I Was Gently Waltzing When Life Boogied In, Part 6

Nikolai’s trip to the edge of the abyss, his peeking down into the void that although postponed, still awaits him somewhere out there, just out of sight but with a presence clearly felt and understood, left a mark on his sensitive mind and a persistent erection in his pajamas. It was as if life, reveling in having been given a second chance, was not going to waste even a single ticking of the clock’s longest hand and having been reminded of the precariousness of the length of its stay, was now brandishing its own tools and devices … at maximum length.An so, once Nikolai’s body had had sufficient time to recuperate, he and Julie could be found, a smoldering coal among the ashes of war, ranked by increasing audacity: under the sheets in Nikolai’s room, in the bathtub ( which started a whole bathroom phase) ,in bathrooms at a friends party, two bars, and even once at a funeral.Julie did not have her period that month. It wasn’t what they had planned for, but it was by no means an unexpected turn of events either, considering the laws of cause and effect.Looking back, the nine months of pregnancy seemed to pass in a flash, and here was Nikolai now, following the nurse to the room where Julie had just given birth, where the distant crying of his child could be heard from and was getting louder as they approached.He walked in. a nurse was holding the baby and rocking it slowly from side to side. He could tell Julie was awake, but she had her eyes closed and her head was resting on the pillow. Her face had the restful aura of someone who has just gone through an excruciating task: a deep, calm weariness.The nurse holding the baby saw Nikolai and walked around Julie’s bed to hand him his daughter. He could feel the excitement growing in him, like an almost painful tickle in his stomach. The nurse placed the baby in his arms: he looked on, riveted for a moment, not knowing what to think.He hadn’t seen enough newborns to not be surprised by their smallness. The hands, the feet, so small. The whole thing completely left at the mercy of another, completely helpless. A strange surge of some feeling he couldn’t quite name, something along the lines of protectiveness went through him.And then, suddenly, something was off. Something stood out … the baby had brown eyes. Brown. The word went around Nikolai’s head like a satellite. Neither him or Julie, nor anyone in their family had brown … they were all blue eyed!*****
The brown earth keeps the blue sky humble, though it remains aloof. And life is an intruder on life, one can only choose whether to welcome it or not.Nikolai walked over to Julie and kissed her brow. It was warm but salty from the sweat. She opened her eyes and gave him a weary smile that expanded slowly until her lips grew slightly apart and the white of her teeth showed, and a wetness welled in her eyes.

I Was Gently Waltzing When Life Boogied In, Part 5

The loud blast of a tank’s canon was the last thing that Nikolai heard before losing consciousness, and another loud blast was what brought him to. This one belonged to an enemy soldier’s rifle, walking through the bodies strewn on the floor, carrying out his order to “clean the area” which consisted of retrieving all weapons and dealing with the dead and the injured.

The policy on the dead was clear, there weren’t many options really: collect valuables and leave alone. What to do with the injured, however, needed to be determined, and this had been the subject of a short meeting a few months ago, in a smoky room where a few generals gathered with their cigars, ice-clinking scotch glasses, oiled mustaches and tidy attire to come to the final decision that those injured and unable to walk were to be shot. “A conquering army is constantly moving forward, and a moving army can not afford the deadweight of injured prisoners” one of the generals had exclaimed with confidence and pompous nonchalance before taking a big drag of his cigar.

And so the soldier was walking through the room, checking pulses here, ending pulses there … nothing but orders being followed, nothing personal. Nikolai was sprawled on the floor, eyes coming to focus slowly on the black muddy boot moving among the bodies, stopping, a loud shot, walking again, this time towards him, a hand descending on a neck to check for a pulse, five or six bodies away. He figured he had about thirty seconds, might as well wait here, wait for him to come near then try to grab the rifle. But he wasn’t even sure if his hands could move, and if they did, whether they can do it fast enough.

The soldier walked out of view. Nikolai was not going to risk moving his head and blowing his cover to be able to see him. He could hear his steps; along with the crescendo of his heart pumping blood with increasing, anxious fear.

The next shot was too close, right behind his head. It sent a jolt through Nikolai’s body which the soldier didn’t miss. He took a quick step and was now standing right over him, gun pointing at Nikolai’s head, the darkness of its barrel the thick darkness of death. “Death” Nikolai thought “It’s here … that was it … that was my life” and felt a strange melancholy take over him thinking of the contrast of the noisy bustle of life and the silent soil he will be buried in and become one with.

“Not him”.

It was Julie, standing in the door frame, a tear leaving a trace on her cheek, her voice shaky and filled with plea. The soldier looked at her and then at Nikolai and her again. Nikolai having lost a good amount of blood was weak and that mixed with the anxiety was causing him to fade into unconsciousness again, but in the fixed eyes of the soldier and Julie a wordless negotiation was taking place.

The soldier understood why Julie was doing what she was doing. He himself had loved and had been loved. But he also longed. He longed to touch, to hold, to slip into the warm, soft, inviting embrace of nature and to leave, though be it for one night … even one hour, leave the filth and blood and the weight of the war that had been around him for much too long, leave it behind and taste the sweeter side of existence.

So he walked toward Julie, slow, with no signs of threat or haste. There was an unspoken mutual understanding between the two, each wishing things were different yet stoically content that they were not worse.

to be continued

I Was Gently Dancing When Life Boogied In, Part 4

But now those dreamy dawns were themselves distant dreams, lost in the haze of war. The war that had been spawned by humans, conceived of the mating of many individuals’ actions and their consequences, but had at some point assumed an identity of its own, had superseded its creators and now seemed to be more of a cause than a consequence, destroying with oedipal blindness.

In the city hall bullets ricocheted off walls, window glasses shattered with shrill bursts of noise. In short pauses of incoming fire people moved around, came out from behind their covers and fired back and ducked when they heard stronger machine guns presenting stronger arguments.
At first Nikolai was paralyzed, he had his back to a wall segment between two windows and couldn’t move as the red bricks broke into pieces at the edges of the windows where bullets landed. But now he was slowly finding himself, balancing fear with control and realizing the limitedness of his options which, as he knew before on a head level but now felt in his gut, included neither waiting for the storm to pass or fleeing out of its path of destruction, he started firing out the window, uncovering as little as possible of his head, but enough to aim.

One thing that was on his mind, and many others’ trapped there with him, was where the enemy tanks were. Outside, there were infantry with rifles and machine guns but there were no signs of tanks, the decisive heavier fire power of which would no doubt shorten the duration of their struggle, though in the same way as a rushing guillotine blade would have shortened the struggle of fallen royalty.

The reason for the slowness of the enemy tanks to arrive, enemy here being a term that signifies a relation, not intrinsic values like good and evil, was their understandable overestimation of the defense plan. Judging by the minimal resistance they had met in the jungle, and the readiness of the defense to retreat, they had concluded that there must be a ruse and suspected the path of the retreat embedded with anti-tank mines which would allow the defense, consisting of nothing but infantry, a safe retreat as the mines would not go off by their treading, but instead would wait snug and smiling in the darkness under inches of earth … would wait for the heavier cue of tanks to blowup, sending man and machine parts into the air.

And so it took a few hours of inch by inch scanning of the harmless mineless fields for the tanks to make their way to the city. But eventually they did arrive and like guests late to a party make up for the time lost by drinking faster, they started a torrential shelling of the city hall.
In the basement of the city hall where it had been decided women and children should stay during all this, it felt like an unending earthquake. Like a giant was walking through the city whose every step shook the floor and walls. There sat Julie among mothers wrapping their arms around their children, old women gasping and sobbing with every hit and children with eyes widened, too shocked and confused to even cry.

A few feet above, time was lost in flashes of sound and light from guns and tanks. The morning seemed like an eternity away to Nikolai, as if he was falling in an infinite well and the peace of the time where air was not filled with flying pieces of metal intended for your head was the receding brightness of the well’s entrance.

to be coninued ...

I Was Gently Waltzing When Life Boogied In, Part 3

Things were not always so bleak for Nikolai. A few weeks ago, on the same day of the week as the day the war finally reached and touched their village, a Saturday, Nikolai was asleep beside Julie and was having a dream, right before dawn: he was standing on the edge of a lake, water rippling slowly to the breeze that blew across it so gently, as if the air was whispering something in the lake’s ear. He chugged a small rock at the lake, trying to get it to skid along the water’s surface as many times as he could, which it did a few times before it disappeared under the blueness. He wasn’t satisfied. He started looking for another rock that was more suitably shaped. He found a dark grey one, its surface was smooth, somehow pleasing to the touch, its shape almost completely round as a disk.

In the dream, he held it in his hand for a while then skipped a few steps forward and flung it. As he let go of the stone, suddenly as if compelled by some force outside of him, he decided to close his eyes, and as soon as his eyes were closed … he was the stone. He felt the air rushing along its smooth surface as it approached the glassy ripples of water below, there was a joyous excitement in the anticipation of contact with the water which was getting closer, closer and closer till suddenly there was a moment’s touch, a wetness that pleasantly tickled his underbelly followed by his almost involuntary reaction to push himself back up ... and he was airborne again, on another arc, rising to fall once more. He felt like he could keep going for as long as he wanted to, He could even cross the lake, and there was something deeply, physically and mentally, enjoyable about this dream-sport.

But after a while something started to pull him away and out of the dream, a wetness … a wetness of a different nature. Something, somewhere outside of the dream was pulling, and it kept on until he finally surfaced into waking consciousness, the remnants of the pleasant dream still lingering in the air.
It was Julie and the wetness of her lips on his nape which she was gently kissing that had waked him up. That had indeed awoken him from a pleasant dream into another, more enjoyable one.
Ahhh … one almost has to give out a wistful sigh when thinking of the joy of the touch of a woman’s lips on a man’s nape, the soft touch of her hand sliding over his back and on his chest, the soft sound of her breathing the only sound he can hear in the predawn darkness of a room with thick velvet curtains … the sweet joy of the presence of this woman that he loves and whose breasts spread and flatten out against his back as she pulls herself closer, her body so familiar, at moments like this almost like an extension of his own, or his of hers, pressing itself against his, warm, wanting, wonderful.
Indeed not. Things were not always so bleak for Nikolai.

to be continued ...

I Was Gently Waltzing When Life Boogied In - part 2

Presently, the stream of gunshots became less frequent and soon subsided to a trickle and then there was silence, a silence more tense than a scream. He slowly raised his head outside the trench after he saw the army officers taking peeks. White smoke of something burning in the distance moved slowly among the evergreens like a beautiful autumn mist. The scene seemed to stand there still for a moment, serene, reflective, beautiful, oblivious to the human drama right at its heart.

The imagery imposed itself on his mind for a moment too brief to be fully registered and was interrupted by a distant rumbling beyond where the tall trees limited visibility. All heads turned, knuckles white gripping the minimal reassurance of bayoneted guns, breaths held in in anticipation, adrenaline soaked brains running through simulations, weighing different options at speeds too high to be articulated in internal monologues, until suddenly the wait was over: two pine trees made a screeching sound as they broke and fell loudly to the ground and from behind them a tank emerged like a tight iron fist with a long middle finger extended towards the sky. It stood there while its muzzle rotated like an animal sniffing the air for prey. The infantry caught up quickly and soon the Morse code of gunshots began again, alas without anyone making any effort at interpreting it.

The defense obviously lacked in numbers and weaponry … no surprise. Soon there were shouts of “fall back” coming from the senior army officers. The retreat plan was to divide in two groups that would take turns in moving back and firing back, while making their way with hopefully minimal casualties to the city hall which had been deemed the most suitable building for them to make their last stand.

to be continued ...

I Was Gently Waltzing When Life Boogied In, Part1

Nikolai's room was filled with books. A poetry anthology lied face down beside the bed, the second volume of war and peace rested on the edge of the desk beside the typewriter. A notebook was kept open by a pen, containing the first few lines of a poem:

The Lily's roots run to the deep beneath

Yet on the surface jolly as a wreath

Goes up and down on the sea’s heaving breast

Toyed by the wind, the sun and all the rest…

But he wasn’t in his room. He had not even entered it that day. All night radio messages had announced the fall of army strongholds that had stood between their village and the enemy line that now seemed to advance like the sweeping hand of night, a dark blade, at its edge a red margin of blood: a twilight... And now he was gripping his gun with sweaty palms among other volunteers who had stayed to fight alongside the army.

At first the war was a joke, the latest conversation topic for his father’s friends, another item on the long list of things his mother could worry about and an excuse for his brother to drag people into passionate Marxist debates, or rather lectures since he would be doing most of the talking.
It was remote, impersonal, a backdrop for his days wallowing between books, staggering between small tables of bars on his way to their toilets, Sunday mornings laying in bed with Julie until hunger drove them out and midnight poundings on the type writer’s keys: the piano that played the waltz to which the world outside of him held the hand of the one within while they gently danced.

But now the war was anything but remote. Distant gunshots echoed in the jungle, sounded like a great ax falling on tree trunks, and each time they sounded a bit closer, which no doubt played some part in causing what had been a mild discomfort in his stomach all day to turn into a more serious need to use the toilet.

to be continued ...

The Fire Within

To live with the fire that burns within
One can only be cold
And leave the thousand blazing tongues
Writhing but untold

Las Vegas Zen

The partial contents of a monk’s notebook found left behind in his room in Flamingo Hotel, Las Vegas.:

*****

The question is not “Did you win or lose?” the question is “How long did it take you to get rid of all your chips?”

*****

Do not ask what the strip can do for you or what or who you can do for or on the strip. Ask instead of yourself what your room number was.

*****

You don’t shake a pint’s round, plump hand, you grab onto it because it’s the only thing that keeps you from falling into the abyss that opens like a maw underneath.

*****

As the bottle empties into you, empty yourself into the bottle.

*****

Do not be the rock that stands in the river’s way, be the pebble that is carried by its current, then all will be according to your whims: your will is the will of the river, and the river’s will...yours.

*****

Let the assholes talk, their comeuppance will soon descend upon them from above.

*****

A departing Koan:What do a Samurai, a heroin addict and a compulsive gambler have in common?For all, their daily routines are marked by a strong sense of purpose: The Samurai trains hard to master his sword, as his life might soon depend on this mastery. The heroin addict must procure his daily fix or suffer the dire(hattic) consequences. And the gambler has to gather the money to place the next last bet that everything seems to depend on: all three lead strongly purposeful lives.

Just a Perfect Day, part 4

Is it predestination that wraps itself in the cloak of chance, or the irreversibility of choice that causes the illusion of determinism, or is this question itself the barking of a delusional dog up an illusory tree: an invalid question asked by an overgrown brain that at first evolved as a supremely adaptive tool for hunting and gathering, and the passing on of genes but somehow, as in a differential equation, this evolutionary solution overshot, went beyond the intended goal, and not only invented condoms, thereby defeating its very purpose of existence, but also started asking questions that were not meant to be asked, that nothing in nature had thought of an answer for, that didn’t even exist outside of its web of neurons?

But if it is so, and the human brain is an evolutionary flaw, or anomaly, was its creation a matter of blind chance or predestined fate, etched into the womb that was the big bang itself, if there ever was such a thing?

Be it choice or fate, the present reality is one of many possible permutations and is only distinguished from the others by the fact that it is indeed the one that is “real”ized. So one could easily imagine how it could have been that Bob’s mother, who plays the lottery religiously, could have called him at 7 a.m. on the Sunday morning following that disastrous Saturday night to wake him up, startled, not knowing for a second or two where he is exactly, the bitter aftertaste of last night still clearly present in his mood, to inform him that her combination of digits arranged sided by side on a small piece of paper turned out to be the winning combination and that they are now millionaires, and how upon hearing this Bob would rub his eyes and ask if she’s alright to which she would say that she knew he wouldn’t believe her and “here’s your dad, talk to I him, what are the chances that we both went mad on the same day?” and Bob, once reassured by his dad of loads of cash awaiting impatiently for his arrival, would hang up the phone, throw a swift uppercut in the chill Sunday air of the room and yell “YES!”, all caps.

However, it is merely a tautology that things that are not probable, don’t usually happen, and Bob had had a whole night of unusual occurrences just the night before and now, unfortunately, it was back to normalcy. So there was no phone call to announce winning lottery tickets, which means that he did at least get to enjoy an uninterrupted Sunday morning sleep. Also, not to leave him in too bad a shape, he did eventually end up getting more that enough money from the insurance company to fix his car.

Just a Perfect Day, part 3

Twenty minutes of a night of precarious suicidals dodging your car, followed by being jettisoned by your friends, quote unquote, the moment the costs of staying with you outweighed the benefits, twenty minutes of such night, sitting in the car’s silence watching streams of rainwater ski down the slope of the windshield, waiting for a tow truck that now seems would probably never show up, was enough for Bob to say the magic words: “FFuck it” he said with two capital F’s and drove the car on the tore remnants of tires to a Safeway parking lot across the street before calling for a cab.

Take a long hot shower Bob, you deserve it, you do. The almost narcotic effects of something as corporeal as standing under a downpour of water warmed up to just the right temperature on something so apparently ethereal as the mind are amazing. He got out of the shower and wrapped a thick towel around him and walked over to the bedroom’s window looking over the street outside just in time to see a car pull up right in front of the complex. The passenger side door opened and Mary, Bob’s aforementioned girlfriend, stepped out into the four thirty a.m. street. The rain had slowed to a drizzle that was only visible as it sped by, slanted, under the yellow street lights. She walked around the front of the car to the driver’s side and bent her head down and through the car window for what seemed like one last goodnight kiss, one last one for the road.

She wouldn’t have done this had she known Bob was watching. She knew her relationship with him was over but she had no intention of being cruel, which is why she had already eliminated the possibility of Bob being home and standing at the bedroom window at that very moment based on the fact that his car did not occupy its usual parking spot, and was nowhere to be seen.

Bob watched this with a calmness that even surprised himself, despite the pang of pain he felt somewhere through his chest. He understood. He had had dim hopes of restoring a pulse in the cardiac arrest of their relationship, but even he knew that describing such hopes as anything more than dim would be naïve optimism. Something inside had seen this coming and had subconsciously prepared itself. Perhaps, had he been more lucid, had he had more insight into his own emotions and thoughts he would have paused to consider whether his aspiration to revive this relationship was anything more than the force of habit. Maybe he would have asked himself whether it would not be better to step aside and stop spending the energy needed to prolong the reverse osmosis of feelings, and instead let the human chemistry take its natural course, even though it would mean it wasn’t meant to be.

However, no need for a pointless, late night fight, he understood that much. So pillow tucked under arm, blanket dragging behind him, Bob journeyed to the living room, where the sofa suddenly turned into a very valuable asset, especially because of its ability to transform to a bed upon the pulling of a strap.

Just a Perfect Day, part 2

Of all the possible metaphorical paths that Bob had to pick to get to such problematic position this was not one of the most probable, assuming free will. Normally he wouldn’t be at Tim’s party. The reason he was there tonight was the “on the rocks” status of his relationship with his girlfriend, who had told him earlier in the day that she will be going out with friends tonight, without a hint of invitation.

Now the reasons for on-the-rock-ness of the relationship are very complex, suffice it to say that they include a phone call last Saturday at 9 p.m. initiated by Bob’s girlfriend during which she reminded a forgetful, drunk-with-a-friend-at-a-downtown-bar Bob, at length and with no little effort to obviate her derisive tone, of the fact that he had been supposed to be home at 8, that they had made plans a week ago and that she had made reservations at the restaurant which she had already cancelled before calling Bob, so there was no need for him to rush home anymore and she was even nice enough to wish Bob a good time with his friend: “hope you have fun” she had said, her tone loaded with sarcasm as a rocket with a nuclear warhead.

This however was only the nail in the coffin of the camel of their relationship which many straws had helped break the back of on many nights of petty arguing and days of cold detachment, the source of which arguments, Bob only sometimes remembered to remember, was not what it seemed: their differences of opinion about how each of them should behave and be, but rather their disability to entertain each other, and hence the complexity of the reasons for the deterioration of their relationship, because who can put his/her finger on that x-factor that makes one entertaining to another and then luckily visa versa.

At any rate, facing the wraith staring into the beams of his headlights some part of Bob’s brain, deep beneath what constitutes the self-conscious part, decided to completely ignore Jen’s screaming from the backseat and Tim’s banging on the dashboard and solely concentrate on turning the stirring wheel to the left with remarkable speed, allowing the right corner of the bumper to barely miss the standing figure’s knee who had apparently changed his mind last-minute and had jumped to the side even though the car had already cleared him. But this caused the car to hit the curb at too exciting of a speed for the tires to hold their breath and so they popped loudly, as the seatbelts tightened on the three law abiding passengers’ chests.

It took Bob a few moments to gather himself and get out of the car. He saw the crash’s cause running at full speed, already half faded into the empty street’s darkness where he had emerged from as if from nowhere. Tim got out of the car and said “what the fuck was that?” staring at the back of the running figure. Jen got out and said “oh my god” in a weak voice, eyes staring at nothing in particular.

Both front tires were shredded so there was no point in using the spare tire. To his disbelief, as Bob listened to Vivaldi’s Summer playing over the phone while he waited for someone at the towing company to pick up he saw Tim calling for a cab. He was looking all around except in Bob’s direction, trying to avoid eye contact. The cab got there before the tow truck. “What if I had no money with me to pay for the two truck? they didn’t even offer to help or stay. fuckin’ assholes” Bob said to himself with quiet rage that almost felt good. “sorry man, good luck” Tim said as he was getting in the cab. “Fuck you” Bob almost said but didn’t, he just kept quiet and looked away. “This is going to be a good day” he thought, so when it started to rain just as the cab was taking off it was no surprise at all.

Just a perfect day, part 1

When Tim said “Hey Bob, can you do me a favor?” he could smell the faint odor of trouble: it was an innocent question that reeked with something unpleasant, like a cute toddler who has made plans on taking a shit on your lap.

The party was running on empty. Most girls had left, and the ones who had stayed had not stayed out of choice: they were either too drunk to perform the complex acrobatics of walking, or were waiting for their rides like a famished African village awaits rain.

Sometimes, if it’s a long night, the hangover starts while you’re still drinking. It’s not that bad, it really depends on your agenda for the next day. Naturally, if it includes any kind of work for which you get paid, which implies that it would not be your preferred method of passing time, you are somewhat fucked. The degree to which you are fucked depends on the nature of your job, and whether it involves a monitor or not.

Bob however is smarter than to imbibe to such excess when he knows he has to work the next day, so he was nursing a Corona, trying to push back the rising tides of hangover over the Atlantis of buzz when Tim asked that ominous question. Bob is a nice guy though, he answered “Sure, what is it?” to which Tim said “well, Jen says she left her bag on Capitol Hill, she thinks she left it on the park bench when her friend went to use the park bathroom, she was asking me if there is anyway she can get a ride up there, she has all her cards and everything in the bag, so I was wondering if you mind giving us a ride up there man?”

Bob had once watched his friend’s bag get snatched by some guy on a bicycle on Cap Hill, right by the soccer field where they were playing. His friend had given chase and had fallen on his ass trying to run on asphalt with soccer cleats. That was 6 p.m. on a Tuesday, now it was 3 a.m. on a Saturday. The bag is gone, even if you had a pink semispherical force field from the future buzzing a finger-melting, limb-severing buzz around it, it would still be gone. The chances of retrieving a bag left on Capitol Hill are as good as a Bigfoot sighting in the Big and Tall section of a department store. But, Bob is a nice guy and he said “sure, I don’t think it would still be there, but sure, I’ll give you guys a ride” but thought “fucking Tim, why do I have to suffer your buzz murdering demands when it’s you who wants to get some ass, and from who? From Jen … that snobbish whore” because unlike most, some nice guys do know what’s up and Bob was one of them.

The car was filled with the black on black hum of tire on asphalt, that acted as a backdrop for the noises of KEXP that was itself a filler for the occasional silences in the three way conversation between the passengers. The theme: party gossip. “Dude what was up with Dan’s girlfriend, I mean is she antisocial or what?” Jen asked with a zealousness the source of which is beyond natural at this hour of a purse abandoning, heavy drinking night. To which Tim answered from the front seat without turning “Nah, I’ve seen her before and she was pretty normal and nice. I think she was as high as fucking kite this time though, that’s why she seemed a little off or weird.” And Bob concured “yeah dude, they were basically crawling on the ceiling they were so high, I mean Dan and his girlfriend.”

What they did not know as they gossiped (some actually prefer to call it “character analysis) the night away in the car was the futility of their journey. Jen’s purse had indeed been snatched. Around 2 a.m., and not by a homeless bum as the stereotypical, and usually true, scenario would be, but by a 25 year old, self-proclaimed anarchist with black horn rimmed glasses, who was strolling through the park on his way home from the bars on Pine street wearing his favorite black leather jacket and a pair of jeans that seemed like they were half a size small for him, out of the back pocket of which a small paper back peeked its head, and whose bottoms just touched a pair of black Converse All-Star’s high tops.

He spotted the fashionably big, white and yellow handbag sitting on a bench, stopped whistling “La Vie en Rose”, walked over and picked it up, and with one hand still in his pocket, used the other to throw the bag in the air so that it would rotate and caught its bottom causing the bag’s opening to face the earth, whose gravity helped disembowel it, its content hitting the park’s cement: several lipsticks, one thin box of eye shadow the door of which was a mirror that shattered upon contact, cell phone, various cards, a black purse and many other small things that Jen kept in her bag and had probably forgot about. He picked up the purse and kicked the bag and walked on.

In a few months he would ponder what he had done that night and would feel bad about it, not so much because he felt like an asshole, but more because he had acted like a badass wannabe, like some thug who has seen too many Hollywood movies where kicking stuff around with a cigarette on the mouth’s corner and a face like you don’t give a shit somehow has a transcendental quality to it whereas, he thought now, it’s nothing but a power high induced by exerting force over small, inanimate objects, of a women’s handbag in his case.

But that doesn’t matter right now. What matters is what drives a person to suicide: The ultimate triumph of the central nervous system over evolution which ironically causes the demise of the former and not the latter. The reason it matters is because just as Bob turned right to get on the I-5 north freeway entrance ramp that night, his car’s headlights suddenly revealed a human figure standing in the middle of the road as still as a cardboard figure, waiting for his knees’ appointment with the front bumper, which would probably send the rest of him flying into the windshield.