Nothing Beside Remains

4.07.2006

Ripping off Michael Cunningham, who ripped off Virginia Woolf

More on Martok/Karl, as an imitation of Michael Cunningham's The Hours.
This is the first draft.

******************
He steps out into the cold, clean air. It is a newly formed fresh morning, as though it had been created from the ether just the moment before he entered it, and would fade back away just after he left it behind. He steps down the slope of the street, guiding his feet eastward.

Karl stands at the bottom of the hill, shifting one foot and the other in a slow drumbeat, waiting for the green light's permission to cross. He stares fixedly at the red-lit hand, eyes as still as his feet aren't.

Opposite him, Marie Halberg stands, feet dancing an impatient two-step of their own accord, glancing up at the persistently red "don't walk" hand. Below her, George Junior screams, his tiny face turning blue with rage and oxygen deprivation. Sighing heavily, Marie bends down to him, all the motion in her hips, graceful, left hand snaking behind the baby to check his diaper, right reaching into the stroller pocket for a teething biscuit. When she rises, her son satisfied for the moment, the light has already changed. She pushes the stroller down off the curb (clatter-thunk, go the wheels) and into the street. As she passes Karl, passes him in the precise center of the yellow-black path, their eyes meet, and are linked by a laser-thin beam of recognition. There he is, thinks Marie, who hasn't seen him in nearly a year. He is suddenly, surprisingly middle-aged (maybe it was the hair, now worn short and conservative?), slouching deeply. She imagines that she can see through him to his bones, sees that they are thin and pliant; sees his insides, all his organs laid out before her. She is filled with a vague and yet consuming sense of disapproval. They pass(the feeling passes, too) and she walks on.

He walks on.

On past the children playing, screaming in the park; on past the old man sweeping the sidewalk outside his convenience store; on past the big opulent hotels and the seedy residential hotels (how incredible, that the one word meant the two things, so very different); on past the wafting mixing smells of ethnic cooking; on past houses, cars, people. Here is life, and here is Karl walking steadily past it all.

He arrives at his destination: Crate & Barrel, glass-walled, full of yuppies and matching placemat and napkin sets.

He pushes open the door, which never seems to stick or squeak, and walks in, a large, dense man, clumsy amid the delicate vases and dainty linens. A man wearing a crisp white shirt that manages to suggest a uniform is rearranging a pyramid of brocade throw pillows near the door. He gives Karl a long look as he enters, as if to communicate the fact that he knows some deep and musty secret of Karl's soul. (This is how Julia Roberts must have felt in Pretty Woman, thinks Karl.)

Now, he stands in front of a vast wall of wineglasses – the shelves seem to reach to the very edges of the universe. Karl is overwhelmed, helpless, adrift in a sea of glassware. Had Corrinne told him to get the plain ones with the twisty stems? Or had it been the handblown ones with the flecks of color? He sinks into himself, standing there, a statue, surrounded by lawyers and businessmen's wives selecting fabrics and flatware. He is lost, alone, utterly stranded. He wants to scream but is afraid of his own voice. The waves crash on his body and he drowns, right there in the store, in front of a wall of glass.

A blast rings throughout the store, and Karl surfaces. He whips his head around, eyes scanning beyond the windows for the source of the explosion (or had it been a gunshot?). The other customers are unconcerned, and a few have shifted their attention to Karl, standing bizarrely tense and alert in the kitchenware section. They shake their heads. People like that shouldn't be allowed in here, they think.

Gradually, he relaxes. He sees it now, on the opposite corner. One of those Hummer limos – all that superfluous metal, as though the thing was to be traveling in space. It had blown a tire, that was all. One would think that after all these years of living here he would have learned to distinguish city noises from real danger, but no.

The rear window of the limousine rolls down, and a face appears to check the progress of the driver's repairs. A brief exchange, silent to Karl, and the smoky glass rises again, hiding the passenger. But the face remains, blazing in front of Karl's eyes, in his memory. He knew that face. He knows that face...

"Sir, are you all right?"

The crisp clerk, wearing a look of contempt behind a mask of concern.

"Fine. I'm fine," Karl stammers.

He begins to notice the people around him: the father who spares a moment of attention from his baby to look pityingly at the man breaking down in the housewares store, the woman in the business suit who studiously avoids meeting his eyes.

"I'm fine," he repeats, panic flooding his veins. He turns on his heel and runs from the store.

He runs and runs, retracing the calm steps of that morning, running home to safety. He runs until he is stopped, abruptly, by something large and solid in front of him.

He crashes, bodily, completely, into a man, and as they both tumble down into the concrete, he realizes with horror who it is.

Karl crashes into William Shatner and down. Karl is flooded with feeling. Here, right here beneath him, is the man he once tried to kill, his former idol. Here is his toupee. Here is the sexual, paternal smile that lurks just beneath. Here is the flesh of the man, and here is the actual, physical fact of his soul – swirling hopes, tumultuous fears, miniscule human feelings that swell up to fill him entirely. Here are the depths of the famous William Shatner, the man beneath the character; the naked and feeble essence that Karl (so blinded was he by the sheen of the persona, so gagged by his own needs projected outward) had never even known existed. And yet, here it is, here, between Karl and the pavement, in his arms. It was tangible, painful.

Without quite meaning to, without deciding to, he hugs Shatner, warmly, arms snaking around his waist and shoulders. He is full of Shatner's awful cologne and the broken, runny eggs of his shattered groceries.

"Hey!"

Shatner recoils, trying to pull away from the embrace, and succeeds only in hitting his own head against the sidewalk.

"Get off me!"

"Sorry," mumbles Karl, rising up on his knees.

Here, above the prone man on the ground, Karl clenches his fist as though around the hilt of a blade. He squeezes his eyes tight, tries to shut out the sounds of the crowd and the police who will arrive any second.

Eyes open, and he is alone again, alone on the street on top of William Shatner, who shoves him off of his legs.

"I'm really sorry," he says again.

Shatner ignores him, squatting on the ground to gather what remains of his bag of organic groceries. The eggs are past salvage, all twelve dead, but the rest might still be all right.

Karl picks up a stalk of celery, moves to put it in the damp paper sack. Shatner jerks away, convulsively. "Forget it," he snarls, and, leaving the produce to rot with the eggs, he walks away.

Karl stands slowly, eyes fixed on the retreating figure. Shatner looks once over his shoulder, and disappears around the corner. Karl stands there for a long time, surrounded by mangled foodstuffs, rubbing his cheek where the cement has left its texture and a few bits of grit.

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