Editing Malady (section)

==Home==

Okay, I'm going to start now. Oh heavens, this is exciting. I wrote
another book once, but I didn't so much write it as copy and paste it
from my inbox. Then again, I called it 'copy-paste,' so I think I was at
least moderately honest about the whole big self-indulgent bag of
artifice. At any rate, that's in the past, and now I'm here, starting a
novel that probably just seems like a journal entry to you. It will
probably still seem that way to you in a thousand pages. But I swear it's
a novel. It's about a dude named Aristotle. Not that one. Just a
seemingly, or at least relatively normal guy named Aristotle. In fact, he
goes by Ari just so that people won't assume he's some kind of
philosopher. Better a Jew than a philosopher.


And yes, Athena, if you're reading this, I know you have a cousin or
a brother or something who is named Aristotle and goes by Ari, but
this isn't about him, or even about you, you self-centered bitch.


Even though it seems that a guy with the name Aristotle should live
in Greece, this one doesn't. He lives in Overland Park, KS, where I'm
from, or New York, because that's where tons of cool shit goes down,
or Berlin for the aforementioned reason, or... Alaska. He doesn't live in
all these places. He's not a jetsetter type, I just haven't decided yet. It's
up to me, after all.


I know that it's a little bit weird to start writing about a guy that
you invented when you're not even sure where he lives, or what his last
name is, but I'm kind of a weird dude, and I think it's sort of original.
Above all else, I'd like my first novel to be original. I know I'm talking
about myself quite a bit, but hopefully that will subside soon, and we
can focus more on Aristotle, who is sitting at a bus-stop when the
story begins.


The sky is grey-white, not quite rain, but certainly full of moisture,
and decidedly ominous. Aristotle is not waiting for the bus - he's
sitting at the bus stop. You shouldn't assume things, because there are
probably going to be a lot of seemingly odd choices in this book. He's
sitting at a bus stop, so were probably talking about Kansas City or
Berlin - places where I'm quite sure you can sit at a bus stop.


I should mention, before anything really happens, that Aristotle is
very smart, and he's got a golden heart that beats mightily with life-
fusion. He's easily compared to the abstract notion of fusion. You will
most certainly come to like him, if I have something to say about it,
though I'm really just trying to get you to like me, for the time being.
Aristotle conjures the word cynosure, which I first encountered in
Melville's Bi"y Budd, and which my eleventh grade English teacher Mr.
Marchant put on his vocabulary quizzes.


Aristotle the cynosure sat a while and thought. He thought about
Whitman and cunnilingus, and the middle ages, and about all manner
of sundry and scintillating things. I switched tenses.


Three birds shot from the sky. Seemingly from the sky, out of the
sky they shot. Three birds silhouetted by the sky - this is what caught
Ari's attention. Three birds stole him from his bus stop revel, and
returned him to the world, which is scary sometimes, but is the only
one we've got.


Ari realized that he had been staring past the grey-white clouds
into the infinity of cosmic wonder and memory-lust for damn near five
minutes. That's not that long - maybe it was ten or fifteen. Anyways, it
was long enough to make him feel slightly ashamed of himself, but not
absurdly long. Use whatever number of minutes works for you based
on that account. This will probably depend on how often you stare
into the abyss, and for what amount of time, on average.


Aristotle was not used to wandering the lonely broom-closets of his
psyche for so long, and he felt slightly ashamed. He unlifted his eyes,
and looked toward the street, in the direction of the birds that had
startled him from his slumber, and are only moderately symbolic. His
fingers trembled the soft tremble of nicotine addiction, and he began
to motivate. He began to walk.


Shame on me. We're six pages in, and I haven't even told you what
our guy looks like. He's six feet tall, on the dot. Does that help? No? I
didn't think so. Maybe it would help if I told you that he used to be
five-feet eight-inches tall. Then again, anyone who is six feet tall used
to be five-foot-eight. The really salient thing is that he weighed two-
hundred and ninety-five pounds back in his five-foot-eight days. Now
he is a very round and very exact six feet and he weighs one-hundred
and ninety pounds. He lost the weight almost entirely by accident. The
sudden drop left him with exceedingly loose skin, and a healthy dose of
sexual confidence. It is this confidence that is on full display as he
walks down the street, switching his hips and biting his lip.


I'm not sure where aristotle is going, but he appears to. At least, he
very much hopes that anyone who sees him get up from his place at
the bus stop will think that he has just realized that it would be better,
for one reason or another, to walk. He is wearing leather sandals, which
he bought a long time ago because they are halfway between Jesus and
gladiator. They make him feel like a nonviolent resistor who conquers
those roman lions.


At this point, I'm wearing seersucker pants and trying to decide
whether Ari should walk by a record store, so you can learn about his
taste in music and his life of song, or whether he should just go home.
I'll tell you what - he passed by the record store, but well just skip that
part. Take it from me - Aristotle can pick 'em.


He arrived home just after four o'clock. His mother was in one of
those moods. I wish I could tell you more about her, besides the fact
that he name is Marion, and she too used to be fat, but later slimmed
down. I wish I could tell you more, I really do, but I didn't invent her,
I invented Aristotle, and she just came with.


Aristotle loves his mother, but can't stand her when she's in her
moods, and that day, around four, she happened to be. So it was that
Ari took a bowl of grapes and carried them up the stairs of 5400. The
stairs moaned under the weight of the grapes. They moaned as slaves
moaned in the thick of the cane fields, or as a whore moans at the
height of her duties, as a mother bereft of her most lovely, most
promising child.


It was heartbreaking for Ari, to hear what the grapes were to doing
to the old, rickety cascade of wood, which had carried him countless
time to safety, from his mothers moods and from the over windowed
exposure of the ground floor. The stairs moaned again, and so Ari ate
the grapes as he went, and heard the stairs say 'thank you, thank you,
Aristotle the Liberator, Aristotle the Defender.'


We are so much alike, the three of us, always pretending that it is
good to eat the grapes as you climb, that the stairs don't notice the
extravagance of the green or red or purple globules of juice and seed
and skin. We are sadly mistaken. The stairs do notice, and on that day
they seemed to swallow the feet of our unrealized hero, or antihero, or
whatever it is that Aristotle will become. They seemed to rebel, for the
first time, not against the grapes, but against the unripe man-boy who
carried them.


Aristotle was 18, and for the first time it was becoming clear that it
wasn't the grapes at all - 'damn you, damn you, Aristotle the
gluttonous, Aristotle the heavy-footed.' Is it the grapes or not,
dammit? Is it the grapes or the weight or the age of the wood? Is it
Aristotle's high arches and heavy walk? I suppose it doesn't matter in
the end. I was just trying to do right by you. I hope that you'll forgive
me if I can't always find the right words. I know that you might say it's
my job to find the right words, but I don't think that's exactly right.
Nobody ever found the right words, because words are a frail, fickle,
fallible substitute for the raw, white milk of this fractured reality. No
words will ever do justice to that moment with the grapes, or to any
moment. I'm just trying to be honest about it.


There were still several, seven, grapes left when he reached his
room. Seven grapes, beige walls, navy carpet, a futon, a futon frame,
boards which went across the frame to hold the futon. A poster from
the 2003 New York International Independent Film and Video
Festival, with the words 'New York International Film and Vide
Festival' in the shape of a human head. Many mornings he had awoken
from the deep sleep of a child, and before all things, he had seen that
head. That can do a lot to a boy, seeing the severed head of art's corpse
first thing each morning. Sometimes he could see it before his eyes
even opened, based on the fluid in his ears and the feeling of his feet
on the frame of the futon. But it hadn't messed him up too bad. It was
just a poster, after all, left by his brother in a room which now had
seven grapes in a bowl. Six grapes in a bowl. He popped two grapes
into his mouth. Now there were four grapes in the bowl. I'm sorry
once again, my friend, my reader, if that's painfully obvious. But that's
how it was to Aristotle, too, painfully obvious, the next step, the next
fluffy pillow, the next ringing of the Sony dream machine, even the
next blooming of the crabapple or magnolia outside of 5400. It was
painfully obvious that soon there would be only one grape, which was
soft. In Kansas or Berlin or New York, you could leave the soft grapes.
You could let them steep with the stems in the half-green
condensation. (His family, like most families where he was from, kept
grapes in the bottom right or bottom left drawer of one of their two
refrigerators.)


For the record, Aristotle did not called 5400 5400. He called it
home. I call it 5400 because I know Aristotle better than anyone, even
in his old age, which has not and may never come to pass. I call it 5400
because at some point at what could be referred to as the future, at
least with regard to the grapes, he will have come to call it that. I
suppose I have the benefit of genesis, if you want to call it that, and
I'm trying my best to pass that on to you, my friend, perhaps my lover,
sucker that picked up my scribbling, not knowing that invention is the
mother of the future, and that the future of this particular protagonist
is beholden to the blood of my pen.


Okay, it's one a.m. I've taken off my watch and lit a cigarette
(Lucky Strike Original Red) so that I can write into the night. I
promise to tell you when the sun rises over Havana, where I sit myself.


Once he had set the bad grape to steep, Aristotle logged on. This is
something he did perhaps too frequently in those days, before his days
of love, his days of loss, his days of destitution and before the end,
which I don't yet feel like giving away. He logged on. In those days at
home it was a PowerBook, sleek and grey aluminum alloy, the best you
could buy. He logged on to look at naked women late at night, and
logged on in the mooring to check Google News, of which he and I are
both very fond. He logged on and on and on, clear cutting a path
through a forest of digits, totally in love with the virtual and unaware
that his fingers flew faster over keys than over any clitoris or
clavichord. There was a certain music to it - the slithering hiss-clack of
his fingers on the board. He logged on and on, longing to clog the
cables that carried the cr y ptographic clarity of human signs
transmuted into such platonic forms. He logged on and on. Poke, post,
emoticon. Oh, how the man-boy could log. His eyes were raw. He
scratched his balls, sticky as they were from the labor of timbering
through the only wilderness he had ever known.


Stir-fry for dinner, or maybe blackened chicken, which is what his
brother called it. it was really just broiled beyond recognition. Too
touchy was the oven in the kitchen of 5400 - too electric. Much later
he would learn that he preferred appliances that used gas - probably
around the same time that he stops calling 5400 home, or will stop, in
however many pages it takes to get him to adulthood.


Stir-fry for dinner is going to be hard - not least because I'll have to
try my hand a dialogue. Sometimes things come out, and you know
you're going to have to see them through, but you wish just the same
that your protagonist were a monk, vowed to silence and clad in easily
describable robes. Anyways, that's not the case - it's stir fry for dinner,
and this is what I'm going to do - I'm going to let myself fall into the
abyss of abstraction. It's a cheap trick, I know, but it's my first go
around, and Wittgenstein did it, so I know, at least, that it's been done.


Mother & Father - "Dinner is ready."


Children (perhaps three or four) - "Is it stir-fry?"


Mother - "Yes."


Children - "We are very tired of stir-fry."


Father - "Be more grateful."


The meal is served at this point, and the family gathers around the
table in what is commonly referred to as the breakfast room


Father - "Republicans are bad."


Mother & Children - "We agree."


Father - "Bertrand Russell once said something along the lines of..."


Mother - "That was Einstein."


Oldest Child (female) - "They coauthored that letter."


Mother & Father - "You're correct."


The oldest male child who is present begins to drum on the edge of
the table using his fork and knife. Ari or the intermediate male child
spins the lazy susan in the middle of the table, at first to get the
Korean chilli paste, and then because he enjoys it.


Mother & Father - "Stop it."


The drumming and spinning and leaning of chairs does not stop.


Oldest Child (female) - "You're a waste of space."


Oldest Child (male) - "You're fat and ugly."


The food eaten, the scene descends into violent anarchy. No one
has been excused from the table, but the table is now empty. When the
oldest female child and the oldest male child have reached a detente,
the oldest male child comes to assert his dominance over the
intermediate male child. Aristotle throws himself into this battle, as
usual, on the side of the intermediate male child. Aristotle has always
been, and will always be the youngest. He throws himself in, but this is
not his choice, it is the way of the world, this world, his world. The
oldest male child is asserting his dominance over both, though his
initial attack, or comment, or act of passive aggression is aimed at the
intermediate. It is an attack on both for the same reason that the
female child's attack was really an attack on all three. As always, the
oldest male bests both the intermediate and Aristotle. The evening,
now full of rain from the grey-white clouds, comes to a close. The
parents do not make love. Mother, Marion, reads The New Yorker, as
they lie in bed, and Father, Avery, reads some biography of an erstwhile
tycoon. The eldest female child goes to smoke weed, get drunk, trip
mushrooms and have sex with her seedy boyfriend, before coming
home at dawn. The male children watch television or play the Sega
Genesis game Altered Beast. The single grape still steeps in the half-
green water of a blue crystal bowl. The stairs creak when they are
climbed, whether the person climbing carries grapes, or a basket of
laundry, or nothing at all. It is scary to go downstairs once the lights
are off, perhaps for everyone, but certainly for Aristotle, because there
are too many windows, and you can see right through this house in so
many ways.


Phew. That was tough, but I made it. We've made it through stir-
fry. Still, there are many things that I feel the need to say now that I
couldn't say when that was going on. By the time Aristotle was
eighteen, all of his siblings had left home. They were older, and college
bound like any normal middle-class kid. His father, too, had moved
out, and lived in another part of the city. This, I suppose, the battle
and the detentes, the stiffness of the spine between his mother's New
Yorker and his father's voluminous biography, is what Aristotle longed
for. Perhaps longing is not the right word. He yearned for it, as one
yearns for God when they pray. Stir-fry had become some sort of silent
prayer aimed at the god of memory, that protean cloud of nostalgia and
memory-lust on high. Stir-fry was his way of saying our father, hail
mary, hear israel, om namah shivayah.


His mother did sometimes still cook stir-fry, though, or blackened
chicken, and occasionally macaroni and cheese, which came from an
old family recipe, and was actually quite good. But that night it was
take-out, and they sat and ate quite peacefully, a mother and her
youngest son, who she had named Aristotle. She had named him
Aristotle, but rarely called him that. She called him Ari or Ar-bar or
Totty or just Ar. She sometimes called him just "A," but only when she
was addressing him in concert with the intermediate male child, who
on those occasions was called just "I." "I & A" she called them. But she
hadn't called them that in some time, because the other children were
all at school, and Aristotle would soon join them. That was the plan, at
least, though I may have to change the trajectory of Ari's young life
sooner rather than later.


Truly, college is no setting for a novel. College is a place for reading
novels, and so it does not make a good setting for one, because who
wants to read about people reading? I'd rather read about people
writing, the stories of their own lives, perhaps, or the stories of others.
Best of all, though, I'd like to write about people writing, and I think
you would, too. So, if at any point while reading this, you get the urge
to pick up a pen, go ahead and go. I won't be offended, though I do
hope you'll come back. Frantz Fannon wasn't offended when I put
down The Wretched of the Earth, though he hates me for other reasons.
He should have hated Sartre, too, despite the lovely foreword which he
wrote, but that is for another time, on another side of this notebook.
Oh, did I tell you that I'm writing this by hand? I know that you'll be
reading it in neat pressed ink, serif or sans-serif, on the fibrous, off-
white paper that I wanted for my last book, but which the press could
not afford. I would probably write it on a computer, if I had one, but I
am in Havana, and a notebook is what I've got. While we're at it, I
suppose I should tell you that these words are flowing a Pentel P205
mechanical pencil, which I consider to be among the greatest of
writing tools. The Sharpwriter 2 is also quite luxurious, and you can't
do better than Uchida's Le Pen, if you want to write in ink. I hope you
don't think I'm telling you this because I'm a snob, though a snob I
might be. I'm telling you this because I wish you could see me, here in
Havana, wearing the white cotton kurta pajama pants that I bought
some years ago in India. I have a pack of luckies, and a bottle of very
cold water, and this full-size soft-sided moleskine notebook, and this
Pentel P205. Now let us go on.


It is summer here, and it was summer there, then. Ari ate his beef
and broccoli, and sent four text messages rapid fire. He wished to see
his friends, those that he had left, and maybe even get some ass,
because he was tired of jerking it on the futon on the the slats in the
frame. It was painfully obvious what would come of the text messages.
Re'em would respond quickly and they would meet up, probably at
Chris' house, who was Re'em's neighbor, and who laughed mightily at
Aristotle's jokes. Then, after a few joints and an easy hour, Josh would
say he was at David's house, and that they should all come over. Katya
would never text back. It had been this way for a long time, and
everybody quite liked it. They had never formalized this convention,
but they had been friends for all their lives, and they didn't have to say
things for them to be plainly known. Re'em texted back. They smoked
the joints. Josh texted Ari. They all met at David's. They drank beer in
the basement, and smoked from bubblers and bongs. They smoked
weed, chiefed herb, ripped ganj all the time in those days, and played
video games or ate burgers, or just drove around. Everything was
highway where they lived, and at night it was six lanes to yourself, the
occasional cop, and the reverberations of loud speakers in small spaces.
The night air so new and grey with rain.


Ari went home with Erica, though it was Katya that he wanted. He
had no trouble getting girls - that's what they were - but he set his
sights quite high, and he had not yet mastered the art of attracting
women. He took Erica to his father's, which was closer for one, and
where he wouldn't have to fuck on the futon on the slats in the frame.
His father never said a word to Ari about the girls leaving in the
morning, only made them feel uncomfortable by flirting at such
ungodly hours as eight a.m. But Erica would have to discover that for
herself in the morning. Even though it wasn't Katya, Aristotle still lit
the candles that he kept by the bed. Maybe it was really for himself,
but everyone seemed to appreciate the gesture. They stripped, and
sucked, and he did his best with her clitoris, though it really did pale in
comparison to the way he fingered his keyboard. Soon enough they
were joined, and Aristotle, at least, searched for the meaning of zen.
One hand clapping, it wasn't, but no mind, and only the fluid motion
of tide and turbulence - waves upon the malecon, the meeting of city
and sea. He was what many women wanted - possessor of a great
strength, but gentle and longing with it until that final gallop towards
the finish and the fall. Erica was no different than the rest - she clung
to him a long time, and fell asleep with her head on his still beating
chest. He was sure that she would come again, and he would oblige, at
least until she got her fill, or they were separated by the strange gravity
of fate. Fate's gravity does not work like the gravity of Newton or
Einstein, but is instead possessing of that quantum weirdness of Bohr
and Feynman. Erica left in the morning, and only smiled a bashful
smile when Ari's father said "Want some coffee?" and "like father, like
son." He said these things only to get a kick, but it bothered Ari and
Ari's girls, and it probably bothered Ari's father a bit, but he couldn't
help it, and no one took offense.


Aristotle slumbered late into the morning. It was Sunday now, and
the only thing in store for him at either of his parents homes was the
incessant droning of the TV. The talk shows at his father's or Antiques
Roadshow at his mom's. He went instead to the pool, where he could
take his shirt off. Even after all this time apart from that extra hundred
pounds, he was still getting used to taking his shirt off in public. It
used to be that he and Josh would wear shirts at the pool, supposedly
because they had been sunburned, but really because they were
ashamed of their soft, young bodies. Now Ari liked very much to take
off his shirt, even if he was very pale and not particularly fit, if only
because nobody seemed to notice. He figured he would always be
grateful for that, just as he would always be grateful for ice machines.
(They had had to use trays at 5400, but he appreciated that now.)


Life was easy in those days, and Aristotle was grateful for a great
many things - his family, which was broken but survived, his dick,
which served him well and had a nice curve, and his future, which was
wide open, but could be nothing but grand.


Poor Aristotle. It's not that he was wrong, it's not that it's going to
turn out badly for him, it's just that it's not that simple. Nobody wants
to hear about the quiet, easy life of a boy who was born with it all.
Aristotle's gonna have to go through some shit. Believe me, it's not
that I want to hurt him, it's just that he's got to be hurt in order to
learn. That's how it works, as far as I know - pain leads to growth, and
growth leads to a good novel. I do hope that you think it's getting
good. Maybe I should stop being so self-conscious. I mean, you've read
this far, haven't you? It's just a bit frightening, I suppose, to do all this
creating and then to open your creation to rejection and scorn. It's
actually not so much the rejection that scares me as the scorn. If no
one should ever see this, I will still be glad that it was done. It's much
more the impossibility of pleasing everyone, and the knowledge that
this book, should it be published, will have its critics just like any
other. It is so much easier to criticize than to write, and though I may
not be the greatest writer who ever was, at least I will have spilled this
ink, and seen what meaning arises from the madness of creation.


You know, on second thought, it isn't criticism which scares me
most, but silence. At least criticism is a reaction - my real fear is that
these words will evoke nothing - neither praise nor scorn. So, dear
publisher, critic, reader, listener, I ask you for a favor - when it's all said
and done, and you've finished this book, or thrown it down in disgust,
or burnt it or framed it, or sold it or given it away, let me know. Let me
know how it made you feel, and which parts shone, and which parts
were unbelievable junk. I'll be sure to include my information, if this
ever reaches you. But more than that and most of all - if you think you
can do better, or you'll never come close, give it a chance. Pick up a
pen or a pencil or a compute or a typewriter, if you've got one of those,
and let it all go. Do it in secret, if you have to, or when you're tired and
alone. Do it in the light of morning, if it pleases you, or late at night as
I do. Write, even if it is for yourself, or for a boy or a girl or a ghost
from your past. Poems of prose or nonsensical sounds - join me and
you'll see, there's no freedom like this spinning of worlds, no joy like
this genesis of meaning, no labor like this sweet hell.


I feel now that I've told you enough about Aristotle's home, and
I'm out of smokes. I'm going to run to the dulceria, which sells
cigarettes, and when I get back I'll start a new chapter. I know that
you can just keep flipping pages, but now would be a good time to take
a break. It just wouldn't be fair if you got to dive right in, and I had to
wait because of this silly addiction. Go ahead without me, if you want,
and I'll meet you in my own future, or stay a minute here, and we can
forge ahead together. I have a feeling it's about to pick up.