by
Ed Park
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I’m forever reading about people who get so incensed at a book that they fling it across the room. This always seemed to me journalistic boilerplate, like those ten-minute standing ovations you read about at the Cannes Film Festival. Nevertheless, for the first time in my life, I fling a book across the room. The six-hundred-page bulk of The Truculáta leaves a dent in the wall, which I attempt to conceal by moving the lamp.
heh
The wife on Ambien hails Uber after Uber. The cars stream toward us like a series of sharks. It’s four A.M. Drivers from many countries gather on the corner, fling curses at our window, break out the booze, promise each other their children in marriage.
The wife on Ambien forgets about our children, Danica, eleven, and Morris, five. We named them after a race-car driver and a cat. It was her idea. She had it on Ambien. I get home from work after nine and see them attacking each other with belts while she sleeps, all the cushions and pillows piled in the center of the living room. Don’t wreck our fort, Daddy, Morris says. That’s more like a tower, I say. Then don’t wreck our tower, Danica says. What about homework? I ask. Homework’s for losers, she says. Losers like you, says Morris. Honey, I call, but the wife on Ambien is sawing logs.
heh
But back to meeting Bethany. Dinner had made me sluggish. Before b-ball at the gym, I planned to shower, get through more of The Gothic Image. It was a book for my medieval history class, about religious art in France. I was a hundred pages behind. The previous owner had highlighted a single sentence in the introduction (“Work of the thirteenth century interests us even when inadequately executed for we feel there is something in it akin to a soul”) before giving up. So far, I understood that one line perfectly, but not much else.
lol
My paper was on René Magritte. Lately I’d been captivated by any work of art that contained a work of art within it. A play within a play, a book within a book, a painting that depicted another, smaller painting. I had never paid attention to such things before. Was the interior work of art less “real” than the surrounding work? If so, why does our mind attribute levels of reality to what is, after all, just color on canvas? Since a painter can paint a painter painting a painting, could we ourselves be paintings, painted by some larger, divine painter—i.e., God? Pondering such things probably wouldn’t help me get into law school, but I couldn’t stop.
My father lives all the way in Taiwan now, where he chairs the welding department at Fuxing Normal University. Taiwan seems random for a white guy named Cal Felix from Peekskill, New York, but a plush gig is a plush gig. He has a driver, a Beemer, a Taoist dietitian. He has a brutalist townhouse, infinity pool on the roof.
heh
It was unreal, that existence. After the army, I had landed at a Pasadena hedge fund called Sempiternal Analytix. It was as weird as the war. Psychopaths in office casual, USC pennants on the wall. All the guys talked fast, used nouns as verbs, verbs as nouns. Surface the spend. Table the thrash. They loved to hear themselves produce language. And there I was with my lips that didn’t work.
After my wife left me, I took a Mediterranean cruise by myself. It was unseasonably cold and I hardly left my cabin, even for meals. I had never been on a cruise before, but I thought that countering the dramatic change of Hannah’s departure with another dramatic change—i.e., being at sea—was a good idea. Something along the lines of two wrongs making a right. It was a terrible idea. It was what it was.
I have seen things I never wished to see, and every night I hear the ocean. If it seems passing strange for a short man to sport such a lofty tone, consider that the other venues of pleasure are closed to me. I stand four foot eight in honest shoes—though hydraulic insoles and good posture get me to five even. I am allowed passage on most major roller coasters. Here at the lighthouse on the island’s northern tip, I hang lanterns that mean “All Ports Closed” and spend my days pitched between anticipation and dissipation. I study the forgotten chapters of The Chicago Manual of Style, with their helpful instructions on bookbinding, perhaps included so that civilization can start anew, after the bomb or the wayward comet, when absolutely everything needs to be relearned.
meh
[...] From my parents' stories I have come to believe that the truth does not reside exclusively on one's own political side. My father reinforced this one day when he told me something that has remained etched in my mind ever since. 'When I was in the prison camp,' he said, 'I knew in my bones that, even if our side had won the civil war, I would still be in the camp, only the guards would have been different.'
notable absence of the word "dialectic" here (I assume it's because he's trying to reach a mass audience and not just fellow leftists)