A Prayer and two Parables

Fotos von Jason Fulford

Paul Maliszewskis Kurzgeschichten haben die Präzision eines Lasers, sind perfekt verdichtet und gleichzeitig enigmatisch. Jeder, der sich ein wenig mit dem Genre auskennt, wird das als ideale Merkmale identifizieren. Sein neues Buch Prayer and Parable erscheint diesen Monat bei Fence Books und enthält Kurzgeschichten, die eine zusammenhängende Serie bilden, an der Paul schon seit 1995 feilt. Die Geschichten kann man grob in zwei Kategorien einteilen: Menschen, die einander hassen und lieben (Prayers), und schräge Erzählstränge, die ins Nichts führen und gleichzeitig alles sagen (Parables). Es lag also nahe, dass wir hier einen Auszug von ein paar der Geschichten abdrucken und sie mit drei neuen Bildern von Jason Fulford kombinieren, der auch das Cover von Prayer and Parable gemacht hat und dessen Arbeit, genau wie die von Paul, auf bestmögliche Art und Weise irritierend ist.

PRAYER FOR THE SAFETY OF THE PUBLIC SCREAMER

From my window, I can see the bus shelter. A woman is walking away from it, and there’s a man underneath, standing. Both are dressed in the clothes of the season, and both are angry. The man I have seen before. I call him Screamer. I hear him before I see him. In this way he is not like a jet fighter. Today, Screamer has a splint on his nose, making it longer and more pointed. When he screams, his splint quivers. Much of what he screams is profane, curses and swears. He often screams, Asshole fall off the fucking earth. In the mornings, I hear him coming from the west, walking toward downtown. Later, in the evenings, he returns, walking toward the suburbs. He keeps a fairly tight schedule, Screamer does. In this way he is not unlike people who work at jobs downtown. Always he is angry. Always he is screaming. I have seen Screamer look over his shoulder, back at the suburbs in the morning or back downtown in the evening, and I wonder what to make of that looking back. My first thought was that he was being followed. Someone was after him. He had made someone angry. My second thought was that he just believes he’s being followed. Whatever the case, Screamer is always yelling at the place he leaves, yelling at what he leaves behind. In this way he is not unlike you, or us, those, say, who have ever felt disappointed by the most recently passed experience, the last big letdown, that time we let ourselves think we were lucky, blessed, made from gold and promises. Precious stones never did rain on us. Which brings me again to what I see from my window. The bus shelter. The woman walking away. Screamer standing underneath. The woman is angry. Screamer, she thinks, screams at her. And why shouldn’t she take Screamer personally? Perhaps he told her, Asshole fall off the fucking earth. The woman bends down to pick something up, and I think she’s going to throw something. I think, She’s going to hit Screamer. But it’s just snow, and the snow is so powdery and dry, it scatters immediately after leaving her hand. She might as well have hurled a handful of dust. And Screamer still screams. The woman’s hair has come undone under her scarf, and she pauses a second to fix it. Screamer curses her, more loudly this time. Asshole, he says. Fall off the fucking earth. The woman walks away, and then the woman comes back. She walks to the corner, and then she comes back. This time, the woman spits at Screamer. And still, Screamer screams. Once more the woman walks away and comes back. And once more she spits at Screamer. As she walks away, I hear her say, I could kill you. From my window, I see the woman crossing the street and walking along the hillside. Screamer is still at the bus shelter and still cursing. Maybe this will be the last time I see him. Maybe someone will kill him. Maybe some people will return for him and do what, I do not know. Fuck him up good. I wish I could intervene. I want to manifest myself on the ground, between Screamer and the woman. I want to move between them. I want to say, Wait, please, you don’t understand. Hold back your blows, OK? Stay, for a second, the stones you’ve selected for this man’s skull. And what if the woman then came upstairs to my apartment? What if she could see what I see? Look, from my window. I’m asking you. Perhaps something would come of it: me, on the ground, meeting Screamer, while she sits upstairs. With the woman may come the hundreds, maybe the thousands, of people who will ever meet Screamer outside, on the streets and on the sidewalks. They all can crowd into my apartment, jostling for a view, a seat, a spot by the window. But can I say, really, that I wouldn’t feel insulted? Asshole fall off the fucking earth. There is spit, and then there is the anger, like fingertips gripping my scalp.

PARABLE OF A MERCIFUL END TO DREAMS OF FIGHTING UNDERWATER

My opponent always announces himself the same way. He says, I have a bum. Warning. I know he means bomb, but he pronounces it in the pinched way of the British. Bum. Warning. I have a bum. Yet he is not British. He has, in fact, never ventured outside the States. He does, however, have a bomb. That is why he’s my opponent, my dear enemy. The city is our battlefield. Streets and avenues have, for me, pugilistic significance, a long history of beatings and many losses. You may walk past these sites without knowing it. I have met my opponent in fields, in parks, in city squares. He has met me on board buses, subways, and monorails. We have fought under overpasses and over rivers. I have struggled against him amidst the carnivals of summer. He has found me cowering in the beverage aisle of a grocery store, hiding in the shadow of a pyramid of Coca-Cola. In tropical restaurants, cool rooms, windy vistas, on snowy heights, there is, we believe, no place we haven’t already fought. Were you unwittingly in attendance at some of our more celebrated bouts? We have wrestled atop buildings, decorating the skyline like two feisty hood ornaments. Always the game is simple, as my opponent takes pains to point out: one fall, mano a mano, me or the man with the bomb. When I fight, however, I am at an immediate disadvantage. When I try to punch him, there’s no force behind it. I draw back my arm, but that’s it; that’s all I have time for. When I try to run, I escape from nothing. I am always caught in midturn, pivoting and pushing off with my strong foot, but no more. Caught and then hit and then hit again, I fall. There is something in me that works against the punch, against my flight; it subverts each of my attempts. It is like misdirection. It is like the fact that water is at its thickest, its most dense, seconds before freezing. It, I say, because it hasn’t any name. It is all effect and no identity. In my most productive moments I come up with descriptions of it; I test them against my experience, comparing them against my bruises, measuring them alongside my memories of the man standing over me and laying into my body with whatever happened to be handy—a socket wrench, a golf club, a tire iron, a stick. It is like second-guessing raised to the power of ten. It is like an interior monologue as loud as a rock concert. It is like the flashlights of a hundred righteous accusers. Everything I do, anything I try, whatever I can manage, it is in double slo-mo. This is the cruelty of fighting underwater. Do I even need to tell you that my opponent is not similarly afflicted? Other opponents trade in casual menace. They like to say, I’ve been watching you, or, I know where you live. My opponent says, I know what you feel. He describes my small, daily failures to me. As if I didn’t know. His assessments are pinches that leave marks on the inside of my skin. He tells me, You are the Neville Chamberlain of your extended family. Or he says, Your love is like the plastic cups left over from a party. My body serves up for him a set of ready metaphors. Your stomach is a growing pit, he says, down which fall the snakes of your seven indiscretions. They are like arrows, their heads like arrowheads, and they move, constantly, one over another. Are you feeling that? he says. When I don’t answer, he asks, Don’t you understand? I’m not sure, I say. Then, after some thought, No, not really, I guess. I’m talking about your insignificance, he says, as if it could all be so plain. I get what you’re saying, I tell him. In general, I mean, but you lose me on the specifics most of the time. My opponent actually looks sort of hurt. Should I be less gnomic or something? he says. I shrug. It would, I guess, be a start. Consider arrows, he says, speaking more slowly this time. Arrows in an empty stomach. Now do you see why I fight him? Even though my moves are slow? My efforts futile? I fight him because I must. I have no other choice, I think. When I’m not fighting my opponent, I see other people whom I imagine are fighting their opponents, on other nights, in distant parts of a darkened globe. Between dinner and dawn, the city is turned over to these fights. A long fight card every night. Many matches and many falls. Who are these people? How can you recognize them? They are those who misbutton an article of clothing. They are those who react last and late to a joke. We are the people whom you find always looking down and seemingly in. Eye contact is for the foolish when it is night and an opponent is about. We stumble frequently, unfazed. We step into traffic, neither surprised nor frightened when we realize our mistake. Not a day goes by that we do not find ourselves stopping people like you and asking for directions in the city of our birth.