__________________
I'd woken up with the first sun's flash into my windows. Despite the cold of the night, the heat was instant. After the short night sleep my skull was cracked wide with the sun's lightning. As if instead of the day emerging, I'd gotten caught in some sustained lightning flash, a brilliant white out that broke the world open and washed everything out from within it. The moment of lightning was appropriate to thunder. Tho it has always seemed to me that they aught be simultaneous. Lightning carries with it its own type of thunder, a sheer crackling mass. Tho thunder is hardly a letdown in experience, it must be in its existential character.
Regardless, the sun had risen and I was at its mercy; my head ached.
Writing through the night in the pale lost spaces of the day had left me wretched. I was both sleepless and lost within my own nihilistic reflection. The whole world felt a nothing to me.
Eventually I scrapped myself up, splashed cold water from the basin on my face and escaped the stilted and dust filled air of my room. In trade I encountered the blinding day, a deadly heat that buzzed at the horizons of water evaporating en masse. A rapture of available waters, not to be returned to this condemned place, but transported to happier climes. We sinners left to peril. Left to tear each other apart.
The little row of lodger's cabins let onto something of a longhouse, a partially exposed three-walled structure fit with a series of linened tables. To one side our hostess—by all accounts a hardened women to be treated as any other permanent feature of the landscape: respected, possible feared, and certainly let alone—served out the morning rations. A hearty and too hot breakfast of meats, cake, eggs and some starchy mass of fried roots. My appetite was as pallid as my soul. Every bite seemed rancid and foul, excessively oily, sulfurous.
Kindly, the men at breakfast were universally silent. An occasional turning of week old newspaper pages and the scrapping of plates was all to be heard. My mind joined the morning contemplation despite myself, casting back to my former homes and lives.
While most of the past as yet appears dead to me, I find myself haunted by the specters of past mistakes and taunted by my memories of the angels of my salvation I have repeatedly rebuked. My small middle west town could not hold my interest even before I could do a thing about its hold on my person. My mother was full goodness and light. She worked fastidiously and never griped. She lived for others and never mentioned it, not even in her eyes or the lines on her face. When she became wrinkled, the worry and the wear seemed all her own and never ate at those of us who were the cause of so much work. It was a phenomenal trick. Even once I had gained the knowledge enough to notice her many sacrifices and their direct relation to my many wrongs, I could not make into the moralizing force my guilt demanded.
When suddenly she died, I was free to imagine just such a guilt. Her ghost would not have to play any role but absent martyr; I had demons enough to torment me for having let her aid me so. But these memories were all nonsense and spoke nothing to my life either before or after she died. They only appear to prepare for her sequel, who know my mind had fixated on, Marianna. And because I did not know Marianna as purely as one knows their mother, I could make her the chastising demon of my imagination as I could not my mother.
Our home was in a small frontier town. Most other middle west towns were not towns so much as commercial centers for area farmers that would slowly accrete citizens. Glowing centers of money, they would eventually establish a set of permanent residents, but they were nonetheless primarily a leech or least a by product of the surrounding farms. Our town was in contrast born a town. Several strong town fathers, not so long ago that we have forgotten their specifics, but already with the gleam of myth, came out into the frontier with a town fully formed in their heads. And with them their families. All had been Russian peasants, were still in their own minds, Russian peasants.
The middle west had the appeal of familiarity. Of barren, icy lands, frozen earth and meager scrub brush. It was like discovering the homeland over again without an estate owner above you. No tsar to take your bright and fit young men off to war when the fields needed tilling. And so sprung up a Russian village with its full cast of Russian characters and Russian troubles.
Of course a Russian village in the heart of America could not reproduce itself unchanged. I am the premier case of this. I was built in the crucible Russian excess. But unlike a typical Russian village which would have scorned and shamed me, perhaps made of me a drunk to die off in the winter snow, I was let loose on the surrounding world. Perhaps in the older world I could have been made a soldier and my excess could be excused as virility, tolerated as an element of exchange. But such was not the case.
My father taught me to work. But more he taught me to enjoy certain thrills. The joy of risk in the fore.
A small family lived beside us and shared our lands. Without serfs, or being serfs, many new land arrangements were established. Our neighbor was a crippled man, but had brought a small fortune to this land. He was also a tinkerer and produced at his forge many tools to aid in the farm work. Still my father grudged the labor he had to do. And I his son. The tinkerer had only a daughter, Marianna. My father began to think of our neighbor as something of a landowner, a noble living off my father's sweat and mine. There was a break. I did not know from what it sparked. But soon their was a fence and hired men.
For me it meant the loss of my little sister. I had grown up with Marianna. And now, without her, I was suddenly cast out of my adolescent world and thrust in among adults. Hard, sad and failed elders who wiled all their time and money away in drink and cards. At first I despised their wastefulness and lethargy, but it soon grew within me as well. I would work harder in the fields for the loss of my father's partner. And when my father died, an overworked barely old man, I did not weep, but only worked the more.
And the poison of this excessive work gave on into nights of debauch when I could free myself from the farm. What was lethargic in the older men, became a form of energetic spite in me. I would find the biggest corporation town and drag all my earning with me. There one could find any number of young men with the same angry energies bursting forth. One could take their money, or fight them with all ease. Or on the calmer nights we would all drink together until every bit of money and credit had expired.
These faceless men in the new and hard world bore no connection to me or to each other. They came from nowhere and carried no allegiance. My patronymic, born in my town like a treasure, could mean nothing to them. All bonds we held could only last as long as a winning streak or the liquor held out, only temporary cessation of hostility. True distrust never fully abated.
Not long into this life I'd mounted large debts and terrible thoughtless crimes in the darkness of wild sprees. The width and breadth of my troubles remain to be nearly totally obscure. The follow me like a cloud more painful for their amorphous immensity. Most recently my father's farm was taken in total and other threats were made, vague notions that what passed for the law would certainly come calling upon me soon. And so I move. I move on to new terrible towns, filled with pained men and look for a final tipping point.
Writing through the night in the pale lost spaces of the day had left me wretched. I was both sleepless and lost within my own nihilistic reflection. The whole world felt a nothing to me.
Eventually I scrapped myself up, splashed cold water from the basin on my face and escaped the stilted and dust filled air of my room. In trade I encountered the blinding day, a deadly heat that buzzed at the horizons of water evaporating en masse. A rapture of available waters, not to be returned to this condemned place, but transported to happier climes. We sinners left to peril. Left to tear each other apart.
The little row of lodger's cabins let onto something of a longhouse, a partially exposed three-walled structure fit with a series of linened tables. To one side our hostess—by all accounts a hardened women to be treated as any other permanent feature of the landscape: respected, possible feared, and certainly let alone—served out the morning rations. A hearty and too hot breakfast of meats, cake, eggs and some starchy mass of fried roots. My appetite was as pallid as my soul. Every bite seemed rancid and foul, excessively oily, sulfurous.
Kindly, the men at breakfast were universally silent. An occasional turning of week old newspaper pages and the scrapping of plates was all to be heard. My mind joined the morning contemplation despite myself, casting back to my former homes and lives.
While most of the past as yet appears dead to me, I find myself haunted by the specters of past mistakes and taunted by my memories of the angels of my salvation I have repeatedly rebuked. My small middle west town could not hold my interest even before I could do a thing about its hold on my person. My mother was full goodness and light. She worked fastidiously and never griped. She lived for others and never mentioned it, not even in her eyes or the lines on her face. When she became wrinkled, the worry and the wear seemed all her own and never ate at those of us who were the cause of so much work. It was a phenomenal trick. Even once I had gained the knowledge enough to notice her many sacrifices and their direct relation to my many wrongs, I could not make into the moralizing force my guilt demanded.
When suddenly she died, I was free to imagine just such a guilt. Her ghost would not have to play any role but absent martyr; I had demons enough to torment me for having let her aid me so. But these memories were all nonsense and spoke nothing to my life either before or after she died. They only appear to prepare for her sequel, who know my mind had fixated on, Marianna. And because I did not know Marianna as purely as one knows their mother, I could make her the chastising demon of my imagination as I could not my mother.
Our home was in a small frontier town. Most other middle west towns were not towns so much as commercial centers for area farmers that would slowly accrete citizens. Glowing centers of money, they would eventually establish a set of permanent residents, but they were nonetheless primarily a leech or least a by product of the surrounding farms. Our town was in contrast born a town. Several strong town fathers, not so long ago that we have forgotten their specifics, but already with the gleam of myth, came out into the frontier with a town fully formed in their heads. And with them their families. All had been Russian peasants, were still in their own minds, Russian peasants.
The middle west had the appeal of familiarity. Of barren, icy lands, frozen earth and meager scrub brush. It was like discovering the homeland over again without an estate owner above you. No tsar to take your bright and fit young men off to war when the fields needed tilling. And so sprung up a Russian village with its full cast of Russian characters and Russian troubles.
Of course a Russian village in the heart of America could not reproduce itself unchanged. I am the premier case of this. I was built in the crucible Russian excess. But unlike a typical Russian village which would have scorned and shamed me, perhaps made of me a drunk to die off in the winter snow, I was let loose on the surrounding world. Perhaps in the older world I could have been made a soldier and my excess could be excused as virility, tolerated as an element of exchange. But such was not the case.
My father taught me to work. But more he taught me to enjoy certain thrills. The joy of risk in the fore.
A small family lived beside us and shared our lands. Without serfs, or being serfs, many new land arrangements were established. Our neighbor was a crippled man, but had brought a small fortune to this land. He was also a tinkerer and produced at his forge many tools to aid in the farm work. Still my father grudged the labor he had to do. And I his son. The tinkerer had only a daughter, Marianna. My father began to think of our neighbor as something of a landowner, a noble living off my father's sweat and mine. There was a break. I did not know from what it sparked. But soon their was a fence and hired men.
For me it meant the loss of my little sister. I had grown up with Marianna. And now, without her, I was suddenly cast out of my adolescent world and thrust in among adults. Hard, sad and failed elders who wiled all their time and money away in drink and cards. At first I despised their wastefulness and lethargy, but it soon grew within me as well. I would work harder in the fields for the loss of my father's partner. And when my father died, an overworked barely old man, I did not weep, but only worked the more.
And the poison of this excessive work gave on into nights of debauch when I could free myself from the farm. What was lethargic in the older men, became a form of energetic spite in me. I would find the biggest corporation town and drag all my earning with me. There one could find any number of young men with the same angry energies bursting forth. One could take their money, or fight them with all ease. Or on the calmer nights we would all drink together until every bit of money and credit had expired.
These faceless men in the new and hard world bore no connection to me or to each other. They came from nowhere and carried no allegiance. My patronymic, born in my town like a treasure, could mean nothing to them. All bonds we held could only last as long as a winning streak or the liquor held out, only temporary cessation of hostility. True distrust never fully abated.
Not long into this life I'd mounted large debts and terrible thoughtless crimes in the darkness of wild sprees. The width and breadth of my troubles remain to be nearly totally obscure. The follow me like a cloud more painful for their amorphous immensity. Most recently my father's farm was taken in total and other threats were made, vague notions that what passed for the law would certainly come calling upon me soon. And so I move. I move on to new terrible towns, filled with pained men and look for a final tipping point.
_____________
This history does little to explain much of the night that I was entering in upon. None of these occurrences can explain this pure passion in me that seeks some absolute space. They came to my mind at the breakfast and now—a morning on—they seem somehow portentous. But my concerns are blood born and not crafted from experience. I desired that day to be rid of something so completely and totally. Perhaps history is precisely what I needed rid of. And perhaps thinking it more thoroughly than I had in years was such a purgation or preparation for it.
The rest of the day I spent in my stuffy room. I lay on my bed sweating as in a fever fully clothed. My boots and gators strapped on, ready to leap at any moment. But I simply lay. At dusk I rose and walked to the hall.
_________________
This history does little to explain much of the night that I was entering in upon. None of these occurrences can explain this pure passion in me that seeks some absolute space. They came to my mind at the breakfast and now—a morning on—they seem somehow portentous. But my concerns are blood born and not crafted from experience. I desired that day to be rid of something so completely and totally. Perhaps history is precisely what I needed rid of. And perhaps thinking it more thoroughly than I had in years was such a purgation or preparation for it.
The rest of the day I spent in my stuffy room. I lay on my bed sweating as in a fever fully clothed. My boots and gators strapped on, ready to leap at any moment. But I simply lay. At dusk I rose and walked to the hall.
_________________
It was stuffy and all too bright in the gambling hall. I lost my sense not only of time, but of being. I became transfixed, I recall, on the spinning of the roulette wheel, the elision of red and black. I bet red every time. The numbers seemed a ridiculous blur and tho I longer to win it all, they seemed absurd. Any given number was just the barest element of a streak of colluded red and black. That red and black were distinct became itself a puzzle, a mandate of my faith. Every time red. Until I was to my last coin.
Dusty, scratched thing I'd put aside after my first winnings to pay the next days room. The same failure as the night before.
The simple pendulum swing of win/lose had left me dull and empty. Winning and losing ceased to be of interest, each play was only a further sustain of play or a step nearer its end, its finality. But the number still mocked me in their utter emptiness. No, they were multivalent, but they counted for naught in my mind. Any given number was not itself, but odd or black or partitioned into a limited group. Nor could these clusters offer me any repose. The half-hearted between lines like the dead desert land that encased us here. That nebulous floating. My mind was aghast, lost in these reveries of dry, floating and uncertain worlds. The fever of meaninglessness was upon me.
And yet the last itching coin seemed ripe for meaning in its dread. Uncertainty would itself mean. I could force meaning onto the dumb coin. Even floating between the lines could take on meaning if only I were willing to stake my life on it. For surely, this last coin lost would cost me something like my life. If not killed outright by my former creditors, the desert would with all ease consume me. No gentle soul to be found in this place, nor religion.
No, in fact. No. The coin must certainly be my death knell. There are cliffs not far from here, an hour's ride perhaps. Surging waves of a mighty and vast ocean. If the coin is to mean it must mean certainly. I cannot simply dry out in the desert, where chance again could thrust in front of me some meek help, some brief respite. Respite which ushers in certainty, floating and all of the inbetweens.
No. With this coin, I wager my body to the sea. And I will go tonight. I will go on the instant. A cabman might refuse me, but I must certainly be able to steal a horse. And meaning will meet me at the water's edge.
I set the coin on double zero. The American singularity. The western edge of the world. The last bastion of civilization pushing ever further. I couldn't help but be bothered that zero was of the same value. But oh, it wasn't. No. Zero, while free of odd and even, of black and red, was only still a number, a thing. It had its place in a certain logic. Double zero was outside of logic, an excess of desire to be more. More nothing. Absurdity itself. If I were to be castigated, I would be so at the furtherest remove from calculation and logic. I must put myself out on the cliff already. And see the swelling waves already out in the distance that will break only after my body on the rocks. Waves that, calamitous, will supervene my own demise.
The wheel spun almost before I was aware of it. And its spin did not seem to stop or to slow. My breathing was quickened and shallow, I'm sure, tho to me at that moment it seemed the very pulse of the beating world. I was caught it the spin of the wheel, the meaningless blur of red with black. But their lack of meaning now held nothing for me. Their blur and wash could mean nothing, it was the æther in which I lived, but it could not compare with the illogical finality of my senseless numbers.
And when the slowly came from somewhere, my head felt fit to burst. The lights of the room spread throughout my vision, collided with each other as spilling water or blood. Sounds too coalesced into a senseless hum that filled my head. As the ball dropped, the wheel continued its cycle. Zeroes, yes. But how many, I couldn't say. The numbers began contract and spread in my vision. Doubling and singling themselves with my breathing. Nothing would sit still, everything was movement, creep and blur. The light was overwhelming, blinding me until the thin white boundaries of the numbers themselves began to recede.
And suddenly I knew I was in a swoon, about to fall into a fit. And it was all light.
