Gabrielle Taylor's "Cockluck"
April 09, 2002
The next day I slept.
I woke at midnight when the front door rattled locked. The apartment was empty; more than empty quiet, desert quiet, early autumn quiet. There would be, I knew, a note from Auntie saying she was gone on location with JB and would be back when he was done. Which she undoubtedly meant, right now. Provided. Provided.
The clack of my front door locks clotted in my ears like wet cotton. There was no other sound and then there was no sound at all, not my liver or my nose or my puffy white sheets. I turned on my glaring red alarm clock radio, loud, I think.
I knocked a handspan of books from my bedside bookshelf and they all fell in tawny profusion, inexhaustible, smashing like a wave against my window and spraying against the wall. My bedroom window eased up and open. Books fell from it like it was a paper faucet and crushed themselves against the sidewalk below.
I fell out of bed. I fell through the books to the bottom and watched them collide over me. Pages flapped over my face. They slid over my sleep-numb cheeks and licked out the window. The shelf was no more empty. The books that fell were not mine. Nor were they books I would have read.
I put on my bathrobe and left them falling interminably to the street. I turned on the bathtub taps and let the water run until it was thoroughly hot, then I turned on the shower.
It seemed that gravitation and entropy -- that space and time and conservation -- were simply conventions as well, as vulnerable as those against theft or in favour of love. That wasn't insanity, perversion, or even hallucination. It was simply pragmatism: anyone could choose to reject any dictate at all, provided one accepted the consequences. The consequences of rejecting gravity could be death; rejecting law, jail; rejecting society, yet another kind of isolation and immobilization.
I scrubbed thick orange-scented shampoo and then rose-scented conditioner into my hair.
If one could choose isolation and immobilization surely one could also choose to involve oneself and to act. As though one was turning up a light in a dark room, the more one involved oneself the more one was subject to situational ephemera: a room that contained a Russian princess one day could hold nothing but unpaid bills the next.
I rinsed off and bundled into a white Egyptian cotton towel.
I could reject their influences: Corin and Alan and William and Stefan; Emerson and Lynd; Bertram Brooker, to whom I'd devoted such curiosity, whose privacy I had invaded so casually; for that matter, Ken Layne, or Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf, or Bruce Springsteen, or even bin Laden, or even my father. I could claim that they were nothing, meant nothing, had had no effect, simply because the random circumstance of their effect was more than I could stand.
Or I could assimilate them, which I had essentially done but never acknowledged. I could draw them all into my being and filter them fully through me, like coffee through a grinder or ice in a blender, until they were comprehensible, until they were good.
I put a CD in my stereo and turned it on. I turned it all the way up and went barefoot into my kitchen.
I could conjure up any of them at any time: bin Laden, or Springsteen, or Corin, or Alan, or even Lynd, or even my father. I could make them flesh, nearly as strong flesh as if random chance had flung them down before me. That I hadn't thought of Lynd -- of Emerson -- in specific didn't mean he hadn't been with me. They were all conjoined to me now. Instead of ignoring that, or flying from it, surely there was some use to which they could be put, some practical aim? Couldn't Emerson Vorace stand sullen and obscure as my doorman? Perhaps Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf could keep the pigeons off my windowsill, and earn his place in my mind.
I took a fifty dollar bill from my wallet and put it in an empty Gunpowder Green enameled tea tin on top of my fridge. The planes wouldn't be grounded forever, and the airfares would be as low as I'd said, by the time the queues were cleared. I wanted to see Fort, I wanted to see Casablanca, I liked to fly, I needed to get away from here. I needed some new exposures. I didn't, I don't, believe that wherever you went there you were. I didn't, I don't, believe people are the same everywhere. Only that one meets the same people if one only goes to the same places.
I ordered Greek delivery and gave my address twice. When I hung up I heard music. It wasn't the CD, it was someone singing. It was Bruce Springsteen, in my kitchen, in jeans and a clean white t-shirt, baking cookies.
"This your place?" he said when I walked in.
"Yeah."
He put down his wooden spoon in a blue ceramic bowl of sifted flour and went out into the living room. I saw him shut off the CD before he went into my bedroom. He was my guest, of course, and I wanted him to be comfortable.
When he came back he introduced himself, and asked what I wanted in my cookies.
The next day Bertram went to Montreal, and when he came back that night, he brought Judith's money from Bruno. His house was cleaned and stacked with neat brown boxes of his belongings.
And that was that.