A Bed Lost, Regained

a short story i wrote late one night

His pajamas were stuffy and so were the stuffy stifling sheets tucked too tight always against his finicky feet. To kick like a restless child, the immaculate white undergarments of his innocence not yet soiled with an awareness of the futility of hope and protest, would be to wake up the dead woman who slept beside him. Naked, the inadequacy of his masculinity exposed for possible derision by unknown demons, or the possibility of intimacy with another human being or even himself something he had long forgotten or never known, would not please him at middle age, gone fat and flaccid, with the decline of virility, not the lionized and senseless kind which men fight wars for, poor Iphiginea butchered for the insatiable masculine desire to assert its sexual dominance and potency, but the noble and courageous kind, the virility of Hemingway, Dimaggio, Teddy Roosevelt.

The nebulous smell of a strange fart was lightly fragrant in the air, as light as the fading memory of sex and happiness. All over the country at that very moment, men, hot and fat and oppressed and lonely, and women too, for feminism’s sake, struggled to fall asleep amidst farts and fading memories of happier times. Most, as they have always done throughout the ages, realized the paradoxical insignificance and gravity of the Sisyphean task every man must perform each and every insipid day of his life, the onera he must bear, the duty he has as a small and unvital mechanism in the machine that drives and sustains the capitalist world. And so, resigned to the absurdity of his situation, he will do his patriotic duty and he will take a heavy soporific dose of Nyquil or a shot or two of vodka and fall sorrowfully to sleep. But the culmination of misfortunes and misgivings, no matter how subtle, is sometimes too much for one man, in his specific meaningless place in time and history, to bear, and so he extricates himself from the shackles on his feet that some call bed sheets, leaves the empty and spurious bliss of the conjugal bed, and goes downstairs to the kitchen. If the dead woman who sleeps beside him is disturbed or disgruntled by his exodus and she says, “Where are you going come back to bed,” he will say to her, “I am hungry,” when in fact he is full, very full, his appetite for life waning, moribund. He opens the fridge only as a perfunctory matter of habit, not looking for any sustenance in particular. He goes to the computer to play solitaire, and when he cannot go on with this little game he browses through an endless stream of porn, cursing himself, no better than a prepubescent teenage boy, gawking at lewd and lascivious girls with buoyant breasts and amorous looks in their eyes, et excrucior. But his hard-on was tepid and uninspired. It made him sad looking at these girls, maybe exploited maybe just sex crazed, in the waning hours of the melancholy night, self-exiled from the bed and from the world.

There was a dead woman in his bed upstairs. He was very lonely, always very and inexorably lonely.

And on the other window he was reading the news and so it turned out that the dirty Jews were being killed by earnest and holy Palestinian martyrs and that worthless Palestinian terrorist children were being bombed by the venerable Israeli military. And so, he remarked, the cycle of man’s brutality to his fellow man perpetuates itself again like clockwork, and the haunting specter of two big buildings falling to the ground loomed large over his head.

Sometimes, late at night with no where else to go but back to bed with a dead woman, men begin to think. And so, for lack of anything better, with no where else to go in the world and with nothing else to do, he thought. And the more he thought the more he realized something about happiness and unhappiness. It was that happiness, not that he repudiated the notion altogether, but that happiness is a feeling, a euphoric stream of endorphins by the brain, an ephemeral and tantalizing sensation, very real and very wonderful but very short and very mortal. There is no state of happiness, he realized. But unhappiness, on the other hand, is very much a state. It is a condition, the human condition, and it is the only thing that unites all the diverse and miserable billions of the earth, the common link between the starving African wasting away in the cruel sun and the rich American cursing the tedium of life. And so he lamented the trivial and universal despair that is the human experience.

There were happy times, of course, when he was younger. If you’re ever searching for happiness, he thought, never look to the future. All the future holds is death and nuclear war, the marginalization of humanity, the degradation of the soul, the decline and fall of western civilization. Second Law of Thermodynamics recalled. Entropy is always increasing. Eleventh grade physics.

No, and do not look to the present. There is never happiness in the present, especially for middle aged men living in the hellhole so euphemistically called America.

If you really want to find happiness look to the past. For all life worth living is lived before twenty. Remember that, he told himself, his back against the current, rowing ceaselessly into the past. He sat, as we all sit, backwards on the train of life, with no conceivable future and little concern for the blur that is the moral and spiritual chaos of the present.

If he could talk to his kid right now about sex, he would never tell him to wait. What are you waiting for, you idiots? There’s nothing out there for you but dusty worms in the gluttonous ground. And like fools they will seek love, but the only true love’s made in a Hollywood studio. It’s a transitory thing, you know, like happiness. All love is destined for loss, and all loss is destined for oblivion in time. Time. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow...

He had been in love once, recklessly and foolishly in love, but that’s the only kind of love to be in. Sixteen. Seventeen maybe. It was only in her arms that he ever felt truly connected to another human being, truly happy, truly loved. That’s the thing about love, its power to expand the capacity of the human soul, that euphoric sensation of goodness flowing in the very veins and arteries of your body. Yes it was the only time he ever felt that he was not alone in the dark and daunting ubiquity called the universe. But she had wanted to wait. Religion. Goddamn religion. Goddamn God. Abandoned and helpless in a foreign and hostile world, a lonely and cruel and ugly world. Never asked to be born, never asked for a part in His sadistic little game called life. And then, as if he had not endured enough, callously denied his one true shot at happiness and belonging in the world in the name of His goddamn religion. Yes, he thought, ever creature has a right to detest his maker.

All this he expostulated subversively, iconoclastically, despairingly, and he tried hard to remember the taste of her kiss and how her pink nipple felt on his lips.

Lost my virginity to some slut at a party a few years later, drunk off my ass.

All this he thought and more. He thought about his brother, the poor son of a bitch shot dead by the gooks in Nam. But the enemy is anyone who’s going to get you killed and in that sense it was goddamn American arrogance and a pattern of military intervention in suppressing popularly supported revolutions in third world countries and worst of all the patriots, the bastards who said if you don’t go to war and die and lay down your life for your country’s hubris you’re a Communist and a coward. But fuck patriotism, no better than religion, the drug and plague of the masses, though the liberals like to say the people, but there are no the people, just individual persons who are overwhelmingly and resoundingly cruel and ignorant. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. The sweet lie they call it. Well I would have loved him even if he’d really been a Communist and a coward because he was a good guy like fishing in the summer and just appreciating the rising sun back when there was still some spark in me somewhere and you could feel the masturbatory energy of goodness and beauty drove the universe, and baseball and how he dared me to jump off the deck into the pool or moon the pretty blue-eyed girl next door, nearly got me killed the crazy son of a bitch. When he died, that was when I knew there was nothing this world had to offer me. It’s just one of those things. Some people are lucky and get along quite nicely in this crazy little world, the Buddhists and the idealists and the ignorant few who live the American dream and do not come to realize its emptiness. But most men are not made for the world.

Perhaps he should, but the gnawing sense of boredom even with sleep precluded it as such so

You can sling a lot of shit in man’s face. You can degrade him. You can crush his spirit. You can estrange him from his fellow man, deny him love and basic human camaraderie, pervert and corrupt him, make him hate life with all the vehemence in his soul. You can do all these things, but it will not often weaken the mysterious and obstinate human desire to live. He knew this and that is why when he stared into the pits of his soul and found nothing but stone, utter coldness, he knew that the spark had been extinguished, and it was time for him to go.

No, suicide is not cowardice. There is no braver act in the world than the taking of one’s own life. For many have come to realize that life is not worth living, but few have the courage to stand up to God and say no, emphatically and unabashedly no, I refuse to go on as an absurd puppet in your little puppet show. It is the only true act of defiance given to man, and it is why he is otherwise, by and large, a tractable creature.

Casually, unpretentiously, without melodrama or histrionics, he got his gun. He picked it up with a philosopher’s equanimity, for his inchoate act was not one of rash emotion, but of cold and calculated reason. He thought of a note. But why? They would demand some sort of justification, but man cannot even justify his own existence, so why then should he be expected to justify his refusal to exist. But there needs to be some contemplation, no not for a possible 11th hour change of mind, it was too late for that, but he must stand on the brink of defiance and achieve that rare lucidity of thought, so as to understand the true futility of the human experience and the absolute justice of his act.

Downstairs he walked, from his wife as far as possible was he.

He had lived alone and so why should he die any other way. Sticking the gun in his mouth he tasted the sweet metallic taste of death and marveled over the simple physics of the mechanism that could undo in a matter of nanoseconds all the chaos of the human soul, all the bitter love and cold despair and tenderness gone callous with time and sado-masochistic sexual desires and, obscurest of all, the goodness that is oft entrenched too deep to be known or felt. Some say in ice which is nice. And that often we so drift off into the humdrum course of our everyday life that we lose ourselves and are really no better than dead like that woman upstairs and then we are born again just before we are about to die in the final sense. Can anything be salvaged from the dust then there were thoughts of a bright-eyed boy that was himself in his most pure manifestation and somewhere was still himself for the human soul is a palimpsestic soul and for you are everything you were are and ever will be so that even the most brutal of killers and rapists and tyrants has that spark of humanity in them. The bright-eyed boy, full of hope and unclouded goodness, reincarnated in his son, for with age we come to reject the western and Marxist concept of the linear course of history, embracing instead the oriental and circular nature of life, the all-encompassing human condition of suffering and the potential for dignity in that suffering, and that as he himself had been lost and perverted, marred by the inevitable toll the vicissitudes of vicious life had taken upon him, that though he had taught the boy to play catch and that the sacred paternal bond had been strong and stalwart, somewhere the son had gone astray from him, as all men go astray from those they love, and that his son was lost, as all men are lost in a life that is so nebulous in its morality and purpose. Now, the gun put aside, in his room he watches the son, and in sleep they look so much like the little kid you lost, and yes the best years are past as they are always past, but maybe one day no not for you but maybe.

That sometime he himself had been a good father and a good human being and that no matter how much you suffer and how futile you know that suffering is you must go on, you must always always endure. For no man is an island unto himself, but a part of the continent, and that in all the alienation there is somewhere a moral responsibility to the world and your fellow human being, and that you must go on, for somewhere there is a dignity in suffering, a nobility in endurance, a spark of goodness in the soul of every human being that ever suffered on this miserable planet. So there were steps to be taken, things to be done. There was an estranged and disillusioned son, who would one day be a man himself with a family and choices in life and suffering, and all you want is for him to be happy, him in need of saving and a paternal bond just as much as he himself needs the filial love. You cannot abandon him now, for to give up on yourself is one thing, but you can never give up on the very future of humanity, embodied by the young and restless and confused son of a broken man. There was a dead woman upstairs too, and he knew in his heart that he had been unjust to her, that his reproaches belonged undeniably to himself, who in all his self-absorbed despair had neglected the woman he had loved once, that when the human heart, no matter its initial ardor, is starved of human warmth and kindness it can grow cold and weary and dead. Yes you must go on because there is nothing for you in death but in life there is always the possibility of renewal and redemption, dignity in suffering, hope in despair, salvation in fall and destruction. No walking upstairs he knew he would not no he could not not as long as there was something human within him as long as there was a son lost in the basement and a hot spot that was his beside his wife beneath the stifling sheets of their lonely bed.