Kamikaze

Diving
A 6,000 foot suicide
Birth to death
at terminal velocity
Falling
from the start
to the end
the impact
Explosion
viscera thrown about in a perfect ring
Like a halo
about the grave
of the raindrop
on the sidewalk

Sitting on a Concrete Wall in Toronto Late at Night

If I sit still enough, I can feel the blood humming through my capillaries.

I'm learning to mind my locations, like a child does. Here is the place. Here are the objects. If I sit very still, I can imagine they are constants, like rivers or mountains, and so am I. Topographical features that change only imperceptibly.

As an adult, I have this sense of everything in the city being in flux; it's rearranged each time I see it. But late at night, it's easier to find the foundations and imagine the constants, the coral that remains when all the flitting fish have hidden from the night. When everything else washes away, here is what remains: dormant vehicles, buildings like canyon walls, engine smells, glowing signs calling to illiterate moths, concrete barriers, street lamps shining on empty pavement, lunatics, and an orchestra of unspecified machines all buzzing and vibrating in a song that plays all day long, but can only be heard at night. 

Death to the Commander

The commander lived in a rest home, and he never had a single visitor until the day he died, probably because he smelled like ash and spoke only of the joys of killing.

He was known by all the staff as "commander" because that is the only name he would answer to. The name on his file met with no reaction. There was nothing in his file to indicate which war, if any, he had fought in or which military, if any, he had belonged to. In conversation he spoke of the glories of battle without enough specifics to clarify one way or another. The other patients avoided him, as they would rather drink tea and play backgammon than listen to him explain, for the thousandth time, how much he missed the taste of blood. When his health took a turn for the worst, they breathed a sigh of relief now that he was bedridden.

One cold winter day, after the first frost but before the first snow, the commander received his first visitor at the rest home. The woman stood a head taller than even the tallest nurse, and she wore a simple white robe with a red border along the bottom hem that looked startlingly like a dark blood stain. She smelled like an electrical fire. Her face was like a burnt log. She strode down the pastel corridors of the rest home like a battleship in human form.

When she arrived at the commander's room, he started in his bed. "Who are you? I don't know you. Get out!" She marched to his bedside, leaned over him until her mouth was beside his ear, and spoke. No one heard the words but the commander. His squinted eyes widened, and he gazed upon her like a long-lost child. "Yes. Yes, please," he rasped, reaching out to her like a child himself. "I agree. Take it, just give me that taste once more!"

A half-breath later, she had thrown him into a wheelchair and was rocketing down the pristinely carpeted halls with him bouncing before her. The nurses who tried to bar her path were smothered beneath her vicious stare. One particularly strong-willed orderly grasped the woman's arm, but no matter how much he tugged, her trajectory was unaffected, and he ended up with rug-burns on his knees.

When they reached the locked front door, she kicked it open without hesitation and brought the wheelchair out across the parking lot. All the nurses and patients, entranced now by the woman and her power, filed out the wrecked door and stood shivering in the flower beds, watching silently whatever happened next.

Beyond the parking lot stood a grove of trees, and within it the woman stopped. From within her robe, the tall woman produced a saber a half meter long with a golden hilt. She lowered it into the commander's lap and took a step back, bowing as she did so. The commander considered the weapon, turning it over, letting the dull winter light glitter along its blade. He took a breath so long and so deep that he nearly doubled in size. Then, quivering, he leaned forward until he slid out of the wheelchair and put his weight on his own feet. The sword nearly slipped from his hands, but then he gripped the handle, and from that grip his whole body seemed to draw strength

His back and legs straightened. His arms spread wide. He threw his head back with all the vigor of a warrior facing his enemy. With a wild scream, he kicked back the wheelchair, which clattered backwards into the parking lot and tipped over, and he held the sword over his head, the point aimed at the sky. At that moment, the sun reached through the clouds and golden light poured down on him like water from a basin. Every nurse and patient felt their eyes water with awe and terror.

The commander hit the ground like a tangled classroom skeleton. The sword bounced away. "There is your taste, commander," said the woman. "Now, for mine." As the woman stood over him, his body cracked apart and crumbled into ash. Even as he wasted away, he reached out towards where the sword had fallen, but not even the ashes of his hand touched it as they fell to the earth.

The goddess of war waved her hand, and the ash that had once been the commander rose from the ground and was drawn into her open mouth. When the last of him was gone, the light from the sun again passed behind the clouds, and the woman was nowhere to be seen.

The nurses and patients shuffled back inside where it was warm, and never spoke again of goddess of war or the commander, and they were better off for it.

Morse Code

Everyone is lonely. People with close friends are lonely. People with intact nuclear families are lonely. Married people are lonely. Siamese twins are lonely. No amount of contact with humans can change this fundamental part of human existence. It is the presence of others that creates this lonesomeness. The fact is, we float suspended in an ocean of our own sensations and thoughts and history, reaching out to each other across the incomprehensible distances between us.

We treasure the fleeting, luminous moments when we feel like we've touched something, someone, anyone. The obstacles between us are empty space, holding us aloft, alone. We look across space and interpret blinking stars in Morse code, wondering if the messages are real or just random space dust passing in between.

Is there anyone out there?

What are these “other people” but imagined futures and a million versions of memories, with questions tacked to each one, imaginings about their experience. What are they feeling and thinking? What do they see from where they sit, on some far off plateau built of memories and impressions and beliefs unknown to me, untouchable by me? They are all fictional. Stories I tell myself. Perhaps they tell stories about me too.

But.

Perhaps the stories are what matter. Tell me the story of myself, and I will tell you yours. In Morse code, across vast distances, blinking stars. If we're describing what we see, and what we describe is each other, we must both See. We must both have telescopes. We must both exist. We must not be alone. This is an act, not a state-of-being.

So polish your telescopic lenses, friend, for the only momentary relief from the pervasive alone we all feel because of each other is each other.

Luke Skywalker: Like My Father Before Me

Everyone knows, at the end of the Star Wars original trilogy, the end of Return of the Jedi, Luke Skywalker defeats Darth Vader in a lightsaber duel. The Emperor, who’s just been watching this whole thing like a parent at their child’s baseball game, laughs and tells Luke to kill Vader and “take you father’s place at my side.” But instead Luke throws away his lightsaber and announces,

“Never. I'll never turn to the Dark Side. You have failed, Your Highness. I am a jedi, like my father before me.”

Isn’t that a strange thing to say? “Like my father before me.” This is Luke’s crowning moment, his great defiance, proof that he is too strong, at least too morally strong, to be pulled to the dark side. And he chooses to say, “Like my father before me?” His father is currently laying at his feet, minus one arm. Even before that, his father was a sith lord, half machine, and a total jerk who had turned to the dark side and been mean for literally decades. Yes, Vader was once a jedi, but he totally failed at it. So, Luke Skywalker, I ask you, seriously ol' buddy, why associate yourself with Vader in your moment of triumph?

Literally everyone has parents. And all parents, being human and fallible, screw up in lots of ways. And their children share their DNA and were (if the parents stuck around) influenced by their parents’ screw ups. So every child eventually asks themselves: am I my father’s/mother’s son/daughter, doomed to fall to the dark side like they did?

When Luke refers to his father, the jedi, he is referring to the aspects of his father that he, at that moment, has successfully embodied. He learned the pitfalls that destroyed Vader, and he now has faced those same pitfalls in himself and succeeded.

Literally everyone can do this. We cannot run from our own DNA, but we can all learn from our parents’ mistakes, succeed where they faltered, and become what they failed to be. Once we’ve achieved that, we can proudly declare our association with them, with the parts of them we have chosen, with their jedi selves. Even though they totally failed at being jedi, we can become what they were meant to be: a jedi, like my father before me.

What If

What if something terrible happens?

I have never been in a fight, not a real one anyway. But in my head I've met my end in a plethora of ways: sword fights, fist fights, bottle fights. Just like the eight thousand and one times I've been stabbed in the back while out for a walk (in my head). Just like the six hundred times I've been abducted by aliens or monstrous beings from other dimensions (in my head). I do this on a moment to moment basis. I wake up doing this. I fall asleep literally to a lullaby of this. This is the soundtrack of my life constantly playing, sometimes louder, sometimes softer, but always playing.

I brush my teeth imagining what it would be like if I were arrested for someone else's crime. I floss daydreaming about the apocalypse. I shave to the melody of “what if,” “what if,” “what if.” What if the subway derails while we're going over a bridge? What if my permit to live in Canada is revoked? What if my wife gets sick and we don't have the money to heal her? What if one of the friends I've shown my novel to betrays me and somehow steals the copyright to it, leaving me so depressed that I can never write again? What if robbers? What if cockroaches? What if disease? What if an accident? What if storms or hail or war? What if mind-reading paratrooper shapeshifter alien vampires?

There are people who prepare for unfortunate situations. They do this by recognizing likely scenarios, planning accordingly, and not thinking about the millions of extremely unlikely possibilities that there is no way to actually prevent except by locking yourself in your house (and even that won't prevent all of them). These people innately know a basic truth: no amount of mental questioning can ready you for the unpredictable, unlikely madness of what actually happens. Not even for vampires. When the apocalypse comes, it will be bizarre and unimaginable. When calamity strikes, it will always be a fresh wound. I've never, ever, readied myself for a real event using 'what if.' I’ve never realized a fatal flaw in a plan using 'what if.' I’ve never soothed myself regarding something scary using 'what if.' All that 'what if' does is multiply anxiety a thousand-fold in an infinite loop of mental creation. I create planets in my own mind, filled with nothing but anxiety. I’ve tossed aside basic physics to make room for more worry and fear amongst the limited neurons in my brain. And I know that this massive construction project is never going to be worth the effort.

But it’s habit now. Years of practice. Decades of teaching myself that literally anything can be a prompt for 'what if.' By the time life taught me that this habit was useless, I had already become an expert. So, what now? Is all this space in my brain permanently wasted? Maybe not. What if an expert in making bombs used his skills to defuse explosives? What if an expert in robbery used his knowledge to thief-proof people's houses? If those things can happen, maybe an expert in 'what if' can turn a method for creating anxiety into a tool for producing hope.

What if something good happens?

The Coming of An Accountant to the Great Plains of Merna

The great plains of Merna, though they were, as their name implied, great, and had held that title since before human language had been invented, had never in their long career seen the likes of Rayfield the accountant.

A thousand years before Rayfield was born, a herd of centaurs from Tafril came through the forests of Ern into the wide, rolling hills of the great plains of Merna. Their armor and spears glittered in the bright morning sun as they marched, crushing the grass and the dirt into a road of mud in their wake. Their captain, the largest centaur ever born, galloped in the lead, standing nearly four meters tall. They marched the length of the plains, shaking the earth as the went, and then continued onwards to some horrible war where they all died.

But still, nothing quite like Rayfield the accountant had ever come to the great plains of Merna.

A thousand years before the centaurs’ march, a meteorite plummeted through the atmosphere with a tail of fire crackling behind it, and by the time it touched the ground of the great plains of Merna, it had burned away until only a crumb remained. But it was a fiery crumb, and rain had not fallen on the plains for nearly a year, so the grass was easily lit. The fire burned away six square miles of dry yellow grass before it stopped.

In the fresh ash, strange new plants grew up, for the meteorite had brought more than fire down with it from the outer reaches. These new plants grew quickly, and their leaves glittered like diamonds. Their shining refractions of light drew flies and men alike amongst the fields of otherworldly plants. None ever returned.

The king of the nearby kingdom of Brendal lost seventy of his best knights and his only son to those fields. He wept a single tear for the knights, but for his son he mumbled two words to his most trusted sorcerer: "Burn them." The sorcerer, who had been beside the king since the day he was born and had never spoken a single word to any other man, knew what the king meant. He hurried away and locked himself in a secret room in the tallest tower of the castle. Heart-rending melodies floated from this tower for three days and nights. Then, an expendable scout was sent to check the great plains of Merna and the fields of glittering plants from which no man or fly had yet returned. But return the scout did, reporting that he had found nothing of the shining plants but ash on the bare soil. Normal grasses soon grew up again, and no one ever spoke of the glittering otherworldly plants, the seventy knights, or the king's son ever again.

An unfathomable number of beautiful, horrible, and somewhat-impossible things had happened in the great plains of Merna. And so many other, mundane things had happened as well. Nearly every eventually had taken place there at least twice. But nothing even slightly similar to the coming of Rayfield, the accountant, had ever happened.

To his credit, Rayfield was no ordinary accountant. He was the most skilled of his firm, and for that reason he, and he alone, had been entrusted by his jealous colleagues with the prestigious and usually deadly task of confronting Valentino the gangster about his back taxes. However, the blunt honest fact was this: nothing like Rayfield the accountant had every happened there because nothing as mundane as a shortish man in an overpriced suit had ever gotten lost enough to be able to arrive at the great plains of Merna.

Charming: Our First Evening in Cairo

In Canada, you need to be polite. In Egypt, you need to be charming.

My wife and I moved to Cairo in the heat of July, without a single friend in the country, any knowledge of the language, or the slightest idea where we were going to live. We had four boxes of possessions, acceptance letters to the American University in Cairo, and a reservation at a hostel downtown.

Our first evening staying in the hostel, we headed out to find food. Being unfamiliar with any local food and knowing that the next day would be hectic, we found a Macdonald's (yes, there are Macdonalds' in Egypt) and ordered a pile of hamburgers to last us several meals. Then my wife went back to the hostel with the food while I looked for a grocer which might have bread and jam for breakfast.

When I went back to the hostel, I passed through the front room, which, like all Egyptian businesses, was manned by one employee and two of his friends. When they saw me, they chuckled and patted each other on the back. I asked if there was something on my face, and they replied by saying that they were not expecting to ever see me again.

With this mysterious conversation still playing in my head, I went to our room and found my wife happily munching on a hamburger. "Why are the people in the front room laughing at me?" I asked.

"Oh," she smirked and raised her eyebrows glibly.  "When I came back, they asked me 'What happened to your husband? You left together, but only you came back.' So I said, 'I sold him.'"

"You sold me?"

"Yes, sold you. And they laughed and asked, 'What was the price?' And all I did was hold up the bag of Macdonald's."

"What did they say to that?"

"They said that I got a good price."

It was then that I realized that I had chosen the best traveling companion in the world. And that realization was proven right, over and over, as we found a flat, bought furniture, and arranged our new lives. There was no heart in the country that she could not charm or strike fear into. I optimistically believe that some of these powers have rubbed off on me, via her and the Egyptians I befriended, but honestly I will always be an apprentice in the subtle ways of the Egyptian wit.