Chapter 7

That the nights that followed were long and lonely, as there was little he could do to avoid being alone, and while it had proved to be a tough challenge when he had drunk himself silly and had the luxury of the prostitutes beside him—that same challenge that he thought he could work his way around without forces higher than himself getting involved in what he originally thought to be very common and innocuous crimes, this challenge of loneliness now seemed less threatening, since he was no longer in charge of his own life. He could no longer control, or at least try to control, whatever fate dealt him. It scared him a bit—that sense of not being in charge anymore, not having that self-drive, self-will, and self-determination to attract the things and the people that he wanted in his life.

He remembered how one of his old high school teachers had said that there are those who let things happen and those who actually make things happen—letting things happen being the less favorable of the two. But to give up on one’s will to determine one’s own life simply involved letting things happen for a change and trusting in the forces and the people and the events that he couldn’t possible see instead—the mysteries of the things that he couldn’t for the life of him map out beforehand or predict with any certainty. He didn’t know what his life was about anymore, because while being incarcerated, it had lost its definition, as if his identity had been stripped. In its place was left this very light and formless person who didn’t know if he should stand up or sit down in the chill of his living room.

The process of being in jail didn’t so much as scar him as it did release him. Living through the ordeal became the scalpel that cut away the pains of continually wanting someone to accompany him through an existence that was always devoid of something—as though he were as light as air, his weight no longer confined to gravity—this feeling that he was the same person but not the same person at all, that he was a part of his world but at the same time totally aloof from it.

While sitting on his sofa in the darkness, he even thought he were some kind of ghost or at least a floating entity that could have been blown away if the wind so took him there or if these forces that he couldn’t name or see sent him one way or maybe an another. It was so very silent in his apartment and yet so very strange, as though he were the only person on earth, as if the other tenants in his building had mysteriously vanished, and all that was left were the shrills of the few night-time insects that had made it to the bridge of winter and the temporary swoosh of cars that passed along the avenue down below.

Perhaps he wandered between the lands of the living and the dead but did not know it yet, as there was no handbook or guidebook or map to show him where he should go next or what to pursue. And if it involved any self-will on his part, or any sort of elaborate plan that utilized his own mind, it would surely lead to the same misery and pain that being jailed had provided. It was more the case that some piece of the puzzle that would have otherwise completed him had been moved or misplaced. Even though he sat in the darkness, lost in thought, he wasn’t exactly so alone. Surely there was a physical need to touch someone in the darkness or at least exchange a few words with anyone within earshot. But again, he no longer had control over who would end up passing through his life or if a woman would magically drop from the sky.

The obsession over women lifted but left a stillness and an emptiness in its place that drove him to his bed without any reason, without really feeling tired or sleepy, but just lying there immersed in the strange and awkward feeling that nothing would ever become of his life unless other spiritual forces decided to give a life to him or at least spark some tremendous idea that would get him working towards something, but a life that would never manifest. He could no longer foresee or predict what hid behind corners. The rudimentary laws of cause and effect leading to predictable results no longer applied. Neither would chance or probabilities explain anything either. He somehow had to trust the wind that carried him, and he would no longer calculate how that wind worked or directed him. He figured that there were those who simply lived on the wind and followed the currents and the breezes that pushed and pulled them through the endlessness of time until there is no permanence at all—just temporary rest and stability and then movement all over again. It was a schedule he couldn’t know but only trust somehow. It was like taking his first steps into the unknown with all of the fascination, awkwardness, and timidity that accompanied a changing consciousness and cleansed perceptions that had once been so firmly rooted in his desires but were now no longer there.

And as he looked through his bedroom window to the alleyway below, a view that permitted the same view of the avenue where a few twilight revelers walked home arm-in-arm and laughed to themselves, it seemed as though joy had been placed at their feet, like a gift from a God that favored them. He really wondered how much longer it would take for his intense desires over women to lift. He wanted these desires gone, as though a doctor could take a magnet and pull these desires up like shards of metal—just one swoop and his desires for these women would be all vacuumed up—all of those images and photographs and pixels and celluloid frames that he had pounded into himself—all gone. Perhaps it was way too late for these desires to be pulled like spools of spaghetti from his mind—a hand that tugs out the soft, diseased tendrils of desire that had warped him so thoroughly.

But he knew better than to think that some miracle would put a stop to his miseries. The sad irony about it was that love was supposed to be the panacea that ended his suffering and pain. But he suddenly realized that love itself and its reckless pursuit had made him suffer more than any absence of it. He had little clue that love was also like its ugly twin, war, and that multitudes died more of love’s twisted ability to carve up a man’s heart than any sharp bayonet that some unreasonable enemy thrusts into another man. But there were other types of love, he figured, and not necessarily the love that demanded the taste of a woman’s lips or the silky feel of her charms in his bed. And at that terrible hour of staring out the window, he saw the shadows of the women gliding down below him. The lampposts illumined their shapes and sizes, their curves and silhouettes, their hair that bounced along their necklines, and certainly there was the urge to reach out and grab one of them, his imaginings doing somersaults in his line of vision. But he understood that it was the desire—that plain, simple, and torturous urge to feel her skin upon his and the gentle brushes of his fingers upon her wrists and the skin of his legs entwined in hers, that needed purging.

Desire could no longer sustain him. It brought him to his knees in the cruelty that a more spiritual world demanded of him, as though a part of him had been ripe for conquest—not by any woman—but by forces he could neither see nor define, as though his entire body and mind were instead a part of some incalculable order that he had little choice but to surrender to. And no, he didn’t go willingly. It seemed as though he had fought it for years and years with tooth and nail flying about this way and that. It was the worst kind of abuse. But he knew he had to give up. It was like a red hot poker that had been jabbed into his most loving centers, purifying desires so relentless that they would have surely killed him if he continued. And in their place remained the vapid air that hung without any sympathy or remorse, without any righteous praise or compliment. Just this heavy air that takes silence as its partner, an air so empty that his weak body could only stand listless as the slow death of maturity had finally found him. It gave birth to a darkness that drowned the room, the appliances in the kitchen dead and obsolete, the furniture layered with dust. And he had many hours to go before morning. He hoped the sunlight would at least make him forget all about it, forget that he ever desired a woman in the first place. He crawled into bed and buried his head beneath the pillows in an effort to dream of something that didn’t involve anything he knew or remembered.

He would have normally sprung up when the morning sunlight came in, as the daylight offered at least some opportunity. He lifted his head up, and just as quickly he dropped it back down. A new day didn’t give him enough reason to participate willingly in it. The question of what to do next became an unsolvable riddle, and from there he began a new routine. He simply fell to his knees at the foot of his bed, his head pressed against the thick of the mattress and his hands clasped beneath his chin. He simply didn’t know what else to do. His ambitions had been taken. He knew it would take time. It would also take having a certain blindness while walking the streets and wondering what to do with himself.

When he finally stood underneath the water that the showerhead trickled over him, he understood that he must somehow confront or at least make amends with what had dogged him for most of his life. He would have to visit the college in town and find something to study. The thought of relying on education didn’t sit too well with him, but he figured that colleges and universities such as the one that had attracted some of the brightest students in the county were actually made for people like him—the same people who didn’t have a place anywhere else in the world—and while he thought a little less of himself for not succeeding in the places and the conditions that really mattered, those failures at least directed him towards the task of unlearning that which he had learned and recognizing that he was no better or no worse than the children who earned their degrees within the comfortable utopian shade that their parents kept paying for.

Sometimes he liked to think himself as better than those people, as they hadn’t suffered as much as he had. They didn’t have any scars, and they never paid their dues as he had to pay them. The students in the town were mainly an insular people who acted recklessly and selfishly, reading so many books to do what exactly? How had high school helped him, and shouldn’t that initial taste of knowledge be enough? Why take on more knowledge when it only confuses people into believing that they can use it to achieve things, when really just the same old things are achieved. The powers are the same no matter how educated or knowledgeable one is, and his resentments towards those who had claimed they knew something had to be confronted. He blamed his boastful attitudes for not trusting the idea of education. He used to think he could get somewhere without it. The countless books they read, their haughty interest in things that generally interested no one but sounded nice in conversation, didn’t seem to change anything for the better, and these books and the conversations people had usually took the place of actually doing something that benefited someone else. Or maybe it was his perception of what they did at colleges that had been irreversibly corrupted by the tough lessons that the streets had crammed down his throat, these spoonfuls of molten rock like swallowing fire whole, while the others ate the candy that their trust funds had given them. It seemed a little unlikely that he’d actually respect education. They pay for twenty years of schooling and then they hand you a mop. He had heard such stories before.

When he walked closer to the university, though, and when he began to see more and more young people—like little boys and girls they were—walking along the mid-morning streets, he assumed they had never understood the banality of shopkeepers sweeping their storefronts to avoid fines from the town’s notoriously corrupt sanitation department, or the frustrated and angry bus drivers, their busses bloated with people and floating like sailboats in the direction of the campus. He had never been to the campus before. He had only seen its edges where a few office buildings guarded green quadrangles of learning, and it seemed a bit odd that he of all people had arrived at its white, stone archway so eager to learn what they had learned. The archway led into a wide yard where even more students with backpacks flung over their shoulders ambled in different directions. His feet were wet with frost as the overnight chill had bled into the morning.

He shivered as he walked, not sure where the right office was. He asked someone smoking a cigarette on the stoop of the performing arts center for directions, and a shaggy-haired guy pointed to the office of admissions up ahead. There were counselors in there, which was a good thing, considering that he had little idea what he wanted to study. He figured he’d enter as a freshman despite being a little older than the typical college senior. He figured they’d make room for a special case such as his, because this sort of thing happened all the time—the late bloomer who gets cut down by real-world forces only to return to the cradle with the debilitating defects that even the grails of knowledge and wisdom couldn’t curb.

The waiting area was sparse and nearly empty save for an assistant who worked behind a glass window, doing what he wasn’t sure. He was simply told to take a seat and someone would be right with him. Her perky smile hid hatred of his kind from within, her face trying too hard to welcome him. Charlie sat in a cushioned chair and read the course catalog that listed the names of all the professors in the college, from the highest ranking ones to the lowest, their degrees and their colleges posted like medals next to their names. He had never heard of some of their degrees before, as schooling, it seemed, had moved light-years beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic. The catalog was filled with the possible things he could study, and while all of them sounded interesting, he admitted that he wasn’t really interested in any particular course of study just yet, as what had been learned in high school was now a vague memory of incomplete equations and essays too under-developed for his teachers’ liking.

The business program interested him as well as the political science courses, but they weren’t enough to stake a career on. He immediately thought that some vocational training, like electrical work, plumbing, or auto maintenance may have been better the better choice than what the college offered. The college offered strange courses, like Post- Colonial Literature, Marine Biology, Media Theory, and Russian History—all of which flew over his head as subjects that were useless, until he remembered that most of these students probably landed in tall office buildings that required a full knowledge of such subjects, although with Russian History he simply thought that a student had to move Russia after he finished, and with Marine Biology a graduate probably gets his suntan lotion, heads for the beach, or works on a cruise ship for most of the year. How these courses of study would impact anyone’s life he wasn’t sure. His mind felt as flat as the world before Galileo. Nothing stirred in his intellect apart from chasing after women, and he even considered Women’s Studies as something that could land him a date eventually, because he seemed to know an awful lot about women by dint of observing them, watching them from a distance, and trying to capture them like butterflies in a net or a rare species of bird. He thought it might have been better if the future politicians and law makers studied Zoology instead of Public Affairs. Asians should study photography, engineering, or computer science, as that’s where they all seemed to be heading.

Interestingly, he didn’t know of anyone from his high school graduating class who actually went to the college. Sure, they talked about it, but once graduation came, he never saw any of those people again. He guessed that the college was more like a separate entity in the town, kind of like what Hong Kong is to China or what New York City is to the rest of New York State—this island unto itself where people from out-of-state and other countries came to study and thereby separated themselves from the locals who fed off of their money like beggars at the palace gates.

There were a few people he knew of who were offered scholarships from the local high school at one point, as though admitting the local kids was in the ink of some centuries-old deal that the town’s officials had made with the college higher-ups, as though the college were forced to deal with an angry town and its equally angry locals who were much like insects who tried to worm their way into privilege. Yes, it did seem a bit odd that they didn’t have any courses on refrigeration, data entry, or medical billing in the catalog—only these shining and glowing degrees and the philosophers and the poets and the modern dancers who simply had no interest in finding regular jobs but learned how to avoid them over time, because they specialized in studying things that they purposely couldn’t apply anywhere, except at the college, of course, where they looked down upon the know-nothings or those who had never been to the theater or invited to a gallery opening. What he perceived as their ongoing privilege weighed on his shoulders like a yoke forcing him down into salted earth. As he sat in the admissions office waiting for a counselor to appear as if by magic, he tried to recall some of his good points and also some of the skills he wanted to work on. He thought of it as a job interview of sorts. How hard could it really be?

A woman appeared in the doorway. She released a young applicant and her parents, their faces beaming and their rapport with the admissions counselor warm and cordial. Perhaps they had exchanged a few jokes or talked gossip or discussed a few news items from the local paper—Charlie wasn’t sure. All he knew was that he should try to replicate this same rapport and be as charming and friendly as possible, perhaps tell her how his father had died fighting for the country in ‘68 or something along those lines.

The counselor was quite a short creature and also delicate. She may have been a student herself. She wore black slacks and flat shoes, a string of faux pearls around her neck, and a blouse with a long flowing bow at the chest. Her jacket was also black in keeping with the symmetry of her short appearance, but Charlie also noticed a tenderness to her, as though she’d be the perfect elementary school teacher if she ever decided to give up her post at the admissions office. He figured she must have been a mother or married at a young age in keeping with her father’s wishes—the type of woman who would do well at a Board of Education meeting or at the industrial park they just built the next town over—a good, diligent, and reliable worker is what Charlie saw, as that’s what the college must have wanted from their employees. Charlie decided that ‘the ethical and responsible desk manager’ would be the profile he would present to her. Without more hesitation, he followed her into a small office that wasn’t much larger than the size of his old bosses’ office at the real estate agency.

“What can I help you with?” asked the woman, after they both nestled into comfortable chairs.

“I’m here to apply,” said Charlie, taking a look around. “What course of study are you interested in?”

“I’m not sure yet, but I know I’d like a degree in something, since most people have their degrees.”

“You really should be interested in something to study, though,”she said.

“Let’s see. I’ve worked in Real Estate and a few other odd jobs in town. I can fax you my resume if that’s what’s needed.”

“And your name is?”

“Charlie.”

“Charlie, well let’s see—you see we don’t take your application here. This is just an informal information session to answer any of your questions about the college.”

“You mean I don’t apply here?”

“No, no. You need to fill out a full application form.”

“Well, you got a pen? I can fill it out right now.”

“I don’t think you understand. You need to complete the full application form with letters of recommendation submitted by your high school teachers. You also need to submit your SAT scores.”

“But I don’t have any of those things. I never took the SATs or anything like that. Is there any way around these things?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Maybe if you can make an exception here, because I’m one of the more adult members of the community and all.”

“There is no way around the process. We are a highly competitive school. Most of our students graduate in the top twenty percent of their high school class. And their SAT scores are in the top thirty percent.”

“You mean you don’t have any openings for a guy who’s kind of middle of the road?”

“Not really, no.”

“What the hell kind of college is this then? Aren’t you supposed to be educating people? I grew up in this town for Chrissakes!”

“You’re invited to apply,” she said calmly. “I’m not saying that you can’t apply to be a student here, but our admissions committee is very selective about the types of students we accept.”

“Is there any place I can go that isn’t so difficult?”

“The nearest state college is about three hours away from here by bus. That’s the only other option available.”

“I got my high school degree, y’know, and that’s not too easy to do.”

“Having a high school degree is definitely to your advantage then, Charlie. What you need to do now is contact some of your old teachers and have them write recommendation letters for you. You need two recommendations, and then you need to take the SAT test. These things have to be done, or else we can’t consider your application.”

“It’s a bit extreme,” said Charlie. “If I take you out to dinner will it make it any easier?”

“There are literally thousands of colleges and universities across the country that you can apply to. It doesn’t have to be this one if you think our admissions process is too, shall we say, selective for you.”

“Too selective for me? Is that what you think. I’d have you know that my father died fighting for this country, and let me tell you something—I’m going to make it into this college. I can guarantee that. I’m gonna take these dumb tests, and then you’ll see how I make it in here with room to spare.”

“Let’s hope you do.”

“Damn straight I will. Good day to you then!”

Charlie marched straight out of the office in a huff. He hoped to make a grand impression on the admissions woman, as she’d see how fiercely determined he was. But just as he slammed the door shut, he opened it again and marched straight back into her office.

“How do apply for this thing again?”

The admissions woman smiled with the type of exhaustion that his mother had sometimes given him when he horsed around too much. She led him to a table where a stack of application materials were laid out. He calmly gathered up what he needed.

“Thank you,” said Charlie before walking out of the office again. He considered giving her a peck on the cheek or some show of appreciation, but the idea dissolved as he left the building and headed back into town. The wind gained speed, and heavy clouds stretched over the sky like a damp and sagging quilt. He made it home after the cold rain wetted the streets. He was just in time for the afternoon news that said the economy was tanking due to falling home prices, expensive oil, and Wall Street’s credit crisis. Massive layoffs were expected in and around the region. The stock market dropped three- hundred points again, and Charlie didn’t know what to make of all this. He too had been guilty at points in his life for spending money he didn’t have. The worst violators would probably get arrested, as this was in keeping with the cycles of time, and the country, it seemed, would have to be rebuilt to fit whatever the vanquished wanted. Faces that he hadn’t seen on television for several years offered their criticism as though it was their turn all over again, their encore appearances right on cue. They criticized irresponsible policies and the criminals who conned the masses and behaved fraudulently.

He had a sense of these cycles and how they operated, but never before did he actually feel them, his heart sinking on the news that he probably wouldn’t find a job and that prices would be higher and the rents would probably be raised too. He was reminded how he simply abandoned his last job at the real estate office and now had very little in the bank. It was the gradual but soon-to-be sudden drop into abject poverty that hid behind the corner, and he wouldn’t be able to worm his way out of it, unless, of course, he robbed a convenience store or started to drug-deal to pay the bills. The effect of the Wall Street bailout wasn’t felt that immediately, but he knew that times had radically changed in a few short months. He knew he couldn’t simply waste his time anymore by relying on lost dreams or simply holding his hands up in surrender as he wonders where his next meal will come from. He did have some money in the bank to tie him over for a couple of months, but in the meantime he would fill out those pesky application forms that weighed on his kitchen table like a stack of encyclopedia.

And then he thought that any simple and mindless job would do, because whatever systems that had been firmly in place had suddenly loosened up, much like floorboards that started to warp and wobble a bit. He knew that his fate, however, rested ultimately with God, but sometimes God goes silent all of a sudden, as though there is no transmission from him at all. It was only the voice of the television trapped in his skull, as though the sides of his head were really walls that kept narrowing him down to size despite his pressing need to escape from those walls and run off like a fugitive in the night just to stop those walls from crushing him.

The news on the television struck him like a funeral dirge would. Maybe this was a good thing. It would clean out the country like an enema. It would flush away the corruption and welcome a new age of purity. Maybe men weren’t supposed to be so happy. Even though God fell silent after His divine evacuation from a world he so tightly controlled, Charlie knew that God left him on his own for now, just as the stock market was left alone. God let the unemployment rates and the recent crime problem loose as well—all of it falling without warning. It was both liberating and vapid at the same time, as though a great force had unclenched its fists and let everything fall to earth. He was slowly returning to a place he once knew, to a person he once was, but now a little wiser and less emotional, more of a human being than before. The cycle pushed daytime into night, and it actually had a purpose and a meaning for a change—the moonlight a little more important than before, the people on the street a little less distant and less perplexing as before.

After a few days of eyeing the applications, he finally got around to filling out the long forms that detailed his every last move—from the beginning of high school to his current situation. He wracked his memory for the classes he attended and realized that he was an unknown to most of his teachers all through high school. He remembered coming into their classrooms, sitting in the back rows, and drawing pictures on the desk with a lead pencil. Some of these pictures were entertaining, like the one he made of the android with box-like bodies that fired laser beams at other such androids. He remembered how he wrote his name in large block letters, and how he used the tip of his pencil to darken in those letters so ruthlessly that the lead point had dulled down to a blunt nub by the time he was through. He would blow off the lead dust that had accumulated on the desk, his name suddenly a large billboard sign that was stenciled into school property. His creation was much like a dated block of stone at the corner of an institution.

To his chagrin the graffiti on the desks didn’t last a day. It was the only consistent contribution he had made to the school, as it eased the boredom of the next kid who had to sit in the same classroom and have very little to say. His teachers rarely called on him. Nor were they interested in a student who wanted to hide. He was unable to see the blackboard, because the jocks in front of him were too tall for him to get a good look.

He did, however, remember his teacher’s names. By the time he had gotten to the recommendation letters, he honestly believed that at least two of his old teachers remembered him. They may have functioned as old museum pieces teaching the same old courses in classrooms filled with dust and cobwebs.

Charlie’s father, long before he died, went to the same high school, and some of his teachers from those turbulent Vietnam years were still there indoctrinating the next bunch of students to look like either Nixon or Kennedy. He also needed his transcripts, so he planned on visiting the high school that very afternoon. He remembered the school buildings much like how a curious onlooker contemplates a sculpture. With each new generation that looks at this art work, it wonders what the hell it is, why is it there, and why it didn’t take all that much hard work to make.