Allegory of Scientology

On a bridge leading to a castle covered in snow I met a man who introduced himself as a Scientologist. – You certainly don’t look like a Scientologist, I told him. He was wrapped in thick furs, and had a weather-beaten face. – This is the Castle of Hope, he said, drawing a thin piece of wire from his coat. If you try to go on, I will slip this wire around your neck and strangle you. – Well then I’ll leave, I told him. – No, he said. If you turn around and leave I have been instructed to do the same thing. – So what am I to do? I asked. – That’s your choice, he said. It was hardly a choice at all, I thought, until I hit upon a simple solution. I must walk backwards, always keeping my eyes on the man. I stepped back, cautiously at first, then growing more and more confident as his eyes that returned my gaze began to disappear in the fog. Then he and the castle had disappeared, and I was on my way again. But why did I not think to step around him, and walk backwards towards the Castle of Hope?

Child Photography

A man at a party was once introduced to me as a world-famous photographer. He was handsome, in his mid-forties, with long dark hair. Later in the evening, I was sitting with him beside a roaring fire. I asked if I could see some of his work. He shrugged his shoulders like he really couldn’t be bothered, but then reached behind him and pulled out a giant black binder, handing it to me. I opened it and found giant glossy photos of a young girl, who couldn’t have been more than eleven or twelve, sleeping half-naked on a bunk bed. The covers had been pulled off and she wore only a pair of panties. In another picture, the girl had rolled over, and her panties had been pulled down. Another picture was a close up shot, with a flash, of her genitals. I snapped the album shut. The artist was smoking a cigarette now, his eyes fixed to mine. – This is child pornography, I said. – Yes, he said, nodding intently. That is one of the interpretations. Yes.

Spleen

There was once a great movement to overcome the “curse of Platonism” on the imagination. Plato made us believe in beauty, love, and the soul: abstract essences that originated in a higher power. So when we banished God as an impotent idea we also impoverished our world. We lost beauty, love, and the soul, because our language still adhered to these abstractions. Today, however, we suspect that this was a misreading of Plato. Perhaps Plato had discovered that to be before an object of one’s true love, or to stand before something really beautiful, is a crushingly banal experience. To a loved one we utter inanities, and feel as moved by a few nice words as we do before the Venus de Milo. A feeling of universal togetherness and immortality occur naturally after a half bottle of wine and watching the sun set over a lake. These are GOOD things, thought Plato, and enslave us to The Good, the general, the banal, the ethereal sky where there must exist perfect triangles and blue flowers. It is not a matter, therefore, to override any curse, but to admit the good as good and reject it. There is no shame in pursuing something less than good, for it bears all the specificity of spleen. 

The Abstract Man

I know an abstract man. He often talks of love, the soul, beauty, and the completion of the spirit. In his darkest moments he speaks of the void. I asked him once, as he was suffering what appeared to be a breakdown in my kitchen, What is the void, exactly? Why do you blame the void when it seems clear that’s you’re upset over a very specific set of circumstances? Namely, the woman you loved but left for rather arbitrary reasons (you were not sure if you loved her) started sleeping with someone else and is really happy? He looked at me, shook his head, profoundly disappointed. – We are born and we die but in between we struggle to make sense of a few scraps of life, he said, in a booming voice. – Surely one must live specifically before one is able to paint the world with generalities, I responded. I should have phrased it differently. He all but screamed, and said that I had clearly never known the void, and that I had no soul. He left my house abruptly, smashing awkwardly against the doorframe on his way out. He was right, perhaps. But my real error was to think that one needs to have lived first to become abstract. That’s not true. We are born into abstraction, die in abstraction, and in the middle only a few see strange fragments, like the mole between two fingers, a new color of grass, or a Nokia cell phone.

The Clouds

When things finally became the way I had waited so long for them to become, I stared out at the blue sky watching clouds pass, waiting for the feeling of nothing to pass.

Completion

The screenwriter has come to the end. He has read it over it twenty times. His friends have read it. His family has read it. The agents have read it. The managers. Four producers. Ten investors. Three directors. Twenty actors. The revisions have been made. The pages are locked. The script is printed. He has no need for a copy, but he has made one anyway. It is years from what it will be, but his work is over.

The Great Wall

The man who first thought of the Great Wall of China never got any credit. He imagined a wall bigger and longer than any wall in the world. He imagined it dividing China. But he was hundreds of years too early, and he lived in a place and time when no one cared and there was no need for a Great Wall. He died unhappily, wishing he could have lived long enough for someone else to have thought of the idea, and the building to begin. He imagined himself showing up on the building site, and showing his drawings as proof that he had been the first to think of it. He never considered the idea that they might have laughed at him not because they didn't believe him, but because it doesn’t matter.

The Pink Rose

I gave her a pink rose. She smiled and thanked me and put the rose to her nose and smelled the rose. It must have smelled good, because she opened her mouth as though to smell through her mouth as well. My mother always told me that I shouldn’t make too many funny faces in the mirror or my face would get trapped in a funny face and I would never be able to change it and I would ruin my life. But I never thought it could happen to her. She smelled and smelled and her mouth opened wider and wider. She plunged her nose into the rose and her tongue came out as though to taste the air around it. I wanted to talk to her. But her mouth was open so wide she could have fit the rose into her mouth and swallowed it. And I waited for her mouth to close and her to remember that I was there, and that a rose is just a rose. But her eyes became red and a tear fell from one of them and rolled down her cheek. And then finally she looked at me, her face frozen and open wide, and she said, I canah claha hmy hauch. I canah claugh ha haugh.

Lost Space-Time

John Hanson’s most prized daily experience was discovering a secret pocket of space-time, which to him meant moments when he was doing something boring and then felt inspired to stop and sit down in the corner of the room or at a table in the mall and scribble some ideas on a napkin, or even just stare out and see the world as though for the first time. The ideas were usually bad ideas, and he usually thought more about himself than he did about the things he was looking at, but that didn’t matter. Space-time made John’s daily existence into a field of endless possibilities, a mine field of alternate lives. The idea of a negative version of space-time, however, began to develop in John’s mind, like an evil twin that wants to destroy everything beautiful. John called this, rather imaginatively, LOST SPACE-TIME. Lost space-time was the sudden experience of panic that he was supposed to be somewhere else doing something else, and that he was already very late. During moments of lost space-time John heard people shouting at him, like the voices of his old schoolteachers. But what made lost space-time especially frustrating was that John could never remember what it was he was supposed to do. Naturally, the two ideas began to merge. John began developing the terror, mostly when he was trying to get to sleep, that whenever he would discover a new pocket of space-time that it would also bring with it a simultaneous feeling of lost space-time, as if the moment a pocket of space-time would open up it would open up into the void of loss and an impossible missed obligation. Part of this merging was the way John named it. Had John called lost space-time anything else it might not have invaded on his space-time. John found the only way to combat this dilemma was to long for lost space-time, to make appointments and obligations and not record them, so that his day would be filled with fear of missing appointments. John hoped that lost space-time would open up a new pocket of space-time. In those days John Hanson wasn’t working.

Booked

I love a woman. I say goodbye to her and tell her I love her. On the train to work, she is there. I ask her what she is doing on the train, since she usually stays home during the day. She tells me she doesn’t know what I am talking about. I love this woman. I tell her to stop following me, and touch her arm. She gives me her number, and tells me that she is going to a party tomorrow. When I go to the office she is there. I tell her I love her again, and she immediately complains that I didn’t call her last night. I promise to come visit her that night. During my lunch break, I go to get a sandwich and she is there, working behind the counter. I tell her I love her and that I see her everywhere and that I would like a big sandwich. She laughs, and I give her twenty dollars and tell her to meet me for a drink after work. She agrees. Back in the office she is there again. She has just started work part-time to pay off her student loans. I tell her to drop by my office in an hour, because I used to work for a bank and know a way to defer the interest charges. I’ll see her in an hour, then after work for a drink, then when I get home, then later that night, and again tomorrow night at a party.

Audit

She came home and found him at the table with the tax files open. She asked him what he was doing. He told her that he was doing his taxes. She said that it was too late in the year to be doing his taxes. Or too early. He told her that there was an audit. She asked him why he was being audited. He told her that he had started a phony charity in connection to his other legitimate charity in order to funnel off some of his capital gains made from short-selling last year and that he had been paying himself a monthly salary of ten thousand dollars a month as overseer of the charity. She asked him what the charity was for. He told her that it was for women’s rights. She asked him why he had never told him about this. He told her for obvious reasons. She asked him why he was telling her now. After all, he could easily have kept the audit a secret. But instead he’s got their tax files spread all over the dining room table. He told her that his lawyer had said she had better know, because he had started the company under her name, and that in fact she was the one who was being audited.

Parallel Dogs

He told her that the dog was dead. She was very upset and said that the dog couldn’t be dead, because she could still hear it barking in the backyard. They went to the back door but the dog wasn't there. He told her that the dog can live on in her imagination, but that it isn’t alive in reality anymore. She asked him if the dog was alive in heaven. He told her that if there was heaven then the dog was there, still barking in the backyard. She opened the door, saying that she wanted to let the dog in then because it was cold outside. He told her that it wasn’t cold in heaven, but she got upset and said that the dog was cold, because if there was a backyard just like this one in heaven then it could also be cold in heaven. She called out to the dog. He told her that if the dog was in heaven then it couldn’t also be here on earth. She started to cry and said that maybe this was hell because the dog was dead here and it was in the cold on earth and they couldn’t help it. He shut the door and said that this was not hell, because dogs don’t go to hell and so the dog couldn’t have died here. She said that this was now hell because the dog was gone, and because they could imagine a better world like earth where the dog was still alive but very cold and barking to be let in. He said that this couldn’t possibly be hell, because the dog’s body was still buried in the backyard. He pointed to the mound and the little cross he had put up in the backyard. They went out and looked at it. He told that this was earth, and that earth is full of life and death and we like to invent categories to separate the good from the bad, but that we often get confused by our own categories and think of them as parallel worlds. She didn’t understand this, and said that she didn’t like living with so many parallel worlds. He told her that the way to stop getting trapped in parallel worlds was to remember that there are only actually parallel lives. There are hundreds of thousands of dogs in the world and when one dies another is quickly born. And that there is a little girl and her father talking about this very same thing right now in Shanghai, becuase their dog has died too, and they too are coming to the same conclusion, that there are many dogs in the world, and he is already putting on his shoes to go to the kennel to find a new parallel dog. She ran inside and returned with his shoes. She told him to put them on quickly, because the man in Shanghai has already got his on and they might get to the kennel first and take the last parallel dog. That’s ok, he said, putting on his shoes. They have to drive all the way from Shanghai.

Marriage

He told her he loved her. She asked him what he meant, exactly. He told her that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her and grow old and have children. She asked him why he put children last. He asked her if marriage was going to be like this, with all these questions about love and the order of things. She said it might be that way. He asked her what her love meant to her. She said that her love was like a flower. He asked her if she had any particular flower in mind. She said it was like a sunflower. He said that a sunflower was a pretty obvious flower. She said that maybe it was, but that maybe love isn’t supposed to be original, and yet no two sunflowers are the same. He asked her what she meant by calling her love a sunflower. She said that it would grow and come out as long as it was shined on. He told her that sunflowers don’t grow. She said that they do, they begin as a seed and grow into flowers. He said that plants grow but that sunflowers are just sunflowers, they are already grown and die soon after. She said that that means she will love him until she is old. He said that he had thought she meant that her love was like a sunflower now. She said that was also true, which means that it would be good idea to have children sooner than later. He didn't respond. She thought he was hurt and apologized and told him that she loved him, and that was enough, and that maybe the metaphor was getting in the way. He agreed, then added that maybe they should wait a few years before deciding to have children.

John Hanson's Weekend

On Friday at noon John Hanson was fired from the Hollows Golf and Country Club after his night escapades of playing “flame golf” were discovered. Flame golf involves breaking into a golf course at night and driving burning golf balls soaked in lighter fluid at the main lodge with a two iron. John knew it was for the best, since he would now have more time to dedicate to his new novel, Golfing With Apollo. Golfing With Apollo was the story about a man very much like him who meets Apollo, the god of the sun, who by day looks just like a wealthy middle-aged Englishman with bad teeth. It recounted the quasi-homoerotic relationship between the two, their incendiary adventures playing flame golf and exploding gas stations in Springfield, Missouri. John returned to his bungalow at 1 p.m. on Friday. Three pages into his “edit,” John realized that it would be a lot easier to write after watching The Matrix trilogy and drinking a bottle of Jack Daniels mixed with lemonade. At 6 p.m., John called his friend Karl and the two of them went to the driving range, then got drunk and played pool, while John ranted about his book. The next morning, John awoke at 11 a.m., sobered up as best he could, and decided that Golfing With Apollo should be a graphic novel. He began calling his old classmates at Middlebury College to find out whether they knew of anyone who could draw or anyone in the graphic novel business. At 4 p.m., he opened up a bottle of Jagermeister than Luna had left in the cupboard after moving all her stuff out three months before. He began sending comments and emails to his friends on Tumblr blog pages. He fell in love with a woman named "catekill" and proposed to her online, offering her half of his inheritance. He sent her a photograph of his face and then opened up a new Tumblr page called JOHN HANDSOME in which he wrote a long erotic poem to catekill. She finally reponded and said no thanks. At 7 p.m., Karl came over and the two of them went to see a zombie film with two mickeys of Jim Bean and then tried to pick up two Goth chicks at the cinema. Karl got lucky but John's "target" decided to take a cab home. At 10 p.m., John took a cab to the casino alone and told a prostitute that he would write a book about her if she gave him a blowjob. She asked for two hundred dollars instead and she sucked him off in the handicapped bathroom at 11:15 p.m. John couldn’t come. He called Luna in tears at just after midnight telling her what had happened to him and she told him to fuck off and never call her again. John woke up at 4 p.m. on Sunday, sobered up as best he could, and picked up the manuscript for Golfing With Apollo for the third time. He stared at the cover page, and imagined his brains leaking out of his mouth and eyes like liquid Jell-o. Suddenly, John realized what his problem was. I am not John Hanson, he thought. I am Apollo. I am the god of the sun. The revelation seemed like a joke at first, but when he repeated the words again, “I am Apollo, I am the god of the sun,” shivers went through him, and his empty life seemed to have more meaning than ever before. If he really wanted to write Golfing With Apollo, he would have to take flame golfing a a lot more seriously, and start really blowing shit up.

Divorce

During their divorce trial he asked her why she had kept so many secrets and lovers from him. She told him that she needed secrets and lovers, because he had bored her and she never felt like she was alive. He told her that she should have tried to find a life instead of living out a statistic and blaming him for her unhappiness. She told him that they were both statistics, that he had worked too much and never had anything to say to her, that they were the kind of couple who had taken the dullest path and believed in a vague idea of love that quickly turned brown like an apricot you keep in your bag too long. He told her that she had never been this lucid when they were married, but that he would characterize their love less like a soft apricot and more like one of those stupid theories by Plato some failed grad student taught them in their first year of college that had no application to the real world. She told him that she was lucid and even happy now because she had thrown the apricot out and nothing smelled like rotten fruit anymore. He told her that he was happy too, that he had started rereading Plato and realized it was quite beautiful as long as one thought of it as poetry.

Bluebeard Update

A year into his second novel, John Hanson developed the habit of staying awake at night while his girlfriend Luna slept and drawing pornographic comics of the two of them having sex. She found them one day in his desk drawer. They were were not just midly perverse. John gave himself multiple phalluses, and often depicted Luna dead after the sex act, her brains blown out by the fire-hose pressure of his semen, or drew grotesque “internal” diagrams of her colon and vaginal canal during penetration. Luna knew that John often had a reason for what he did. John was strange, but it was partly a persona, and his first novel along with his persona had been reviewed well. She decided to just ask him about the drawings. “That’s an exercise in alterative lives,” he told her. “I’m living the life of someone very similar to me, someone who indulges in every one of his perverse desires. It’s for my character.” Luna hadn’t heard of John’s new character, since he rarely talked about his work with her. But this time he was inspired to share with her. He took her into a secret basement room to their house, a room she never knew existed. It was a second smaller room connected to the basement storeroom. Behind a wall of boxes and a stack of card tables was a small wooden door. Inside the cold little room were two naked light bulbs and a stained pullout couch. There were racks of drawings, most of them pornographic, as well as hundreds of swastikas and recreations of Nazi propaganda posters, each laboriously inked and colored in with pencil crayon. On a shelf was a row of large jars containing neighborhood cats and dogs soaking in preservation fluid that had gone missing in the neighborhood over the last year. There was a mini-Fridge filled with Amsterdam maximum alcohol beer, Red Bull, and Russian Standard vodka. (And yet, a year earlier, John’s friends staged an intervention for him and John broke down, vowing he would never drink again.) Nailed to the wall were women’s panties and thongs, as well as Polariod photos of humiliated prostitutes and underage street girls with come on their faces, or rolled up hundred dollar bills inserted in their rectums. Finally, squashed in the corner of the room was an old school desk with an IBM typewriter and a stack of file folders. – Meet John Hanson 2, he told Luna. – Oh, fuck, John, she said, unable to contain her disgust. – You mean to say you’ve been coming in here for the last year every day while I'm at work and writing your new novel on that shitty old typewriter? No wonder it’s taking you so long.

Past Condional Grail

Had someone told the Grail Knight, “if you leave that beautiful princess with the golden hair behind, if you abstain from touching her at night, if you throw yourself into the forest again with nothing, you might come across the Holy Grail,” then there would be nothing that distinguishes the Grail Knight from any other knight. That’s not what happened. God onlly knew what went through the Grail Knight’s mind when he left princess Blancheflor behind. Even the nasty little dwarf didn't know. He too left Blancheflor’s castle without getting laid, not even by the lady dwarf who worked in the kitchen. He too plunged into the dark forest, which seems even darker to a dwarf. But he never saw what the Grail Knight never intended to see.

What the Writer said to his Character

No one liked you. No one thought you were a believable character. I guess we gave it a shot. I don’t know what it was about you. Of course it was my fault. You’re not real. But I still have one last chapter to write. It’s the one where you are hermetically sealed in a room for an entire year with only water and a minimal amount of food. After one year, spikes emerge from the ceiling and begin moving down. They move down a few inches every day and, after ten days, the spikes pierce your brain. For hours, all you can do is scream. And then you slowly expire. I won’t bother to make your last thoughts realistic. It would be out of character.

Improve Your Brain

A book which has sold over a million copies in Japan promises to improve one’s brain power. The book consists of simple mathematical equations, memorization exercises, and passages from great works of literature which are meant to be read aloud daily. After about the fifth exercise, a little rabbit shows up at the bottom of the page and tells you that you are doing a good job. A few pages later, a monkey comes up and asks you if you have noticed any improvements. On the thirtieth page, the rabbit and the monkey are playing a game of “tag” among the mathematical equations. Then they both show up a page later with the caption, “Do you like the book?” It’s not as though you could respond to them. By page 40, the monkey, the rabbit, and a new character, the frog, are shown fishing by the pond. The caption reads, “Just Fishing.” On page 45, the rabbit and the monkey stand over the frog, who looks like he has died. They both have a confused look on their faces. On page 55, both the monkey and the rabbit are lying on the ground, maybe sleeping, maybe dead. They never show up again. On the last page is a glossy photo of Dr. Kawashima, the author. “It has been 60 days now,” the caption reads, “And you should have a better brain.”

Prodigal

My daughter returned to me a queen. It is a small, despotic country, and my new son-in-law is anything but kind. But I am still very proud, for she left my house a whore!

Good Organization, or How Beef Becomes Pork

I was looking for coffee, and walked to the center of the shopping market. I picked up some fruit on my way. I got confused between organic bananas and normal bananas, overripe bananas and brown bananas. None of the bananas were yellow. I got espresso, not coffee, at the end of an aisle. I walked back to buy bread. A woman was throwing buns from one container into the next. They looked more like pretzels. I put one bun in a bag, walked away, then walked back and took three more. A woman was speaking English on her cell phone. I took two little packages of liver paté. I wandered into the wine section. I realized my basket was too heavy and walked back to the front of the store to get a cart but then found one on the way. How lucky, I thought. That’s good organization. I put the basket in my cart and wheeled it to the wine section, taking a jar of pasta sauce and a package of salami on the way. The same woman from before was now speaking Hungarian to her friend. I put two cans of two different non-alcoholic beers in my cart, then two more bottles, then two bottles of regular dark beer, then put two cans back of non-alcoholic beer and got a bottle of Hungarian red wine. I took a carton of grapefruit juice. I put some cookies in my basket, then put them back. I wandered back to the dairy section, got one individual yogurt, two sour creams, one kefir, then three more individual yogurts, then exchanged two of those yogurts for a big one, and put back one sour cream. I passed the cookie aisle again, and took a cheaper brand. I found some frozen chicken wings in bags. I put them in my cart. I wanted to leave now. But I needed a head of lettuce. There was no lettuce. I was lost. There was a special on mozzarella. I hadn’t bought enough, I thought. I looked a long time at a pre-made chicken sandwich. I wandered over to the meat section, and stared at the meat. It looked like beef. But it could have been pork.

Piotr's Dream Part 2

After Piotr and the President of the United States had killed Piotr’s two brothers they would decide to leave the corpses on the floor so they would dry up and disappear because Piotr’s brothers were never kind to anyone when they were alive and so they didn’t deserve to be buried properly. And there would be a beautiful woman with red hair and blue eyes covered in pretty furs that Piotr had never seen before in the doorway. “You have been away so long,” she would say to Piotr, which wouldn’t be true. “When are you going to make love to me?” And the President would say, “Go ahead, Piotr, I just like to watch.” And afterwards Piotr and the President of the United States would take the blood-red plane to Moscow, leaving the red-headed girl behind. “I’ve always wanted to see Moscow,” the President would say, in good Russian, because Piotr preferred speaking Russian. “Let’s go and find some pretty dark-haired tall girls and hear them laugh at our stories and make love to them and then we will fly back to Washington, where I will let you sit on an ivory throne beside my golden throne, and I will give you a job writing comic books and talking to women and continuing your important research on the Dark Force for your dissertation.” And then they would go and do all of these things.