Thursday, September 24, 2015

My Next Tattoo.

Right now I am in a bar reading the essay  "Why Some Hybrids Work and Others Don't" by Lia Purpura and - describing an encounter she once had with a boyish millionaire - she explains, "I was tired and righteous and broke" and I have not read the next paragraph yet, but I know that is my next tattoo:

Tired. Righteous. Broke.

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Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Longue Duree.


I’m reading an essay for class entitled “American World Fiction in the Longue Duree” by a guy named Joseph Tabbi and in it - in reference to a whole bunch of shit you probably don’t care about - he writes, “Poets can be prophetic without being politically responsible.”


I like that sentiment very much. Essentially he is saying that you may still be right over the long term even if you get some of the details wrong. “Long Duree” is a term of art that you can look up, but basically it means in the ‘long duration’ or ‘long run’.


And - as you know - I tend to like my poets both prophetic and irresponsible anyway.

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Monday, September 14, 2015

Mimes of the Midwest.


Below is a new short story that I finished recently. It is about mimes. But not really.


As with most stuff I post on here, it is very first drafty.


It is fairly long and so I have split the bite-sized sections up into separate posts because you likely do not want to have to  scroll through 14 pages of story on your phone, or whatever. Now you can read it at your leisure! One post at a time! After all, Dickens published Great Expectations in a serialized form. People all around the world used to crowd the docks as ships arrived from London carrying the latest installment and those people would yell up to the sailors on the boats, "What news have you of Pip?!"

Well what I have done below is sort of that but in the style of Netflix, which also gives you everything all at once.

To be additionally helpful (you're welcome), I have also included a super utilitarian post at the end that says “The end.” Obviously that sort of marker would not normally appear at the end of the story because I am not in the habit of writing New Wave French films which require an indication that they have ended.


Anyway, I hope you enjoy reading about mimes and the Midwest!

fin.

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Volkmer’s Mimes.

Volkmer’s Mimes
by james bezerra

 A not-even-that-remarkable typo triggered a somewhat unlikely series of events which ultimately resulted in Lieutenant Volkmer equipping a small army of mimes with black market weapons procured through his contacts in the Bulgarian dwarf mafia.

To his credit, Volkmer did his work diligently while simultaneously and quietly finding it to be ridiculous. His orders had been coded double black, so there was no appealing them. He decoded the order four separate times and then four more times just to be sure. Finally, confident he had transcribed it correctly, he sighed deeply in and out through his nose as he looked down at the order:

 Acquire approx 50 mimes, deployment ready. Await further instruction.

He was not a naturally social person and so he had not minded a posting as a NOC agent, operating outside of bureaucracy and traditional structure. He in fact prefered to be working alone, despite the unpleasant reality that NOC officers tended to be summarily executed when captured.

He looked at the order one more time, sighed one more time, then ripped the flashpaper page from his notepad, crumpled it into his own empty coffee mug and set it alight with a match. It went up so fast that the sizzle sound of the flame was audible for just a moment. He switched off the burst transmitter. Secured its water-tight case, wrapped it back in its fetid plastic bag. He lowered the bag back through the hole in the school’s septic tank, careful to tie the cord of the bag around the magnetic hook inside the tank. He sealed the tank closed and spent several minutes scrubbing his hands in the mop basin. Volkmer zipped his overalls back up and began to climb the stairs out of the basement. The school day was nearly over and soon there would be classrooms to clean.

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Monet.


 The occasional requisition of mimes notwithstanding, it was a quiet life and Volkmer found a calm and disciplined pleasure in it. It was cold in that part of the country, but he was not unaccustomed to that. The wide prairie would stretch gold and green in the summers. The tall grasses would sway and bend on the hot breezes and there would be a horizon, but no edge to the world really. The winters were positively different, but beautiful in their own way. The earth would become dense with snow and all but silent. On those white mornings he would often stand on the wood porch of his small house by the iced up river and feel as though he were gazing out into one of Monet’s haystack paintings, where even light was made somehow heavy and slow by the cold. He would watch patiently and no matter how slowly the shadows moved, he could hear even them crunching the frozen grass. Those were his favorite mornings. 

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The Great Plains.


NOC agents were generally expected to live on the salaries from their cover identities, so as not to draw suspicion, but often they are given access to funds through other means. Volkmer’s other means were a safe deposit box one town over. In the deposit box were green stacks of bound bills. The box was always full, as if the greenbacks grew there. 

But that was one town over and it was snowing, so instead he drove from the high school to his town mall. He purchased the bookstore’s only book about mimes with the crumpled bills left over from his lunch that day. Then he drove his pick-up across town to The Great Plains Bar & Grill, which was actually only a bar, where he ordered a drink and began to read.

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Information Concerning Mimes.


 All things which exist in the world, Volkmer realized as he read, have histories.

 The modern mime artist traces his roots to a specialized stage actor of the ancient Roman era known as a Patomi’us who performed something akin to contemporary ballet, in that it was a form of dance and movement intent on pantomiming and exaggerating the gestures and motions of life.

 For some reason Volkmer stopped reading there and looked off to a dark corner of the bar room which was, at that moment, completely empty. He thought then briefly about Monet’s haystacks.
 Mimic dancers of the Patomi’us type always wore masks or makeup so as to de-accentuate the individualizing features of their faces in order to enhance the graceful universality of the movements of their bodies. To that end, it was not uncommon for both male and female pantomimes to perform nude, but for their anonymizing facial obscurations.

 The modern conception of the mime dates to early 19th Century Paris where Jean-Gaspard Deburau began to experiment with the silent white-faced figure. 

Both Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton were influenced by the craft and techniques of mimes, which they both separately co-opted for their iconic silent film work, which had, in turn, a profound influence on the subsequent development of the craft and techniques of later mime artists. One such artist took the nom de guerre ‘Marcel Marceau’ while a member of the French Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Paris. One night while helping a group of Jewish school children escape across the border into Switzerland, Marceau discovered he could keep them quiet by miming for them. The trick had been to keep them delicately fascinated; neither frightened nor delighted, simply captivated. He would later describe mime as “the Art of Silence”.

 Volkmer ordered another drink by raising his empty glass at the bartender but saying nothing.

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On the Question of Romance.


 NOC agents of Volkmer’s type were generally of two minds when it came to romantic companionship. There were those who felt that it could add to the veracity of their covers. Others saw it to be an unnecessary complication not worth the effort. All agreed however that reliable access to sex helped alleviate the stress. Also, the loneliness.

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A Quasi Cosa Nostra.


 That the region in which Volkmer found himself living boasted a large immigrant population of Bulgarians was worthy of note, but not particularly an oddity.

That the local Bulgarian population descended almost entirely from two villages in the lush, emerald green valleys of the Rhodope Mountains is also not particularly peculiar, as such clustering patterns are common in the settling habits of first-generation immigrants.

That the Rhodope region was historically inhabited by a statistically significant population of dwarves is a genetic peculiarity. The fact however that the dwarf population had largely emigrated in the last three decades is unsurprising given the quantity and quality of persecution it had endured after the fall of the Communist regime and the resignation of Todor Zhivkov, who had always seen that the population was to some degree protected, owing to his fondness for them and the fact that his maternal grandfather had been half-dwarf.

That insular immigrant communities form their own criminal architectures is so common as to be the standard. It was in exactly that way that the infrastructure of post-feudal Sicily’s Cosa Nostra arrived on the Eastern seaboard of 19th Century America. Similarly, the Bulgarians had brought a violent and secret underworld with them to the plains, as well as into The Great Plains Bar & Grill.

When the bartender had approached Volkmer to replace the empty first drink with a full second one, Volkmer slid a cocktail napkin toward the bartender. On the napkin Volkmer had written: Kato, please.

The bartender set down the drink, wadded up the napkin, and disappeared into a back office. When he returned he said to Volkmer, “Tomorrow. 4:30.”

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FOMO.


 The question of romantic entanglement was one that Volkmer had spent a good deal of time thinking on. He had long since recognized himself to be an emotional isolationist, but that did not stop him from noticing the slender pale legs of the girls at the high school when spring would finally warm the white shell off of the world.  

 A small river ran near the back of the peaked little house where he lived and on the humid summer nights he would sometimes hear the unmistakable female tinkle of laughter coming from that direction. He knew that the locals spent long summer nights floating down the river in inner tubes, drinking beer, watching the fireflies, and kicking their bare feet lazily in the water.  

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Kato’s Van.


 Volkmer’s contact in the Bulgarian dwarf mafia was called Kato and they met the next day. They were on good terms. On a previous occasion Kato had succeeded in acquiring 3,500 pounds of Semtex 1A at Volkmer’s request and he had subsequently asked no questions when two weeks later a Federal building containing, among other things, the regional offices of both the IRS and FBI had been bombed.

 Kato ran a used car dealership on the outskirts of town. When Volkmer stepped onto the lot a salesman gently took his forearm and led him to a brown conversion van at the back of the lot. The salesman slid open the van door and Volkmer stooped inside. Despite the richly upholstered interior of the van, it still felt cramped to Volker. Less so to Kato who sat on the back bench seat, which could be folded down into a full sized bed. Kato was eating a wedge of vending machine egg salad sandwich. He grunted a hello and with his short arm held out a similar wedge - still sealed - to Volkmer, who accepted it graciously.

“What do you need then?” Kato asked, his accent seemingly thicker than Volkmer remembered it. Kato, while both a dwarf and an integral member of the mafia hierarchy, was actually an Albanian. Volkmer also knew him to have a large tattoo of Alexander the Great across his small hairy chest. Neither of these slight incongruities had ever been explained to Volkner.

They agreed on a price for 50 AK-47s - used, but in perfect working order - and two bushels of hand grenades. Volkmer finished his sandwich and then drove to his safe deposit box the next town over. 

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Interruptus.


There had been a woman once - in a way - who had made him question things. 

Before he had lived in the little house near the river, Volkmer had lived in a pre-war brick apartment building in town. The window of his little living room had looked out into the center courtyard and into the opposite apartment beyond. He had lived there through the winter and felt that the building was a frozen warren of dull red caves, but then spring came and it was in the spring that he realized that he could see into that opposite apartment. Whereas all through the winter there had been a dark curtain there, suddenly there was a bright square of light. At first the apartment had been completely empty, but within a few days a young couple moved boxes in. She was small and beautiful in a pale, pre-Raphaelite way. He was lanky with a beard and his body was lean in such a way that Volkmer sometimes thought that he could see the sinews and muscles stretch and then relax a layer beneath the skin. They were beautiful in that thoughtless way that only youth ever can be.

They never did buy curtains for the living room and never appeared to even think to do so.
Many nights Volkmer would turn out all of the lights in his apartment and turn his chair toward his window and their window and he would watch them go through the motions of their evenings together. At some point he realized that one or both of them were deaf. In a moment of sudden clarity he’d realized that the humming bird motions of their fingers were a language.

From the bookstore at the mall he purchased a book and set about decoding them. It took all of the spring, but eventually Volkmer was able to somewhat follow the flitter of their words. He, it turned out, was rather funny. He was animated and gregarious. She, it seemed to Volkmer, was more contemplative, though occasionally sardonic.  

Many nights She would disappear into the bedroom and He would continue to sit in the living room watching television. Volkmer could not see into the bedroom once the door was closed, but he could see when She turned out the light to sleep because the edges of the doorframe would cease to be illuminated. On those nights Volkmer would stare at the man angrily, unable to understand why He did not follow Her into bedroom at every opportunity, if only to nuzzle His face into Her hair or press His mouth slowly to the back of her neck.

That spring had passed slowly into summer and there came a night in July when they arrived home late, dressed nicely and drunk. She in a flimsy little black dress and He in slacks and a tie. Volkmer’s windows had been open for the breeze, as had theirs, and he heard her giggling and it was - he’d realized suddenly and obviously - the first time he had ever heard Her make a sound.

They had kissed there in the living room, and touched there in the living room and Volkmer had inched his chair just a little nearer to the window. His hands slid down to the flesh of Her thigh and Her fingers ran across His lips and He raised the dress up and over and off of Her body and She pulled at the zipper of His pants and He unwrapped Her from her bra and She unbuttoned hastily each of the buttons of His shirt while His fingers, always so quick, moved back between Her thighs.
 Volkmer watched them as they giggled and stumbled and kissed and soon they had moved all the way to their window and all he could see then were their shapes against the light of the apartment. 

Volkmer watched as His body moved behind Her and She pressed Her palms flat against the glass of the window. He cupped her breasts, tenderly at first, then harder as She began to push Her hips back into Him. He reached an arm out above the arch of Her back, pressing His own palm flat against the glass for support as He leaned into Her body.

Volkmer listened carefully to the wide vowels of her sounds as they drifted across to him.
 In his blackedout apartment Volkmer stepped carefully toward the window and pressed his own palms against it, knowing that the thickness and warmth of the glass against his hand felt exactly as it did for Him, and for Her.

Then She suddenly let out a loud oblong moan and jerked against Him, shifting His weight and His palm left the glass by uncontrolled inches, then fell back fast and his palm smashed hard into the window and the glass split into a web of fissures and a sharp crack echoed around the brick courtyard of the building.

Shocked, He grabbed Her shoulders and pulled Her away from the window, then quickly guided Her down, out of sight onto the floor.

Volkmer took his own hand off his own window and he looked out to the other apartments facing into the courtyard. A few of them had snapped on their lights.

Then he heard it. The summer breeze carried it into his apartment; the disembodied sounds of Them laughing uncontrollably. 

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The Loneliest Number.


The hardest part of the assignment to fulfill had proven to be finding 50 people. Volkner did not know 50 people. His research turned up an acting school in Duluth and he had even called, but when a woman answered and said “Hello?” in a sweet and nasal voice, Volkmer just sat silently in the living room of his little house near the river, unsure of what exactly to ask.

 “Hello??” She said again into the silence before hanging up.

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Further Instructions.


Further instructions came down to Volkmer per the standard protocol. He arrived at work and found a message slip from the office paperclipped to his timecard. In the school secretary’s looping cursive it said:  Your brother called. 

On his lunch break that day he descended the concrete stairway down into the cold basement. He unsealed the septic tank, fished out the plastic bag with the burst transmitter. He decoded the order:

LONG: 43°05'10.4"N LAT: 94°01'49.6"W. Arranged in hatch pattern crossing traffic lane running E/W prior to exit 194. Deploy in two days. 0900 hours.

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Flavors.


 Volkmer would often think of her after he moved to the little house near the river.
 Not so much on the winter mornings when the isolation and the whiteouts brought him peace, but on the summer nights, when there was no escaping the syrup thickness of the air, which he sometimes thought had a taste on the tongue like someone else’s flavor.

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Favors.


Still unsure of where to acquire 50 people, pressed for time, and frequently wavering between annoyance and bemusement, Volkmer drove that night to The Great Plains Bar & Grill to have a drink.

 He considered possibly conceiving of a plan that would involving recruiting 50 students from the high school, though he admitted to himself from the start that he likely would not be able to concoct such a plan.

Then suddenly, in a moment of serendipity so implausible that it could only have actually happened, Kato climbed up onto the barstool next to him, drunk and completely naked. “Have you seen my tattoo?”

 Volkmer turned slowly to the naked Albanian dwarf and asked for a favor. 5o of them.
“No favors,” Kato replied, “just money.”

The next morning, despite the increasingly thickening whiteouts of snow, Volkmer was at the bank one town over when it opened.  

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The Engineer.


It was never disclosed to Volkmer - because his handlers did not deem it to be operationally relevant - that his target was an engineer with a wife and young child. The Engineer was the architect of a DARPA project intended to disable hostile satellites using intense, targeted electromagnetic radiation in the form of a beam of laser light, which - if perfected - would technically violate a half dozen treaties of varying degrees of international importance. Hence the decision to make such an unusually violent example of the Engineer, who was from Duluth and known by sources to be driving from his research lab at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, to surprise his parents at their 50th wedding anniversary, in two days.

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With Her in the Hay.


 Sometimes Volkmer would imagine laying with Her in any one of the tall hay bales that dotted the endlessly flat expanse of the summer. They would lie there, Her head on his outstretched arm, watching clouds float ever so silently and he would be so happy that he would nuzzle his face into Her hair and whisper to Her, even though he knew She could never hear him.

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Deployment.


 “And that is 50!” Kato counted out the last Bulgarian dwarf to hop out of the last of the vans. “Pay me.”

Volkmer opened his parka against the gathering blizzard and retrieved the green bricks of cash, the edges of which fluttered violently in the wind.

Kato shoved the bricks inside his conversion van and slid the door closed. He shouted into the blizzard howl, “You like the face paint? I did them all myself this morning. All of them!” He handed the book on mimes back to Volkmer, “I missed maybe my calling.”

Volkmer began to walk to his truck, then stopped to looked back. He watched Kato distributing machine guns to each of the dwarves, with their painted faces and children’s department striped shirts and sweaters. He watched them clumsily organize into formation on the road, the drifts of snow momentarily obscuring the ones furthest from him. Volkmer thought then again of haystacks and of light held in place by cold.

Volkmer returned to the high school basement, fished the transmitter out of the muck and sent the only message he was allowed to send: 

Deployed.

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At Exit 194.


 As he drove through the gathering blizzard, The Engineer realized that he had made a potentially life threatening mistake when he’d set off onto the empty freeway headed east toward Duncan Iowa

 His wife - raised in Alabama - had not spoken to him in two hours. He would have apologized were it not for the fact that leaning forward and peering into the whirling snow took all his considerable concentration.

 But then, just before exit 194, he laid hard down on the breaks and the tail end of the car wiggled and lost some traction, then finally slid to a stop. 

 The headlights only momentarily permeated the opaque curtains of snow, but when they did, The Engineer saw the oddest thing he could ever even conceive of, and he was a man who conceived of a way to shoot down satellites with beams of light.

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The Return of the Typo.


The man who filled the safe deposit box one town over was called Vauxhall and he was laying across the roof of his Bronco near the bend in the freeway near Exit 194. He aimed his binoculars through the blur of snow at the car he’d been tasked with tracking from North Dakota and he was utterly perplexed by what he thought he saw through the undulating sheets of white.

“The fuck …” his words trailed off, taken by the wind.

What looked to him like two dozen tiny, heavily armed mimes standing completely still - ominously as silent as shadows moving across ice - arranged in a hatch pattern across a freeway, in a blizzard, passing in and out of whiteout existence, occasionally illuminated only by the headlights of a car that was beginning to reverse cautiously away. 

 Vauxhall struggled to get to his feet in the wind. He shook his fists toward the freeway and then threw his binoculars at it. 

“MINES!” he screamed into the shriek of the blizzard, “MINES!” 

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The End.


The End.

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Saturday, September 5, 2015

I do believe that I have finally found the exact center of the middle of nowhere.


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Behold the mighty Colorado River! And this overpass.


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Every Bar.

Every Bar 
by james Bezerra

Friday nights
desert downtown
Yuma refracts
all sound.

Bar music
wouldn't even
be worth
the bother

when heat
stifles day-life,
becomes resonate
echoing off

narrow streets,
artificial adobe
government buildings,
sweat bodies.

At least
this bar
is an
Every Bar.

All towns
have this
dark, locals
sticky bar.

Air this
pregnant, humid
makes here
glow loud
with sound.

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I can even close down locals' bars in places where I'm not a local.


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It is 85 degrees here at 12:30 at night. At least they have ice.


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