Notes From The Hermitage
Letting It Slip
The talk turned to James Joyce and, the way it does, to shit.
I had only moved to New York a couple months before and here I was, already having a drink with someone I hadn't seen in well over a decade. We met by chance in the lobby of the Angelika movie house. I heard someone calling out my name in a drawling, almost mocking English accent. What grabbed my attention most was how perfectly he pronounced it. The only memory I could dredge up when confronted face to face was that he once owned one of the very first portable Macs, the heavyweight ones, more portly than portable. After we parted, exchanging numbers,it turned out he only lived several blocks away in Brooklyn,the memories returned: drunken days together working at a bookstore in California and later, his life as an itinerant soccer journalist, a cynic's trade if ever there was one.
Only in New York, I thought, and imagined this is how life would be here, that all my old friends would appear, as if by magic, to re-populate my newly lonely life.
When we met for drinks, his girlfriend revealed she stomped the television beat at the New York Times, and from talking about TV we moved to that ancient English pastime: slagging off the other guy. The rules are simple, one person says something, and the other shits on it. This just goes on. The English have been playing this game for centuries, and my militantly English friend was a true enthusiast. He soon brought us to the Irish, and I could tell immediately this was a favorite topic. The slagging would be broad. When I defended "the rather stupid Paddies" (his phrase), he immediately shot back, "Even a stopped clock gives the time twice a day." I had to give it to him for that one, if not for accuracy then for quick wit. Whatever, I never enjoyed the game,I've always thought the cynical Englishman one of those evolutionary curiosities, like dodos or giant sloths, nurtured in isolation and clueless about their obsolescence in an interconnected world.
That's when the talk turned to Joyce. There was, his girlfriend informed us, one great Irishman at least. "But did you know," undercutting her own point, "he would sit under a glass table while Nora shat onto its surface. He loved to watch the shit drop down as though it was landing right on top of his face." The excited glint in her eye spoke volumes of the taboo she believed she was breaking and, I later thought, the dull nihilism of a passionless life. The Times, I said, really is the last word. The Englishman added robustly, "She would piss on him too!" All three of us spoke excitedly about shit, about Joyce, about all the things we knew nothing about.
Some years before, an acquaintance asked me to take a shit on the linoleum floor of his kitchen. He wanted to watch and, once I finished, he would clean it up. He was quite serious. Tall, manic, a son of privileged easterners, he had grown up resenting the money of his parents, resenting his background, had moved west and become instead a library book thief, a welfare cheat, a self-proclaimed radical, a middle-aged man who believed, though he had been given pretty much everything a person might ever want, that the world still owed him. Now it owed him the opportunity to watch someone shit on his kitchen floor and for him to clean it up. I don't remember how we met, probably through friends, and all of us who vaguely knew him soon found we couldn't, despite our best efforts, rid him from our lives. He wanted to test my radicalism, my willingness to transgress accepted norms. And, no doubt, make me party to whatever web of psychodrama he daily thrived on.
His was an invitation to step outside of society: Come with me, he was saying, and the world you've known you will never know again. The old call of the mystic, of the trickster god, this the Pied Piper playing, except we were both standing in an apartment in San Francisco and the man making the offer held no otherworldly gifts, and no beliefs at all except those of ego self-gratification,he was, as nearly as that word can be defined, a nihilist. And his call was limited strictly to the material world. He'd have laughed at me if he suspected the cut-rate mysticism I read into the subtext of his offer.
Transgression, whatever that word means,is the cheap coin of our realm, the currency we exchange when we want to talk about spirit but no longer know how to. When the truly mystical, the more honestly transgressive, which happens in the quiet moments of our aloneness, has been stripped from language, taboo becomes the boundary wall of our rhetoric, and breaking taboo the only discourse left when what we really want to talk about is soul. This was the Englishman's language, the girlfriend's language, my language: What were we all talking about when we were talking about James Joyce and shit? I don't think any of us had the slightest idea.
Whatever, I refused the book thief's request to take a dump on his kitchen floor, and he, to his credit, seemed genuinely surprised. Soon after, and to my great relief, he stopped talking to me.
I thought about him again after I left the Englishman and his girlfriend.
The Englishman asked me over to dinner, to drinks, we should do this again, and again. But what exactly? We'd never been friends, the Englishman and me, we'd worked together, and later I'd see him at the bookstore returning from some soccer match in Asia or South America with tales of bad food and crazed natives. But now we had found ourselves neighbors on the other side of the country and in a city of eight million. It was as if fate had brought us together. We were meant, if not to be friends, then to soothe with drunken evenings each other's loneliness and wax nostalgic about a past we never shared as friends.
But cities play tricks on the newcomer. The whole scene bugged me: him, his girlfriend, it was ersatz, the false camaraderie of survivors after a disaster. When I left them I thought of all three of us as shipwrecked sailors trying to catch desperately hold of a lifeline. Perhaps he thought I held that line, perhaps I thought he was the one who held it. He telephoned me a couple times, getting my machine, and I returned the calls, thankfully getting his machine. We never met again.
If I did hold a lifeline, I let it slip. The city, perhaps, was playing a trick on both of us.
Ranbir Sidhu
Ranbir Sidhu is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize in fiction and his work has appeared in
The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, Zyzzyva, Other Voices, Press and a Houghton-Mifflin
college reader among other publications. Trained as an archaeologist, he has worked in
California, Nevada, Israel and France. One of his finds, a 3000 year old woman,
made cover skeleton of Biblical Archaeology Review. Most recently, he worked for
the United Nations in Sri Lanka. Recently, he received his first royalty check.
It was for 99 cents and for a story published over ten years ago.
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