a cab and failed to crop out the difference between the two he ended up in the wrong one wandering around a fish paste factory neighborhood for hours with blisters the size of grapefruit.

                “Seongseo?”

                Aden didn’t want a repeat disaster, especially not now, although he figured it would only be typical, when s**t rains it storms.  He shoveled through his jacket for his wallet with the address in Korean while the driver just mumbled in fang and rubbed his head.

                 He found his wallet but noticed the book was gone.  Damning himself he felt around the floor of the cab and checked the seat.  Nothing.  He figured he must have dropped it somewhere between the sidewalk and the cab.

                “Wait, just wait.”

                Aden clambered out of the cab, tugging his jacket up over his head and rushing back across the street, damning himself over and over for his constant lack of luck.  He found it exactly where he figured, by the grace and goodwill of chance, it would be, lying in the gutter soaked all the way through.

                “Figures, no break for this man, no break.”

                He grabbed the book, shook it out best he could, and slipped it up his shirt before wheeling around and making a mad dash back to the cab.  But he’d made it only halfway before a couple, oblivious to his mess, all caked up in their charming night, slipped into the taxi first.

                “Great, I don’t even want to know what’s next.” Grumbled Aden as he stood in the street, socks soaked, face frozen, and not a taxi in sight.

                Suddenly he heard tires screech and the zip of surface water, he pivoted only in time to catch headlights flood his pupils and a bumper nail him in the knees.  He rolled off the hood and landed face up on the pavement, his body railing, his head feeling like a pop-rock jet turbine.

                “God, you hit him, you didn’t stop!?”

                Layered between the ringing and pin-roll of the rain, Aden heard two voices and a rush of footsteps.

                “He in road, he crazy, you no stand in road!”

                Someone cradled his head and checked his pulse.

                “You alright?”

                “Yeah, yeah, I think I’m alright.” Aden managed while trying to lift himself up onto his elbows.

                “You crazy, you in road.”

                “Help me get him into the cab.”

                “He crazy-”

                “Help me get him into the cab!”

                He pulled himself up, arms draped over two bodies, and collapsed into the back of the taxi, his neck sore as an old mattress spring, head still riddled with bell tolling.  The driver clambered into the front and lit up a cigarette, pulling on it hard and ranting in mixed Korean and English.  The other passenger slid in beside him and felt inside his jacket.

                “What are you doing?” Aden eyed the figure.

                “Checking you for blood and stuff.” She stated.

                “Blood and stuff? I’m fine; I’m not bleeding or anything.”

                “Where go?” Asked the driver.

                “Hospital.”

                “No, I’m fine, I don’t need to go to a hospital.”

                “Look.” She snapped and drew back her hood. “We’re going to the hospital, like it or not, you just got hit by a car, who knows what’s wrong with you, concussion, broken bone, internal bleeding.”

                Aden froze as she kept searching him, her hand touching the book.

                “What?” She looked up; her eyes inches from his, every detail in her face a flush fool’s gold under the cab light.

                 “Nothing.”  He tried to act balanced, nonchalant, but the cocktail of newborn bruises and this sudden revelation pit him in a fillet state of mind.

                “Doesn’t seem like nothing, you’re looking at me like you’re mind got zip-tied.”  She kept searching him, her tone the same, her resolution unchanged.  He wondered if she noticed, if she even recognized who he was. “Now we’re going to the hospital.”

                “No, I don’t need to go.”

                “You’re going.”

                “I’m not.”

                “You’re going.”

                “I’m not.”

                “Then get out of the cab.”

                The taxi driver just sat up front in a fit, his cigarette smoking up the whole cab.

                “Get out?” Aden had no idea what was going on.  She just sat back, folded her arms, and let her face melt raspberry.

                The moment was awkward, the driver still laughing, the rain clattering against the hood, her demeanor unmoving, the onset of lumps sprouting on his head.  Aden couldn’t figure out if maybe the knock from the car perhaps had blown his brain into defect, maybe he was hallucinating or still wiped out on the pavement.

                “Where do you live?”

                She broke the tension and turned away.

                “Sungseo, twenty minutes or so from downtown.”

                “My place is closer.”

                “Your place?”

                “If you won’t go to the hospital, I’m at least making sure you’re ok.”

                “I’m fine.”

                “You’re coming to my place.”

                Aden gave in and lay back.  He sure as hell hadn’t expected her to be such a firecracker.

                “You both crazy.” The cab driver laughed.  She ignored him, rattled off her address in punctual Korean, and five minutes later they were climbing up her apartment stairwell to the top floor.

                “Let me have your jacket it’s soaked, I’ll get you a towel, you want tea? Sit anywhere, I know it’s scattered, I wasn’t expecting to have to drag home some nut who throws himself in front of cabs you know, I share it with Biggie I hope you don’t mind.”

                She disappeared into the kitchen, kicked on the gas stove top, and started shoveling through a drying rack.

                “Biggie?”

                “My fish.”

                “Biggie as in the rapper.”

                “No, Biggie as in a proper noun.”

                Aden clambered over piles of books and notepaper, splintered jewel CD cases with marker titles like ‘Ariel’ and ‘Bell Jar’, kashmina blankets, sepia tone postcards, and empty mugs before managing to fit himself between a tattered collection of novels spilling off one cushion and clothes hogging the other.

                “What did you say about a nut?”

                “I said a nut who throws himself in front of cabs.”

                “I didn’t throw myself in front of the cab.”

                She returned and handed him a towel.

                “Your jacket.”

                “Right.” He pulled it off and the book slipped onto the floor.  She only eyed it casually and took his jacket.

                “What are you reading?”

                “It’s not mine.”

                “Not yours?”

                “Yeah, it’s yours.”

                She hesitated before picking her copy of The Wuthering Heights off the floor.

                “It’s soaked!”

                “I know, I’m sorry, I dropped it in the gutter, that’s why I got hit by the cab, you left it in the café and I was trying to catch up with you.”

                “No worries.” She laughed and pitched it into a random pile.  “It’s terrible literature anyway, full of that scab drama you know, with all those unnecessary elements that bowtie a frail story and shell out a cast of characters obsessed with jumping off cliff after cliff.”

                “I thought it was alright.”

                “Course you would, you jump in front of cabs.” She smirked and wheeled back into the kitchen.

                Aden just grinned and looked around the single apartment.  He found it odd, her bed was clean, unwrinkled, hospital corners in full chime, her walls arranged in a gossamer style, a framed Gone With The Wind film poster, Audrey Hepburn smoking a thin filtered light, and a Pablo Neruda poem in Spanish chalked in thick esperanza Aharoni font hanging over a nightstand, but the rest looked like it’d been victimized by a haboob.  Her shelves were a mix of paint supplies, pots, jade turtles, jars of candy, and book after book while her floor lay feverish with every random anything imaginable. 

                “Tea, towel.”

                “Thanks.”

                Aden cupped the mug and started drying himself with the towel as she hung up her jacket and sat Indian-style on the bed.

                “I never got your name.”

                “Aden.”

                “Shoshanna.”  She sipped on her tea and started scrolling through her phone.  Aden sat tense, trying to distract himself with the towel and shuffling over what he could say to not make the entire episode awkward, if it wasn’t already at the peak of oddity.

                “Thanks by the way, for the tea and all.”

                “No problem, is it good?”

                “Haven’t tried it yet.”

                “Don’t thank me until you try it then.”

                “I will, it’s hot.”

                “Course it’s hot, it’s tea.”

                “I know, but I don’t know, I have this weird quirk, I can’t drink hot drinks you know.”

                “You said ‘know’ three times.”

                Aden eyed her quizzically, he’d never run into someone who counted words and he never even realized he’d said ‘know’ in the first place, but what did that matter, whether or not he repeated any word.

                “Sorry.” Shoshanna looked up and laughed. “I have this weird quirk with language, the repeat bothers me, it’s like language abuse.”

                “Vanity Fair is language abuse.”

                “Truth.  A marvelous toilet read”

Aden found the revelation a bit blunt, a definite TMI, but she just kept on.

“So you said I left the book in the café?”

                “Yeah, you straight abandoned your literature.”

                “I leave things everywhere and always forget where I put them.”

                “Another quirk?”

                “A terrible habit.” She slid her phone in her jean pocket and sat back against the wall.  “I think I remember you from the café, you were half-writing, half-scoping out the place?”

                “Just writing.”

                Shoshanna eyed him again and like the coward he was Aden couldn’t arrest it, he just went back to toweling himself off.

                “What do you write?”

                “I don’t know, I dabble, I try, poetry sometimes, prose other times.”

                “Let me see.”

                “It’s no good and the notebook is probably all wet.”

                “Let me see it.”

                Aden realized it was aimless rolling down any way other than her highway and nodded at his jacket hanging on the rack in the kitchen.  He’d never met a woman, let alone a person anything like her, so incessant, so casual with him when he was just a stranger, and yet, as curt as she was, she seemed interested, far more interested than even Cale appeared when it came to something so personal like his writing.

                “It’s in the front pocket.”

                “I’ll get it.” She hopped up, skipped around the mess, and came back with his notebook.

                “I’m telling you it’s not much though, just scattered thoughts.”

                Aden found himself nervous, about what she would read and think.

                “I like scattered thoughts, they’re natural, do less harm.”

                Shoshanna sat back against the wall, pressed a finger between two random pages, and flipped his notebook open.  Aden lay the towel aside, tried the tea, and studied her mess blankly. 

She was something else, something more, he couldn’t figure out quite what it was, he’d known her for maybe a half hour or so. Known her? He didn’t even know her, her name, her disgust with Bronte, her damned persistence, and that was it.  She certainly wasn’t what he expected, or was she? Did it even matter now?  He could barely believe it all panned out this way, an hour ago obsessed with a ghost he was convinced he’d never see again, and now here he was, feet from her, skin and everything.

                “Reminds me of Vonnegut.”

                Aden looked over, she was still busy reading.

                “Really?”

                “Really.”

                “I don’t know what’s worse, having the decisions of the world being made by faceless, gray politicians in their bureaucratic attire, smoking factory cigars, wearing silk underwear, or polished, pampered bigots eating drum sticks off swords, crusading for gold- at least one seemingly dreams.”

                Shoshanna finished and flipped to another page.

                “Just a negative rant.”

                “I like this one.” She noted and read it out loud. “Love is a label duct-taped onto the inexpressible hormonal rage we piss on and complicate because we can’t control it, we don’t understand it, when really there’s no depth to it, it’s like the birds and the bees nonsense, nothing more than reproduction and mating, a natural mechanism to keep our miserable species going.”

                Aden was unsure, he penned it in ruin, angry at how the world paraded around the concept of love, but now here he was, knee-deep in that same damn whitewater- pathetic notions of love at first sight, the pretty idea of soul mate, a conspiring universe that draws two meant-to-be lovers together through unexplainable collisions.

                Shoshanna left the page and looked up. “Have you ever been in love?”

                The question caught him on his toes.  He wasn’t sure if she implying something or ofeven what to say.  He thought it over, desperately wanting to say exactly what she wanted to hear, but he caught himself before he blew bubbles, mad that’d he even thought about compromising what he really believed in for some stranger, and that’s what she was really, and probably what she would remain, another stranger.

                “I don’t know, I guess I’ve loved at times, but I’ve never really been in it.”

                “Do you think it’s real? Or something we invent to make ourselves feel better?”

                “Love is just over-attachment.  I think we goad ourselves into making it a necessity.”

                “But it makes life better, doesn’t it? Aren’t we better people for feeling so deeply about others?”

                “I don’t know, I think the former is perspective.  The latter, fact.”

            She didn’t once look up.  Aden caught a snapshot smile on her face before she flipped to another page.

                “What about you?”

                “What about me?” She asked and kept reading.

                “Have you ever been in love?”

                “Sometime forever ago.”

                Suddenly Aden felt his gut twist.  It made him nauseous, imagining that another guy had ever made her laugh, held her secrets, and stolen her love.  He pictured some Dean character on a brick wall cradling her and rattling off ribbon poetry, then he thought of them behind closed doors, the two making pale love, and it made him sick to his stomach just imagining that she ever slept with another guy, or even possibly thought about it. 

                “So you see?” She asked and shattered his quiet rant.

                “See what?”

                “How everything is bullshit- politics, money, fashion, the protestor who drives 200 miles to protest a war with ‘Blood for Oil’ signs.”

                “It is, all of it.”

                “It’s all like those Chinese finger traps, everything- brand jeans, Facebook, sex, I can’t stand it.” She laughed and lifted the notebook. “Love the rant on the basketball player.”

                “Which one?” Aden leaned forward to catch the words. “The one praying after the game.”

                “Yeah, it’s gross that someone in the NBA would thank god for his talent of pitching leather balls into hoops, as if god, the cosmic overseer, invests his design in and actually cares about such nonsense.”

                “No one understands it, though.”

                “They choose not to.” She shut the notebook, climbed back over the mess, and slipped it into his jacket.  “You smoke?”

                Aden looked up and nodded, unsure of why she brought it up, he assumed she smoked and offered her a light.  She just shook her head and slid the pack back into his jacket pocket.

                “Can’t stand it, kissing a smoker is like kissing an ash tray.”

                “And kissing a diva is like kissing glittery s**t.”

                The words shot out of his mouth before he could roll them over.  He damned himself quietly for the slip, it was a toxic habit, how he always reacted like fire brick to even the slightest bit of criticism drawn against him. 

                “I suppose, wouldn’t know.” Shoshanna just shrugged and returned to the bed. “So why do you write?”

                Aden had never really thought about why he wrote and no one had ever asked him why.  He found it natural, exciting at times, often painful, but he could tether his scattered thoughts, create something out of nothing, outside of the bounds of convention and the world around him.  A day dreamer, he also lived in the temple idea of someday becoming an inspirational writer whose work defied time, imagining that all his short works were charcoal sketches for a magnus opum to come, what it would be though, he had no idea.

                “I guess I write to create, to dance real feeling across the page, something with skin and raw sensuality, and words- however inexpressible everything really is- are the closest to a sense of reality we can grasp, the closest we can really get to someone else.”

                “That’s why I think I’ve always been afraid of writing, I’m afraid I’ll never be able to handle the lack of truly expressing myself.  I try, but there’s more comfort in an empty page, in silence.”

                “At times.”

                She lingered before agreeing.

                “Sometimes I write to vent too, sometimes I fictionalize myself because I can control where I go on paper, and it seems like in life, even the choices and the moments I’m certain of fall out of my reach, and when I write I sink into the page and feel warm again.  Everything else is cold.”

                Shoshanna leaned forward, her eyes bent away from him.  “Why does it have to be?”

                “What?”

                “Cold. Everything. The world.  I try, I try to smile like everyone else, to make it all worthwhile, to escape the down, but it doesn’t change it, the fact that I-”

                Shoshanna drew back and shrugged it off.  Aden had an odd feeling that he knew exactly what she would say, that it was exactly what he had always felt, the reason for his own decay.  She looked up and held his eyes, fighting to say it.  She’d never met someone she thought could really understand, she always wanted to, but now that he was here, she didn’t.

                “It doesn’t matter.”

                “If you think about it, it does.” Aden waited.

                “I’m just not interested, I guess, in putting up with it all, it’s not fair, I never wanted to, I didn’t have a choice, now I’m a slave to my body, to dying, to people and all the crap around me.”

                They both looked away, caught deep under water in the same trench.

                “And all you do is hate.”

                “And all I do is hate.”

                “But you don’t want to.”

                “No.”

                “But it’s hard not to.”

“It’s hard.”

Aden saw the hurt surface and he wanted desperately to say something to make her smile again, laugh, to save her from it all, but he didn’t know how, or what to do, not when he hated and hurt just as much, if not more.

“ It’s not your fault, I mean how much money do we waste on ice cream and videogames and underwear and booze? Probably enough to feed Sudan for a year.  But it doesn’t matter, no one cares, and it’s hard not to hate a world so damn black and white.”

                “Does it help when you write about it?”

                “I get it out on the page, but it never goes away, the words just end up staring back at me, reminding me.”

                Shoshanna had always been afraid of that, of anything that would settle and remind her, the dust on the photo of her lover from forever ago, reminding her of time, of the past, of no going back, the lines on her face, that one day she would grow old and grey, and words, they could only preserve and never really solve, when all she wanted was to forget.

                “Have you ever published anything?”

                “Bits, pieces, but people don’t want to read about it, rubs off as hate I guess, people don’t like facing the black, especially when they’re living so comfortably in the white.”

                “Maybe it cripples your writing.”

                Aden supposed it did, even when he cropped up enough optimism when it came to his writing, it was never enough to keep him afloat, to turn the tone into diamond.  Besides, he’d lost faith in the literary world, in writing, people only wanted a light read, something entertaining, or some closet-list of facts to further their own preconceived notions about the world around them they so desperately pretend to understand.  But he found that his lack of faith in humanity had bled beyond his writing.

                “It cripples our lives.”

                “When you hate something or someone, isn’t it ironic, how we become slave to it.”

                “Even when you love something you become a slave to it, even when I look at the beauty of the world around us, the rain, the moon and the tides, the expanse of the universe, dreams, down to the fact that you and I are here at this very moment and we will never be here again, I just become a slave to that realization-”

                She understood it all too well.  She couldn’t stand not being in control, especially with how she felt and how she lived, and damn if anyone or anything tore at her footsteps.  She didn’t care if she walked on sand, as long as it was her choice, and even when her stubbornness had ruined her in the past, even if it would continue to, she wouldn’t let up on the reigns. 

                “And you can’t stand it.”

                “No.”

                “Because you’re not in control.”

                “Exactly, but it kills me, because life should be nothing more than a humbling experience.  And still, I don’t want to be a slave, not even to love.”

                She excused herself to the bathroom and shut the door, her body heavy, mind a flutter-kick of thoughts.  She wanted this, she left the book hoping he would find her, and she laughed when she thought about how she’d given up and taken the taxi only to literally run into him.  But now that he was here, she was afraid.  What was it?  The fact that it had actually happened, that he was what she wanted him to be and at the same time far more than she expected.  She wondered if Coelho was right, that when you really want something the whole universe seemingly conspires to help you achieve it. 

                Maybe that was what frightened her, because every other time everything seemed to fall into place, it always collapsed in the end, especially when it came to love.  She was betrayed before, the scars were old but still fresh, and she never wanted to be in that position again and yet, now here she was, falling again, at first sight again, illogically again, except this time she knew she couldn’t take the pain of falling out.  But she also knew she couldn’t run from it, that we live and die, that moments come and go, the morning spring, the evening autumn, and she was more afraid of never being able to stand again than falling.

                She palmed her face in the mirror, studying the color, the details, the room around her, how impermanent it all was, and she was afraid that something inexpressible, shared between two dying beings, could never be permanent, that it would always fade, that any love, no matter the depth, would become only a shade of young infatuation, that every moment to come would only wither it down to nothing.

                She shook her head, nothing would be resolved here, she would never know, and so she decided to let the moments decide as they came and went, to believe in tonight and let tomorrow be.

                “Come on.”

                Shoshanna left the bathroom, grabbed her coat and his, and headed toward the door.

                “Where are we going?”

                “Just come.”

                She led him up the stairs, anxious, like a kid again on Christmas morning, her blood pulsating with the waterfall rush poets and writers, kings and queens, waiters and lawyers and soldiers tried for centuries to preserve in jars of words and art, in dim rooms and candle-lit corners, on battlefields, in stale photos, in the seconds that lined the waking life that would come and just as easily go.

                “Is it still raining?”

                “I hope so.” Shoshanna opened the door and stepped out onto the roof.  The rain fell like watered quartz, gowning the city in a wedding dress that seemed to sift against the evening whisper, the lights ghostly, lingering, like words that break between lovers who should have never given up, or given in.

 “Sometimes I spend the whole night up here, just staring at the sky, the city.  People rush around their entire lives and they don’t even stop for a moment, to simply look at the world around them.”

                “It’s sad.”

                “A tragedy.”

                They stood in comfortable silence, lingering, as if on the edge of the world, their bodies tense and close, whitewashed hands outstretched, fingers dying to feel, to trace the lyrics.  They wondered together, and miles and miles apart, what love meant, if it could mean, if this was it, if they should go for it, and while both wanted to know, to love the other, to be loved, like any other human being they were caught in the Constantine wire of doubt, of fear, of cowardice, of being unable to let it all go and freefall, to make love like there’s no tomorrow, to make love like the world will stop and the moon will fall from the sky, to make love like they’re the only two living, breathing, beating things in this entire universe, to make love because they are desperately in it, and one day, they both know but they won’t say, there will be no tomorrow and there will be no more love…

                Shoshanna turned to him, she couldn’t linger further.

                “In a world like this, can we really mean love when we say it? When we feel it?”

                “I think when we say something, anything, we should mean it. Mean every damn thing we say.” He whispered as he watched the rain slide down her face like silicon brushstrokes on canvas, or a string of sunlight on a green pane, and he wound himself against the thought, that perhaps transience is what validates beauty, the fact that you can never be here or there ever again, that all slips into the sea eventually, that she could be beautiful in every passing moment, in every angle, in every way, even until the very end.   “And in a world like this, I think love is all we really have.”

                “Would you mean it if you told me you loved me?”

                Aden knew he’d mean it, but words wouldn’t do, they could never do, and to jar the inexpressible, to shell out on the moment, he realized were a sin.  Love, to be abused, mistreated, betrayed, wasted, or fretted away, was such a loss, and the loneliness, the despair, the ache of being caught up in himself, on always living on the edge of a knife, no longer worth it, not here and not now.

                “I would.”

                He took her hand, palmed the silver of her skin, and together, above the backdrop of mist wick lights and water color concrete, distant faces in swollen windows, strange bodies, the passing of cars, the living, the dying, the turning twine of starlight in the runny tar night, the casket questions of where we will one day go, what will we become, and who we will be, they stepped off the edge of the world and love become a moment of undoing.

               

Reviews

[Star Shaped Heart]

sometimes i wanna kill you two... lmao! i havent been able to stop writing and creating. for 3 days at the beginning of jan i couldnt stop rhyming, making contradictions, cliff hangers, puns, borrowing lines etc etc etc and making stories intentional with deeper meanings. and since then, WRITING! its good and bad. i cant wait to get em on here. do people think you guys are crazy too? they do me... thats why its sometimes bad... lol! this you wrote high brow is fiction based on fact to exactly whats happened to my life. soon to come my writings about Mr Pessimist and Mrs Optimist taking over the world together UNSTOPPABLE!!!!! hahaha!

[jessica Wray]

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[Linear]

The Hollow Man as asked me to read this, now my attention span is child like, but I shall put it into my reading list and try to resd it when I can, and then I shall review thank you.

[Katie_Steele]

AMAZING! Such talent!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!