"When's he going to get here?"
"Soon."
"What's he going to be like?"
"I don't know."
"Why don't you know?"
"I don't know."
"How do you know you don't know?"
"I – "
"Everybody shut the fuck up!"
Host Dad is watching The News.
Host Mom resumes doing dishes. Host Sister resumes studying English. Girl Host Cousin just sits there looking all cute. Boy Host Cousin resumes eating his own hand. Host Brother resumes reverse engineering his childhood toys, transforming them into mildly aggravating and somewhat deadly projectile weapons.
"Does he smoke like dad does?"
"Yes."
"Does he drink like dad does?"
"I think so, yes."
"Shut the fuck up," bellows Host Dad.
Host Brother is momentarily shutted the fuck up. Host Sister memorizes fifteen English words. Host Mom puts on a pot of tea. In anticipation. It is 10:30 PM.
"This is boring," says Host Brother, glaring at the television, amplifying his slingshot.
Host Dad says nothing, is watching The News.
"I don't care about The News," says Host Brother.
Host Dad blinks vigorously, is profoundly hungover, is watching The News.
"When's he going to get here?" asks Host Brother, and nobody says anything.
There is a plastic basketball hoop hammered into the hardwood wall above the door to the living room, and Host Brother has a small foam ball with which to play basketball against himself. He shoots some hoops. He clunks a shot against the backboard. The ball sneaks between his legs, ricochets against the fold-out futon, falls into Host Sister's hands. She takes a shot, misses. Host Mom scolds her for doing so. Smacks her once, smack, one proper smack across the cheek. That's a boy's game. Don't do that. Host Brother gets the rebound. He misses a layup. Nothing else is said. All is boring. Host Dad is watching The News.
Outside, it is snowing. The snow falls and falls, and it's something obvious and ordinary to the Host Family in the living room. Host Mom tongs another log into the fire. The sparks flit out of the oven like the last of the fireflies. They blacken and fall to the floor. To be swept up later.
"When's he going to get here?"
"Ssu!"
(Georgian Mother for "shut the fuck up.")
It's creeping up on 11 PM. The snow is devouring everything. My arrival ever more unlikely. It's possible, Host Brother thinks, that I won't show up at all. It's possible that I never existed in the first place. He plays basketball with himself as obnoxiously as he can until he wears himself out. Host Dad is still watching The News. Host Brother gives up. He sits down on the futon next to his mom until she threatens to kiss him on the cheek, then he runs to his and his sister's room and locks the door behind him and hides out there for the remainder of the night.
Round about midnight, a profoundly bearded American shows up at the doorstep with two bags of luggage. That's me. Me and Host Dad get wine drunk together. Nobody has to work the next day. But everybody has to work the next day. Because everybody has to work every day in Georgia.
Because every day in Georgia is a piece of work.
Host Brother in the next room listens to us talking through the wall and wonders what I'm going to be like. Neither of us have ever had a brother before.
Friday, January 25, 2013
Thursday, January 03, 2013
Escape Button
Somewhere in the bustling bowels beneath the Capitol building, sometime around noon, my trousers exploded and the button that had once so dutifully bundled my junk together suddenly shot off down the hall and went skittering betwixt the clickity-clacketing wingtips of any number of our fair nation's elected officials. Then, as gravity would have it, my pants fell down. That was when I decided that I didn't have a future in politics. This cockamamie vaudevillian bullshit, I knew, would happen to me every day that I remained on The Hill. Or for as long as The Hill would have me. The Republicans would've been better off hiring Mr. Bean.
I was finished. Kaput. Less than a month in, it was time for me to retire. Still, my dong was hanging out in a very public place and for eminently prosecutable reasons, an escape had to be made. So I sequestered myself in the most secluded basement bathroom I could find and listened to Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) filibust ass in the stall next to mine while I tried to MacGyver my pants back together with a broken keyring and half a tab of prechewed Dentyne chewing gum. Were there any emergency tailors lurking in the depths of D.C.'s Fraggle Rockian underground, I wondered. Certainly, I figured, I couldn't be the only man on Capitol Hill having trouble keeping his pants up – but that's what interns were for. And I, alas, was the intern.
My engineering efforts having failed colossally (and stickily), I sucked in my gut and adopted the Napoleon stance – i.e., the Untreated Ulcer Swagger – then I made my hunchbacked way out through several security checkpoints with one arm clenched around my waist and the opposite hand resolutely cupping my balls. This drew some looks, sure, but once I'd made it outside, out into D.C. proper, I was just one of a million other half-dressed derelicts cupping their balls: a privileged one in fact, with two whole pantlegs to his busted-ass pants and a Van Heusen™ necktie to cover up the delicate bits.
I caught the subway home looking mighty glum, indeed. Nobody in the office knew that I was gone, or that I wasn't coming back. I had no idea what to tell them, or whether I should tell them anything at all. Maybe I should just steal away in the night. That had always worked for me in the past. Or maybe there was still time to fix things. Call in. Apologize. Say you got sick. Brush it off. Get some sleep. Put on a new pair of pants and turn up bright and early the next morning. But the button thing. Always a button, always an unzippable zipper, always a banana peel when you least expect it. That shit happens to me all the time. It doesn't happen to John Boehner or the thousands of Princeton grads lining up to puff on his metaphorical cigarette. Whatever Paul McCartney has to say on the matter, fools don't make it on The Hill. But what was to be done if I didn't make it? What in the ever-loving hell was to be done next? I'd thrown everything I had into D.C. and watched it spiral down into a black hole, like one of those plastic charity vortexes you see at the mall. Fuck me. I put my head in my hands and swallowed back a delicious flare of gastric acid. The train shudder-whooshed into a tunnel and I watched through my fingers the bright white sidelights streak by like flashes of a future that I – through idiocy? through laziness? through some sort of subconscious moral rectitude? – was now banishing to a dark and irretrievable past. All knowingly. All willingly. All because of a fucking button. I'd gained weight. I chewed the inside of my cheek and looked up. An old black fellow seated in the seat in front of me seemed to be reading my reverie.
"Rough day?" he asked.
"Life kind of sucks at the moment," I said, "to be perfectly honest."
"It's never life that sucks," he said. "We always have the power to change things. It's all in your mind. It's all up to you. Remember that, son."
I told him I would. I thanked him and shook his hand. Then it was my stop, so I got up and clutched my balls and embraced my artificial ulcer and shuffled off the train like a sack of potatoes on stilts. Witnessing an exit like that, I'm thinking maybe the guy changed his mind.
That afternoon, I tendered my resignation over the phone. And so my paid internship became an unpaid one. I'd fallen off The Hill.
It wasn't a wasted trip. I learned some things. I learned, for instance, that politicians very seldom (if ever) actually write their own material; speeches, press releases, op-eds; no, the writing is almost entirely left to staffers like me. On the other hand, I learned (and was pleasantly surprised to learn) that most representatives actually do take time to read the mail they receive from their constituents, so long as the letters are not written in shit. I learned that most members of the House cannot afford to live in Washington D.C.; when they are in town (which is not altogether all that often) not a few of them spend their nights on tiny little futons that fold out into their tiny little office closets. Quite a few politicians are hapless drunks – how they keep this under wraps media-wise is something I never did figure out. John Boehner's office is the one closest to the designated outdoor smoking zone. Can't say I blame the guy. The House chamber or the Senate chamber, or at any rate whichever chamber it is where the President of the United States makes his State of the Union Address – that chamber is an optical illusion. It belongs on the side of the Interstate, next to Carhenge and The World's Largest Ball of Aluminum Foil. I shit you not. The room puts on at least 15,000 square feet when seen on television. It is actually very, very small in real life. You couldn't host a Magic: The Gathering tournament in there. Also: there are gas masks and various paranoiac anti-terrorism prophylactics stashed in little tote bags tucked under the seats. House and Senate votes are cast via a machine that hasn't been upgraded since the late 1980's by my guesstimation. On the machine, there are three square plastic buttons – red, yellow, green – "Yea," "Nay," and "Meh" – and I imagine they flash excitedly and play the original Pac-Man theme when pressed. Voting also involves inserting a dusty gray plastic game cartridge into a warped wooden slot – not sure how that works, or whether it works at all. When you come right down to it, the overall aesthetic of our representational democracy lies somewhere between the original Atari, gas station slot machines, and a 1987 Plymouth station wagon tricked out with woodgrain everything. What else did I learn? Well. Come CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) season, the "Casual Encounters" section of the D.C. craigslist is clogged with anonymous personal ads soliciting all manner of clandestine conservative buttsex. I did not partake, but I can tell you it's legit. The bars in D.C. abide by all sorts of byzantine drinking rules – you can't stand up; you can't sit down; you can't wear two items of clothing that belong to two different colors starting with the same letter – and these rules make drinking very difficult. Just because I learned all this crap doesn't mean that I understand it. But perhaps most significantly (for me at least), I learned that I am very good at sitting down at a keyboard and cranking out mass amounts of bullshit in a very short time, bullshit that argues in favor of all manner of harebrained and horrific and hateful things – and most creepily of all, I learned that this aforementioned bullshit of mine, written without an iota of sincerity on my part, was effusively adored by certain circles of voters who (were they not a kind of dominant and well-funded minority in America) would almost certainly be institutionalized. But now I'm politicizing again. And like I told you: I've retired from all that.
Where were we? So. I left The Hill. I did not leave with my tail between my legs as you might expect, but with my tail wagging at the thought of going somewhere else. At the end of my month in D.C., I coughed up the rent and caught an Amtrak back to Omaha. Days later, I learned that I'd been accepted for a volunteer teaching gig in Georgia: The Country. I had no money, no other options, and no real desire to do much of anything else. A week later, I was in Georgia. And that is when shit got interesting. To say the least.
I was finished. Kaput. Less than a month in, it was time for me to retire. Still, my dong was hanging out in a very public place and for eminently prosecutable reasons, an escape had to be made. So I sequestered myself in the most secluded basement bathroom I could find and listened to Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) filibust ass in the stall next to mine while I tried to MacGyver my pants back together with a broken keyring and half a tab of prechewed Dentyne chewing gum. Were there any emergency tailors lurking in the depths of D.C.'s Fraggle Rockian underground, I wondered. Certainly, I figured, I couldn't be the only man on Capitol Hill having trouble keeping his pants up – but that's what interns were for. And I, alas, was the intern.
My engineering efforts having failed colossally (and stickily), I sucked in my gut and adopted the Napoleon stance – i.e., the Untreated Ulcer Swagger – then I made my hunchbacked way out through several security checkpoints with one arm clenched around my waist and the opposite hand resolutely cupping my balls. This drew some looks, sure, but once I'd made it outside, out into D.C. proper, I was just one of a million other half-dressed derelicts cupping their balls: a privileged one in fact, with two whole pantlegs to his busted-ass pants and a Van Heusen™ necktie to cover up the delicate bits.
I caught the subway home looking mighty glum, indeed. Nobody in the office knew that I was gone, or that I wasn't coming back. I had no idea what to tell them, or whether I should tell them anything at all. Maybe I should just steal away in the night. That had always worked for me in the past. Or maybe there was still time to fix things. Call in. Apologize. Say you got sick. Brush it off. Get some sleep. Put on a new pair of pants and turn up bright and early the next morning. But the button thing. Always a button, always an unzippable zipper, always a banana peel when you least expect it. That shit happens to me all the time. It doesn't happen to John Boehner or the thousands of Princeton grads lining up to puff on his metaphorical cigarette. Whatever Paul McCartney has to say on the matter, fools don't make it on The Hill. But what was to be done if I didn't make it? What in the ever-loving hell was to be done next? I'd thrown everything I had into D.C. and watched it spiral down into a black hole, like one of those plastic charity vortexes you see at the mall. Fuck me. I put my head in my hands and swallowed back a delicious flare of gastric acid. The train shudder-whooshed into a tunnel and I watched through my fingers the bright white sidelights streak by like flashes of a future that I – through idiocy? through laziness? through some sort of subconscious moral rectitude? – was now banishing to a dark and irretrievable past. All knowingly. All willingly. All because of a fucking button. I'd gained weight. I chewed the inside of my cheek and looked up. An old black fellow seated in the seat in front of me seemed to be reading my reverie.
"Rough day?" he asked.
"Life kind of sucks at the moment," I said, "to be perfectly honest."
"It's never life that sucks," he said. "We always have the power to change things. It's all in your mind. It's all up to you. Remember that, son."
I told him I would. I thanked him and shook his hand. Then it was my stop, so I got up and clutched my balls and embraced my artificial ulcer and shuffled off the train like a sack of potatoes on stilts. Witnessing an exit like that, I'm thinking maybe the guy changed his mind.
That afternoon, I tendered my resignation over the phone. And so my paid internship became an unpaid one. I'd fallen off The Hill.
It wasn't a wasted trip. I learned some things. I learned, for instance, that politicians very seldom (if ever) actually write their own material; speeches, press releases, op-eds; no, the writing is almost entirely left to staffers like me. On the other hand, I learned (and was pleasantly surprised to learn) that most representatives actually do take time to read the mail they receive from their constituents, so long as the letters are not written in shit. I learned that most members of the House cannot afford to live in Washington D.C.; when they are in town (which is not altogether all that often) not a few of them spend their nights on tiny little futons that fold out into their tiny little office closets. Quite a few politicians are hapless drunks – how they keep this under wraps media-wise is something I never did figure out. John Boehner's office is the one closest to the designated outdoor smoking zone. Can't say I blame the guy. The House chamber or the Senate chamber, or at any rate whichever chamber it is where the President of the United States makes his State of the Union Address – that chamber is an optical illusion. It belongs on the side of the Interstate, next to Carhenge and The World's Largest Ball of Aluminum Foil. I shit you not. The room puts on at least 15,000 square feet when seen on television. It is actually very, very small in real life. You couldn't host a Magic: The Gathering tournament in there. Also: there are gas masks and various paranoiac anti-terrorism prophylactics stashed in little tote bags tucked under the seats. House and Senate votes are cast via a machine that hasn't been upgraded since the late 1980's by my guesstimation. On the machine, there are three square plastic buttons – red, yellow, green – "Yea," "Nay," and "Meh" – and I imagine they flash excitedly and play the original Pac-Man theme when pressed. Voting also involves inserting a dusty gray plastic game cartridge into a warped wooden slot – not sure how that works, or whether it works at all. When you come right down to it, the overall aesthetic of our representational democracy lies somewhere between the original Atari, gas station slot machines, and a 1987 Plymouth station wagon tricked out with woodgrain everything. What else did I learn? Well. Come CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) season, the "Casual Encounters" section of the D.C. craigslist is clogged with anonymous personal ads soliciting all manner of clandestine conservative buttsex. I did not partake, but I can tell you it's legit. The bars in D.C. abide by all sorts of byzantine drinking rules – you can't stand up; you can't sit down; you can't wear two items of clothing that belong to two different colors starting with the same letter – and these rules make drinking very difficult. Just because I learned all this crap doesn't mean that I understand it. But perhaps most significantly (for me at least), I learned that I am very good at sitting down at a keyboard and cranking out mass amounts of bullshit in a very short time, bullshit that argues in favor of all manner of harebrained and horrific and hateful things – and most creepily of all, I learned that this aforementioned bullshit of mine, written without an iota of sincerity on my part, was effusively adored by certain circles of voters who (were they not a kind of dominant and well-funded minority in America) would almost certainly be institutionalized. But now I'm politicizing again. And like I told you: I've retired from all that.
Where were we? So. I left The Hill. I did not leave with my tail between my legs as you might expect, but with my tail wagging at the thought of going somewhere else. At the end of my month in D.C., I coughed up the rent and caught an Amtrak back to Omaha. Days later, I learned that I'd been accepted for a volunteer teaching gig in Georgia: The Country. I had no money, no other options, and no real desire to do much of anything else. A week later, I was in Georgia. And that is when shit got interesting. To say the least.
You Should See the Other Guy (Pt. 1)
"Get over here, you sassy bitch."
The Irishman and I slopped our arms around each other. It wasn't very convincing. You'd be surprised how difficult it is to properly hug an Irishman in the backseat of a Georgian taxi without violating certain boundaries of platonic friendship. He slipped me his portion of the fare – I'd borrowed my half from The Irishman in the first place – then he leaned on the door and fell out into the street and began his eight kilometer stagger home.
The cabbie asked me for the fourth or fifth time if I was really sure I wanted to go to Jgali. I met the caves of his eyes in the rearview mirror, suspended as they were in the reflected light of the full moon. I told him that yes, I lived in Jgali and wanted very much to go there, and for a moment I wasn't sure if the beer breath swarming around the cabin was the cabbie's or my own – but given the sort of evening I'd had, I figured I could safely assume the latter. The cabbie grunted and cranked the ignition and after a few shuddering whinnies, the car lurched on down the road. Then I scooted to the far end of the backseat to avoid the gaze of those dark and disembodied eyes.
From that angle, in the rearview mirror, I was treated to a glimpse of my own wrecked visage: the nose gashed and scraped and slightly off-kilter, a Hitlerstache of dried blood basted into my beard, a black empty space where a front tooth used to be. Looking rough. But you should see the other guy. Then again, my assailant had been an inanimate object – a dilapidated flight of stairs – and aside from their dilapidation, I was quite sure that they were looking far better than I was at the time.
The night before, Halloween eve, my expat comrades and I had judiciously elected to get tipsy and go prowling around an abandoned tea factory well after midnight. There is no such joy in the tavern as on the road thereto, my friend David "Weird Beard" Lawrence had quoted to me earlier in the evening, and I can assure you that there is no more ominous way to kick off a night of revelry than to quote Blood Meridian. Nevertheless, that initial sense of foreboding faded as the night progressed, along with many another anxiety, along with many a rational thought, and by the time we were scoping out the teaworks for stray dogs, hoboes, and Soviet-era junkenirs, the lot of us were bellowing and yammering and ribbing each other the way all young men do when abroad from mind and country.
It would be tempting to blame this one on drinking – and the drink, along with its resultant drunks, certainly deserves a lot of blame for a lot of things – but anyone who knows me well would tell you that I am among the world's most uncoordinated oafs even in the best of mental states. I have always had a knack for injuring myself, more often when I'm sober than when I'm not. This past spring, I slipped on a soccer ball and snapped my wrist in half with my ass. And were you to dig further back in the archives, you could put together an impressively long blooper reel of me clonking myself in the head with doors of all sorts (screen doors, revolving doors, refrigerator doors, garage doors), tumbling headfirst into shrubs, falling backwards out first story windows, and generally "biting it" in any number of physically improbable ways. Sober though we were not, I can tell you that all of us were perfectly ambulatory, except for me, and that fact had little or nothing to do with beer.
As I tripped and fell up the stairs that night, in the split second before impact, I knew it would be especially bad: less towards the comical end and more towards the permanently disfiguring end of the injury spectrum. Swaggering up that dark and crooked and craggy stairwell, my toe clunking against one step and my foot failing to find the next one, the world panning and flipping, then rushing up to greet me, I had time to think to myself: this is going to fucking hurt.
But it didn't. Not at all, really. Nevertheless, it was not a graceful landing. My face slammed into a wall of stone and I seemed to slide diagonally across it. There was a chorus of horrified grunts from the gentlemen standing on either side of me. I lay for a moment at a truly weird angle, sprawled chest-down across no fewer than five stairs. Then I got to my feet and said – very calmly, I'm told – "I have destroyed my teeth."
The dudes recoiled from the man saying this. I was bleeding generously from the mouth and there was one very large gap in my teeth where once there had been several small and endearing ones. But as I tongued around assessing the damage, I was pleased to discover that I'd only knocked out one half of one of my front teeth. The good news was that I still had 27 1/2 left. The next step, I thought, was simple: track down the missing chunk, then have it glued back on. By a Georgian carpenter. Like my host dad.
We scoured the steps with our matching government-issued Nokia cellphone flashlights and after only a minute or two, managed to track down the amputated fang. I held it up to the light, turned it around in my fingers, grinning proudly and gorily all the while, then slipped it in the front pocket of my suitcoat, where it would remain for the next 24 hours.
The following evening – Halloween proper – the Irishman met me in Zugdidi, the closest thing we had to a city, and he shared with me a brief but cathartic sympathy drunk. Then, before things got too unreasonable, we caught a shared taxi back to our respective villages.
So that's how I wound up where I found myself. There in the backseat, I took the tooth out of my suitcoat pocket and held it up to the moonlight. It was such a small, strange, brittle little object. It had seemed so much bigger in my mouth. I noticed with some perplexity how clean it was on the front side, and how tar-streaked and secretly gross it was on the back. Must brush more thoroughly in the future, I thought. Must start flossing. Or quit smoking. Or all three. I opened my mouth and tried to fit the tooth into the space that it used to inhabit. Not too bad, I thought. Shouldn't be too much trouble, not even for a Georgian dentist. Hell, maybe I could even fix it myself. Georgian dentists, I assumed, were to be avoided at all costs. Or even at no cost at all. Then I reflected on what I was doing, and how truly insane it must appear to a Georgian cabbie who probably hadn't even seen a foreigner before, nevermind a toothless one trying to eat his own tooth, and I checked the rearview mirror to make sure he wasn't watching me, and remembered that I'd scooted over earlier to the opposite end of the backseat for exclusively that purpose, and in the mirror I once again saw my beat up old face looking back at me, holding one chipped half of a tooth up to meet its estranged other, and I swollenly grinned and was about to slip the tooth back into my suitcoat pocket when I glanced out the windshield and saw that we were headed – undeniably, unstoppably – and at fifty miles an hour – off the road and into a ravine.
The cabbie cranked the wheel. The car flipped over. We flew. I watched with mild fascination as the tooth – like an astronaut being sucked out into deep space – shot out of my fingers, and as all the crap in my pockets went drifting around the cabin in all sorts of gravitationally interesting ways.
What those fortunate survivors of near death tend to say about these sorts of things seems to hold true, at least in my very limited experience. Time slowed to a standstill. I realized, clearly and calmly, that I was about to die. And with measured relief, I knew that there were still a couple of seconds between me and that annihilating moment, and that the brain being the beautiful and weird thing that it is, I could stretch those seconds out as long as I wanted to, within reason. If I was about to be done living, I wasn't quite done thinking.
My thoughts came with the clarity of stillframes cycling through a slide projector. How sad, I thought, that this was the way I was going to go out. A car wreck in Georgia. One of thousands. A statistic, if they even keep those statistics in Georgia. I wondered if I'd make the Georgian news. I wondered if I'd make the American news. I wondered if I'd get a blurb in the local newspaper, and how big a blurb it would be. I wondered what they'd have to say about me, wondered what sort of feelgood gloss they'd slather over the desultory path of my third and final decade on earth. I wondered how my family would react, then I opted not to think about that. I realized with some surprise that I had no major regrets, realized that regret was, as I'd often suspected, pointless by its very nature because dead people don't regret anything. All and all, I knew, I hadn't done such a bad job with this life thing. Still, there was the thought that this wasn't the way I wanted to go out – that I deserved, if not something better, at least something more unique or more distinguished or more dignified, or at any rate something more appropriate. A car wreck in Georgia. How passé.
Who would come to the funeral, I wondered. And where would all my possessions go, or to whom? Or did I even possess any possessions? Anyhow, I figured, none of that really mattered anymore. I wouldn't be around to worry about it. I'd be gone, and I knew full well where people went when they got gone: they were just gone, gone the same way they were gone before they'd existed. These were thoughts that had never distressed me and they certainly didn't distress me then. That said, I wasn't exactly at peace, either – a fucking car wreck in Georgia. Shit, I thought – I could do so much better. And the timing wasn't quite ideal. There was still so much left to do. Death, I knew, was not to be feared. But that didn't mean it shouldn't be avoided.
I wondered about the cabbie and whether these sorts of thoughts were coursing through his mind same as my own, or whether the thoughts I was having were the product of a Western education and a reading list steeped in French existentialism, or whether the cabbie had already survived any number of near-fatal car wrecks and simply assumed he'd survive this one like he'd survived all the ones in the past. Maybe he would survive the wreck and I would die, or maybe I would survive and he would die, or maybe we both would die, or neither of us. I wondered whether I'd sacrifice his life to keep my own, and decided that I happily and remorselessly would, if only because I knew what I knew about myself and the people I cared about, and knew absolutely nothing about the cabbie, and to volunteer my own death and the suffering it would visit upon the people I loved in order to spare the life of a stranger who, in all likelihood, was just another mediocre Georgian taxi driver – this, I knew, was somehow existentially false. Whatever happened to the cabbie, I wanted to live.
I wondered about the possibility not of perfect survival or of perfect death, but of mortal injury, and wondered what the cabbie would do to save me, or what I would do to save him, and in any event what could possibly be done for either one of us in that black expanse of countryside, at that hour of night, that far removed from people and cities and hospitals. A sense of profound isolation swept over me. The whole known universe, in that moment, was trapped within the confines of my skull, or at best in the cabin of a 1997 Opel Corsa station wagon that was hurtling upside-down through space, and there was no way of sharing my thoughts with anyone, no way of transmitting them telepathically, no way of speaking them, no way of writing them down for posterity. No blogging about this one. You're on your own now, Petit.
The moment, as I said, stretched on forever. But having dabbled a bit in these sorts of states, I well knew that the term "forever" was only a loose one; that however long the mind seemed to shake the shackles of time, those shackles were inevitably clamped right back on. By what? By time itself, I suppose. I thought about how strange that was, that a moment should seem to stretch on forever, even as it is busy becoming the next moment; how strange that the thoughts that I was having then could arrive in a single flash of comprehension, like a simple and indivisible word completely and instantly and nakedly understood, and yet each realization stood alone and independent, clear and stark as the stars on the stillest night of Mingrelian winter. Weird.
Then the moment, as they all do, passed. The car tumbled into the ravine. The sound, I thought, was like a shoddily wrapped Christmas present rolling down a flight of stairs. My head slammed against the ceiling. Why, I thought, that knock must've given me a concussion. But in the rapidly cycling moments that followed, I realized that it hadn't. I was lucid. I was alive. I was extremely pissed off. I began cursing. Cursing the driver. Cursing my luck. Cursing the universe. Profanities abounded. The car tumbled. I raged. Raged against the dying of the light, if you will. The windshield exploded. A confetti of glass sprayed into my eyes. My head slammed against the ceiling and the ceiling against the earth, each percussion more terrifying than the last. The cabin of the car was being rapidly crushed, its corners closing in on me. I raged. The pinprick bright stars and the gaping full moon swirled past, framed by the busted window, the constellations in time lapse. I raged. Time was moving now. Gone was the moment – all that was left was whatever happened next, the inevitable. We tumbled down the hill. The world crashing all around. Then, a terrible silence, a rush of gravity, and a heartstopping crunch. I was sitting upside down, ass over head, legs to the ceiling. I was breathing. I breathed. Nothing mattered. Nothing hurt. An instant of living, silent as its opposite. The full moon watched me through the window.
So. That could have been the end. Now I suppose I'll take you back to the beginning.
The Irishman and I slopped our arms around each other. It wasn't very convincing. You'd be surprised how difficult it is to properly hug an Irishman in the backseat of a Georgian taxi without violating certain boundaries of platonic friendship. He slipped me his portion of the fare – I'd borrowed my half from The Irishman in the first place – then he leaned on the door and fell out into the street and began his eight kilometer stagger home.
The cabbie asked me for the fourth or fifth time if I was really sure I wanted to go to Jgali. I met the caves of his eyes in the rearview mirror, suspended as they were in the reflected light of the full moon. I told him that yes, I lived in Jgali and wanted very much to go there, and for a moment I wasn't sure if the beer breath swarming around the cabin was the cabbie's or my own – but given the sort of evening I'd had, I figured I could safely assume the latter. The cabbie grunted and cranked the ignition and after a few shuddering whinnies, the car lurched on down the road. Then I scooted to the far end of the backseat to avoid the gaze of those dark and disembodied eyes.
From that angle, in the rearview mirror, I was treated to a glimpse of my own wrecked visage: the nose gashed and scraped and slightly off-kilter, a Hitlerstache of dried blood basted into my beard, a black empty space where a front tooth used to be. Looking rough. But you should see the other guy. Then again, my assailant had been an inanimate object – a dilapidated flight of stairs – and aside from their dilapidation, I was quite sure that they were looking far better than I was at the time.
The night before, Halloween eve, my expat comrades and I had judiciously elected to get tipsy and go prowling around an abandoned tea factory well after midnight. There is no such joy in the tavern as on the road thereto, my friend David "Weird Beard" Lawrence had quoted to me earlier in the evening, and I can assure you that there is no more ominous way to kick off a night of revelry than to quote Blood Meridian. Nevertheless, that initial sense of foreboding faded as the night progressed, along with many another anxiety, along with many a rational thought, and by the time we were scoping out the teaworks for stray dogs, hoboes, and Soviet-era junkenirs, the lot of us were bellowing and yammering and ribbing each other the way all young men do when abroad from mind and country.
It would be tempting to blame this one on drinking – and the drink, along with its resultant drunks, certainly deserves a lot of blame for a lot of things – but anyone who knows me well would tell you that I am among the world's most uncoordinated oafs even in the best of mental states. I have always had a knack for injuring myself, more often when I'm sober than when I'm not. This past spring, I slipped on a soccer ball and snapped my wrist in half with my ass. And were you to dig further back in the archives, you could put together an impressively long blooper reel of me clonking myself in the head with doors of all sorts (screen doors, revolving doors, refrigerator doors, garage doors), tumbling headfirst into shrubs, falling backwards out first story windows, and generally "biting it" in any number of physically improbable ways. Sober though we were not, I can tell you that all of us were perfectly ambulatory, except for me, and that fact had little or nothing to do with beer.
As I tripped and fell up the stairs that night, in the split second before impact, I knew it would be especially bad: less towards the comical end and more towards the permanently disfiguring end of the injury spectrum. Swaggering up that dark and crooked and craggy stairwell, my toe clunking against one step and my foot failing to find the next one, the world panning and flipping, then rushing up to greet me, I had time to think to myself: this is going to fucking hurt.
But it didn't. Not at all, really. Nevertheless, it was not a graceful landing. My face slammed into a wall of stone and I seemed to slide diagonally across it. There was a chorus of horrified grunts from the gentlemen standing on either side of me. I lay for a moment at a truly weird angle, sprawled chest-down across no fewer than five stairs. Then I got to my feet and said – very calmly, I'm told – "I have destroyed my teeth."
The dudes recoiled from the man saying this. I was bleeding generously from the mouth and there was one very large gap in my teeth where once there had been several small and endearing ones. But as I tongued around assessing the damage, I was pleased to discover that I'd only knocked out one half of one of my front teeth. The good news was that I still had 27 1/2 left. The next step, I thought, was simple: track down the missing chunk, then have it glued back on. By a Georgian carpenter. Like my host dad.
We scoured the steps with our matching government-issued Nokia cellphone flashlights and after only a minute or two, managed to track down the amputated fang. I held it up to the light, turned it around in my fingers, grinning proudly and gorily all the while, then slipped it in the front pocket of my suitcoat, where it would remain for the next 24 hours.
The following evening – Halloween proper – the Irishman met me in Zugdidi, the closest thing we had to a city, and he shared with me a brief but cathartic sympathy drunk. Then, before things got too unreasonable, we caught a shared taxi back to our respective villages.
So that's how I wound up where I found myself. There in the backseat, I took the tooth out of my suitcoat pocket and held it up to the moonlight. It was such a small, strange, brittle little object. It had seemed so much bigger in my mouth. I noticed with some perplexity how clean it was on the front side, and how tar-streaked and secretly gross it was on the back. Must brush more thoroughly in the future, I thought. Must start flossing. Or quit smoking. Or all three. I opened my mouth and tried to fit the tooth into the space that it used to inhabit. Not too bad, I thought. Shouldn't be too much trouble, not even for a Georgian dentist. Hell, maybe I could even fix it myself. Georgian dentists, I assumed, were to be avoided at all costs. Or even at no cost at all. Then I reflected on what I was doing, and how truly insane it must appear to a Georgian cabbie who probably hadn't even seen a foreigner before, nevermind a toothless one trying to eat his own tooth, and I checked the rearview mirror to make sure he wasn't watching me, and remembered that I'd scooted over earlier to the opposite end of the backseat for exclusively that purpose, and in the mirror I once again saw my beat up old face looking back at me, holding one chipped half of a tooth up to meet its estranged other, and I swollenly grinned and was about to slip the tooth back into my suitcoat pocket when I glanced out the windshield and saw that we were headed – undeniably, unstoppably – and at fifty miles an hour – off the road and into a ravine.
The cabbie cranked the wheel. The car flipped over. We flew. I watched with mild fascination as the tooth – like an astronaut being sucked out into deep space – shot out of my fingers, and as all the crap in my pockets went drifting around the cabin in all sorts of gravitationally interesting ways.
What those fortunate survivors of near death tend to say about these sorts of things seems to hold true, at least in my very limited experience. Time slowed to a standstill. I realized, clearly and calmly, that I was about to die. And with measured relief, I knew that there were still a couple of seconds between me and that annihilating moment, and that the brain being the beautiful and weird thing that it is, I could stretch those seconds out as long as I wanted to, within reason. If I was about to be done living, I wasn't quite done thinking.
My thoughts came with the clarity of stillframes cycling through a slide projector. How sad, I thought, that this was the way I was going to go out. A car wreck in Georgia. One of thousands. A statistic, if they even keep those statistics in Georgia. I wondered if I'd make the Georgian news. I wondered if I'd make the American news. I wondered if I'd get a blurb in the local newspaper, and how big a blurb it would be. I wondered what they'd have to say about me, wondered what sort of feelgood gloss they'd slather over the desultory path of my third and final decade on earth. I wondered how my family would react, then I opted not to think about that. I realized with some surprise that I had no major regrets, realized that regret was, as I'd often suspected, pointless by its very nature because dead people don't regret anything. All and all, I knew, I hadn't done such a bad job with this life thing. Still, there was the thought that this wasn't the way I wanted to go out – that I deserved, if not something better, at least something more unique or more distinguished or more dignified, or at any rate something more appropriate. A car wreck in Georgia. How passé.
Who would come to the funeral, I wondered. And where would all my possessions go, or to whom? Or did I even possess any possessions? Anyhow, I figured, none of that really mattered anymore. I wouldn't be around to worry about it. I'd be gone, and I knew full well where people went when they got gone: they were just gone, gone the same way they were gone before they'd existed. These were thoughts that had never distressed me and they certainly didn't distress me then. That said, I wasn't exactly at peace, either – a fucking car wreck in Georgia. Shit, I thought – I could do so much better. And the timing wasn't quite ideal. There was still so much left to do. Death, I knew, was not to be feared. But that didn't mean it shouldn't be avoided.
I wondered about the cabbie and whether these sorts of thoughts were coursing through his mind same as my own, or whether the thoughts I was having were the product of a Western education and a reading list steeped in French existentialism, or whether the cabbie had already survived any number of near-fatal car wrecks and simply assumed he'd survive this one like he'd survived all the ones in the past. Maybe he would survive the wreck and I would die, or maybe I would survive and he would die, or maybe we both would die, or neither of us. I wondered whether I'd sacrifice his life to keep my own, and decided that I happily and remorselessly would, if only because I knew what I knew about myself and the people I cared about, and knew absolutely nothing about the cabbie, and to volunteer my own death and the suffering it would visit upon the people I loved in order to spare the life of a stranger who, in all likelihood, was just another mediocre Georgian taxi driver – this, I knew, was somehow existentially false. Whatever happened to the cabbie, I wanted to live.
I wondered about the possibility not of perfect survival or of perfect death, but of mortal injury, and wondered what the cabbie would do to save me, or what I would do to save him, and in any event what could possibly be done for either one of us in that black expanse of countryside, at that hour of night, that far removed from people and cities and hospitals. A sense of profound isolation swept over me. The whole known universe, in that moment, was trapped within the confines of my skull, or at best in the cabin of a 1997 Opel Corsa station wagon that was hurtling upside-down through space, and there was no way of sharing my thoughts with anyone, no way of transmitting them telepathically, no way of speaking them, no way of writing them down for posterity. No blogging about this one. You're on your own now, Petit.
The moment, as I said, stretched on forever. But having dabbled a bit in these sorts of states, I well knew that the term "forever" was only a loose one; that however long the mind seemed to shake the shackles of time, those shackles were inevitably clamped right back on. By what? By time itself, I suppose. I thought about how strange that was, that a moment should seem to stretch on forever, even as it is busy becoming the next moment; how strange that the thoughts that I was having then could arrive in a single flash of comprehension, like a simple and indivisible word completely and instantly and nakedly understood, and yet each realization stood alone and independent, clear and stark as the stars on the stillest night of Mingrelian winter. Weird.
Then the moment, as they all do, passed. The car tumbled into the ravine. The sound, I thought, was like a shoddily wrapped Christmas present rolling down a flight of stairs. My head slammed against the ceiling. Why, I thought, that knock must've given me a concussion. But in the rapidly cycling moments that followed, I realized that it hadn't. I was lucid. I was alive. I was extremely pissed off. I began cursing. Cursing the driver. Cursing my luck. Cursing the universe. Profanities abounded. The car tumbled. I raged. Raged against the dying of the light, if you will. The windshield exploded. A confetti of glass sprayed into my eyes. My head slammed against the ceiling and the ceiling against the earth, each percussion more terrifying than the last. The cabin of the car was being rapidly crushed, its corners closing in on me. I raged. The pinprick bright stars and the gaping full moon swirled past, framed by the busted window, the constellations in time lapse. I raged. Time was moving now. Gone was the moment – all that was left was whatever happened next, the inevitable. We tumbled down the hill. The world crashing all around. Then, a terrible silence, a rush of gravity, and a heartstopping crunch. I was sitting upside down, ass over head, legs to the ceiling. I was breathing. I breathed. Nothing mattered. Nothing hurt. An instant of living, silent as its opposite. The full moon watched me through the window.
So. That could have been the end. Now I suppose I'll take you back to the beginning.
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