I was looking for a place to die; somebody recommended Brooklyn.
Man that’s a good first sentence, John reveled. Maybe the best. Definitely one of the few that had stuck by him all these years, resting in his subconscious. Although I can still recall by heart, he thought, the following: I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice – not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Chirstian because of Owen Meany.
Can it be considered a sentence with all those commas? Oh well. It’s the opening, the beginning. It counts. He was even willing to look past the Christian thing.
John was very into beginnings. He needed to be thinking about beginnings right now, about creation, conception. The alterative was too mortifying.
He had read somewhere that you could improve any first sentence of a book by adding ‘and that’s when the dragons came’.
I was looking for a place to die; and that’s when the dragons came.
He smiled slowly. Okay. Alright. Intriguing.
I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice; and that’s when the dragons came.
Hm. Works better with some than others. Although… I am a Christian because of Owen Meany; and that’s when the dragons came. Ha! Pretty awesome. Goes to show.
He lay back on his cot. ‘He was looking for a place to die…’ Why? Did he know he was going to die, of some terrible disease; or was he going to end his life himself? And who was this person that recommended Brooklyn? He wondered how that conversation went. ‘Hey you there, do you know any good places to die around here?’ ‘Oh, yeah, I hear Brooklyn’s nice’. Didn’t that somebody have any questions? Any inquiries as to why this person was looking for a place to stop living? And why Brooklyn?
I was looking for a place to die; somebody recommended death row.
John turned on his cot. Then he remembered; there were some books under there, still. He leaned over and felt with his hand around the space. Scooting over slightly, he hung his head so he could see. Three books. He grabbed them.
One was the bible. He tossed that aside. He wasn’t very much into fiction presented as non-fiction. He liked it better the other way around. He looked at the other two books: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Black House. He opened the first, and immediately remembered reading the opening sentence the first time.
When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along to an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.
God, John thought, jealous; that’s fantastic. He had tried himself to be a writer of sorts, to write the Great American Novel so to speak – but it hadn’t amounted to much. Some essays, a short story. He never had the patience, or the talent. I mean, listen to these words. Perfect music for cooking pasta. Genius.
His thoughts drifted to the story of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. A man desperately looking for his wife. John swallowed and allowed himself to think of his own wife, just for a moment. Only a few flashes – her brownish, grayish hair. The folds of skin underneath her shoulder blades. Her scent.
There he stopped. Enough. He had, by his own doing, ensured his wife would never speak to him again. And there had been love, before. There had been understanding, and laughter. But not a chance of that now. He sometimes imagined, against his better judgment, that she would come to see him. But as the days, the hours – and now the minutes – passed, it turned ridiculous. It was Goddam laughable, the way he insisted on torturing himself.
He could write it down, you know. There could be a book there. He could sit and write and cope.
But time was the problem. Time had never before been a problem for John, but now it seemed to be the only thing occupying his mind. The lack of time, and also, somehow, the abundance of it.
An icy dread crept up his spine.
As a distraction, he flipped to the end of Wind-Up Bird, and read the last sentence: In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.
He threw the book away, shattered. He put his head in his hands and breathed out. Tears seemed to well up, not in his eyes, but in his entire being – in his feet, his knees, his skin. He sat for a minute like this, breathing in and out in his hands. A lump had formed in his throat. He felt like he hadn’t drunk anything for ages.
Slowly, a mountain came to mind, a blueish-greyish mountain in the clouds. Where birds flew and there was a brook somewhere. A man walked along it, thinking about life and death and loved ones. Adventures awaited – maybe the man had a mission, a quest. Or he wanted to escape what he’d left behind. He’d walk and walk and when he got to where he was going he would sit, on a rock or a log maybe, and breathe.
John pressed his eyes closed tightly for a few seconds. Then he took the last remaining book, with thin, pressed lips, and opened it.
Right here and now, as an old friend used to say, we are in the fluid present, where clear-sightedness never guarantees perfect vision.
He let the words sink in; visualized them. A present not fixed, but fixable. And things that seem clear and certain… not guaranteed. Not set in stone, but fluid.
Possibilities. A future.
He wondered if he dared look at the last sentence. He flipped through the book, feeling the pages under his thumb, creating a flow of air. Wonderful, boundless air. He breathed deep – this air that could fly out of the tiny window at the top of his cell, traverse to a world unknown to him, and places and people he had never met, would feel him, would know him. The air he breathed. Limitless.
He squinted gingerly at the last page. Then looked up, having heard the door to his cell rattle. His heartbeat came up within an instant. He was stupid enough to think my wife until reality set in. The guard looked at him. John dropped the book.
I was looking for a way to die; somebody recommended the electric chair.
John stood up. He tried to face the guard with dignity. He felt the lump in his throat grow. He took a step, the guard reached for him.
And that’s when the dragons came.
Dianne Willems
Image: Bars and a brick wall from Pixabay.com
