Hi guys! I just wanted to start posting the stuff I worked on over the summer. This is the bazaar scene that a few of you have already read, but I'm posting it just in case some of you haven't had a chance to read it or refresh your memory. This is chapter 4 of the story I did for my writing project at CUC. Enjoy!
P.S. If you guys need me to post the first 3 chapters just say so I have them lying around somewhere.
Chapter 4 Part 1
For a child, the world is simple, and some parents view it as their job to help their sons and daughters to remain blessed with foolishness. When the parent’s vaneer fails under the pressure of the complexity and strangeness of evil that a child’s little world is destroyed and can never be regained. “It’s when you take the time to sit down and watch the people go about their tasks that you begin to understand that we are all connected,” my father said, taking a bite out of a cracker with a dab of dried tomato paste. He stood up from the bench and extended his hand to me.
The noise excited me at eight years old. Animals brayed and honked as they were herded down the streets. Children pretended to shoot lasers at each other, dropped playfully dead in the dusty road, and made awkward dying sounds, which ended up sounding more like agonized cattle. I latched onto my father’s hand and he lifted me into the sky where I could observe the world from my father’s shoulders. The bazaar was busiest at high noon and the perfect time for a father and son to bond and ponder the great questions of life. Shops and merchant stands lined the busy street on each side. The dried meat vender threw a slab of flesh out on the stone heater, frying someone’s lunch. At another store, electronic, a tad outdated, spider slaves were being sold by the gadget vender. The metal arachnids twittered and bumped into each other on the vender’s marble stand.
A merchant shuttle soars above the buildings. Trails of rainbow exhaust streamed from behind it like a silk sheet being laid over a table. The massive air vessel disappeared over the highest shanties but I could still hear it’s engines, sounding like a chorus of chain saws.
The soldiers had returned, marching in their magnificent armor. A little boy’s dream. My father stood to the side of the street and let me stare in silence at the wonder of foreign technology. “They are here to protect us,” my father said. He would tell me this almost every day we came to the bazaar. I would usually just keep looking at them. This time I looked down at my father and he was staring blankly at them. His eyebrows and eyelids stressed, betraying his jolly tone. And to me, the world remained simple still, a thought of my father’s concern never crossed my mind.
“Many people pretend that they have their own lives. Tams sells his fruit at a certain price because he needs us to pay for it. And we need his fruit to be happy. Fruit is just one of the many things we need to be happy. We are this way because the more we need the more others can be there for us,” my father said, striding confidently over to Tams’ wooden fruit stand, grabbing a melon and squeezing it. Keeping up with him wasn’t hard for me because my father was my life when I was eight. Holding onto him, feeling his powerful shoulders through his dusty brown clothes, I felt a part of the world and that it was there waiting for me.
The soldiers continued moving, always watching and keeping to themselves. I would wave at them because I thought they were lonely and afraid to be away from home. Sometimes they would wave back.
“Can I be a soldier some day?” I asked my father.
“I don’t think your mother will approve. You will have to wait until she’s dead and gone to have your own life,” my father’s belly shook with laughter.
Music from the city played from windows. Soriah, a famous Delphian singer born in the ghettos sang to her home from a box of technology in the window, singing for her homeland as if it were a lost lover:
“You’ve gone off to war
Yet you’re here in front of me
Pointing a gun at yourself
You would take me there
Your eyes are glassed over
As you drift away
Come back to me
Yet you’re right in front of me”
Against the stone shanties people sat next to fires, talking and sometimes singing. One man stood out. He had a tattoo on his forehead formed in a shape I couldn’t recognize. The ink seemed to quiver as he lifted a musical instrument called the combine, invented by our people. A wooden tube attached to a large pottery shaped holder with a hole in it and strings. He caught my eye and retained a lifeless expression, playing mindlessly on the instrument with his mouth. A man beside him sang in chilling harmony with the combine’s haunting melody,
“Will he look at me with favor
From behind my broken walls
My broken walls, my broken walls
Will he look at me with favor
What is fractured stands too tall”
The singer also had a tattoo, but all over his arms and neck as well. It seemed to crawl on his skin and seemed to reach into the glazed whites of his eyes.
“Some have completely disengaged themselves from the world to avoid pain. They believe that the world’s ills are caused by connection and that all we can do is separate from that which makes us human,” my father said, walking a little bit faster. “I want you to take time to remember names.” He walked up to the fruit stand. “Address him by his name,” my father whispered with his head turned so the burly fruit vender couldn’t hear him.
“Greetings Mr. Tams,” I said politely.
“Hi child, you are growing quite handsome and the like. Must have got it from your mother not this ugly brute,” Tams said. He was the biggest fruit vender anyone had ever seen, at least that was the rumor. He used to be in the circus and could juggle fruit. My mother didn’t want Dad to take me to Tams’ stand because she said that he talked too much and that heavy talkers have nothing good to say.
I tried to honestly listen to the advice of my mom and dad. They were, like me, observers of others and I wanted to be like them. Especially my father. I liked getting dwarfed by his shadow and loved to see the world from his strong shoulders, enduring his one side banter with the townspeople.
“I hear your daughter is getting married Tams. Why couldn’t she wait for my son to be of age? He is going to be quite successful someday.” My father placed his big hands on the wood and glared at Tams with mock intensity.
“She’d be an old maid by the time he was old enough. You bloody fool. And please keep it down. I don’t want the zombies to hear you. The soldiers’ll just a soon break into my daughter’s reception and make advances on our women.”
“But Tams,” my father mocked. “If they weren’t here my son wouldn’t have the opportunity to marvel at the beautiful foreign crafting of another culture.”
“You’re a fool as usual,” said Tams.
“See son? Some men degrade one another to connect with them. And his daughter marries because men and women are lonely by themselves.”
“You married mom because you were lonely?” I asked.
“Yes son. Men and women would die without each other. And we weren’t happy enough without a child. It’s why people have so many children. They need them. They have so much love to give and need to receive love and adoration from their children.”
“Is that why you had me?” I asked.
“We were happy but we wanted to be happier. Connection is too big to ever fill, like a glass the size of a mountain.” Father’s hand thrust into the air like a temple parapet.
“That would hold a lot of ice cream,” I said.
“It would hold all of the icecream in the world,” he said setting me down and electrifying my nerves with his tickling fingers. “We should find it someday when you’re old enough to go on one of my trips.”
“We would get sick and die.”
“You sound like your mother. Don’t let her break your spirits,” Father laughed. “You are just a boy, don’t you start worrying about eating healthy foods or going on diets or practicing some sort of asceticism. Dream of long tables filled with food and never ending tubs of ice cream. Don’t be so careful. Let it all in. For you there are no limitations to the beauty of your potential.” He pulled me up on his shoulders again. “Be careful of the hateful things people say.”
“What do you mean, father?”
“Tams is just scared, that is the only reason why he says angry things about the soldiers. I don’t want you to be imbittered against others. Our family respects others, even our enemies. Seek first understanding and you will see out of another’s eyes.
“I like the soldiers, papa,” I said, not understanding why someone could not be amazed by them, and not feel safer with them around.
My father closed his eyes tightly and his eye lids creased. I think he wanted to tell me that Tams was wrong and I was right to feel safer. His eyes darkened. But he would never share his fears with me. The trolley clanged as it stopped in the road at a small makeshift station, built out of wood, where men and women waited to go to other districts. My father’s eyes lit up when a foreign woman and her daughter exited their transportation. “Ah, watch this.” He pointed. Both ladies were dressed in clothes I had only seen on the television.
“Visitors from the North,” father explained. “A mother and her daughter I’m guessing.”
The mother stood strangely like she had something stuck in her chest. She was one of the thinnest women I had ever seen but her foreign dress was magnificent. The lace of the dress flickered from purples to blues to greens. Her cheeks were caked in snow like whiteness and her hands were very thin, her eyes tired but gleaming. She approached the soldiers, her dress flowing and changing, electric. One of the soldiers, with a 4 horned shield hoisted on his back, stopped. The shield fell from his back and anchored into the street throwing up a fly swarm of dust. His iron hands lifted to his inhuman helmet, taking it off to reveal the scarred and bearded face of another human being. With his massive hands he flicked, with ease, his child onto his back where his daughter sunk her small arms into the air around her Papa’s chest, grabbing a hold of the cold steel, she shielded his head and back from the sun’s rays.
“Some customs are universal,” said my father with a hint of satisfaction. “Like me, this man is a father and the little girl wants to see the world from atop of her father’s shoulders. Piggie-backs are a custom that can only be enjoyed and relished in a small window of time, before the father loses his strength and the child grows too big to keep up on a man’s shoulders. Conroy, promise me you won’t get old.”
“I can’t stop it,” I said maturely laughing at my father’s childishness. I waved to the daughter and she saw me and waved back. “That armor must get in the way of hugging,” I mused.
“Sometimes people disagree with each other. They disagree so much that they argue with weapons and hurt each other. And by doing so we lose touch. We lash out to protect ourselves.” The soldier kissed his wife and the daughter squeeled with delight as the wonders of another world lay in front of her. “They have come from long distances to see him. What many forget is although they are confused and lost, these soldiers, who fail like the rest of us, are connected to us.”
The singing man and the combine player were dancing in the street, while the crowds made room for them, some clapping along. The reunited family stopped what they were doing to watch the hypnotic and precise timing of the singer dancers. The daughter clapped as the instrument player started beating the outside of the base of his instrument and kissed notes into existence from the tube. He played along with the daughter’s laughter although the mother kept a healthy distance away from the Delphians and their odd customs.
My father also stopped to watch the spectacle. I began to clap my hands to the beat like the others. The daughter saw me and smiled shyly as she continued clapping her hands. The soldier laughed, happy his daughter could feel comfortable in such a dangerous foreign world. I looked to my father for approval but he carefully watched, his lips pursed and his eyes watching everything. “We,” he paused and put his hand in his hair, “are connected by music.” It was unusual for him to stutter. “I am weary of this tune.”
“If your eye causes you to sin,
gouge it out, gouge it out.
If your hand causes you to stumble
Cut it off, cut it off.
Give him an inch and he’ll take a mile
By and by, can oil and water tarry a while?
Lies, lies, lies all in a pile
Give him an inch and he’ll take you for a mile.”
My father set me down slowly and gripped my shoulder with intensity. “Go now, to your mother,” he hissed.
I kept clapping. “Why father, this is so fun. Why don’t you dance?”
“Conroy. You do as I say!” He grabbed my arm. But his grip lightened and he fell on his knees.
“Papa,” I screamed. Blood was trickling from father’s mouth. I grabbed onto his arm but felt a numbness course through me and I also fell to my knees, gasping. I could barely feel the wetness trickling from my own mouth and the taste of blood.
“May Delphia one day be free from tyranny,” the singer shouted and grabbed the throat of the mother, lifting her up. All around us the people, as well as the mighty soldiers, were falling to the ground as the combine player continued his tune, the player’s eyes dancing madly. Sweat drenched the face of the father soldier as he attempted to fight his contorting body, not even able to crawl in his wife or daughter’s direction. The singer’s tattoos now danced all over his body as if they were living entities. He sneered and spit in the woman’s face. “And God rest the souls of our daughters.” Fire erupted from the singer’s body. He and everyone close to him were consumed in light.
Although blinded, I was now bumping up and down, thrown over my father’s back. He had regained some strength by some miracle, and was limping and running far away from there. Through the haze another explosion ripped through the streets.
When some time had passed, I awoke to see my father gasping and coughing against a trash dumper. He gagged and spat out blood and vomit. My father moaned, wavering back and forth on his knees, holding his head in his hands. “God help us, God help us,” he groaned. He inched towards me and grabbed my arm angrily. “You do as I say,” he screamed shaking me, his eyes bursting. “You do as I say,” he screamed again. Then he gathered me into his arms and heaved, and he shuddered, whimpering, shattered by everything.
Although I didn’t realize it until much later in my life, my father was a fool. A lovable fool, but unforgivable for leaving me so ill equipped for the true, bitter world. Seventeen years after witnessing the evaporation of a foreign family and many of my own people to those tattooed bombers, I stood in the middle of thousands of dancing people once again; as they celebrate meaninglessness. Being connected. It’s not a plausible theory. People are parasites, sucking each other dry of all life and meaning, waiting for their next fix on the various opiates of their choosing. This is the true face of Delphia, my home, if home can be considered plausible at all for a monster like me.
To be continued...
No comments:
Post a Comment