In
the Opposite Direction
by J. J. Steinfeld
I
A few minutes before, the sun just
about to rise, a cold, windy summer’s morning, Corey had been walking
down the street, thinking about how he needed to get his life in order:
eat better, get more sleep, find an ordinary, routine job, stop screwing
things up, he had diagnosed himself. He was hoping that today, or maybe
later in the week, he would meet someone new, a woman he could hold, not
have to talk about the past; or if he did talk about the past, he could
make up less scarred one. It’s been over a year since the woman he
adored, that was how he used to describe her, still thought of her, left
him one morning, right after they had finished breakfast together. Her
leaving completely caught him by surprise. Scrambled eggs, hash browns,
whole-wheat toast, freshly squeezed orange juice. He had burned the
toast, but quickly toasted up four new slices, toasted to perfection,
she had complimented him. He had squeezed the orange himself. He had
really tried not to mess up, to tell her the truth about his life, to
every morning make the best possible breakfast for both of them. He
adored her, told her that so many times, and it crumbled in a second. He
hadn’t lied to her, hadn’t made up another person for her.
No matter how uneasy he was with the
past, he kept thinking about it during the morning, as though he were
studying someone else’s mistakes and errors. Then he saw the store
window and stopped. Corey reached into his inside jacket pocket, the
pocket with a dozen stick pens and a small gun. All but one of the pens
fell to the sidewalk and Corey thought of pick-up sticks. Stick around…stick-with-it-ness…stick
in the mud…a stickler for… He caught himself saying the words
aloud. Stick to your guns…stick around… Stick ‘em up, he said at
the two mannequins. I have a gun, yes, I have a gun…
Corey pulled the small gun out of his
jacket pocket—a gun he had traded a beautiful leather coat for a week
ago; a leather coat he had stolen earlier that day—and shot at the
larger of the two mannequins through the store window, the glass
trembling into a fissured topography, but he missed his target. The
window display was for beachwear, a lazy day at the seashore: colourful
umbrella, overflowing buckets of sand, oversized sea shells, inflated
grotesque beach creatures lounging absurdly next to the happy mannequin
couple, the suggestion of a forgotten sideshow world. The larger
mannequin looked just like his old high-school English teacher, the one
Corey had shown the first batch of poems he had ever written, and the
man, a fleshy arm around his student’s shoulder, said, "These are
a tender, courageous arrangement of words, Corey. You are wise beyond
your years. I sense you will be a great writer one day."
Arrangement, Corey thought, what a hideous description, said as much to
his teacher. Corey never became a writer, not a published writer; he
held no desire to be a professional writer although he was fascinated by
words and the writings of others, and often wrote poems that he rarely
showed to anyone.
Now, recalling his teacher’s words
with a sharp, memory-scraping accuracy, he looked at the mannequin he
had shot at and questioned his mind’s construing of a resemblance. How
could that be? The mannequin was sexless, a smooth plaster form. At the
beach the teacher had wanted to drown Corey, or so Corey had accused
him. "I’ll not let go of you, you’ll be safe. Embraced by the
sea is when I feel closest to God," the man had tried to assure the
teenager, embracing his student. "I don’t believe in God,"
Corey had yelled at his teacher, twisting out of the man’s hold. But
he did believe in God, prayed to God even when he was in jail. "I
want you to understand, Corey, I didn’t mean to…" If he hadn’t
thrown sand in his eyes and ran, the man would have led him into the
ocean. Corey heard the man shout after him that he looked forward to
seeing him at school, that his poetry was lovely, but Corey promised
himself never to believe another sweet-worded compliment.
He shot the gun again, missing his
target once more, this time the glass shattering, a sound of both
foreboding and angry celebration. He looked around, concerned for the
first time if anyone was nearby. It was early, too early for any of the
tourist shops to be open. The smell of the ocean was bringing memories
with it. The last week, fifth morning in a row, he had been coming down
to this area, about fifty kilometres from where he grew up. Stepping
into the window, closer to the larger mannequin, he fired twice quickly,
hitting the mannequin with one of the bullets, the misshapen form
falling to the floor, its left arm breaking off. Corey detected sadness
and fear on the smaller mannequin’s face, thought it might reach to
stop him, but he knew his imagination was entwined with his impulsive,
fervid actions. Corey fired again, shooting at the left arm of the
larger mannequin as if he thought the appendage were attempting to flee
the scene of the crime. The final bullet he shot hit the fallen
mannequin in the right leg. The wounded mannequin could no longer
suppress its pain, and agonizing screams filled the display window and
Corey’s ears. The smaller mannequin’s tears, Corey observed, filled
the disrupted beach.
After putting the now bulletless gun
back into his jacket pocket, Corey bent down and broke off the mannequin’s
right arm. Like breaking off a thick tree branch, he thought, but a
jagged piece cut into the palm of his right hand, cutting short his
poetic image. Some of his blood dripped on the smooth-faced mannequin;
then, intrigued by the random design, he drew eyes, a nose, and a thin
mouth on the smooth face. No vital organs hit, he whispered at the
mannequin, and laughed. Why in the midst pain—his pain? the mannequin’s
pain?—did his uncertain, edgy laugh emerge. Give me a gun and I’d
end your stupid bullshit—that’s what he told his teacher on the
beach, and the man cried, asked for forgiveness and secrecy…wept the
word love, and Corey laughed and threw the sand.
Holding on to the tree branch of an
arm, like a souvenir of a lost holiday, he thought this time, Corey
walked through the beach display, knocking over the colourful umbrella
and buckets of sand, crushing the sea shells underfoot, spitting at the
inflated grotesque beach creatures, and stumbled out of the window. He
considered picking up the pens he had dropped earlier, but instead
succumbed to childish playfulness and kicked them from the sidewalk onto
the street. He wondered what sound would be made when cars ran over the
pieces of plastic, whether the ink would be squeezed out into a warning
message. Once more Corey looked around and didn’t see anyone, thinking
he was lucky this time, and after hurling the mannequin’s right arm as
far as he could down the street, in the direction of the ocean, into the
past, he hurried off in the opposite direction, his body covered with
the cold sweat and exhilaration of a man who had tempted and sidestepped
fate.
II
The waitress, who had served Corey his
breakfast each of the previous four times he had eaten at this touristy
coastal diner, and each time told him how he reminded her of her grown
son, the way he always looked down at the table and played with his
food, but this fifth visit he told her that he wasn’t especially close
to his mother, that he had broken her heart on more than a few
occasions, the way he couldn’t stay out of trouble. Thinking that her
own dear son had brought happiness into her life, despite his
limitations and handicaps, the waitress suggested her customer clean his
injured hand, told him there was a first-aid kit under the cash
register, and he said he’d be okay, he always healed fairly quickly.
"You don’t want that cut getting
infected," she said, refilling her customer’s coffee cup.
"Pain has a way of making me feel
more alert, less complacent, if you get what I‘m saying," he
said, pressing a piece of toast against the palm of his injured hand.
"Not really," the waitress
said, walking away from her enigmatic customer. Corey resumed breaking
his toast into pieces, smaller and smaller, an artisan confused by his
creation. Pain, he thought, the pain of existence…pain in
the ass…painful… full of pain—thinking about words as a way to
counter the futility he was feeling—the taunting, mocking mannequin,
he imagined, had felt pain, excruciating pain. Corey was sitting at a
table in the back, underneath a photograph of the Atlantic Ocean, even
though the diner was less than a stone’s throw from the Pacific Ocean,
if you had a strong throwing arm, He saw himself in the photograph, and
his old English teacher. Then he imagined the contours of the ocean as
the contours of God, and had the urge to write a poem about that image.
Later, after he went back to his room.
When the two police officers, young,
handsome men wearing protective vests, came into the diner, Corey, three
or four years younger than them but too gaunt and pale to be called handsome any
longer, turned his body toward the wall with the Atlantic Ocean
photograph, wished he hadn’t brought his bulletless gun with him. What
sort of protection would that be, its steel mimicking ferocity? What
explanation could he give for the hidden weapon, lethargic inside his
jacket? A good-luck charm? A gift with sentimental value from a
cherished friend? Should have left it with the wounded mannequin. He
thought of the two police officers as Neptune and Poseidon, their guns
as tridents, attempted to differentiate which one was the Greek god,
which one Roman.
Strange, how he didn’t remember the
lineage of Neptune and Poseidon, but nevertheless played with the notion
of cop gods of the ocean. Something he tripped up on, the names of Greek
and Roman gods and goddesses. Ares and Mars, Demeter and Ceres, Hermes
and Mercury, Dionysus and Bacchus, Athena and Minerva, he recalled
mislabelling them on a school exam, the year he quit school, rather the
year he had his first serious run in with school authorities and the
police and had his formal schooling rearranged. Still, it wasn’t the
gods and goddesses, Greek or Roman, he needed to confront now, was
caught with in landlocked inevitability. The inevitability could be
dissolved, he thought, if he were on a boat sailing on the ocean: then
he could take deep, freeing breaths and look off into the distance, into
the vastness. He has a fear of water, though. One of the earliest dreams
he can recall was of being chained to himself, except his other self had
no ears or mouth, the two selves crawling along the ocean bottom,
crawling for dear life. He had never learned to swim, yet he loved the
ocean despite this fear, at least loved the idea of the ocean. Can you
love what you fear? Fear what you love? These were questions he had
asked on many occasions, as if they were a calling card he needed to
hand to any person he met. He had asked the two questions not that long
ago of a jail guard, who took particular delight in ridiculing Corey’s
then caged existence. Of the woman he adored, made love with every day
for a month after one of his jail stays, and who had left him abruptly
at the end of that month with an explanation that was now a memory
purgative for him. Of the memory of his parents, who’s parenting
skills were lacklustre to say the least. Something he actually wrote to
each of them in happy-silver-anniversary cards on what would have been
their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary had they not divorced ten years
earlier.
The police officers look around the
diner, but Corey, facing the wall, does not know this, not specifically.
His thoughts go back to the photograph. He liked the incongruity of the
misplaced photographic scene, or is it displaced, he thinks. He whispers
the words misplaced/displaced as if they are one word, a
prayerful word. He knows the police officers are looking for him, that
is not arguable, but he wonders who had called the police. As he was
walking toward the diner, he hadn’t seen anyone near him on the
street. The tourist shops weren’t open yet, the sun was barely up.
Just the diner. Perhaps someone from an apartment window, staring out
from the boredom of an anonymous life. Or from a distant rooftop,
binoculars spying his inexplicable disruption of the morning. Could he
extricate himself from the police officers’ pursuit, these cop gods of
the ocean? Cast doubt that he was the culprit? Could he explain his
injured hand? Shooting at the past—a mannequin in a store window as
history, his history—what a joke. You agree, officers? I’ve had some
disputatious yet meaningful conversations with officers of the law in
the past. He laughed at the imaginary conversation.
His right hand hurt, the palm sore, but
he still wrote on the napkin, word after word. He liked filling napkins
with words. He wrote the word betrayal, saw smaller words
dwelling within its sheath. There is little doubt in his mind that he
had been betrayed, informed on. Now he believes with an irrational
certainty that it is someone who knows him, a former fellow inmate, the
woman who left him after a month of lovemaking, the friendly waitress
who claimed he reminded her of her son. He cannot discard the word betrayal,
the letters adhering to him as firmly as the wordless tattoos he has on
his arms and back—starts to make other words from its letters, three
letters or longer words. Word games relaxed him—alone in his room as a
boy, locked in a jail cell, at a restaurant table—even if he squeezed
the pen so tightly that had it been an animal its neck would have been
snapped. It wasn’t that he felt resigned or trapped, only hating empty
spaces and long pauses. He was filling the time with the writing of
words, three letters or more, until... Until what? he thought as he
wrote "bet… tray… yet… let… late… ray… bay… rat… bat…
brat… bray… belt… ale… bale… tale…"
in quick, uncontrived succession.
Corey, if a succinct, social-services
description is needed, is a sad, disruptive man who is unable to
maintain regular employment. Or a more literary or psychological one:
thin, muscular, a mass of contradictions, a large vocabulary,
self-taught, an avid reader who alternates between volubility and a
reluctance to speak, except maybe to motherly waitresses, that it the
phase he is experiencing now, having just celebrated his twenty-fourth
birthday by shooting a mannequin in a store window because he saw
someone who had hurt him. From his past? From an imagined past? Lately—maybe
not so lately—thoughts of time fast and slow and devious, and images
and recollections came in and out of his mind shimmering, wavering. At
the age of twelve he began to speak and write eloquently of things
violent and disturbing. His parents were baffled yet pleased by their
son’s creativeness. First one teacher, then a child psychologist, and
later another therapist, began to speak of a talent, a facility with
language, My God, the child reads more than most adults, more than I do,
that child psychologist had said. Before his next birthday his mother
and father had separated and talked eloquently of divorce, the son
wrote, but not violently. There was no animosity or violence in their
marriage, he had written, only erasures and excuses. At the age of
fifteen he broke the jaw of a teacher, his first overtly violent act,
then walked out of the classroom. Throwing sand in someone’s eyes in
self-defence wasn’t a violent act, was it? It was English class, the
one course in school he liked. Still, he was outraged that morning,
tapping angrily at his desk, seeming to attempt to reshape what had been
happening in his life. The teacher twice told him to stop his annoying
tapping, and other students in the class looked at him with disapproval.
Later, in a letter to the woman who left him, he wrote of it "as
that forlorn fateful day drenched in damp despair…heck, a little
alliteration never killed anyone, and besides I don’t write for
publication, only to annoy myself, which I do in great abundance."
After the punch, he softly quoted a line from a poem that no one in the
class recognized, though one of the students was certain she had read it
somewhere. He had written the poem at his desk. Not his first poem. His
first poem he had already shown the teacher. Shown him all the poems he
had written. A week later he returned to school, bruises across both
sides of his face, stitches over his eyebrow and on his chin, a
nervous-handed calligraphy, and the police were called. He quoted
several lines of the poem as the police were arresting him. That was
almost nine years ago. Corey has spent nearly half of that time in jail:
petty theft, meaningless fights, senseless disruptions. He got out a few
days ago and would sit in a small, stuffy room of a rooming house until
he left in the morning, hungry and frustrated, until each morning he
would go to have breakfast, attempt to give some structure to his days.
This morning began as the others, changing only when he shoot into the
window before arriving at the diner.
When he first met the woman who was to
become the woman he shared a month with and later claimed he would jump
into the middle of the ocean for her without a second thought, yet he
wouldn’t use the word love—But you can’t swim, you told me,
she criticized his example of sacrifice—Corey was sitting at the
counter of a different diner, telling her that being with her was like
acting in a movie trying to evoke an earlier, simpler time. But earlier
times were never really simpler times, wouldn’t you say? She said that
to him. And he scratched his forehead, scratched very hard. "I feel
like I’m a character in a novel…a minor character but one who does
something crucial and irrevocable," Corey said, his fingers
creating a new language.
"What do you mean by that?"
she asked, touching his arm gently.
"I mean by that," he said,
paused, and looked at the counter. A tiny lake of spilled coffee caught
her attention. He swam with his thoughts through the coffee lake before
going on: "It means I have a preference for a more crafted
reality." He shook his head at his words, scratching harder,
finding new destinations on the limited terrain of his face.
The woman had married a man without
scars and with a steady job, that was how she had explained it to Corey,
on a small card, her handwriting neater than usual. As he thought of
that now, Corey shook his pen, trying to summon it to life. He drew a
few circles, trying to revive the pen, but it was out of ink. He said
something longingly to the memory of the woman. Then he reached inside
his pocket… Both police officers removed their guns, and to Corey it
sounded as if the cop gods of the ocean were both speaking at the same
time, a single loud voice.
"Put your hands on the
table."
"It’s a goddamn pen."
"…on the table…"
"A pen for writing—"
A bullet entered the wall near the
photograph of the Atlantic Ocean.
Corey’s gun was empty. He had a dozen
pens in the same pocket as his empty gun. Lots of pens, no bullets, no
swords either, he thought, rhyming pun with gun, gun with pun. The pen
is mightier, he yelled out, as if trying to impress a teacher who
thought he was unprepared for a classroom discussion.
Another shot, a bullet with purpose and
disdain.
His last thought and last sentence were
quite different. His last thought was of diving off the side of a boat,
into the ocean, and beginning to swim into the vastness. His last words,
coughed as much as spoken, were, "I never learned to swim…"
The first word fiction
writer, poet, and playwright J. J. Steinfeld learned to spell correctly
as a child was Kafkaesque. As an adult he has had a recurring
dream—or is it a nightmare?—in which he plays Scrabble with Franz
Kafka and loses by several hundred points each and every time. Despite
being trounced in Scrabble dreams, Steinfeld, who lives in
Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, has published a novel and nine
short story collections, including Forms of Captivity and Escape
(Thistledown Press, 1988), Dancing at the Club Holocaust (Ragweed
Press, 1993), Should the Word Hell Be Capitalized? (Gaspereau
Press, 1999), Anton Chekhov Was Never in Charlottetown (Gaspereau
Press, 2000), and Would
You Hide Me? (Gaspereau Press, 2003), along with two
short-fiction chapbooks by Mercutio Press, Curiosity
to Satisfy and Fear to Placate (2003) and Not a
Second More, Not a Second Less (2005), and a poetry chapbook
by Cubicle Press, Existence Is a Hoax, a Woman in Fishnet Stockings
Told Me When I Was Twenty (2003). His stories and poems have
appeared in numerous anthologies and periodicals, and over thirty of his
one-act and full-length plays have been performed in various forms,
ranging from staged readings to full productions. His first poetry
collection, An Affection for Precipices, will be published by
Serengeti Press in 2006. |
