Posted from The Citrus Report
The sky closed its eye today. For a moment I saw its breath, the fog clearing up and the path in front of me continuing on in endless resplendence. I threw my watch away, tossed it over a nameless bridge while the sun was falling from view. As of this moment I have been walking for an innumerable amount of hours. Time has no use when traveling without rhythm or pattern. I measure each moment in the amount of steps I take rather than the amount of seconds that pass. The road looms and moves long and slurring, a ribbon with unmatched tenor in this or any other moment in my life. I threw my watch over a bridge several hundred paces previous to the events in this sentence. I have been walking, I was walking and I will continue to walk- either until I reach where I am going or until my legs and limbs bleed and I cannot go any farther. If that comes to pass, I will have to wade to my destination, crawling and carrying myself with arms until I reach those streets whose image and name I have studied but have yet to set myself in other than in moments of imagined time and space, the densities of a dream being the things that have carried and brought me here.
I am walking.
I have kept my hands inside my pockets for hours now, continuing to walk, the blood barely circulating through my veins, the cold and its temperatures completely covering me. I feel a sickness washing over me, feel its neck, nape and lips all around me. The woman who I have been imagining comes back to me again, in brief snatches of person- limbs at first, arms, wrists and hands, and beyond that those features of a face before another car drives by me and its lights splash my current reality: I am walking 540 kilometers to get to a city that I have dreamed about since a child, a place whose myth cannot possibly match the one I have built up for it in my head. I see the cities around me, those towns and villages brief on my way and I see them like children congregating in the corners of street and road before getting to the doors and altar of Paris. At times, a person can live off dreams much more easily than reality.
What nameless faces, figures and fugues occupy the mind when it has nothing else to wander on-.
*
Night now and I have been walking endlessly since Frank dropped me off. Different sets of miles are digested and catalogued by my feet as I’ve begun to find characters and faces in the features of buildings, their architecture, and that other architecture of trees surrounding the path and street.
I crossed the Rhine around nightfall, the sun falling in snatches with patches of light whispering words through the fences of cloud blockading the blue in ventriloquial contusions of movement- unseen strings and vivid color dancing back and forth, as if the fight for day were one battled by clouds contumacious to the spinning of the sphere and the need for night to cover this region of continent and country.
A rain is falling outside my tent and everything that I can see outside is covered in the screen-mesh gauze which lines the entrance/exit of my tent. I try to move my hands but am unable to. Every appendage that juts out from my person is numb- ears, nose, fingers and toes. I can see my breath in front of me and with my breath I try to trace shapes to keep my mind occupied. Dreams have a way of closing in on one’s self, the psyche one of the many endless and endlessly explored hallways of a person. I have been writing every day of my life it seems, however, I have been walking only for one. This was my first night. The stars, when visible behind the clouds, give off an endless shiver of silver, their light reflected in hours’ old reflection of a glinting sun 93 million miles away from where I am and where I am feeling the same amount of distance from the sun from where I want to be. Paris, a few inches away on my map and several hundred miles away. On foot it seems like a destination all at once a mystery writhing and moving; a piece of cloth held by a nameless child whose hands and head are held out the window of a moving car. Cars move by me here just as in that previous sentence’s image and when they do I see their lights like fire- far off they signal out to me, a strange figure walking along the road, and far off further they leave me, going by my back or front side, leaving and pulsing away along the road’s vein at an inexhaustible and ludicrous speed, too fast for my feet to comprehend or ever reach.
I have been walking endlessly and endlessly walking for what seems like forever. It is my second day and all I can think to think of is how grateful I am for Frank who filled my bag with a small amount of rations and food. Upon looking through the bag, I saw a letter from him, covering a small amount of bills and a blade, the both of which gleamed like liquid.
Note: A monolith of roadway that seems as much a wall as it is a flat surface which my feet trudge along upon. I have seen it now, spreading along on the lines and vines of a reality that has since come through in the blight of a mind that cannot stop thinking. It is a breath still lingering on and long, slow slurring and whirring like an endless wind and reverie from a snowless night still freezing in temperature.
*
* *
The car pulled passed me and stopped. Along the ridge, on the separate lanes spreading out amongst the trees of highway he stopped. I walked towards the vehicle, seeing very little at the time, my eyes blinded and burned, buried under the falling reservoirs that tried and attempted to come through in the vastness of the rain.
He honked once.
I walked up to the window and before I could speak he spoke.
“It’s raining.”
“I know.”
(We’re screaming over the rain right now.)
“Why don’t you get in? You need shelter.”
I thought it over, glanced at the interior of the vehicle and made a decision that ended up changing who and what it is that I was to become after this journey.
He reached over and pulled the handle of the car.
“Come on, you’re getting soaked out here- come in, it’s fine.”
I get in the car.
He begins to laugh and leans over, extending his arm to cover the space behind my headrest.
“Bet you’re surprised that I speak English.”
I hadn’t even thought about it, but tell him yes.
He smiles and begins a long story about his mother and how she always tried to make sure that he knew English, I say nothing and continue to nod as he switches from one story to the next, going graphically into detail about things that his father did to the family before abandoning them. I apologize for no real reason but mean it sincerely. I think of him as a lonely man, one who just needs to talk to someone.
We talk for a brief while and I begin to feel safe in his company. He tells me he’s going a long ways, that he has to go back to his house in the country and that if I want to I can stay there with his wife or when he gets there he could let me out and I could begin walking again. Both seemed fine to me. I decided to decide when we got there and closed my eyes, an action I don’t remember committing but must have done for the next memory and sentence to make sense.
I opened my eyes. The rain was still coming down in small contrails; streams and rivulets of water bleeding and pulsing along the pane of windshield and glass. The car was rocking somewhat heavily. I turned to John who had both his hands on the wheel.
“On the side road- need to take this to get to my house. Don’t worry.”
I wasn’t worried until he told me not to be. A strange emotion- I brushed it off however, realizing that paranoia is something that can destroy a man.
We continued to drive further down the road, winding until eventually reaching a small house.
“Hmm, Lynda must not be here yet.”
He parked the car and turned off the engine, the car shaking itself still, the sounds of the engine purring in harmony with the rain on the roof until stopping. He stepped out and turned to me through the window-
“Watch the mud, it- actually – wait there – I’ll come around to get you.”
I stepped out and closed the door. He came up to me and grabbed me by the shoulders somewhat abruptly and aggressively.
“I thought I said to wait. I don’t want you dirty. Come on, let’s get inside.”
He touched me in a way that seemed to signal what it was that was awaiting me while we walked into that house- a place so foreign to me that it felt like we were the last two people here and the world whirring by outside of us was merely a set for some other film and all the curtains will soon rise and the credits will fade.
Images can remain in the mind forever, premonitions just the same.
We walked the twenty or so feet to his house, the door illuminated by a lone bulb hanging above the faded wood. He keeps telling me how there are no other houses around, how he likes to be here isolated and I begin to realize that there is no Lynda, he has no wife and that I am, as he says, out here alone.
It seemed with every step his body language began to change and his voice dropped. We walked further, thoughts whirring and running by in my head so rapidly that even now they are all I can think of as I recall and recollect these memories.
Strand of thought: The only thing I have to do is keep myself from going inside there and I’ll be safe, as long as I don’t get inside his house, as long as I don’t enter his house I’ll be safe.
I step inside the house.
The door closes slowly behind me and his arm, long and thin, reaches forward for the lamp; thin wires of hair protruding from every pore in a haphazard fractal of direction with wrists moving in circular motions and fingers, twig-like in their lack of flesh, reaching up and pulling the string of the lamp.
Pendular light now invades the room, the lamp and bulb swaying to an unknown meter, the chain clinking with every other movement.
“Take a seat.”
He smiles an unwavering smile, a smile that wont leave his face, a smile and grin that says more than I can put down and a smile that I cannot describe accurately for for me to delve into that memory of that face of that smile would be for me to delve into spaces and regions of thought that have since been buried and extinguished beyond the realm of remembrance.
He pulls out a chair and leans in close to me, his breath being felt on my neck before his utterance of three sentences / statements which I will remember verbatim for the rest of my acknowledgeable existence; every word and inflection suffused with a nonchalance so fully formed in every breath of his that it was beyond eerie, minatory or direful. It felt that I was breathing the same air as all the evils of this world and that all those evils had converged and merged together in the form of this one body next to me.
“You must be tired. Let me show you your room. Best for you to sleep as soon as possible.”
I inhale deeply, deep as I can, and get up with him.
And we walk down a thin hairline of hallway, the corridor stretching through numerous turns and portions of stairway, an Escher-like quest through labyrinthine quadrants, the light leaving my view after the third turn, don’t worry don’t worry he keeps saying, only a few more steps only a few more steps, and we walk with feet shuffling, my hands holding myself up and guiding my walk, I in front and he in back, fuck this is the end fuck this is the end; my hands are running along the surfaces of wall next to me, a hallway too thin for me to stretch out comfortably, still they are there, imagining a place and picture of my surroundings and the fear burning inside me being a feeling all-encompassing until we reach the room and he lights a candle- a flame that burns slow and long, a flame whose ethereal qualities still sing to me and a flame that I watch flicker longer than any other.
I look out the window in back of him: the moon perfectly framed in the pane.
I think of the moon as my mother; the road and destination as some other.
And, though I don’t believe in religion, I begin a prayer.
The candle continues to burn, crying small spheres of wax which harden on the surfaces of floor surrounding us like an ocean of carpet and wood. Our environment is as soundless and vacant as the obsidian hallways that led us here.
He tells me to sleep and I get under the sheets of the bed while gripping the handle of a knife in my pocket, his eyes and gaze sharper than any blade I could ever possess.
-Jason Jaworski
