kyle

“Hi. I’m calling about the medical school ad on the subway?”

“Yep.”

“Kyle.”

“Well I used to be an illustrator. But I just quit two and a half weeks ago. And you know, now I’m interested in getting involved in street performance.”

“23”

“I have a B.A. in Art History.”

“Well it was a state school. Do you need the name? Okay. Sure. Sure. I understand that. It’s the University of Southern Maine. The Portland campus.”

“Well like I said, I haven’t been employed for a few weeks. But when I was, I wouldn’t exactly describe any of my time on the job as ‘intense concentration’. I guess there would be times when I wasn’t reading the newspaper or eating at my desk, when I would sort of drop into a different gear and really churn on some of the stuff, and when that would happen it felt good. It felt like it should when you use the words “career path” within your parents’ presence. But mostly it was tedious and boring, drawing atomic families or pizza slices. And I’d have to walk around the room every twenty minutes, looking over other people’s slumped shoulders or out the windows at rainbow oil stains on the pavement, just so I wouldn’t feel permanently cross-eyed. But are you talking about like creative bursts? Like the floodgates really opening?”

“That would rarely actually happen. Actually, at the end of my tenure I had set up a rewards program for myself, like I was a chimpanzee learning sign language, and everytime I finished an outline or a set of thumbnails, then I would surf the computer for half the amount of time I had worked on the proceeding project. If it took me half an hour to draw up a logo, then I’d check on a message board for fifteen minutes. This was as much my carrot on a stick as it was a sort of passive-aggressive protest though. Our insurance plan was cut back by Top Management, who claimed it was for our benefit, so we could get the best health care at the most affordable cost, because we paid for half of it. Now if you’ve got liver spots and you know the name of your across the counter pharmacist, that’s one thing. But when I get sick four months after this policy change announcement, I find myself doling out ninety bucks for a stomach bug. When it should have really been Top Management who was doing the doling you know. Not us. So I made the computer be like their punishment. Top Management thought they were saving money on that chintzy insurance deal but they were really losing in the long run, when you factor in for every forty hours that I actually did work, I would then spend twenty more hours not even necessarily on the web but sometimes just staring at it with the pointer hovering over the Google search field, trying to think of something to punch into it. It was like infinite knowledge. I would just stare at in awe. And I believe myself to be a somewhat intelligent person, but the omniscence that lay within that field would just make my neurons fire in some clustered burst of activity and I’d have a total brown out upstairs. Sometimes I would even catch myself just unconsciously spinning the pointer or text bracket around the screen, trying to make a perfect circle. So in the end Top Management still did the doling. Just in a round about way. And I don’t fault them for that. Their plan was to get as much out of me for as little as possible. They assumed to be quite Machiavellian. My plan was to do only as much as was necessary to keep the position. We were polar opposites, Top Management and I, regarding the doling. ”

“I think it was something specific about that building though. I don’t know if it was asbestos or some vermiculite or what. Probably not because that must be illegal I’d imagine. But there was like this harrowing presence that hung over us all day. I could walk outside, down the street and get an ice cream sandwich and be fine after blinking rapidly for a few seconds. My vision would focus and I could fill my lungs again. But the minute I walked back inside that place it was a spiritual swamp. Actually, that smell that you get on train stations? Of black grime and leaking coolant and dead mice and electricity? Something like that. One of the guys who had been there for ages actually referred to the building as Dickensian. He referred to it as if we had a crippled child on payroll and pregnant teenage gals were losing fingers in the machinery. We actually had blood stained sheets from an old hospital laundry acting as drapes.”

“Well I had a professor in college who said that if you woke up in the middle of the night and you had an idea, but then went back to sleep and promptly lost that idea, that for all intensive purposes, you never had the idea. It doesn’t matter what sort of genius social theories or clever concepts you brewed up, because if there’s no hard data then you’re just like the rest of us. So, no I don’t keep a bedside journal or anything. I never wake up in the middle of the night or remember my dreams. I’m sure I have them, because I must have them or else I’d be drooling in a padded room. I just can’t access them. I always hear people describing the mundane metaphors that they ascribe to their dreams. And these are the people you’re talking about I’d wager. The kind who not just keep a bedside journal but are so eager to decipher their dreams that they subconsciously set themselves up to wake up in the middle of the night so that they can jot it all down and maybe even get back into R.E.M. fast enough that they might wake again and jot again before the morning shows up. Like if they decipher this information, being chased on a bicycle or sex with celebrities or bouncing sheep, that eventually with enough hard data they’ll aquire the Rosetta Stone to their own skulls. And they’ll then have the password to God’s cryptography. But I don’t relate to that at all, whether it’s characters in a movie daydreaming or it’s actual physical people. When I was a kid I actually started crying when I went to see The Never Ending Story. My parents had to drag me out to the lobby because I was such a mess. What happens to humans when they don’t dream?”

“I just thought it was part of this whole process here that you guys were working on.”

“Okay. No problem.”

“Once when I was younger I did. Yes.”

“Specifically? My parents were getting marriage counseling and at that same time I had an incident at school where I kicked in the back leg of another kid who was actually on crutches at the time when I did that. My folks asked for a referral to a children’s specialist but the woman who counseled them just had them bring me along to one of their weekly sessions. And it was not at all what the ten year old me was expecting.”

“Well there were actually two rooms. In one was an office area with a big recliner for the woman and a wicker futon that my parents sat on. And in the other was this sandbox filled about an inch deep with fine white sand. Like Californian sand. There were large blocks of wood and some large polished stones and when I was left in there I kept thinking that for a supposed shrink this woman didn’t know a whole heck of a lot about entertaining kids. I think I remember this woman specifically having a lot of Native American art. Like mandelas and adobe hummel type things.”

“Well that’s the weird thing. It’s really the one bit I came away from the experience with because I have no idea what problems my parents were talking about with her in the other room. But yes, after their hour session was over, the woman came into the sandbox room and crouched next to me and asked exactly that question. About the blocks and the stones. And I looked at the sandbox that I had been dawdling with for the hour. I had interacted with the blocks and the stones, we could see that, with the sand oveturned and indented draggings. But I hadn’t built anything. The blocks and the stones were just scattered around randomly. I had no idea that whole time that I was supposed to, and expected to,be building something.”

“And then we went home.”

“Well once more at the beginning of college. The same woman actually. After the first visit she wanted me to come in for some kind of eye therapy. Where she studied my eye movement in correlation to different emotional subjects we discussed. But I couldn’t afford the visits, so I stopped going. I felt bad about that.”

“As I just said, my parents were in therapy. I guess it was for about seven years. Before all the really bad stuff started happening. Then they gave it up altogether. But they’re still married.”

“My daily routine? No I don’t think so. And when I have experienced that it’s not in the classic sense of like some epiphany blurring at the edges. It’s more like ‘oh, i’m here again’ or like looking around at my housemates and realizing how these are the least important events in our lives. But we’ll repeat them over and over again. It’s not like when your high school English teacher explains the structure of a Greek tradgedy, with chorus and hubris and all that, and the story peaks like a triangle, where everything goes downhill after the climax. There’s no peak in real life, it’s just a straight line. Despite any happiness and misery we just keep cruising along the line. That’s what deja vu is. When we get wrapped up in the fiction outside our lives.When we forget about that straight line.”

“See. Now this is the question I was waiting for. This is why I wrote your number down, despite the other people on the train watching me do it, having also read the ad, and probably thinking me a total and complete fruitcake. Because I’ve had an experience not exactly like what you describe. But close. I don’t know that the phone is going to ring prior to it actually doing so. But I have had a sort of a history with empathy, let’s say.”

“When I was sixteen I came down with a terrible intestinal pain, I actually left school it was bothering me so much. I fell asleep on the family couch within an absolute pejoration. I woke up to my sister sitting cross legged about ten inches from the television screen. She had it switched to MTV. Kurt Cobain killed himself that afternoon. I remember scenes of adolescents in tears at some vigil, with a voice-over of Courtney Love reading his suicide note and barking obscenities at Kurt that were just a series of bleeps on our end. Later I figured out that the estimated time of his death was, given the three hour time difference, just about the same time I came down with this grotesque intestinal pain. Like it was I who had been shot. It felt like some kind of vortex.”

“Yes. I knew it was a head shot.”

“Well because there was no point in thinking about it. I could have just been having a subconscious reaction. I could never know for sure. I beleieved that the more self-introspection I did would result in a negative state of mind. Contemplation never got me anywhere.”

“Yes. Yes sure, I have. Yes.”

“Marajuana mostly. I was very interested in tryptamines when I was in school, read a lot of books on the subject, but I only ever took LSD once.”

“Frightening. Absolutely ball crushing scary. I didn’t see giant, powder-white, talking gorillas or think I was a peeling orange. None of that nonsense you hear about in D.A.R.E. The only thing I hate more than people describing their dreams is people describing their acid trips. But I was shitting myself just based on the feelings that were spurting to the surface that night. There were a couple of other guys there and we were all watching that Madonna movie Body Of Evidence. They kept having panic attacks whenever she’d pour the candle wax on Willem Dafoe. Throwing their arms up together and all making grunting simian graons. One of them was a theater major and spirit gummed a crimson mask to his face. Somebody else had a plastic green dreidel and they were spinning it on the dorm room floor, trying to divine the future from the results. There wasn’t even any like mysticism to it, it was just like one side would represent a ‘yes’ answer and the other would be a ‘no’. One of the guys just kept staring at it in motion like it was the Blessed Mother. Idiots. I didn’t experience anything like that. I was still at the helm so to speak.”

“With me? I said that already. It was just the intensity of polarized feelings. I’d never felt connected before. And afterward it’s really been a question for me. Like, whether I’m emotionally unavailable or maybe spiritually crippled in some way. Or maybe I’m just hyper aware of others who seem so completely fake in their relationships.”

“No. I’m aware of my own faults. That’s what this is about. What is wrong with me. Okay, here’s one example. A perfect example. One of my big fears right now is that I’m incapable of love. This has the potential to be a serious problem. Because I cannot for the life of me understand one couple I know who claim they are in love. And I’m talking about pronouncements here. Couples who use the word ‘love’ in large groups of friends. Couples who cup one another’s hands, kissing the knuckles, gazing into the other person’s eyes. At public events. Couples who describe one another as ‘hot’. My room mate’s girlfriend does that. Someone said that he looks like Nicholas Cage and her response was, ‘I could see that if Nicholas Cage were hot.” As if Nicholas Cage weren’t a household word synonymous with sex symbol. I can’t get that. Is that love? See, that’s an example. That’s a fault. I think I’ve been dealing with that since before LSD though. Even when I was a kid and every movie I would watch ended with the male protagonist and female protagonist hand-in-hand. There was never any presentation of them existing together and just, you know, doing life. I the viewer was supposed to assume a happy future, free of disease and dysfunction, was for those characters as soon as the screen faded to darkness and the credits roled. When I was a kid I loved Ghostbusters 2 because we find out Sigourney Weaver and Bill Murray just couldn’t handle it. They couldn’t live with each other. They dropped the ball.”

“No. I didn’t see much artistic film when I was growing up. We watched movies with sequels. Like Lethal Weapon. Thanksgiving was a Lethal Weapon marathon in our home.”

“How much money will I get for this anyway?”

“So I have to finish this? Before you’ll even consider me? And I’m sure there’s like notes that you’ll need to take after listening to the playback on this conversation.”

“...four hundred dollars. Yes. I...well yes.”

“...finish othe people’s sentences? Ha. Yes. Ha. Ha. Yes that happens to me.”

“No. I wouldn’t say that I am. My living situation is indicitive of that. It’s not like I dislike the other people I live with. I actually like them all quite a bit. I’ve never lived in a place with so many diverse backgrounds. But, well... they’re always talking about the guy who lived in the room before I did. About parties this guy would throw. Or women he would bring back, women that would be found wandering around the kitchen in a pair of his silk boxers on a late Sunday morning, I guess. I’ve heard about that more than anything. Apparantly one morning there were two of them. Women I mean. And I’m told that one stayed in his room, now my room, until the middle of the night, while the other watched sitcoms on our couch downstairs. Then the women switched places. The one went upstairs while the first slept on the couch. There weren’t any racuous noises or anything. But everyone knew what was up. Both of them were sighted making his breakfast too, wearing his old, oversized, band T-shirts that hung just above their nimble knees.”

“Well I can’t compete with that. Is all. I just don’t feel accepted because of it. And nothing, no matter how absurd or quote -- crazy -- I manage seems to cover that. I’ll be sitting in the living room when someone comes home and they won’t even say ‘Hello’ or ‘Hey Kyle’ or anything.”

“What do you mean by that? Like zeitgeist? Like something ethnic?”

“Oh. Spirit as in ghost. Poltergeist. Eidolon. Phantasm. Apparition. Wraith.”

“Uh. No. Never.”

“Okay. Cool. Let’s get back to that.”

“I feel like all I see are details, but my vision is in some sort of tunnel surrounded by fog, that won’t let me understand the world around me. Or the decisions that need to be made. I find myself staring at people, getting lost in the chisel of their face or the arc of their breasts. I’m caught up in everything and it is difficult to distinguish my assumptions from reality. There was a description on the radio about this new television show about grim reapers. It described the people who were supposed to die, but didn’t, as bad souls. Like your soul went rotten or something and you turned into a lesser sub-version of yourself. I feel like that. A sub-version. A contributing factor is the sadness I gleaned from seeing my housemates. Some of them have had their dreams fulfilled. They’ve met their goals. But there is still something missing from them, like they’re dead inside. And they can only replace that with idle chatter and that chatter is utterly incapable of describing how they feel. It worries me to see them like this. Because if their hopes and dreams, which were simple and easy to fulfill, were incapable of providing a satisfactory life, how will my, more complicated and more expensive in cost benefit, affect me?”

“I think it’s made me feel less like a living, breathing, guy. You know what I mean? Because after an emotional intensity that high, the rest of life: attitudes, behaviors what have you -- feels like I’m dead inside. And I look at the reflection of that realization in the decisions I’ve made as far as goals or career. And I really don’t have many. I like to be entertained. I enjoy that. And think to myself, why not just embrace that? One of things that really sort of calms me, not in the sense that I’m angry or excited and need to be placated, but in that it makes me forget about the lack of excitement or anger or even pure pleasure -- is to scan, download and arrange photos for my personal screen saver and desktop theme. I have all different combinations on there. They fade, feather, blend, morph. There’s some live Grateful Dead pics, some NASCAR, Star Wars, Ghostbusters of course, and also some personal photos of me at different political rallies, protests and stuff. And there’s a few of my cat, around the house.”