Authors: Michael Allen Zell
I returned a couple hours later with a change of clothes, my dufflebag, and box of Vachal ex-libris in the back seat. Oh Eve, I’ve reached you again at last. I’m home. I was sweaty and exhausted but with adrenaline pushing, and then stunned to find the front door wide open, all the lights on, and her apartment a tossed overtaken mess, as if she‘d made quick take-it-or-leave-it decisions. I assumed she’d be waiting for me after I finished, but no Hannah, and the kitchen looked like a charnel house. The November soil (off of Chef Menteur Highway, where you must have found the body by now if you’ve read this far) at the place was soft, so it‘d presented no difficulties, but the physical action itself as well as its ramifications kept me pumped and jittery, though it felt like I was dishonoring the moonlight. I want to make it clear that before rolling him into the hole, I collected all of the 20 dollar bill halves since it was my money, but I did return the surprising letter also tucked in his pocket, one from the animal shelter thanking him for his donation. I expected that Hannah would be in a hurry but was surprised she wasn’t at the little house on Dauphine Street, after what she’d said and all of the sufficient trouble I’d taken, surprised but with a sense of denial about what looked to be the case. No Hannah, but she’d be back soon. I slept there that night, tried to sleep I should say, on her couch in the parlor, so I didn’t have to see the kitchen again, waking hourly with the expectation that she’d return soon. But she didn’t return, so after a sinking morning, sunken afternoon, and an evening of waiting with hope growing ragged, I checked at the club she danced at and was told she hadn’t been seen for days.
I’ll admit to expecting her to show up, and every night I’ve been looping the block, clinging to the honest intentions of her hypothetical heart. Maybe there was a misunderstanding. But it’s finally sinking into my fallow mind that this is what she does. She bounces. She’s a cunning operator who bounces around and then never has to prove her dear hasty deceits. She’s only in communion with betrayal. Or was she just scared? I thought that by proving myself to her with this deed, I was finally lucidly seizing the future with a piercing focus, boldly asserting control, a man of action, but instead I was executing confusion. I’m still confused. She’s a wandering spirit, out there forming new constellations in a wider sky then I’ll ever know. Did she go to Havana? I thought she was my port, but instead I’m the ship that drifts aimlessly in disenchantment to the tides of another. I’m always the cover, the beard, the idle pastime, the one they move on from.
This incident might be instructive at a future point were I not likely to repeat the identical course of action and expectation, again thinking it was a courage-headed step. The weak don’t make avowals, though, but quietly follow those set by the strong. That isn’t so much a maxim as it’s an expected acknowledgment that some are born to act and others to respond, all spinning through well-traveled labyrinths, with confidence only in the known course.
Day 20
I know how poorly I’d handle a court hearing, walking up the steps of the imposing building at Tulane and Broad Streets, anxiety
rising, mired in the hallway, wondering if the judge bothered to show up that day, much less on time, anxiety rising, entering the indifferent courtroom after an indeterminate wait, anxiety rising, becoming increasingly stirred up knowing what comes next, anxiety rising enough that I’d probably tremulously collapse from the stress of it all. Granted, this scenario makes the improbable assumption that I’d actually make bail or avoid expected street justice meted out by The Pelican’s fellow officers. If the unwieldy hurdle of the latter was surprisingly cleared (which is partly what the notebook is for), but not the former, I’d spend a year or so in the odious madhouse called Orleans Parish Prison, at the mercy of sadistic guards and coarse prisoners. I’d lose my apartment, eventually my car, and be broken by the time the case came to court. A weakened rather than hardened man. At that point, fainting would be strenuous beyond my capabilities. There’s likely a prison guard version of The Pelican, assuming they care about anonymity there, and I’d be a probable recipient. I feel light-headed and guilty, a hair-shirt of the mind, with only simple examination of these possibilities. The only thing chiseled about me is my elephantine anxiety.
It does allow better understanding of Raskolnikov in C
rime and Punishment,
I mean the psychology of it all, of looming discovery, trying to sleep when anxiety’s rising. To take a broad view, it then stands to reason that one’s own actions ought to be mostly compatible with corresponding temperament, and it could be a tragic mistake to assert otherwise, extending beyond comforting torments, forcing disunity of nature. Use your space, but know your place. This sounds jarringly obvious on the face of it, but the contrary occurs all the time, whatever the reason that such ill-inspired behavior foolishly asserts itself to deny nature, like miscasting oneself in a role. Is there anything worse than an inflamed dreamer? The stars glitter as they should when the meek remain meek and the incorrigible, incorrigible. A combination of Dostoevsky, Karl Marx, and Robert Burton. Behavior by each, according to one’s humors. The Anatomy of the Distribution of Temperaments. More commonly said, If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime (there’s no need to take the time to mine the well-trodden related ideas of only having the right if you have the might, or if this kind of villainous behavior can lead to liberation). It’s an unjust truth, but anything otherwise is an incompatible extravagance. Although criminals can be civilians, civilians shouldn’t be criminals. We civilians are neither inured nor savvy enough to deal with the institutionalized system, and this nature isn’t easily camouflaged. For most of us, a required trip to the DMV or City Hall is sufficient, we’re unequipped to handle the matter-of-factwait-to-take-a-number-to-take-a-number bureaucracy if coupled with incarceration, much less the threat of the possibility of it, and though I’m not guilty, here I sit.
I can picture my mother tearfully exclaiming to my father across the kitchen table, I thought he was misdirected, but I had no idea he was capable of this? I can picture it strongly, both of them wearing a fresh crust of shame, that at this very moment, I’m internally responding to the image, pleading, You don’t understand, mother. I’m not capable of the act. If I was calibrated that way, I’d be placid and abstract. I’m certainly not capable of serving hard time, but what I’m least capable of is this unconsummated relationship, the not-knowing, the outsized head games of living in anticipation, not-knowing whether or not this in between is the only country I belong to from now on. I’m actually not enigmatic, just sinking. I’m the Raskolnikov who didn’t swing an axe, but will be considered the perpetrator regardless, that is if they find the sub rosa place, mother. But even if they don’t, there’s no consolation, no pleasingly visible end, what with all of the accompanying inner turmoil the possibility of discovery brings. It’s the closest thing to purgatory on earth that I can imagine, a distressing morass of foreboding. I’m a master of maintaining unflappable theories, mother, but in real life I’ve remained as I am, wavering and incapable. There was overreaching, yes, but I was only a sucker for a face. I saw Eve again.
Day 21
I’m not naturally drawn to cemeteries, despite the plentiful above-ground variety in New Orleans. Ornate headstones, much less gravestone rubbings don’t hold appeal. Funerals especially repel me. So, I must come to terms with why the place, a crude burial spot, appeals. Why am I drawn to go back to the place and dig up the body, potentially attracting troublesome attention? Since you aren’t me, you might think it no more than an obsessive compulsion to confirm that he remains there, not resting but decomposing without dignity. You might also speculate that I hold a deep need to get caught, so returning to the place would be for the chief reason of an alert to my complicity. There may be faint strands of both those assumptions at work, but one can only admit to what one knows.
I know I’m drawn to dig up and rebury the body, at least in part, to reexperience the initially-unexpected euphoria of the taboo. I know that the physical exertion, the power over another human, the expected approval from a woman I desired (and still do), for at least these reasons, I reached combustion, became drunk on the action, and crave that fiery cup again. I know that the rationale for this notebook is partly an excuse to return to the place, an act of necessity providing justifiable cover for a weakening into craven impulse. I know if I give in to a follow-up visit after the second trip to bury the errata notebook, then it’ll become occasional habit, which will become repetition, which will become routine. I know I’m of weak stock and therefore must restrict myself in the same way of the other, older, restriction. I know I knew this around a decade ago, that although gravestone rubbings don’t personally appeal, human rubbings do, with my role both that of paper and pencil. I know I avoid crowds, force myself to walk unoccupied sidewalks or in the streets, never take buses, stay away from Mardi Gras parades, and generally hermit myself from what I like, which is what I am. In New Orleans, anything goes, until it doesn’t. This is a difficult city for innocent excursions anyway, what with all of the con artists of desire lurking around, trying to hide in public. Since this notebook may never be seen, I can divulge what cold introspection has revealed. I‘ve justified this ongoing compulsion with a convenient theory rather than admit to actual arousal, legitimizing it away as an art project of life, although one mostly resisted, an updating of Max Ernst’s technique of using frottage to add texture to his works, my version no more than a dismissing of conventional forms of public interaction and replacing them with traces of sensual tactility, hoping for the spontaneity of a pleasing stranger who might reciprocate, all of this deconstructing society. But really, the rub turns me on. Don’t let my excuses and jostling belie a booming self-disgust. I know this transmuting of expression, hopeful cry of communication, wouldn’t be seen as that of a visionary mind but a diseased one, a frenzied goat perpetually rutting. I know certain tendencies are considered –ism and –mania aberrations although seeming to me like perfectly natural behavior, so I cloister. I keep from certain situations and cloister, which is how I also must handle the place and the inclinations it’s provoked in me. I know.
There’s little doubt, at least in my mind, that the writers Cabrera Infante, Melville, and Bruno Schulz, as well as the artist Vachal, would fully understand the indicting impulses and searing cravings that arise, the chance for ruination, knowing we’re all linked to this common story by different thirsts, all patriots to a nation of taboos (Who isn’t, other than those who are anomalies or in denial?), and they’d cumulatively advise that one can either feed or starve the craving when it arises, though it can also be used to seed artistic work. Is there any question that this defined group didn’t infuse its own work with impolite stirrings, that one impetus for their creativity, in fact, was as a means of sublimation, to release the capped-up cravings? I feel one with the ones who once sat as I sit here now, with the police scanner’s volume turned to a hushed intimate cadence. It seems perfectly clear that what is in me will come out from me in defined form, so I’m obliged to free it, harness it, and purposefully tame it in certain fashion, if not respectable, at least presentable. Otherwise, I’ll be one more Scorpio fallen into ruin from my own stinger, if I’ve not done so already.
Day 22
An unexpected change in behavior has come about over the 22 days I‘ve written these pages, initially thinking I was spending quiet mornings in cliché, weakly languishing in torment, hoping for modified composure, trying to correct perceptions that potentially wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t made a mistake of desire and dabbling. Do you have confidence in me, in what you’ve read? I’ll miss the errata notebook and can’t imagine burying it, though I must and this needs to happen quickly. That’s no urgency scam. The notebook has become me, though, another form of Raymond Russell, but from a different observational angle. The notebook is Raymond Errata and, though parting with it’ll be like losing a limb, I hope to be able to read properly again, hope that a writing dabble hasn’t ruined the sustained pleasure of a good book. Since starting this notebook, it’s become distressingly impossible to read with focus. I become jabbed with thoughts of the notebook, then return back to the book page at hand, stopping often throughout to jot down an exceptional phrase, ruminating over an idea that might be adapted, and critiquing how a particular sentence might be better written. It appears that I can’t be both reader and writer, which isn’t the same as a writer who reads. One suffers for the other to flourish. Of this, there’s no middle ground. Not only is it troubling for the sake of sabotaging escapism and slowing down my learning tremendously, but also because of alarmingly turning my own pages into a closer resemblance to literature than the intended mere telegramming of events (granted, telegramming seems to be the highest aspiration for the present day prevailing breed, that mouth of rotting teeth, it’s a pity when writers don’t value words, attempting little beyond a 4/4 time plunk, plunk, plunk, plunk in print, and more so when readers seek no more than those writers).
It’s time to change out the books bricked into the support piers. The weather and bugs have left only wiggy pages amidst intact covers, but I don’t have replacement titles ready to insert yet. None of this is to say that I consider myself any sort of emerging writer (that would be a flimsy unworthy title), to which the proper response would be sheer mirth. Who am I other than a lazy but committed scribbler, conveying a core specimen of first draft faith, but letting the letters labor to do the real work, the form-altering nature of things? Any lucky eloquence is due to the letters themselves. Who’d be interested in my dim insensible thoughts? I’ll never be a writer or a cousin to mankind. No, I’m not confiding speciously (a lovely word for an ugly manner) when I say that I’ve no wish to be a writer. There’s surely no market for pastiche-strewn pages. Leave the mortal arts to me. Let others perform the wound-picking struggle, claim alleged virtues, be confident in their weaknesses, and libel their friends and neighbors. Likewise, let the nocturnal habits of the alphabet speak with the tongue of the moon, transmuting and reversing my common speech, skipping beyond the heroic, back to the core to evolve forward, but let this happen after my part with it is done. Let the names be named in the dirt and may they never be uncovered.