meet me at the vanishing point

http://mmatvp.blogspot.com

A longer story I'm putting up

Song of Emma And Me

Probably the biggest mistake we made was joining the circus, but there were plenty of others-- mistakes that is. Maybe I should start at the beginning. Maybe.

1.

It wasn’t raining the day they told us he was dead. I remember that. And it was quite sunny when our mother disappeared. The morning they put us in the custody of our uncle, there was a beautiful sunrise. Emma woke me up to watch.
He didn’t have poor intentions, our uncle. He was nice. They kind of guy we liked to spend a day with. Not a parent. Not a parent, at all.
And so we left. We left our home of seven and thirteen years. We left our beds, unmade. We left our uncle unaware. We left a note. I think.

2.

Our father spent his youth on the coast in California. He had buried a shoebox on beach there, we knew that much. We didn’t know what was in the box. My sister, Emma, said we needed to have an adventure. She said our world needed saving. As my older sister, I would have followed her to the crater of an active volcano. I followed her into the back yard.

3.

We walked west, away from the sunrise. We found a bag full of dead squirrels. We were lost. We came to the stream running along the back of our subdivision. Emma turned to me the early morning sun bright on her face and said, “well, here we go.” And there we went. Straight into the water. Our journey westward begun.

4.

His first words to us were inaudible.
Emma asked him his name and he said Hector. He was in his forties, mulleted, mustachioed. He was working on his car and humming the national anthem.
“Where you kids going this time of morning in the summer?”
Emma answered: “California.”
“Well it’s going to take you a while on foot.”
“Yes it is.”
“I can get you kids as far as Canada.”
“That is no where near the right direction.”
“It’s where I’m going. At least you’ll be moving.”

5.

We went with Hector to Canada because he was right, we needed to keep moving and Emma said we needed to learn when to yes to people who were trying to be our friends.
I at least knew when to give up control.
Hector told us we should join the circus because it traveled and we could ride on elephants.
So we did.
And it was a mistake.

6.

The ringleader of the circus was called E. Alfred. We worked thirty six hour days. He had a special clock. It was madness. There were freaks and animals and strong men. We were small. We were lost. We were trapped. We were kept awake constantly. Any time we had a break we were placed in a small pit with hungry tigers, to keep us alert. When we finally fell asleep, I think it was a year later, we woke up in Mexico in the backseat of a cab. Hector was driving and apologizing. For the circus.
“But you have to admit, you are now much closer to California.”
“We are we going?”
“Away from him.” Hector gestured backwards.”
We turned around and saw we were being pursued by E. Alfred. He was riding a galloping elephant. He was bearing down on us. The world was getting hotter all the time. The cab was going three hundred miles an hour. I noticed it was on fire. But we were committed. This was do or die, probably both.
And then, just like that, we crossed the border. We were in California and Hector was downshifting like mad. The border patrol had commandeered Veil’s elephant and were using it to hose down their bicycles.
Hector pointed towards the beach our father had buried the box on. Well he said it was behind the hill he was pointing at.

7.

Behind the hill was a subdivision. the houses went right up to the ocean. Our father buried that shoebox in 1976. For all we knew it was either excavated in the building of this place, or it was now a part of someone's foundation.
We walked towards the ocean, beaten, beleaguered. We immersed ourselves in the water. I looked at Emma and she looked at me and somehow we both knew what the other was thinking.

NOTE: I wrote this as a rush assignment for class based on a much more detailed Idea, so yes, sketches.

Pictorial

Number Three: Edward

Edward’s father opened the gas station in 1969, the year after Edward was born and two years before his mother disappeared only to reappear later as a minor star on Latin American television. When his father was institutionalized in 1986 for an incurable melancholy that never seemed to blossom into depression Edward himself took over operation of the gas station. Soon afterwards he moved into the house his father had built in the weeds behind the Fuel For You Too Food Mart.
Over the next several months Edward immersed himself in the process of becoming his father. He began to despair. He stopped shaving and showering according to any regular schedule. He skipped meals. He pumped gas.
Sometimes he smoked cigarettes while he pumped the gas. The customers sat sweating in their seats but no one said anything because Edward looked like the kind to simply extinguish the butt in your face, or else calmly ash into the nozzle. Still, the customers kept coming because Edward hadn’t adjusted the prices since 1986.
But 1986 was twenty years ago. Or more. Or less. Now hemorrhaging money, Edward wastes away. Smoking his cigarettes, pumping his gas into the cars of strangers who never even knew his father, never knew the gas station in its glory days, if a gas station can have glory days. Edward allows his glory days to fade away as well.
On Sundays he visits his father. They attend mass in the chapel in the psychiatric hospital and they sit silently in front of a window, gazing through the glass or at it. Edward looks at his father who frowns at his son. Edward catches his reflection in the mirror and thinks for a moment that his father sure looks like hell before realizing it's his own reflection.

“He climbed out of the window of his apartment last thursday and he hasn’t contacted anybody since then, or no one has heard from him, no one that I know.”
“He climbed through the window?”
“He always left his apartment that way.” Seeing the confused look on his face I elaborated; “He was afraid of his neighbors.”
“I see.”
He didn’t but that was okay with me.

:::

His son once told me he believed his father could read minds until he was twenty eight years old. 

:::

“Why did you change your mind?”
“By then it seemed he had either lost the ability, or more likely he had given it up.”

:::

His paintings first started appearing in the late nineteen fifties inside the dust jackets of his favorite novels. He traveled around the country, in boxcars, stopping in small towns and cities, visiting bookstores and doing his work. In nineteen fifty-nine he was arrested in a bookstore in Northern California, in March. He had been painting a scene inside the cover of Don Quixote, I wish it were a different book. He was arrested because by that time he had “defaced” over two thousand books. Most of them by Jack London.

:::

“He cannot read.”
“Not at all?”
“No, not at all.”
“How can yo be sure?”
“He cannot read.”
“But, how can you know? Has he told you this?”
“He cannot read.”

:::

July 14
Two months after detectives interviewed me about D’Lane’s disappearing a small article ran in the paper today. “Eccentric Artist’s Disappearing Act.” No one even called me. Fuck it all.
July 16
I ran into that shitty crime reporter who wrote the article in a bar on Michigan Ave last night. I told him I was going to kick his ass. He said who the fuck do you think you are? I told him I was Thomas D’Lane’s biographer and if he was going to go around writing shitty half-assed articles like that he could suck my cock. I was drunk. I was trying to impress a girl who had left fifteen minutes before the argument even started. I had forgotten. If I am completely honest with myself he kicked my ass.

:::

“He’s been spotted.”
“Where?”
“Canada. Mexico City. I think he is in the Ukraine.”
“Why?”
“He told me.”
“You talked to him?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Last night, as I fell asleep.”
“You had a dream?”
“He spoke to me.”
“Fuck.”

Tomorrow

And so I woke up and I thought it was Thursday but I was wrong. And I thought my name was Amsterdam and again I was wrong. What kind of day was this going to be?
My house was not located in the same place on the block as it had been a few nights ago. It was going to be one of those days. I gazed up at it. It had three extra floors. It had a chimney. And yet it was undeniably my house. There were no clouds in the sky.
I walked to the park which I found to be as it usually is. Except my favorite bench which was covered entirely in pigeons which it never is. I shooed them away, or I tried. They sat, perched on the bench, unmoving. This had never occurred before either. The world is very different today I thought to myself.