Sleeping Postures
Christophe Brunski
I paused too abruptly inside the doorway, and the hush of air closing in with the glass pane that supported the perennial Come in! We’re open! nudged me curtly in the back and completed my entrance into Ronnie’s PayDay Diner. The bells sprinkled over my head like mistletoe run by a clock and my weighty jacket seemed to expand in the wave of agreeable heat.
“Just you?” A waitress in that famous red-plaid waitress form, blue name-tagged Sally, shining, smiling, dutifully radiant yet down-to-earth, and proffering a wire hanger for my ragged jacket.
“Yes.” I was quite sure no one was joining me on this particular morning, a morning plugged into the middle of a frigid winter. No invisible ghosts, no psychological specters, no assistant vagabonds. It was a solidarity I welcomed. I took the hanger with a nodded thanks, and hung up my jacket on the battered rack just aside the door.
Sally the waitress led me through a frightful labyrinth of chairs and tables and left me in the safety of a small square table by the window and an automatic cup of coffee. I sat and let myself be introduced the to atmosphere. The tabletop was somewhat dull and tarnished seemed not to reflect, but to absorb and small secret swellings of light here and there. I began to knead my closed fist on the aluminum edging of the table, thinking about the ironic way such nondescript things have of becoming so vividly etched in the mind and memory. My hands were still so numb that the temperature of the thing was totally ambiguous to me. I was thinking that I should have worn gloves, that I couldn’t feel a thing like this.
I looked around me. It was the very atmospheric complacency of this place, like any other roadside diner, that elicited my tendency to magnify details into icons. Looking out the windows, what struck me most was the flow of tanker trucks passing on the highway. Well, not the trucks themselves. It was the distance between my table at the window and the road, not a very long way, by any means, but its emptiness highlighted the passing of these trucks and the sun was positioned so that the light was reflected off the mirror-like tanks when they passed. So many hurdled by in rapid succession as to lend the image of diurnal stars soaring past the window, that magical canvas of moving pictures.
I sat quietly with myself and listened to the diatribes and explications from inside myself. I wondered what I looked like and imagined the classic scenario of a director sitting like a misplaced star in a theater of empty seats, listening to a few candid actresses dramatizing on-stage. (Figuring the voice of reason just had to be female...) I thought that thus far, all my destinations had been starting points or mid-way markers. All one can look for is a place to start, it seems most of the time. You can travel the world(s) fifty times over before realizing you were already there. All the hours of premeditation in the muscles around the eyes, and it takes a fourth of a second to blink the lids open and see. And it’s a world of mirrors, because it’s all from within. Of course, it takes a hell of a journey to figure that out. One of the actresses threw up her arms in philosophical exasperation: Ten thousand days to find the ground beneath your feet! And another five hundred to believe you’ve done it! And on my yellow notepad I penciled in, line after line:
Another five hundred to believe you’ve done it...
Another five hundred to believe you’ve done it...
Another -
I was called away from my enchantment when suddenly a girl placed herself alongside my table. “May I please?” she asked me. I told her the pleasure was mine. Seemingly she had come out of nowhere yet I figured that she must have been seated somewhere shortly before I arrived, because she had carried a menu with her to my table and I couldn’t recall hearing any more ringing mistletoe.
“Thank you. Really,” she said. “I was lonely over at my table,” she said, although I figured there was more to it than that. Her chair pulled out, her chair pulled in, up close to the table. Truly, I made no attempt to return to whatever half- or wholly-engaging thoughts had previously taken me. I didn’t. For some reason, I welcomed the distraction. It’s necessary to be drawn out of oneself from time to time.
Her name, she told me, was Merredith. I instantly expected daisies or something to sprout from her smile; her natural speaking voice was really quite pleasing, but when she injected her streams of social gaiety it rode a treble fluctuation, and if graphically registered would simulate the Himalayan skyline.
She said, “I love the winter. Do you love the winter?”
“I enjoy the cold.”
Her exemplary posture slackened a little, and the supportive base of her elbows on the table widened, and she lowered herself a bit more, resting just short of total relaxation, the stitches in her knit green sweater stretching with her smile. “Me too.”
I heard a Ready to order? from stage left and Merredith asked for some milk and juice and something else while I scurried through the menu, which I hadn’t even opened. I can never decide. The eyes turned to me. “Same here,” I said, closing the laminated wings of the menu. Sally with the name tag left and I leaned forward across the table.
“What am I having for breakfast?”
She laughed joyously, which lightened my repast-related tension a bit. “Milk, toast, and OJ. I hope you’re not too hungry!”
I was starving. I told her, “I guess I’ll order something else in a little while. . . “
“Yeah, you can always do that.”
God, her teeth were white. But I found myself drawn back to the window. I could feel her staring at the side of my face. This lead me to resume my study of the passing oil tankers with increased vigor. But I wasn’t thinking. Not at all.
“What are you looking at?”
“Nothing, really.”
She let a moment slide by in quiet before asking me if I was the type of person who likes just to sit and meditate to myself.
“I guess I am, to an extent,” I stumbled, “But what is that supposed to mean, you know?”
“Yeah, I know. But that alone, I mean your... resistance, there, signals that there’s something going on in your mind. Are you the artistic type?”
I raised my hand to a slight altitude of objection but she continued, “No, I’m serious. Are you?”
“I don’t know...” I hated this type of conversation, the type I held with myself all the time... “What good is the artist who thinks he’s an artist? Doesn’t that take away from it a bit? Doesn’t that slightly falsify the whole thing just a little?”
In decidedly quick measures she took her elbows off the table. From a purple backpack which I hadn’t noticed sitting nearby on the floor like an obedient dog, she drew a few small cards. She spread them out in front of me, saying, “You’ll like these,” and I surveyed what was a four-pointed fan composed of the glossy Kunstiarten one buys in the gift shops at museums. (Oh, I had been there.) Two Monets, a Degas, a Van Gogh.
“Oh, god,” I thought. “It’s always the Impressionists...”
Her finger tapped the Monet. “The Flowering Arches,” she said.
I refrained from comment.
So she continued. “See how the edges are all, like, obscured and indefinite?”
I nodded my head, somehow, barely moving, hardly able.
“That’s because Monet had. . . cataracts, or something, before he died. “
Thanks Darling, I knew that. I felt my internal organs settle in for a long and drawn-out lecture on the typical information sought out by every Girl-Who-Likes-Paintings; information that fit nicely on index cards, and, if one was lucky, could be recited in front of the actual canvas while men with dark braided hair sauntered past and finished every third sentence in French.
She planted her forefinger on the Van Gogh and told me to observe the manic yellow halos around the hanging lights of a sinister night cafe. “Yellow- it’s principal to all his masterworks. And you know, yellow has long been the color most associated with madness. He used to frequent these types of places in the midst of his lifelong sadness... And considering the turmoil in his friendship with Gaugin, it’s entirely clear that - “
She went on. I was forced to choke myself on her eager verbal porridge, siRing through repulsive words which, to me, seemed to constitute a kind of confession, on her part, that the words Essence and Feeling were not in her vocabulary, because within those academic games of soul-less Simon Says they were never mentioned- both are too easy to spell and too hard to define.
Perhaps what I did not say had stenciled itself across my forehead, for as I completed these thoughts Merredith stopped abruptly and corralled her miniature gallery. I felt sorry. To interrupt whatever I might have said to this effect was the waitress, again, setting down a grapefruit ordered some minutes previously by my companion. Sally offered a squawking apology for the delay and fluttered off someplace else. Merredith began to saw apart the yellow fruit. I stared at its pale rind sitting without revolt in a glass bowl, and I imagined how much poor Vincent would have simply loved somebody just to talk to, and here I was in the presence of such a person, a surprise gift, and I had nothing nice enough to say. At the grill, another breakfast was being prepared, the grease sizzling and hissing a somber culinary applause. I coughed, because I had nothing else to do.
For some time, we let the din of the place do the talking. She played along with our silence, letting the symphonic dropping of plates, the swinging of the kitchen door, and the tide of other voices replace our own. Obviously she found it a trifle morbid, but there was little I could do. Anyway, I was telling myself, The mentality we share as human beings seems inevitably divided into two critical bodies: One led the mind when actually thinking, the other responsible for engagements in conversation, and they only very rarely crossed paths and produced the much-aspired-to by-product known as eloquence. Of these two critical mental bodies, most people are one or the other. Merredith and I would no doubt be drawn at opposite ends of the chart. Then why the silence? I wondered. I had always thought polarities were a perfect match. It seemed overall that she was a very warm person, so I tried to prohibit my mind(s) from ruining that. I watched her eat.
Her spoon hung poised over the bowl like the needle of a record player, about to land again on the threadbare vinyl it had already decoded and translated thousands of times. But the tip of the spoon, much to its own surprise, clanged bell-like on the table.
Your eyes are red,” she said, not looking at me, then continuing the autopsy of her grapefruit. “So,” she asked me, like a journalist starting over from scratch, “What is it that you do, anyway?”
In the most concise language possible I broke the news that I was a so-called writer. I hoped to avoid any lengthy replies, analyses, monologues, or questions. I was bored with myself.
“Writing! Magnificent! I knew you were an artist.” She wiped her hands on her napkin. “So, you can bring what you think into reality... That must endow you with a certain freedom. Doesn’t it make you feel free?”
“Not quite.” I said that it was up to the insane to control their private piece of what the rest of the world dubbed reality. I said that there was no trap worse than the ability to play God. But somewhere in between the moment I took a short breath to say this and the moment I shut my mouth again, softly, I had changed my mind. I was there, perfectly there, and perfectly within my right mind. Yet hadn’t I brought this about? This morning was entirely of my own hand. If things seemed to run themselves, to be happening to me instead of the inverse, then this was caused by my failure to realize beforehand that I was as free to create as a child with a shard of glass etching a cloud into a field of hard-packed dirt.
“Not quite? You don’t think so?” she said, reading my face and taking a sugar packet from its little tray by the napkins. “It seems that we sometimes believe something a little less after saying it. “
Boy, do we. I thought about this as I watched the stream of sugar cascade into the yellow empty rind, piling into absorbent dunes, sinking. She crumpled the edge of the packet as one might fold the ear of a dog.
She stared straight at me. “The problem with you writers is that you never say anything.”
“Untrue,” I protested. “Plus - what, then, would we have to write about?”
“You see, then? It’s back to pad and paper. You may say all the right things, but you never DO it!”
A statement to which all my former teachers and lovers would eagerly attest. If she was right, she was right. Writers disembowel themselves onto the pages that they and others hide behind. She told me that words were my greatest aegis. She had a point, although arguments are so easily inverted... I had by now no doubt that should one invade her homely and falsely erudite bookshelves, any given volume could be opened to reveal ball-point effigies labeling Irony with a star and Foreshadowing with another. How I dread these blotches of ink thrown across the sun.
But all this time, my concerns were gradually drawing themselves back to the level of the fact that I was dead tired, and at any rate glad to have somebody to talk to. Our breakfast was drawing to a close. Something had to come next, I thought.
“Where do you go now?” she asked.
Where do I go now? I thought. I shrugged. It was my way of asking her permission to join her. “I’m following you,” I announced.
“Oh, good. I do enjoy your company. Where do you want to go, then, eh?”
“As I said, I’m following you, which means you pick a direction.”
“Okay.” She smiled as we rose from the table, spilling down random bills and coins as we went. Whatever we had left had to be enough, we figured, so I swept up her purple backpack from the ground, slung it over my shoulder, and we left, plan-less and carefree.
My legs felt oddly buoyant atop the crush of the parking lot gravel underfoot. I watched my legs cross this gray plateau. In a second I was moved by the clarity of which I saw the rocks scatter under and away from the soles of my shoes. Through the thin layer of tears the cold wind brought to my eyes when it blew, they appeared more defined, more crisp and superbly aware of their own borders than I ever could have imagined them, or anything. I plundered my way to the passenger side door of her car, colored pewter and polished by the sun, and I paused there, waiting for her to unlock the door. Dazzled by such a enormous sense of random perception, I managed to drop the now-symbolic purple backpack onto the ground, spilling half its contents onto the stones. Merredith’s fragments of the Louvre, a lipstick, three pens, and a legal pad with some notes tumbled to the ground.
I stared at the pad, hurriedly waiting for the trigger to activate my memory. What was it? What was it? What -
Ten thousand days to find the ground beneath your feet!
And another five hundred to believe to believe you’ve done it!
Another five hundred to believe...
“Oh, my God,” I said.
Merredith was about to get into the car. “What? What’s the matter? Just pick the stuff up. What, did something break, or something?”
“No,” I said, “Everything’s fine. I’ve got it.” I gathered her stuff and zipped the bag.
Merredith leaned over from the driver’s side and unlocked the door. It was pleasant inside, the cool kept out and the sunlight kept in. As Merredith’s body rolled through the movement of retrieving her keys from the pocket of her jeans, I thought I felt a downy whip of her hair brush my cheek. I don’t know how this could have happened. She was really nowhere near me then, yet, deciding that I had not imagined it, I felt three times over at peace with the world. How can that be? How can the edifice of Concern, Question, Thought, and Reflection be so simply leveled by a strand of hair?
The car stalled once. We left the parking lot of Ronnie’s Payday Diner behind another tanker truck. Even with their growing intensity, my thoughts were receding into silent horizons.
(We are physical creatures who must always return to our physical nature. At beginning and end there is nothing, except that we are human, and even to question such a thing is already to wander amidst a circular garden from which we must always return, in one lifetime or another, stumbling and dropping our bags, stepping back into the collective home, found and re-entered at the moment we stop our searching, and remember simply to sense our own existence...)
I let this voice speak inside me, and I listened, and coupled with Merredith’s prating, it formed a marvelous duet. She spoke again in her amusing half-textbook dialect, which my ears were learning to digest without repulsion. Her speech to me sounded slurred and worked like an elixir, two invisible hands laying back my head to lean against the window, where it rested, untouched by the jolts thrown up from the street through my body. Like a gull born above the clouds and given ten seconds to live, I dove into my sleep.
