Nyssa
Unillustrated eBook Version
Part 1: Love Notes To A Stranger
Copyright 2011 James Curcio
Smashwords Edition
Copyediting: Michael Tesney
Mythos Media.net
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
But who is that on the other side of you?
T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland
I’m dying. Not in the hyperbolic, smoking-at-the-cafe faux existentialist way. More in the bleeding out on the ground, narrating to yourself as your vision begins to blur kind of way.
I’m not screaming, or shitting myself. At least not yet. I've always been strong willed. Too strong willed. That's what led me to here. It, and her. Even now, speckled with my blood and dribbling tears of shock, she’s still beautiful. A beautiful monster.
Dangling on a ledge now, peering into an abyss of light, she's still with me. Always with me. At least I have company here at the end of the world.
I can’t imagine a world without myself in it. Can you? Let’s be honest. We struggle to begin a sentence in first person without that misleadingly simple letter that also happens to be a word: “I.” We are Subject to ourselves. There's no story without it, so I guess the story is about to end:
The ledge gives. I am falling.
--
Specks of light transform into snow flakes, pirouetting their way down to the trash on a city side-street. A video store sign flickers like a pulsar as people slog by—college students, distracted parents and their children, the wisp of a crackhead. All of them vanish into the white.
I recognize the scene from a few weeks ago. I was inside this store, living out my purgatory. I guess this is the part where my life flashes before my eyes.
Incunabula Video was a small privately-owned chain. We kept the doors open by selling the bizarre foreign shit you couldn’t get through major chains. There was little real profit in it, but the owner was equal parts stubborn and stupid, and its not like he had a whole lot of overhead with the salaries we get paid.
In a month, it would have been my tenth anniversary working here. I started as a clerk when I was in film school. It was an easy way to chew down my loan interest and cover what I considered necessities at the time... weed, coffee, alcohol, and cigarettes. As a long term investment, I might have saved some money and drank pesticide.
When you’re in college, you’re always a mere step away from fame and fortune. There, everyone is an undiscovered artist, sculptor, or writer. Everyone is brilliant and misunderstood. But then you graduate and suddenly you’re just another face, a store clerk, a barrista, a fucking longshoresman. Then it hits, the realization that you, or your family, were conned out of $30,000 a year. That film script or novel never quite pans out, a year turns into ten.
Quiet desperation isn’t just the English way. Life freezes in place, a nightmarish version of Groundhog's Day, but you keep getting older. The Eternal Return of the proletariat. I was starting to get a gut and a very real sense of defeat that I carried in the hardening curve of my spine.
Though it's been a struggle, I haven't stopped writing. Failed relationships and the occasional surreal dream fueled that creative fire for a while, but eventually I discovered I had to try something new or it would burn itself out. I needed fuel. Each day all I saw were an endless procession of customers... so they became my characters.
The shifty long-hair with the ZZ top beard, he was an ex-Ranger, I told myself. I wrote a story about guilt and the psychological price of following orders, when those orders are to kill.
A mother and her blossoming daughter. The mother kept looking over her shoulder as if she was afraid someone would burst in at any moment. They were on the run. Another short story in the making, this one about how we try to control our own lives by controlling the lives of the others. Give the reader a slight twinge of sympathy for the psychopathic ex-husband.
Today, I was just reading The Stranger covertly behind the desk, ignoring patrons in the most obvious way possible. I had no energy to write, (which is a tricky thing for me, since everything for me is writing. Even when I live, I am really writing.)
The bells on the door rattled. I didn't stir. I was fixated on the text in front of me, and you know. Fuck this job.
“For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and they greet me with cries of hate.”
Hilarious. I love the French. I glanced up, a faint smile tracing its way across my face. A young woman was drifting around the foreign section, a sea elf with a floating bob of electric blue hair. My smile froze and turned into a grimace before washing away entirely.
Eventually she approached the counter. Now I was pretending to read. She smelled of ozone and lilacs. It didn't seem like perfume.
“Is this any good?” she asked, pointing at the Klaus Kinski movie in her hands.