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Two Stories of Turning in the Tabloid City |
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As soon as turning became what everyone wanted to do, it became clear that there were not enough places for everyone to turn. --The sun, a man in a sombrero said, and set up a kiosk in the mall. His wife was large, like the sun, but darker, and he thought she would fit nicely under a beach umbrella a short way from the flaking action of the tide, which would leave him free to chart his destiny with something juicy and easily entranced with his newly landscaped mouth. No one came. It was not to be. People turned elsewhere, crowding the Artaud Multiplexes and Jean-Paul Coffee Salons or setting up tents in the laps of trees, returning to the arboreal life so many had dreamed of after the crash in the chinchilla market. Our entrepreneur had watermelon shish kebab for supper and slept dyspeptically beside his wife who bleated into the damp air her forgiveness and a love so forlorn its destiny atop the country charts seemed like a sure thing. This is a story of hope. Across the tabloid city Rachel and her boy Felix stand at a corner. It is not clear if they will cross or will continue to simply stand there, enjoying the sounds of the traffic and the animated hijinks of pedestrians who enact the age-old drama of not wanting to die until sometime later in their personal history. But something moves them. It is again this desire to turn. And as Rachel senses from other epiphanic moments, turning is not what she does best but what she does because she has to, because not turning is impossible in the present scheme of things, a scheme so routine and yet so bizarre that new instruments are invented daily to record its maneuvers against the hopes of humankind. So she turns. She turns away momentarily from Felix, who in his turn, turns momentarily from Rachel, and this becomes their story from here on out. --Felix, here is my hand, Rachel says. Take it and let's play a game together. |
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