And when we talked we ended up turning a blind eye on the
ones who saw no other hope than a change in the weather, a hurricane perhaps
that with a bit of luck would send everybody, friend and foe alike, straight
to the bottom. - Italo Calvino
:: 1 ::
Benito felled the sky, tossed it down nail by nail from the 81st floor into
the skeletal guts of his skyscraper; and it was indeed his skyscraper, he told
himself; he built it, he owned it, and if he could speak English he'd tell the
head contractor just that: Listen gringo, these hands put together and they
take apart, so now remember this, that I told you what's what, when my building
touches the heavens or when it crumbles to dust in this your barren farmland.
He watched another nail tumble out of sight and imagined the sound it would
make when it hit the concrete below. Benito swore he heard his name.
His father had brought him here: this country, this town, this farm, this highrise
in the middle of nowhere. His father had seen an opportunity, a vision, a promise.
Benito saw a childhood with no pleasure, seven years of construction, a future
that would last forever. Benito saw a prison.
Although Benito's father was a master iron worker, all Benito had learned after
three years of tutelage was that when standing at the building's halfway mark
-- the 81st floor -- the sky and the ground looked almost identical, like portals
to worlds equally distant and foreign, unreachable and strange. He liked to
confuse his senses, and he imagined that this was one place where falling would
truly feel like flying.
The suspended scaffold on which Benito lay hung in the center of the building
between two girders, and Benito kicked off from one girder and sailed to the
other, then slowly drifted back to where he would kick again, the process lasting
almost a minute between kicks since the supporting ropes stretched up over twenty
stories. To Benito it felt as if the building was swaying while he remained
still; if he let his eyes unfocus, he could see the eighty floors of girders
bend above him. Most days this pastime had a meditative effect, but not today,
not after that morning's humiliation and certainly not with revenge fantasies
and images of a particular contractor's head on a stick paralyzing his mind.
That his father had struck him to the ground or that the contractor had kicked
dirt in his face right afterwards hardly bothered Benito.
Those were acceptable defeats, the tax that comes with the territory, and he
had it coming anyway, he knew that. He had deserved much worse, he thought,
for compromising the project like he had, for putting lives in danger, for wasting
money and manpower -- for driving a dump truck into the soft concrete wall of
the building's foundation earlier that morning. Bewildered by the many pedals
and levers and buttons, Benito had realized too late that the machine was engineered
to crash, designed for disaster, and driving it was a mere prerequisite to achieve
that end.
Immediately after the crash, Benito had considered his curiosity innocent enough,
or even forgivable, like the way a middle school basketball coach forgives the
team for another winless season. He thought the crash was almost laughable,
and maybe even necessary. But his error was definitely not excusable; Benito
had understood that well enough. And so he did not fight back or struggle or
complain when the two men knocked him around. He simply dropped to the ground
and waited.
What angered Benito the most had come after the contractor stepped off his
back and walked over to his father, screaming the entire way.
His father squared his shoulders with the charging contractor and did not blink
even once during the intense verbal assault. In that moment Benito realized
that his father's aggressive stance and gaze did not represent courage but masochistic
need, a man conditioned to desire abuse because to him pain is synonomous with
survival, and a hand in the stomach is better than never being touched. Like
how a dog obeys its owner because it understands repetition not language, how
it defends its master out of fear instead of loyalty.
His father had merely nodded his head after the contractor stopped yelling,
and when Benito had looked at his father as the contractor walked off, he saw
a surrendered man, the posture of a fool, and a face that spoke like a flashing
neon sign, repeating one message for everyone within view to read: I didn't
understand a single word that came out of that man's mouth. In his father Benito
had divined his own bleak future: a stranger in their homeland carrying tools
without handles, blueprints written in invisible ink, and a deed of ownership
to property on Mars. Benito had witnessed rage and rebellion rise and fall in
a heartbeat, both washed over by the tradition of resignation, two brutal and
fantastic worlds at war with oblivion.
Benito had jumped up and cursed his father then, called him a coward and an
ignorant, and articulated his shame with words his father could understand: fracasado, difunto, patético. His father had already
begun to work again and he either ignored Benito or didn't hear him or didn't
understand what he had meant. So Benito gathered his frustration and retreated
up into the belly of the building, halfway between the sky and the earth, home
and Hell, where he lazed idly and daydreamed actively, murderously.
The contractor must die, Benito thought. I must end him. He humiliated my father
and alienated my people, and I must deliver him.
For three hours, Benito swung on the scaffold and imagined defiling the head
contractor scene after scene, redeeming his father a little more with each swing
of the axe and every pint of the contractor's black blood. After every death,
Benito pulled a nail from the metal bucket at his head and let it drop from
his dangling hand. It was a long afternoon, and there were many nails left.
Benito's cell phone rang just as he kicked off from the girder
and sailed away again. He sat up, fumbled to pull the phone from its clip on
his belt, and knocked the bucket of nails over the edge with his elbow. The
nails spilled out, began their descent into silence. Benito watched in slow
motion while he brought the phone to his ear.
"Bueno," he said. A pause while he listened. In his own language
Benito asked, "Father? Is that you?"
The scaffold reached the girder at the other side of the building and started
to pull Benito back across. He propped himself on one elbow and listened to
the words coming from the earpiece; they were beautiful and unknown, a language
he had never heard yet could understand fluently.
Benito's father stepped out from behind a column and grew large as Benito drifted
closer. He stretched out his arms and muttered words that sounded sorrowful
and apologetic. Benito eyed his father and his open, empty hands; he concentrated
on the voice in his phone; he would do whatever was asked of him; that voice
meant everything to him.
"Yes Father, I understand." Benito folded his phone and tucked it
away.
When the scaffold reached the girder where Benito's father stood, Benito kicked
off with all his strength just as his father moved to step onto the planks.
His father stumbled forward into the gap and used what little leverage he had
to jump out and grab for the edge of the scaffold. The ropes creaked, the boards
lifted, and Benito tumbled down into the steel throat of the building.
Benito looked up as he fell and saw his father hanging above him. I hope he
makes it, he thought, and then he shifted his body so he could watch the ground
creep closer. He wanted to enjoy it. He was a dragon in flight; fire screamed
from his mouth and he heard whistles of panic as he passed floors by the dozen.
A city on fire, razed into ash. Benito looked at the ground and imagined it
was Heaven.
:: 2 ::
Mother,
Sometimes I feel like I'm alone on this project, like I've got thirty thousand
hands that all do what I want when I want but it's still only me playing with
building blocks like a child in a sandbox that's as big as a planet, and maybe
that's why I let the head contractor hit that kid who smashed up the site today,
because I liked him, I liked the kid and I'd let him drive a dozen trucks into
my building if he'd only explain to me in layman's terms why every day that
goes by and every day that this structure grows I feel less affinity with magic
and more with the sand at my feet, the sand down my slacks, the dirt in my eyes.
But he couldn't tell me that even if I had asked, so you know what I did instead,
I watched the contractor muss him up a bit and then tear about the father because,
you remember this, that's what fathers are for, for suffering the wrath of well-positioned
and articulate men in colorful neckties. Right? We know this story and we know
that father and that suit and we know the words they use between them; we've
been both of them, the father and the suit, and the suit and the story. You'd
think that if I could birth a skyscraper that I could find or forget him, or
forgive him. Where is he these days? We both know the answer and we both know
how much dirt he had to chew through to get there and we both know he'll never
come up daisies or roses or freshly uncorpsed. And now I'm belaboring the point
like it was a failed teenage dump truck driver and in place of my fists were
loose-lidded jars containing furies who had little better to do than mete out
unnecessary justice to accidental Hispanic children and their dead, pathetic
father failures. Like I was that scuffed-up kid who climbed up and out of sight
into the bones of my building, and like I was the contractor this morning, like
I wanted to be him.
Na na, hold on, I gotta say it again because my mind is just a piece of shit
this morning. Why don't I say it fucking right?
Mother,
The architect called this morning, Miko called this morning, Miko left me a
message this morning and she said she'd pull her entire team if I didn't stop
construction on the building immediately. I rang her back and asked her to reconsider
and asked her to let me make some phone calls before she made up her mind and
asked her to give me ten minutes to change her mind. You know what? I doubt
I could convince her even if I had the rest of my life to try, even the rest
of her life. I doubt I could convince myself, even. It's just the fixity of
the thing, or the fixture or the mixture. Oh fuck. I don't even know what the
fuck I'm saying. Over three hundred sponsors from thirty-three countries and
dollar-for-dollar matching government funds on top of that; a monument to human
solidarity, the global village at work to preserve the legacy of mankind and
earn our seats in the kingdom of angels. You believe any of that shit? I know
you do, and you always have, but I'm not you, and I'm not so sure I'm me either,
not most mornings, not especially this one. And just who could I call to help
me convince her? Who could I call. Who could I call. This building wouldn't
exist without Miko; this building will fall without her. So what did I do? I
did what you'd expect of me, I yelled at everybody, I said, Listen, I'm gonna
give a clue here now: I don't want any more bullshit any time during the day
from anyone, that includes me; it's going to be very hot, gonna be very uncomfortable
for everybody; I don't want anybody yelling; if we get anybody yelling around
here any more today, then the shit is gonna hit the fan. The contractor blushed,
and the father of the broken kid, he turned around and bolted up the building,
maybe to hide or find his kid, maybe both or neither or something else, like
maybe he forgot something up there, his soldering gun, his hardhat, his pride
or his child, his memory or future. Maybe I'll go up after him.
Mother,
Don't worry, I didn't go up, but maybe I should have; I stayed right there
in the ass of the fucker, in the hollow bottom where the foundation walls pushed
back at the earth and kept me alive and not buried, against my better judgment.
I would have liked to have slept there, made myself a bed from steel shavings
and looked up at the sky through thousands of meters of cold human labor and
pretended that I was still a child using cardboard toilet paper rolls for a
telescope, seeing the world through the far end of a red and white plastic straw.
You remember I would always hide in the basement, you remember my hiding spot
behind the furnace, where no one could hear me crying because of how loud it
was with all those bangs and whirrs that came from that old junky thing. I don't
think I could hear it either. But I hear it now, I hear my cries in the tinks
and clinks of metal on metal and the pulse of machines with fleshy faces. And
in the foundation the sounds made me sleepy, so sleepy that -- did I tell you
this? -- that I didn't notice that things were falling all around me, small
things, a thick coat of corrugated nails that broke upon me in one quick stroke.
They sounded like music. Not percussion like you'd expect, but like a flute;
they whistled as they hit. A few hundred nails raining like brimstone, and me
at ground level, contemplative, me without my umbrella. It felt just like home,
it felt just like being a child and hiding from my future in the basement. When
I opened my eyes, when the echo of metal striking concrete dissolved into the
screams of frantic laborers looking down at me, I saw where the nails had landed
around me, everywhere around me. I touched my body and waited for my deliverance.
I looked up expecting a white light at the end of a tunnel, but instead I saw
a tiny blue dot, the sky. Instead I was alive.
Mother,
It was a miracle.
Mother,
It was a warning.
Mother,
Mother. I'm burning.
Mother,
The workers pull me up from the scarred foundation and ask me the same question
in a hundred languages, and although I know the answer, I can't speak. I can't
talk to them to tell them I'm fine, I'm not hurt, they still have a job, get
back to work, they're fired, I quit, I'm bringing this building to the ground
and they're coming with me; I can't tell them that. I can't speak with them.
In the pattern of their talk, throughout the circle in which they stoop around
me, I hear each worker pause at the end of a sentence and then begin again.
I can hear these pauses, and I wait for them to line up, for
that one-second hush where the entire group of them mute out at the same moment.
I know it's coming, I feel it like wind in a subway tunnel, like the silence
before a telephone rings. It's just a matter of time. And when their talk ends
as I had anticipated, when they close their mouths in unison, I finally hear
someone speaking my language; I hear it soft and off and away, coming from inside
the skyscraper: the language of peace and anger, fire and flight. Just as quick
as I heard it, the onlookers lift their tongues and start their speaking again.
I get up and the workers fall from my body as I push to the edge of the earth
where my building begins. I look up into the building and listen; I can't see
them, but I hear them, here they come, dropping like flies, falling like raindrops,
like angels. They're burning and I listen to them like they're hammers striking
a piano, like they're words straight from my mouth, wet muscle in the pinch
of my teeth. It ain't worth it. Not this shit; it ain't fucking worth it.
Mother,
The way they echo off the concrete walls below.
It's only a matter of time.
:: 3 ::
Fuse.
The light dies and I work through the new dark without pause.
I used to say that when a light bulb flickers it's dying, and if it dies too
much then it is dead. I obsessed over repetition, and if I entered a room with
a flickering fluorescent bulb, I wouldn't leave until it had burnt out. This
was when I worked freelance, and if I got stuck while leaving a client's then
I'd sit down and get working right there. People'd act friendly when they'd
see me cantilevered over a stool drafting schoolhouses or meta-pagodas; they
acted nice because I worked firelike; I burned buildings into paper from the
top down and gave them my name; I called them Mother, I called them Promise,
I called them Miko. I'd work until the light died, and then I'd go home.
Now I say this: light doesn't die; it talks in slow motion. Listen:
The light shuts up and I work through the new dark without pause; my office
is quiet with only the ambient drone of the yellow window cast at the feet of
my chair. I sketch for a client across the world who has just woken up; it's
a prison. I sketch it blind because I am forgetful, because I have lost the
tradition of watching what I do.
The phone rings for the first time tonight, and Kohei answers it from his desk
in the silent corner of our black morning office.
"Yes," he says, followed by a pause so long that I think he has hung
up the phone. But then he says, "Goodbye."
Kohei is lost as well; his is a laconic tradition. He is my mouth, my assistant
and translator, my access to hundreds of foreign countries, and he'd lapse into
speechlessness if not for the dozens of two-word phone conversations he has
each hour from our hushed and beloved office in midnight Kyoto.
We wake up at night and start our day.
Kohei hangs up the phone and continues his work in darkness.
I switch on an emergency light: a free-standing plastic stick with a battery-operated
bulb shaped like the flame of a candle. Kohei stifles a sneeze. We make eye
contact and smile for as long as it takes.
"What is it?" I ask him.
"A fuse, I imagine."
"Will you go see?
"Yes, Miko."
He leaves the room and I hear him stop in the hallway because our phone rings;
when he hears me answer it, he continues on.
The man's voice in the phone is noisome and unwelcome. I want to purchase his
pleasantries and drop them into the ocean that lies between us, like the bodies
of valiant sailors and cowardly mob informants. He speaks English and I misunderstand
his greeting while I switch tongues.
"This is Miko.
"Yes."
The phone whispers into my ear while I hold on the line; from my end to the
other, shadows of all the crossed telephone conversations brush against each
other and echo back to me. I consider falling in love with that static. I cup
my hand around the earpiece and try to create a space into which the clicks
and hums might mold. A second man's voice comes out instead.
It's the financier returning my message. He's in the bottom of the building
right now, and when he looks up he sees beauty and harmony and possibility and
solidarity and wonder.
I tell him that he must be in the wrong building.
I tell him that his words do not describe the building I designed, that the
building I designed is obscene and obsequious.
He puts me on hold because he heard something, maybe something falling.
The lights in our office blink on. I haven't stopped working.
I look down at the paper in front of me and am surprised; I'm further along
in my draft than I expected. How long had the lights been down? Had I fallen
asleep while I worked, while I talked on the phone? It's not improbable. What's
more likely: that I fell asleep and continued to work or that I work faster
when I cannot see? Am I still on hold? I'm not sure.
Yes. I hear the financier yelling at someone. No one yells back.
Kohei enters the room and sits at his desk. He contemplates a mock-up for a
client that he has made: a mall shaped like a skyscraper on its side, a gravity
bomb at the moment of impact. Had he worked on it without light as well? His
lips move and I realize he is talking to himself. Or maybe to the work in front
of him. I want to be next to him, to hear the train of words come from his mouth
and drive into my ears.
The financier steals my attention.
He asks me to reconsider.
I tell him that I cannot reconsider.
He asks what he can do to change my mind.
I look up from my work and Kohei is watching me; he is still working on his
mock-up and still talking to himself, but his eyes keep on me, they steady me.
I wonder if he could ever hurt me, and then I understand that yes, he would,
he'd make me hurt myself if I asked him, if it were appropriate.
Listen:
I want to tell the financier: End it. The vainglorious, the arrogant; I cannot
live this way.
It must fall.
The financier is waiting for my answer. I have ten minutes to change his mind.
I tell him he has ten minutes to change my mind.
He thanks me and disconnects us.
Kohei stops talking to himself when I hang up the phone. When his lips were
moving he may have been speaking for me, for how he wished I would speak. He
may be me. I'm not so sure he's not.
I stop sketching and look at the prison in front of me. It's an idea; it's
perfect. I fold it into quarters and slide it into a file under my desk. I pull
out a different folder, one with all the names and contact information of the
workers at the financier's skyscraper.
I drop my finger down onto the top sheet without looking.
Benito Hernandez. I have never heard that name before. That name means everything
to me.
Kohei holds the paper I hand him. He recites the phone number I had circled
and looks up at me.
"This is our work now," I tell him. "I don't care how, just
end it."
He nods and picks up the telephone. I go back to my desk and pull a blank sheet
of paper across.
I close my eyes and sketch as fast as I can because I want more than anything
to hear the words he is speaking. I concentrate. The words he speaks are not
mine, they are not his; I can hear them clearly and I recognize none of them.
They're perfect, gorgeous; they're divine.
The phone clicks on the cradle in a language I understand. I face the window
and look at my well-lit reflection; the glow from my face ghosts against the
black glass background of another frozen night in our horizontal city.
Kohei crosses out Benito Hernandez's phone number and circles the ones below
and above it. The light of our office begins to flicker. This may take a while,
I tell myself. All day; all night.
David Meiklejohn now lives in New York City, in spite
of what the bio from his previous story might
say. His book, PLOTS, was recently published by Effing
Press.
