To a flake of your life

The OCP movie work is getting interesting, finally, now that it is time to fit the puzzle together. I have lost interest by now, but two more creative minds are working on it. I have become more the spec-writer, producing pages and necessary screen-play patches, rather than commanding an over-all view of the script.



The brilliant engineers at NTC un-fixed the entire neighborhood's telephone connections three days ago. They assigned wrong phone numbers to our landline, so that the ADSL service no longer worked. But, it is alright now. I am on the internet from my computer, which feels much better than trying to write emails from the nearest cyber, where the kid has figured out that I might want to rent his DVDs.



Here's what might appear in the paper on Sunday:

---

To a flake of your life

Besieged is the word for how it felt. Trapped. Weighted. Buried, mauled, left to rot. Change was desperately the new sauce for vitality. Let it tang on the tip of the tongue, let a new tinkle be ear's new laugh, let it come, what may come, and let it bring what dares come. Such was the flare of a need for friction, a need for flight. But, there was little distance to be covered on a fire built of no fuel. The leash of professional slavishness was short. How far can a man run to escape work and detail, dialogue and scene, reversal and climax, sustained illusions of stillness that look into the soul?



Monsoon hasn't come yet; the heat is unbearable. There is not enough haze in the air to cut out the sun. Roof and walls thicken during the day, fatten with the poison of afternoon heat, make the nights infernal. Sleep becomes thin, unravels every minutes, leaves holes in its shimmering shroud through which come real and imagined worries. The threat of a night before a chemistry exam almost ten years before erases the trunk of experiences since then. Gone, the many years spent happy since, the few years of work and romance, of reading poems under a tree and writing poems on roofs, cliff-tops, peeking at a bird's nest after friends and merlot. Gone the welcome memories and maps of faces and bodies that otherwise spiced sleep. Panic sets in. Sweat becomes the cold prison from which the mind looks outward, at the already too-bright sky, the loud remonstrations of neighbors laboring at hand-pumps, and the knowledge that once more the reprieve has passed, once more, the cool black of night that should have been wrapped over eyelids has evaporated.



Desperate for something to hold, slapping the sweat that has matted his thin rat-tail hair, a man gazes west and sees what? A road to nowhere. Mhepi, its pine-forested pubic mound, and arranged in a ring below it a skirt of heat darting up from blacktop roads. Microbus drivers thrown just slightly off their already mad axis; their erratic swerving and cornering over long stretches of an empty road. Immobile like swatted flies, shopkeepers paste their cheekbones to small squares of concrete on their floors, shifting every few minutes on their straw mats to cover another inch of untouched coolness. In a tea-shop that doesn't sell tea, there is a girl, who can't be more than twelve years old, who has been wilted by heat and wrinkled and pruned by sweat into an unhappy hag. From the coldest part of the house, where she washes dirty dishes, an swarm of flies rises on cue, to hover inches away from new skin, testing the alien for signs of life, salt, nutrition dripping from nose-tip.



Thirty minutes pass. No fridge. No eatable that hasn't been left out in the heat. One half of the shop is dark, the shutters pulled down, a fan roaring from a corner. A phone rings and a body stirs awakes from one corner, crawls on all fours. It is a bitter, bitter man calling, angry at being duped: he paid good money to go somewhere. His money has disappeared, but the visa hasn't arrived. He trusted her, a sister from his village, he trusted her to take care of him, and now he is a destitute, without enough money to pay the lodge for the night, and there is the bill at the bar to worry about. She calms him. She calms me, her voice beseeching, scolding with mild seduction. She leads him through an interrogation with yes-no questions only. She strokes her hair as she forces him to agree. There is a bold stripe of blonde highlight in her hair.



Tell me your story. She stares back, stroking her hair, tapping the table with a thin, chipped nail. I write stories, but today I couldn't think of anything to write, so I have come hunting for stories. Tell me your story, and I will write it exactly as you want me to. She taps the table, asks me if I want anything else to drink. Where did that man want to go? You know, some Arabian fantasy, sun and sand and towers eclipsing man's ability to see clearly. What happened to his money? Why didn't his visa arrive? She stops tapping the table. What sort of stories would we tell? Interesting ones. Don't hesitate. Tell me, anything, about you, about the business, about the neighborhood. She gets up, clears the table of egg-shells and empty glasses.



So much for something to hold. So much for tell me your story. A stray dog corners itself into a tight box of shadows between house and wall and utility pole. Back off, mongrel, it says with its panting and squirting over the new kingdom. After almost a minute of staring back and forth, the dog no longer feels threatened, it lowers its hindquarters with princely leisure, lets its testicles hover over the ground, seeking the coolest spot. The spectacle is concluded. Although it is later in the afternoon, the heat is just as unrelenting. Instead of the scorching sun overhead, it is the waft from the ground that stifles. A thirsty tongue can't decide upon its essence: it switches between a coarse-barked log and a brittle wafer.



A boy brings a bicycle out-matched to him to the bridge over the Samakhusi sludge-run. There are three men sitting on the bridge, having surrendered in the fight against pre-monsoon heat. There is a stack of plastic envelopes, baggies, of all sizes, on the bike's carrier. But the boy isn't authorized to sell them: he stands guard by the bicycle and waits. Tell me your story, kid. I write stories, but I have nothing to write about today. He stares back, grabs the rails on the twelve-foot concrete bridge over Samakhusi and leans over. It is a ridiculous gesture. The water is barely four feet below, black and curdled, bubbling instead of foaming, moving only imperceptibly under the crust. Tell me your story, kid. Treat me to a flake of your life. He looks to the other men sitting on the bridge. He can't trust a man who sits on a bridge over Samakhusi, under Mhepi, asking for stories. He spits over the rails and watches the white blob float down, over an endless chasm, to echo and splash on the torrent a mile below.