Incompleat Iconoclast » Fear

Exercise #23: Too Much

Edward F. Gumnick — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 04:25:14 +0000

Outgoing

Today is the day. I’m going to leave here. I’m going to make a couple of sandwiches, wrap them in waxed paper, put them in one of the brown paper bags that I asked Morena to buy when she brought me groceries last week, and I’ll add a bag of baked potato chips and a can of Coke. Then I’ll put my lunch in the new backpack that I bought online from Timberland, along with a couple of magazines. I will walk out the front door, I will lock it behind me, and I will take the three flights of stairs to the ground floor. I’ll walk out of the building and turn right on the sidewalk. Then I’ll go four blocks north and two blocks east to Riverview Park. I’ve seen it on a Google map. It looks lovely and green in the satellite image. I can also see it from a couple of online traffic cams that look south along Lincoln Parkway. I know from the police reports I read that the neighborhood policing program has reduced crime in the area, and that Riverview Park is patrolled at all times of day and night.

So today might be the day. I’ve spent a lot of time building up to this moment. I haven’t been outside in four and a half years. Not just outside the building, but outside the door into the hallway of my apartment building. I wasn’t always like this. There was a time when I walked the streets without a care like so many people do. But that was before I realized how dangerous it is out there. Still, some of the friends I’ve met online tell me that I should be strong, that I should not be afraid, that I’m missing too much by spending my life in this small apartment. On an intellectual level, I hear what they’re saying. But there’s a voice inside me that won’t let me forget how easy it is to lose everything in a matter of moments. And so I take precautions, I guard my safety, my privacy.

Maybe today will be the day, though. I’ll load up my backpack so I’m ready for whatever I might encounter out there. The food, of course, and bottles of water, filtered twice through the charcoal filters I ordered. Maybe a flashlight. The keys for all my door locks, except for the one to the deadbolt, which I’ll leave under the loose edge of the carpet in the hall outside my door. You can’t be too careful. And something to read, not so much for the entertainment as for a buffer against the possibility that people will want to talk to me. If I look like I’m reading, people will leave me alone. And my surgical mask, too, will discourage casual conversation, though I understand that it’s not serious protection against any of the more virulent antigens out there. I will have to take my chances.

I don’t know if today will be the day. There is still too much to be done at home, too much to think about.

Note: The assignment was to write about “something you have too much of.” I wrestled with this prompt for a couple of days, but I was getting nowhere. Perhaps I spent too much time thinking about it, or let it become a mental block with too much power over me. I decided to write from the perspective of a character who finds the whole world to be too much for him.

Exercise #12: Fear of Water

Edward F. Gumnick — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 05:39:39 +0000

Tomorrow the god will show his face in the shadow of the big temple. Then the priests will feed us a meal of corn and beans and give us a drink from a gold cup, wash us, paint our faces with the signs of Kukulkan in red and blue, and dress us in gold and feathers. And then they will lead us to the cenote.

I want to believe I will have the courage walk on my own legs and that they will not have to drag me, as I have seen them drag others. At the edge of the great well, they will say prayers to ask the god to accept us and bring an end to the drought. And then we will jump into the cenote, or we will lose our nerve, and the priests will pick us up and throw us in. If we survive the fall, they will pull us out of the well, and the god will give us the gift of prophecy.

I want to be brave. I want to make this sacrifice for the sake of our people, but especially for my parents and for my little sister. But I am not sure that giving up my life will bring the rain. I am young, but I am not too young to remember last year and the year before that. The priests gave victims to the gods, but the rain still hasn’t come. Why do they think that this year will be different?

Once my father was gone for eight days, scouting with a party of warriors. When he came back, he told me about a man that they met in the jungle to the west. The man was tall, with long limbs, and he told them of a place many days’ march to the north where rain falls nearly every day, and of places far away where the gods make rain flow across the ground in a kind of roadway of water.

I don’t want to die. I want to escape to a place where the gods don’t ask so much of their people.

Note: The prompt was to write about “a time you were afraid of water.” I didn’t feel like writing a hurricane story, so I tried something else.

50/50 Fall 2008, Exercise #9: Reaching

Edward F. Gumnick — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 20:16:29 +0000

The boy saw his youngest sister reaching for the handle. The pot of soup was threatening to boil over on the front burner of the stove. His mother had told him a thousand times, “You must always turn the handle away from the edge, because otherwise your little sisters will try to grab them, and then they’ll spill hot stuff all over themselves. So it is very important for you to turn the handle the right way.” It was only decades later that he thought about how much responsibility that was to place on the shoulders of an 11-year-old boy, even if he was tall enough to use the stove, and responsible enough to be trusted with cooking for the family, and handy enough in the kitchen not just to open up and prepare canned soups, but also to cook some simple recipes. So he was always very careful to keep the pot handles parallel to the edge of the stove when he stood cooking in front of it, and to turn them another forty-five degrees away from the edge if he ever had to step away from the stove—but never for more than a moment.

But the babysitter was not as careful, even though she was 17 and should have known better, so sometimes he had to be careful for her, turning the handles to a safe position when she stepped away to answer the phone and to have long, giggling conversations with her boyfriend or one of her girlfriends from school about boys and songs on the radio and hair and makeup and teachers. But this time he was not watching, he was in the family room in front of the television, and he wasn’t supposed to have to take care of his sisters, that’s what the babysitter was for, but even though he was mostly paying attention to an episode of Star Trek that he’d seen seven or eight times already, in the back of his mind he knew that something wasn’t right, and he could smell the canned beef stew cooking, and he could hear it bubbling on the stove, and then in a moment he was seized by the vision of his youngest sister, the one who had recently become very curious about the universe of things above her head, and he could see her standing in front of the stove and looking up at the rattling pot and wondering what to make of the bubbles of stew starting to splash over the edge of the pot, and he could see her reaching for the handle, and he could see her pulling the boiling liquid over, spilling it on her face and neck and arms and screaming with pain and fear while the babysitter stood transfixed in shock or panic or disbelief, so he jumped up from the carpeted floor and ran into the kitchen and turned the handle on the pot away from the edge, and then he stormed into the hall, grabbed the phone out of the hand of the surprised babysitter, slammed it down on the receiver, and stood rooted to the floor in front of her, his face red with rage, angry tears streaming down his face.

Note: The prompt for this exercise was to write a text that “starts with someone reaching for something.” I had a lot of trouble with this one, maybe because it was the next one up when Hurricane Ike came along, so I tried several false starts at moments when focus was somewhat lacking. I finally cranked out this mostly stream-of-consciousness piece to get past the roadblock.

50/50 Fall 2008, Exercise #8: Letter of Persuasion

Edward F. Gumnick — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 04:36:59 +0000

Letter to a young homosexual

Dear much younger self,

This is a warning from your future self. Ignore it at your peril.

I’m afraid you probably will ignore it, because you aren’t looking for advice. You’re looking for absolute answers, and you have some very limited ideas about where to look for them. You will not find any of the answers that I can give you in the places you’re comfortable looking.

There is so much I could tell you, but what I wish for is the chance to stand at your shoulder when the opportunities to make choices present themselves to you. I would stand there and whisper into your ear. “Desire is good. (Or at least not bad.) Trust it. (Or at least don’t fear it.)” Or maybe, “Give in to your feelings.” Or “Use the force, Luke.” Hell, I don’t know if even that would get through to you.

No, see, I’ve gone off on the wrong track already. It’s not about desire. You’ll figure out desire on your own eventually, and you’ll get to understand it before you understand the nature of truth—not big Truth, I’m talking about your truth, i.e., the truth of who and what you are. You’ll start making sense of desire before you get a handle on love or discipline or loss or sacrifice or compassion.

Let me be blunt. Come out! Come out now, or come out soon. Come out to everyone you know, starting with yourself. Don’t think about right and wrong. Focus on honesty. You were always an honest guy. You may not know a thing about hard work, but you could be trusted. It’s eating you up inside to have to lie to your parents, your siblings, your friends. Stop it! You’re killing yourself slowly with the lies. You know it’s true. I’m not telling you anything new. What are you waiting for, your next nervous breakdown? You can be that honest guy again.

I need to tell you something about yourself that you don’t know: You are fearless. I know, you don’t feel fearless. But your fear is only a byproduct of your double life. The fear of being found out, the fear of being exposed, the fear of being known for what you are—the fear is a lie. It won’t survive the light of day when you finally do what you need to do.

Note: The prompt for today is to “Write a letter to someone specific in which you attempt to convince or persuade him or her of something.” This is the beginning of a letter to myself that could serve as a template to someone else who needs to hear it as badly as I once did. There’s an awful lot more to say.

Boot Camp Day 3: Searching in the Dark

Edward F. Gumnick — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 05:20:16 +0000

It’s the same dream, but it’s always different. I am back in the old house, the one where we lived before the war came and my father lost his job and we had to move north. I know, as I always know, that HE is here. He is here in the house with me. I can’t hear him, I never see him, I don’t want to see him, because I know what will happen if he finds me.

I wake up in my bed in the room we shared. I look around me in the darkness. I can see the three windows, filled with starlight and street lights. There is more light out there, on the shingles of the roof outside the windows, more light on the lawn that slopes away toward the valley. It is most dark inside the house, but this room isn’t the darkest.

Everything is there as we left it. The huge old radio sits on the dresser we shared. His big desk, my smaller one. His piled with books I couldn’t understand, with magazines, with the tools and supplies for his fly-tying, with pieces of leather and electrical components that I couldn’t identify. My desk has only an orderly row of books standing between two plain wooden L bookends. They are fiction—dog-eared paperbacks and thrift-store third editions of second-rate spy thrillers, science fiction, ghost stories.

I know that I cannot hide in the closet. That’s the first place he’ll look. That was always the first place he looked, and everyone had to learn that hard lesson once. I contemplate the attic door. He has to stoop to go through it, but I don’t. But I don’t know what I will find behind the small door. Will it be as we left it, packed from the center aisle below the peak of the roof all the way out to the eaves with moldering cardboard boxes and bug-infested baskets of old linens, broken toys, strands of Christmas lights, and outdated appliances? It used to be a maze of hiding places and a source of unexpected treasures. But this is a dream. Might I open the door to find the attic empty, and hear his footsteps in the hall outside our bedroom door? Will the bare bulb that hangs halfway between the door and the outer wall of the house be lighted, or will I have to feel my way carefully across the plywood sheets, reaching for the chain that hangs somewhere before me in the dark? No, I should not have wasted these moments considering the attic.

I climb out of the bed. In this dream, I am always surprised again to find how short my legs are. In my waking life, I cannot remember being small. It seems to me that I was always big, and strong, and if not an object of fear, at least imposing enough to avoid most physical confrontations. But my short legs—they are thin, too, not the sturdy pillars into which they would grow—my short legs barely reach the floor. I feel the carpet. Even in the dark, I remember its shades of brown and gold. I tiptoe to the door and press my ear against it. Nothing. He is not in the hallway. I think I would be able to hear his breathing. I pull the door open, taking care to keep the hinges from squeaking or the knob from banging against the wall.

In the faint glow of the nightlight coming from the open door of the bathroom, there is no sign of him in the hallway or in the open door of my parents’ bedroom at the far end. The other doors are all closed. He could be behind any of them. But that is not his usual game.

I keep to the wall on my right, from where I’ll have the best view into the bathroom and the open bedroom door. When I am outside the bathroom, I drop to my knees. I reach out and place the palm of my right hand on the cool linoleum. I know somehow that he is not in the bathroom. I draw back my hand and think about the space underneath the vanity. I could fit in there. I think of the warm, wet smell, and now I can almost smell it. No, not there.

He wouldn’t go in my parents’ bedroom. I know he wouldn’t. He pretends to have no respect for authority, and I think he is afraid of nothing, but we have been given a few rules, and he knows that we are not allowed in there when Mom and Dad aren’t home.

I wonder for a moment where they are. In the dream I cannot remember that one of them is two thousand miles from here and the other has been gone for 15 years. I am too young to think about these things.

I make my way down the stairs, careful to walk only on the ends of the treads where the nails are. Walking on the well-worn middle path makes squeaks and pops that you can hear from the front porch. Fourteen steps. I have to be more careful now. There is no nightlight in the downstairs hall. We aren’t supposed to go downstairs during the night. The curtains are drawn, and in this dream, there is never a light burning from my father’s study at the back corner of the house, and my mother is never in the kitchen making a cup of chamomile tea before bed.

I am quick to move away from the vulnerable open position at the foot of the stairs. Around the end of the banister to the left, there’s a small space next to the telephone table. I fit in this space, and in the deep darkness, no one can see my pale legs or the light-blue cotton of my summer pajamas. I wait here a few moments. It is always while I pause here that I realize that as much as I don’t want to do it, I must go into the basement.

Note: The prompt was “searching in the dark.” The character from whom the narrator is hiding—or whom he is seeking, perhaps—is loosely based on my brother, who did not abuse or torment me in the darkness (at least not on any regular basis), even if that’s how this piece kind of sounds.