likesbears: (via: brightredlemons)
fiction inspired by rundonotwalk and stanley kubrick
I looked out my window at the tree branches, which were still waving wildly. Once again I had the strange notion that the white flowers on the branches were somehow “more than flowers” and once again I felt like I was on the verge of understanding something—but then it was gone. In its wake I found myself thinking again about my last purchase, during which the usually reticent, hipster delivery dude with his skinny black jeans and Chuey wool biking cap suddenly opened up and started talking a mile a minute about his time spent working in a growhouse in college. There was something about the plants that he liked being around. He used to sit in the shadowy living room in a canvas camping chair with an iced mango green tea and read science fiction novels (sometimes aloud, he informed me) among these enormous, crystal encrusted pot trees that sprouted pod shaped purple buds like something from another world.
“There was this one season that was really wild,” he said, “The plants seemed to be radiating or something. I’d have these visions of something coming out of them—a crazy spirit being like a plant version of the Aliens from the Alien movies.” He looked at me to gage my reaction and I nodded instinctively, although I was having a hard time processing everything he said.
“I only smoked it once,” he said. “Believe it or not—one toke of that switched your shit up. It was like a super weed. American Beauty Gob-ment styles. We only moved it for a week before the whole shop got closed. Permanent-like. Hewhocannotbenamed didn’t want that stuff getting out on the streets and waking everyone up—calling them to revolution and shit. No way.”
He’d spoken more in those few minutes than he had in the course of several months of deliveries, when he’d glance up from his texting to ask me politely what was up and nod when I told him nothing much as he texted on his phone. I didn’t mind as I preferred to keep it professional with whoever they sent over. I noticed his occasional side glances to the piles of books lying about and wondered which ones he recognized.
Was it Crime and Punishment, or The Trial? Maybe Hemingway or The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson that caught his eye?
Was it Heidegger? Nietzsche, Derrida or Deleuze? Midnight’s Children or Shakespeare? Gertrude Stein or Shirley Jackson?
Or maybe it was the short stack of Manga novels whose colorful spines were slices of art candy?
At one point while talking about the growhouse he bent over to silence the relentless buzz of his phone and revealed a band of white flesh with bones sticking out above the elastic band of his boxers. That night I’d dream about seeing him as a small dot standing way out on a metal beam at some kind of immense construction site. They were building a skyscraper next to a pit. In the dream I found myself predicting that he was about to be blown off the metal plank and falling down for thousands of years, Gandalf style.
“It was almost like they were trying to talk to me about whatever I was thinking…or reading…” he seemed excited by this last bit, and I finally realized that during the entire time he’d been delivering this unexpected monologue, he’d been staring at the Netflix envelope next to the TV. The DVD was on top with its painted title side clearly visible: “2001, A Space Odyssey.”
“That was one of the books I read,” he said, when he felt me watching him stare. “It’s actually the one that really got me wondering if I was meant to be there, reading that book at that moment, in that growhouse with those particular plants close-by.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I looked down at the floor.
“Do you like science fiction?” he asked—his voice low and conspiratorial.
“Yeah,” I said from behind my bangs.
“Have you seen that movie before?”
“2001? Oh, um, no. But I’ve seen a few of the famous scenes, and I know the general idea.”
“Oh. So now you’re finally going to watch it.”
“I guess so. It’s one of those movies that I always knew I wanted to see but never did…cuz, well I dunno why I didn’t. It’s weird cuz it’s the kind of movie you’d think I’d see…just knowing what its about—it seems right up my alley. Given the things I’m interested in.”
My voice sounded funny. I wasn’t use to talking to him, and I certainly wasn’t used to him staring at my mouth while it moved.
“What are you interested in?” he asked, his green eyes sparkling.
My first thought—out of habit—was to shut down. I wanted to hold on to all of this stuff for just a little while longer. At which point it would be necessary to be calm and measured. A few months ago I would never have been having this conversation at all.
But this was the new era—the law of 6 degrees shined over my head like the hundreds of bulbs I’d wired up the apartment with—keeping me lit up and AWAKE—gathering clues like a detective, knowing that each and every person I came into contact could provide the information and the identity of the boy. He could be a friend of a friend—a little brother or the son of the Con Ed guy I never let in to read the meter. It seemed that it was left to me to remain open when I’d be clamped shut.
“Me? Um well, I dunno—time and consciousness, mainly. The next level of human evolution and how it’s all happening on the internets. Through technology, but you know—in a non-Fascist way.”
I stopped talking. I heard birds tweeting outside.
“Wow,” he said, but I couldn’t tell how he meant it.
“Wow—what? Are you interested in any of that stuff?”
“All of it,” he said softly, smiling in a way so open and unabashed that I had to look down again.
