Only Life's Illusions

By strange coincidence two hours after posting early afternoon today (read it first!)  I stumbled upon  this passage in the novel I am currently reading:

The living also believe that what has never happened can still happen, they  believe in the most dramatic and most unlikely reversals of fortune, the sort of thing that happens in history and in stories, they believe that a traitor or beggar or murderer can become a king and the head of the emperor fall beneath the blade, that a great beauty can love a monster, or that the man who killed her beloved and brought about her ruin can succeed in seducing her, they believe that lost battles can be won, that the dead never leave but watch over us or appear to us as ghosts who can influence events,  that the youngest of three sisters could one day be the eldest: perhaps for example. 

Javier Marias -- "Tomorrow In The Battle Think On Me", pg 150.

I suppose it's a good time to hear the Joe Diffie song  Ships That Don't Come In. (Written by Dave Gibson.)

One Mulligan

I lost a friend today.  He packed up his things, sublet the apartment, got in the car and drove away.   Not far from here, but far enough so we won't be seeing each other much. "Will e-mail," were his last words when we said Goodbye, as if that didn't go without saying nowadays.   Heck, we e-mailed each other when he was here, and I regularly exchange e-mails with people on three continents.

Let's roll the film back a month.  "She called me, wants to get back together," he told me as we were sipping our usual cappuccinos in a  downtown cafe.  "After two years?" I said. "A year and nine months," he replied, and I thought that like some people he counted the number of weeks or even hours since the event. Still, a few months ago, it must have been in July, he told me he had finally gotten over her, and now this.

"And what did you say?" I asked.

"I told her I'd think about it.  Has anything like it ever happened to you, a girlfriend coming back?"

"Once when I was nineteen," I said.

"And since then, didn't you always think or hope that it would, could, should happen again?"

"Yes, and it never did.  Fate gives us just one mulligan per lifetime."

Then, he decided.  He didn't ask my advice and I didn't offer unsolicited words of wisdom. What was I to say?  Let him enjoy his mulligan while it lasts.

One Word, One Thing

 

I watched an interview with a woman writer (no, not Alice Munro), who said that  that the ideas for  her novels start with a single word.  That's how she started writing her previous book, from a word that she made up, a neologism, and while she was writing it, a couple of words jumped out at her, she jotted them down, thus getting a start on her next novel.

Then, there was a photographer, who said in a recent interview that he photographs just one thing at a time.  That's all I caught from a page of a newspaper or magazine, promising  myself to come back to it, and as happens so often, lost the source and the memory of where I had seen it.

I on the other hand photograph three things at a time, believing that a photograph must contain three elements of interest, such as the photograph I snapped yesterday afternoon at a street fair.  It's not very good, but it should illustrate the point.

All this leads me via some twisted path to the short piece below which had its source in a single sentence I overheard somewhere in passing, just it and nothing else.

*  *  *

"I don't spend time considering hypothetical situations!", I said, trying best to hide annoyance.  It's not going to happen, so why waste your brain bandwidth.  That river has long ago flowed to the sea. And I'm not standing on the bridge no more.  What if, what if, what if!   We'll deal with it when it comes about. Except that it won't.  But if it did, I think that I would say, no, thank you. Damn, it turns out I'm considering a hypothetical situation anyway.  "Let's go for ice cream at the new Italian place around the corner," I said getting up.

Without a Word

"I spoke three words all day yesterday,"  said my friend  Walker, "Beer and thank you."

"You're a regular chatterbox," I said, sipping my pint of IPA. "On Sunday I spoke to no one, not even the cat, and on Monday, I spoke one word to anyone, and it was 'No!'"

"Well, who did you treat to such a rude refusal?" asked Walker.

"A young woman," I replied pausing for a couple of seconds to wait for his reaction.  "I was picking up a prescription that my doctor sent down to the pharmacy in the morning, after a blood test revealed I needed a stronger dose, 10% stronger, to make me 10% crazier, I suppose, and isn't it wonderful how such  transactions can be completed without a visit to doctor's office, without a word spoken, electronically, and as she was handing me the medication, along with the required sheets of paper describing its effects, after-effects and side effects, the sheets that no one ever reads, the pharmacist asked 'Would you like additional information ?"

A Few Dutch Words

A young couple sat down at the table next to mine where I sat sipping Earl Grey tea and reading the mystery novel which arrived in the mail yesterday evening. Trying to read from then on, because the man spoke in one of those radio announcer voices that even at normal volume carry across a large room. And so, while reading the same three sentences on page 23 over and over, and understanding not a word except 'and' and 'the', I began to eavesdrop.

I didn't help. The context of what they were talking about was as mysterious as those three sentences. Until they changed the subject and the man said: "And after all those rejections, by  the family, university, work , women, he rejected himself!" What?  His companion then asked him the question I wanted to ask: "Rejected himself? What do you mean?"  "He moved to Russia, changed his name, his habits, his way of thinking."

That's all I heard.  They changed the subject again, or did they?  They spoke of family matters, and I don't know why but  got the impression that the man who "rejected himself" was a family member or a friend.  But maybe he was talking about a movie or a novel.

I couldn't hold it any longer, got up and went to the bathroom in the corner of the cafe.   When I returned, the couple was conversing in one of the languages that I fluently don't speak.  I recognized it as Dutch.   Were they Dutch? Their English was free of a foreign accent.  I took a look at their clothes and shoes seeking signs that their foreign make was different from the foreign make of the clothes and shoes we wear in America, but I didn't notice any indications.

But I heard, or thought I heard, in their conversation a few Dutch words that I had managed one way or another to acquire over the years, 'geweer', 'moord', 'vijand', that translate to 'gun', 'murder', 'enemy', respectively.

They finished their cappuccinos, got up, carried their empty cups to the bus tray by the counter, which told me that they knew the routine and had been here before, and stepped out,  crossing the street eastward toward the university.   I looked around me checking if I was in a dream world, or on some other planet, not believing what I had just witnessed.  The table to my right was empty and clean, were these people here a moment ago, did I read it in my mystery novel, or did I make it all up?

Theme of a Dream

Where do these themes come from?

A bus goes to the airport every 30 minutes. Unreliably.  Sometimes it doesn't show up. There is only one evening flight to London from here (well, at least that's true), that is often booked up.  I'm waiting at the bus stop near a young Indian fellow.   We miss the streetcar (yes, a streetcar not a bus!) we were supposed to board, while I was explaining the situation to him. We walk to an office to buy airline tickets, but the flight may be overbooked anyway, and we won't know until we arrive at the airport terminal.  I'm going to visit a friend of a friend who just moved there (that's true, too).  But how is he going to host me if he himself is being hosted by friends of friends?  We walk back to the bus stop, when I remember that it'll be cool in London this time of year. I turn to go home to fetch my leather jacket.  Will I make it on time?

Displacement

We were talking about Jhumpa Lahiri who has a new novel out ("The Lowland").  As is often the case, I haven't read the works of the  writer, but have read plenty about her.   She was born in England, grew up in the United States, her parents traditional Bengali, who spoke their native language at home, she never "lived fully within" America, as she says, married a non-Bengali against the wishes of her parents, and now moved her family to Rome, Italy,   'giving her children a taste of the same "loss of place"' (quote from the Wall Stree Journal.)

Her novels are about dislocation, and that is what we spoke about.  He told me a story of a Filipino man living in the United States, who traveled to Manila, shot two people to death there, then boarded a plane to Los Angeles returning to his quiet life as a respectable member of the community.   A classic hitman scenario is where the hired killer visits a city, kills a stranger, and quickly returns home.  But this wasn't it, our man knew his victims, it was some kind of a family feud, betrayal, revenge.

The story provoked my imagination, but there was too little detail to look it up on Internet. And if the man got away with it, how did his story get out and reached my interlocutor?  In any event, it's a seed of a story about displacement and ties to the past that somehow, some way cannot be broken.