A Masterpiece

       -18 degrees and the cold is caustic, but the man who sells his reindeer silhouettes on the side of the dirt road every day still tries. When I pass him on my way downtown, I’m stuck on the chorus of a Johnny Cash song I started singing when I stepped outside:  “Born to Lose.” I don’t like it, but extreme weather has a way of choosing things for you if you don’t choose quick.

       Today, for the first time, I slow my pace and really look at the silhouette man sitting in his red, duct–taped car. His head is small as an acorn squash and his body large like he’s wearing every sweater he’s got. Does he pray to God someone’s as crazy as he is? Crazy enough to stop?-18 degrees but my cheeks feel hot when our eyes meet and I don’t approach him. I’m an artist, which means I’m poor but also that I should support the man if I could. But I know I wouldn’t.

       “I could write about you though,” I say once I’ve passed. “Make something of us.” Because my next story will be a masterpiece and, if it isn’t, one of two dreadful things will occur: an apocalypse or –– worse –– nothing at all. But how can I write when my imagination is busy piecing together what people think of what I say and do based almost entirely on what they don’t say? Mentally writing and revising mini–conversations and selecting those to pursue in real life and those in stories?

         If a PhD program for “Highly Functional Craziness” existed, I’d get a full ride.

       At the diner downtown, I eat an orange. I haven’t had fruit in almost as many days as I haven’t written anything good, and how can a writer faced with scurvy compose a masterpiece? While peeling the orange, I spray juice on the dry, lean jalapeño–of–an–old man sitting beside me at the bar reading the Horoscopes. 

        He turns his head. “I know your kind,” he says. “Troublemaker.”

        Had he seen me use the Men’s restroom?

     “Careful: the government is always watching.” He folds his paper. He wants to talk. A pretty young woman’s attention thaws an old man’s story like March sunlight thaws a frozen lake. “Didn’t want to join the Foreign Service so I changed my name in 1970. Plus I was dodging my fourth ex-fiancée if you know what I mean.”

        I nod. I don’t know anything about it.

      “Names are arbitrary anyhow,” he says. “My second fiancée was Mary Elizabeth, which was too plain a name for someone with a fancy laugh so I called her something different. She still lives back home in Rutland. After your fifth abortion, what else do you do? Paid for three of them. I’m a bad man.”

        I open my journal to take notes.

        “I’m not right in the head if you know what I mean, sugar plum,” he says.

        I nod. I know all about it.

        “It’s the war did it to me.”

        Which war? But I don’t ask because now he’s talking about corn syrup and Socialism and the absurdity of making laundry a day’s long ordeal and a duck farm in New Hampshire that’s been in his family for three hundred years. His story rockets hot through my veins like a drug and, for a minute, I’m high and no longer born to lose like Johnny Cash. I’m born to write and make something of all this madness and truth –– something at once exquisite, authentic, and functional like the finest of china.

      When he interrupts his story to ask me what I write, I put down my pen and close my journal and start separating my orange into wedges –– look around. The cold has plastered frowns or smiles onto the faces of patrons entering the diner. I now feel more panicky than high; weather has a way of taking up too much space like what people don’t say. And also like the coat I’m still wearing even though I planned to stay as long as it would take to write something good. Finally: “Tragic–comedy.”

       “Delightful.” This dry, lean jalapeño-of-an-old man stands. “Well I’m off.”

       “Where do you go?”

       “What do you mean ‘where do I go?’ Home. I go home.”

      My wording makes it sound like I think he’s homeless. A writer and yet, every day, I fail to delicately manage how I relate to the world through language.  In conversation, I fail to bring out the finest of china. And so, in style, I continue:  “And do what at home?”

       "A whole lot of nothing. What else does a veteran with a PhD in Political Science do? Not to mention I’ve done enough for the people already if you know what I mean.”

        I nod. I’m not sure if I do.  “Why do you read the Horoscopes?”

      “For me, sugar plum, those are the comics.” He snags the mini bottle of hot sauce and the saltshaker too and stuffs them in his coat pocket. And then he’s gone, and so is my orange, and all I can hear are patrons ordering their eggs how they like them. I, personally, don’t know how I like my eggs or if I even like eggs. This has caused me anxiety in the past and anxiety now and will forever if I don’t figure it out.  I study the destitute ‘vacancy’ sign blinking at irregular intervals outside the motel across the street. Reminding me of the smile of a meth addict with missing teeth, this promising message’s ‘n’ and ‘y’ are dead. Is this really so hard to fix, or has the owner resigned to the truth that we’ll understand his message with or without the letters ‘n’ and ‘y’? What makes one person keep trying even in the most inclement conditions, another give up, and another decide he’s done enough? What are the contours of ‘enough’?

      My final question: if I don’t get a master’s degree or at least write a masterpiece, will I end up alone in backwoods Maine eating canned beans, reading Steven King novels, and revising tragic-comic stories that are tragic–comic mostly because they’re ridiculously terrible? Will I die plagued by what Milan Kundera might call the ‘unbearable lightness’ of what I (and others) never said or did? Will my being have no gravity whatsoever? I laugh because, if not unbearable myself, I’m funny, aren’t I? At least give me that.
      But for now, I need to write something –– anything. I take up my pen. Like the first winter frost condensing on a window, an experience about which I’d always been wary of writing condenses on a blank page in my notebook. I don’t like what I have to say, but it’s at least better than writing Horoscopes or fortunes for cookies:

In a psychiatric institution six years ago, Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being appeared at my bedside. If you asked me about my confinement and the book, I’d tell you it was all a conspiracy involving doctors, lawyers, CEOs, government officials, and maybe even the Pope himself. These figures wanted me –– a writer –– to be as miserable as they are and to keep me from trying to let the cat out of the bag again.

There was no God or Finance –– no China or Law. No Perfect. These “realities” were manufactured by the first fearful, discontent men who sought grounding and glory and other impossible things. Over time, in a trance, people moved away from creating value in their lives through relationships with others and with the natural world –– through what’s real. Degrading relationships, they tried instead through religion, money, territory, titles and synthetics.  And it was my life's purpose to help put an end to the real suffering generated by such imaginary things. Although arbitrary in its own way –– language has the capacity to both restore ‘the authentic’ and build community. I’d start a revolution through writing stories that expose how individuals I meet relate to the “real” and the “imaginary.” It would be entirely selfless!

But, claiming that I’d try to break it open and swallow the ink, the doctors wouldn’t give me a pen. I said I was mostly happy and clear –– that I didn’t want to die; my life was composed of snuggles, mountains, a mother’s love, and art. All that was unbearable was what I called ‘my abduction.’ The conspirators were trying to brainwash me into believing that I and the world in our natural states were inadequate. That I needed external validation –– especially theirs –– to be okay. After all, I couldn’t leave the institution until they determined I was ‘better.’ For me, what became more unbearable than anything else was the possibility of never clearly translating my thoughts and stories into writing nor learning how others would have responded to them.

Months later, my mother confessed to giving me Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being when, drugged by those doctors trying to delude and suppress me, I’d asked her for a book. I’d said I needed something to distract me from the realities of my oppression and growing fear. Never questioning the presence of the word “lightness,” I’d at once fixated on the combination of the words ‘unbearable’ and ‘being.’ I’d claimed that the book was ‘propaganda’ and that, in the form of distortions, language was destructive. I’d accused my mother of being part of the conspiracy. Because not even she would listen, I stopped speaking. Tormented by the loss of my ‘voice,’ I stopped sleeping. When I finally met the doctors’ standards for misery, they released me. Now self–obsessed, terrified, desperate, confused and backwards like almost everyone else, I was no longer a menace to society. How could I write anything compelling about ‘the authentic’ when I didn’t know what was real and what imaginary?

Home again, the process of eating a bagel devastated me. At first, the fact that there were two halves was promising. For a while at least, I’d have something to distract me from my terror. But, three quarters of the way through the second half, I panicked. Soon it would be gone and, until I found something else to hold onto, I’d be left suspended in that hollow, groundless space of ‘nothing.’ The fact that doing something I once enjoyed –– eating a bagel –– now devastated me was even more devastating than the bagel. So I turned to God and Nyquil and bad boys and cookies. 

My conspiracy theory had always seemed full of loopholes, unclear, and even self–indulgent. So I never wrote about my experience until now –– unable to think of anything else to write about and desperate. Writing something is better than nothing, isn’t it? And every masterpiece starts with something, doesn’t it? But what will people think of this story, and what if nothing comes of it? 

But I must keep trying despite my fear. I must make something of myself. I must write a masterpiece. A masterpiece! I mustn’t let the conspirators win.

Or is this piece of writing itself evidence that they already have?