chapter 5

That Friday, 2 o’clock in the afternoon I was the avenue of the America’s using a vast network of satellites and cellular towers to hear the politics that goes into choosing housing at NYU. Leah modestly denied what brought her such nonchalance comfort; that she got what she wanted. She was on the cool floor for next year. You know the one, the one with out the losers. I kept, for the good of our love, insisting what she needed to hear but never agreed to. We’re talking straight gangster real politik Kissinger shit.

The situation worsened as I encountered more of those fliers. I could take one or the other; her (but oh never my), humanistic tendencies, or their gambling conception of what constituted art. The two of the together, just kill me now. Last Tuesday Marcus saw past my confidence and clarity. He’d been right. I needed to get out. I sensed to look up.

I saw Sara, smiling again, in the window of an old Toyota Land Cruiser. Someone had removed the TO and the TA, leaving. “Yo!.”

They turned right, just in front of me, not because they could pick me from the crowd but because this was where we agreed to meet. I followed them down the side street until they had a spot for me to jump in. I opened the door. Together in colliding pitches they said hello. I said Yo, although I don’t think they got it. Sara climbed into the back of the car, insisting I ride shotgun. Quite decent of her, I think.

After a number of lumbering weight shifts as he navigated the blocks of the city to an exit ramp. We made small talk out of the city, heading over bridges; Manhattan shrank in our rear view mirror but never lost its marvel. I kept looking back, like a child watching his mom wave him off to kindergarten on the first day, until the last brick of the Bronx disappeared behind the anemic greenery of Westchester.

New York, as it turned out, is actually quite natural once you get up into it. In the fall the trees are fading from green into a singed yellow and a red Marcus said looked like the apples that grew at home. Plopped along the ridges and tree lines, little white houses looked like paper creations with the windows punched out and rough around the edges. Dioramerica.

We had been driving for hours when we picked up a college radio station somewhere outside of Albany. For a minute or so the repetitive ramblings of some douche bag attempting comedy made me yearn for a quick end to it all. When he finally shut up he did what I expected from a college radio station disk jockey. Drug music.

“Do you like Jimi?” Marcus asked. “Of course” I said. I loved Jimi. I absolutely loved Jimi.

“Jimi’s from Seattle”

“I didn’t know that” No one ever told me how was I supposed to.

“You didn’t know that?”

“Nope”

“I can’t believe no one knows that” he said. “You would know if he was from New York, you would know and I would know”

“I know”

“What the hell is that?” I changed the conversation from where exactly Hendrix met the devil for his skill to a hunk of metal on the side of the road. “Jesus H. Christ” I said. “A tractor?”

Marcus kept on talking, he’d never stop. The sun sank in the west and lit the Appellations red. That sight, of the pink sunset sliding over the slow hills like sorbet must have meant the world to many people. Perhaps if I had been able to enjoy it in silence then its flavor on the eyes would have taken a fixed position in the synapse of my brain, but, he kept talking. I blurred his voice from my head, watching the groves of this and that growing in squares like on the labels of wines. Something snapped my attention back at him. Red again.

He told me in the future the lands of North America would be colored red by the mapmakers. Red, as Rome and China are both painted now. Red, because it is the color of shame, and fitting for the worlds civilizations that achieved such power through blood and good intentions only to collapse under the weight of their own bellies. (Red, which grabbed my attention to this, did so for another reason). I agreed. But in all fairness, I did not live in America. I tried to explain this to him as I pictured Red America in the rust of derelict tractors along the roadway. He didn’t listen. All the way up the tiny, windy roads of the upstate into the green state. He didn’t believe me.

Nothing he said struck me as all that wrong. I’d find it shocking in the newspaper. But wouldn’t be that surprised to hear someone shouting it from the street corner. Not an incarnation of Christ street corner shouter, but a protester. Someone who seemed to have their cause in order. But no matter how many times I told him plainly I wasn’t that type of American he said I was.

Because it was not Americans that defined who American were. But the enemy. Stone thrower defined where the window shatters. Under the worst or circumstance, the same people. Then America would be lost. But, save desolation, he said, the enemy would define us. I asked him who the enemy was. Being en route to the natural world on his instruction began to look, with the discussion, as the fulfillment of my initial impression of Marcus, before I saw the watch. Out west. Out of touch. But he didn’t blame the Arabs, or the communists, the gays or the Jews or the increasingly popular Mormons. He blamed all of them, and us, he and I, as contributors to the stitching of the star spangled banner.

“It doesn’t matter where you vote. Red or blue? Depends on how fresh the wound is man. A southern Baptist bigot in Georgia or a heroin fiend in Philadelphia (they vote?) could vote two ways but if they both buy bananas that came from the same grove in south America then they together are touchable, tangible America. The banana growers protest their poverty and wages, get replaced with younger workers, lose fingers, gain understandable rage and tell their children of what America has done to them”

He takes his hand off the wheel, momentarily steadying it with his knee while he pulled another pack of cigarettes out of the door panel. Most people ask smokers trying to quit if they mind. Not him.

“Then those children turn around, grow up and low and behold start trafficking yayo because its easy cash, because its there way of getting something back from America. They come across an American schoolgirl walking along the beach and of course they want rape her, hold her head under the water and mail her crushed skull to the American Embassy. They know she has absolutely nothing to do with their fathers suffering but that’s exactly the point man.

He pulled a pair of sunglasses, thick and plastic but sturdy looking, from the fold in the visor. In the reflection the cigarettes burn and the gaping landscapes looked to be the same size.

“She’s oblivious. She has no idea what the repercussions of her actions are, as innocent as those actions may be, the flag means one thing, and even if she’s just stitch of the star, if the whole thing gets burned then she’s getting burned too man”

With that I interrupted, quickly relating a tail from my grandmothers family. She was a member of the Ross Clan in Scotland. The same clan as the émigrés that bore Betsey Ross in the new world. Thus, Bets and I were related. He didn’t care. Sara had fallen asleep in the back of the little sport utility. That didn’t surprise me girls fall asleep all the time in cars. Especially to relevant stories.

He blamed, if not for a better term without malice, those in America who had fallen into the trap of discussing at what degree to stop perusing progress. America had been beautiful in his mind when, even under the tight joints of the church steeple, it lead the rest of the globe in the search for the free world.

As soon as it lost sight of Polaris it never thought to look up again.

In all fairness he was pushing it. Although I really shouldn’t have said blamed. You cannot blame for the unfortunate nature of circumstance prevents it.

Marcus did not see it that way.

Circumstance was gravity. Constant, but its effects relied upon a number of variables. The bloated populous, which sounded like something he took from Marx, steered itself into the path of least resistance. The easiest. Down. In my mind that’s how I saw it. He began to draw upon abstract, and yet somewhat communal experiences to explain it to me.

But he had it. Allow me to explain. He didn’t have all the pieces. I had what he was missing. But as his pieces began to form together with mine in a puzzle I had been constructing since the gravity reference I saw it.

Gravity affects all objects the same. In terms of accelerating to the ground without resistance. Here, it is time that is the speed, time that the constant. In the downward spiral all that is needed is for resistance to change just a fraction, and the equation would be thrown completely off balance. Yet, for such a bloated and dispersed society, the thought of even a miniscule and panoramic change would be too daunting a task to be placed on any body smaller than…oh…the Federal Government. They’re busy.

“And even if the Government stepped in, so much of the populace would label whatever they had to say propaganda for the simple fact that it was deliberate”

“Uh huh”

“You know like, if the government made a firm stand on any domestic issue as firmly as we need, you know, people would just be like “fuck you - you have terrible intentions, I have no reason to trust you”, even if they do have reason.”

“Yeah” I agreed. “People are fickle like that”

“So in theory it works. But in practice the whole construct functions in a slightly different capacity”

“What?” I lost him again. I sensed a need for a soapbox, but I had nothing else to listen to.

“With the two party system man. Instead of the government seeking approval of the people on ideas, it’s the people seeking the approval of the government for a forum for their ideas. Ideas that are probably useful, yet shot down as the two party system allows for enough reasonable doubt to cast any grassroots movement as either extreme or the result of the “other” parties propaganda machine”

Propaganda machine you say? Wow. “You want extremist input in the government”

“What kind of input isn’t extremist?”

“Obvious input?” I had no idea. I hadn’t read the paper before he convinced me

“I don’t know?”

“It has nothing to do with the idea itself. Ideas are by nature neutral. Their acceptance denotes their classification; you just need the bulk of the people to nod their head. Or to sit idly while more extreme maneuvers are met with blank stares.

The car stopped. Marcus leaned into the backseat and woke Sara up. Outside of the car: blotting blackness, ferns and tree branches cast carnivorous alien silhouettes. Marcus stepped out to the back of the car.

“Grab your bag, eat that cookie Sara made for you your going to need the sugars, it’s a hike in from here”
“To where? Where are we?”

“Out by Walden’s Pond”

“Really?”

“Well. Not really. Closer than you’ve ever been though. Am I right?”

“No. I’d been there on a field trip” he couldn’t see my smile.

Hiking alone in the dark, however safe is justifiably terrifying. Hiking without fear in the dark is a symbiotic experience. It requires others. Everyone is at the height of alert; their senses straining to make up for the lack of sight. You don’t talk. You point out places where the person behind you can trip. You keep it close. I treaded fast in this little expedition to bring battery operated light to the heathen landscape, right behind Marcus, watching the thumb grips of his backpack swing with each of his steps it sent me into a trance of sorts, as if my reciprocating bi pedal ness took commands from his brain. These are dangerous times, when you no longer have to worry about what’s directly in front of you. Thoughts, like in dreams, take tiny flickers from the day’s meditation and run with them. Less likely are these to be moments of mania than they are to be good, old fashioned regret.