Thu, 19 May 2005

Putting Your Life In Someone Else’s Hands
The thing we most remember, obviously, was the plane crash just up the road. We were out playing, watching, listening to the long tear in the sky reach a zero up in Feldman’s fields, the crack of the trees and steel. We were on our bikes and heading down county road V5G within seconds, all eager to witness, to be of some help. A wake in the corn starting back on the road spread as the fuselage came apart, the left wing split, the grove around the small empty pond bent left, the path of a small piloted tornado. There were police there before we had a chance to properly enter the cornfield, and contented ourselves with watching trucks rush along the culverts, twilight fading, eventually riding home after the roadway grew too crowded for comfortable observation of other people’s tragedies.

Later, after the work had been done, we went out to the field, stooping under the tape and beng careful nto to knock over the wooden stakes, looking for clues, for a reason such a crash would occur here, where nothing ever happened. We thought of stealing something, but nothing left seemed to carry the center of what had happened, so we kept coming back each weekend until all the pieces had been stolen away from us, all the traces of recall and strategy pulled away, nothing left but the scars in the earth. We started pulling pieces from the abandoned pile of Studebakers down by the burial pond and dragging them out to the crash-site, trying to redefine what we had seen with the limited means available to us. There was a scrapyard over in Washburn, and with the help of an older friend with a car and no friends his own age we snuck over the sheet-metal fencing, pulling whatever looked under the moonlight like controls, like flaps and spoilers, like shreds of fuselage stuck in the earth.

A year later survivors of the original crash came out to the site to remember, or to put it behind them, or maybe just to match up their memories to the place. Feldman was so spooked he had abandoned this whole square from the road to the grove, a second lighter crop poking up from leftover seed, grass and foxtail between the rows catching at their feet as they wandered onto the site, all the kids laying out and soaking up sun on a timeless pointless early-summer day stuck somewhere between missions and sugar-laden intrigues. Trains out on the Great Western, just barely within range, filled the quiet around the passengers, staring at us, speechless. Eventually we realized we were being watched, and looked up.

Later they turned the empty field into a bar, the only bar within walking distance when I was twenty-nine and decided to take my hermiting to its logical conclusion, retreating to the woods. When one retreats to the woods, one should not hang around in crash victim bars (or any bars, for that matter), as it makes the whole notion of retreat kinda laughable, but there I was, sucking down small bottles of off-market vodka with my new peer group, photographs of our mock site next to newspaper clippings and a polariod of Duane Berryberry, who once accidentally played there when his Amphouse gig was cancelled due to arson and curses. People had forgotten me, unsuprisingly, and I looked in vain for a small me staring back out of the pictures. I knew these people would never come into contact with my friends, my family, the people who were looking for me. Only it’s Iowa, and Iowa is a small world.

Most of my friends were gone. Josef had gone up to Minnesota and killed himself. Seth was gone, gone away, nobody knew where. Ana was sick and not seeing anyone, her hair gone, the promise of the benign faded. the circus had disbanded, Harold and Lawrence reunited and no longer in fear of the Cult of the Yellow Sign. Everybody else was grown up or in jail or dead. Almost everybody. There were still two associates still unaccounted for, as of my last day in the world. I should have known.

“YOU! How utterly fitting that you’ve cocooned in the nest of other people’s pain, so like you, swiping their stories in their sleep and imagining the maudlin applause fo those who wonder where you are. Shaaaaaame!”

“Tell him, Rissa! Shaaaaaaaaaame!”

“You’re not even drinking real booze! What kind of alcoholic nose-dive is this? William Holden wouldn’t drink sippy-cup size vodka bottles! Dylan Thomas could get drunk faster on his own piss than this swill-ale the infirm and forgotten have made their house brand!”

I barely mumbled something about crash survivors and respect then Rissa, who I always had a crush on (and yeah, you can get plenty of miles of psychoanalysis out of that), rapped me across the forehead with her cane (she had started carrying a cane as the best possible legal weapon, though the nails she had pounded through the base weren’t quite cricket) and screamed “That was twenty years ago! Enough is enough, you sad sodden sorry sacs of sympathy-sick…”

“Scallywags, Rissa?”

“Owen, please. I’m building to a secondary crescendo here. I can’t very well use that Bluebeard action at this point; something more striking is called for.”

“Violence ahoy! I got the gas!”

“No no no! I still have another ten minutes of material!”

Long before there was any cance to properly build, however, Owen had poured gas and kicked over candles and screamed [Owen would like me to inform the audience that he did not really pour any gas or kick over any candles and is only said to do such a thing in order to wrap up what is obviously a poorly thought out conclusion; he has better and more noble things to do with his time than set bars on fire without a decent reason] while we ran out, attempting to destroy history-roots, to free people to the present.

Only that moment, that present, fades. There is no holding on.
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #