seems like a terrible time for the paper walls to fall down.

on the surface of the water [i & ii & iii]

The last post shall become the first part of a story I’m working on in my exploration of the aesthetic. I’m going to post it again and then continue on from there.

I

Perhaps the weaver of her fates could not think of a clever name for her, for she was onomastically ungifted. A sort of fuzziness plagued her vision when she thought of her name, so instead she thought of her grandfather’s. Mobius. A fine name, a fine German. Her mother’s dad’s dad had an affinity for Mobius, as in August Ferdinand Möbius (1790-1868), the German mathematician most associated with the idea of a one-sided surface (as though surfaces did not have two sides, like stories). Regardless, her grandfather was similarly one-sided: he was enigmatic at all times.

When he died she was not really sure what else to do. It struck her that a temporal appreciation of familial comforts was certainly ineffectual - she needed something more. It then occurred to her that the generations must continue, string like, twisting through time on the heels of tradition and family and Culture. So she went to his house.

The home was to be cleared out that afternoon but she did not really think much of this plan. To her, Mobius would always be this place. She would come here and hear her grandfather’s voice when she was young, though she never really understood what he said - his thick Bavarian tones oppressing her American, childish ears with their heaviness. She was always tired, but he would give her push-pops.

The first place she went was his closet, where she came upon a brown corduroy coat with the elbow patches still intact (brown suede). It was clunky, but with great effort she lost herself in it. Her hands parely passed the sewn on ovals, but she was Mobius and that was all she knew. Slid her feet into worn slippers, walked to the bedroom. Through the light blue sheets she stumbled, white pillows seemingly ominous - turned grey through the years. She felt wetness on her hair, and went damp to the study.

Mobius’s closet of a study was not the Holmesian vision of wall to wall bookcases with leatherbound volumes. There was leather, but only on the handle of a stained iron letter opener and on the covers of thin notebooks. She opened one. The year was 68. She read Mobius’s script as though it was hers, the jacket still obtuse on her frame. She wanted to get inside of the text and be read by him - she despaired her ignorance of his interpretation; why did he underline here - what causal justification for this bracketing? this star? Mobius was awake now, and she decided the new energy should not be wasted.

She felt less fuzzy when she put the pad back, as though the roundness of his cursive reppelled her cursed focus back into sharp. Perhaps tonight she would use his toothbrush.

——-

II

There were at least five influential people named Mobius, Germans with the last name. Well, four of them were German, one of those being half Swiss - the fifth being French, Moebius only his pseudonym. In fact, two of them had an e.  The Mobius in this story, of course, knew nothing of this. After all, it was 1968, there was no time for history. History was being made.

In just two months, Cash played Folsom, Packers played Super [Good], Kitt called war bad, VC played bad surprises, and bowling was not played by blacks in South Carolina. The Olympics went French, and Mexican also.

In the next few months, a Kennedy would enter a fatal race while an unnerving leak sprang from Utah army grounds. Columbia was shutdown as Hair was sprayed on stage just blocks away. Man U played well while Nixon and Agnew found a conservative audience that liked them. The Pope hated on birth control while a volcano hated on Costa Rica. Some men in camouflage had to go back to Vietnam for a second tour, they had no choice. The moon was seen but the last sixty five seconds of the Jets-Raiders was not. The Beatles made music.

To Mobius, all of these events were commonplace. She cared little for sports and thought politics was a sport. As for the war, this story won’t concern itself with war. War is too messy, not clean enough for white sheets. Mobius did not like red ink anyway.

She remembered one day when her grandfather - she remembered much more of their moments than those of her parents, who she was almost sure never really existed - was reading to her. The ritual ended most of the days she stayed over at his house, which smelled the same way it does now, in his closet. His fingers would slowly curl the pages so that when his eyes and lips had reached the last line the sheet was already falling left, revealing another mass of plot-lines and characterizations. This book was of certain significance to him, because he too had once killed an Arab for no particular reason. L’Etranger struck her as powerful also, not so much for its story but for the impact it had on Mobius.

When the story’s arc neared its end and the chaplain came in to give the protagonist his final reading, when this man of religion appeals to the man of nothing to give into some semblance of something, Mobius put the book down. She was lying down behind him, who was sitting with his feet on the ground and the seat of his pants on the edge of the bed. Silence seized the room, but she could not hear him breathing. She was staring forcefully at the back of his head, his shoulders, trying to discern any irregular movements that might have signaled an emotive transition. Was his face wet with compassion for the problematic main character? Were his eyes open or closed, was he thinking or had his eyes just grown tired and fuzzy? She never knew, but she always fell asleep before she had a chance to find out. In the mornings, he was gone, and she could not remember her dreams.

III

Before she was Mobius, she was a series of short runs at jobs that went nowhere but places she knew she had little interest and even less capability in. She was once a maverick, once a personal assistant. She even worked retail before she grew queasy at the sight of the women dragging themselves into stores where they spent their days squeezing into pants one wishful size too small. Her manager, a quaint man who was more openly gay than more openly business (or even fashion) savvy, noted her disillusioned air and sent her on a 15. “Get some coffee, smoke, go outside.” “Why Jesse?” “Because you’re too bleary eyes to move any cashmere and the Company is not paying you for it. What is it with you straight white women anyway?” She meant to comment on his quip, telling him to hell with your fifteens and androgynous first names and cashmere. She hardly felt straight or white or a woman, though she knew no one except Lady Bird who seemed to anymore. She and her highways, always beautiful. What was straight, other than not gay? Was she being so straight by not telling all of the employees below her how “delicious the person of the same sex as I is in the third fitting room?” It was her last day.

So she gave it up, the life of days and paychecks and hours. Time to her was what made the normal people normal, it was the intersection of “ought to” and “will do,” where the execution of the expected took place.

Mobius woke up forty years later, forty years after the day that LL Cool J was born, and felt refreshed by the opportunity to once again fulfill a routine she had carved out over the long years that plague a single woman’s existence. She first went to the bathroom, where she read seated for twenty minutes and standing for two when she brushed her teeth. She did not read while she rinsed, because once she did and that was the end of Kessey. One Flew Over The Mouthwash. Luckily she did not have to shave her face, although she did feel a certain roughness to her skin since Mobius the elder died. Regardless she was done now, there is no time for dillydallying if Narrative is to keep up with her on this the most important of her days. She was out the door.

In the car now, she drove to Irvine from Laguna Niguel. It was ironic that this story is not in a city, that for all her grittiness she was nothing more than one of less than one hundred thousand in her town, that her building was no more than two stories high but perhaps fifty times greater than the size of the apartments in which so many of literature’s sunken, gouty characters brooded. There was less then, it seemed, to her than her appearances.

Her car was too nice, her house too much a home. She was spending her time in closets in old man clothes, but she had it all.

Once she was in Irvine she walked around the stretches of office buildings with their slightest attempts at variation in architecture. She would take a lunch in a bag, and find a new table outside of a new building each day and take out her cell phone and pretend to eat while pretending to make business calls. She was a master at this deception. “Alright then let’s reconvene this group to gauge the progress of the project as we move forward. Right. No, I don’t mind if you’d like to take the initiative and go ahead and lead that task force. Productivity is really killing us. Right, right. You know how it goes with those union folks. I’m going to need those reports by the end of the day. See you then.”

As the actual ants crawled out at the lunch hour of 11:30 to 3:30, Mobius would watch them carefully. She loved the games. The ones who parked far, where they could be sure to avoid door dings, the ones who had three briefcases (shoulder, hand, rolly). Her favorite of all was the quadruple cell-phone artists, generally men with a police belt of communication devices ensuring that they never have to talk to their wives or children.

Then it happened, the moment seemed to unravel with a sort of perfect irony. The phone she was pretending to speak into rang loudly, alerting the worker bees at the table next to her and snapping her out of her practiced trance. She did not recognize the number rattling her phone but she picked up it up and held herself tightly.

–”Hello?”
–”Hello.”
–”How do you know my…”
–”You need to stop pretending to eat your lunch and talking about business.”
–”Why?”
–”Your grandfather needs you. And you’re bad at it.”

She never knew who that man was, though she may have asked his name and he may have told her. All she knew was that she instantly gone. And then she was at the side of her grandfather’s bed, and he was dead.

creative writing

Perhaps the weaver of her fates could not think of a clever name for her, for she was onomastically ungifted. A sort of fuzziness plagued her vision when she thought of her name, so instead she thought of her grandfather’s. Mobius. A fine name, a fine German. Her mother’s dad’s dad had an affinity for Mobius, as in August Ferdinand Möbius (1790-1868), the German mathematician most associated with the idea of a one-sided surface (as though surfaces did not have two sides, like stories). Regardless, her grandfather was similarly one-sided: he was enigmatic at all times.

When he died she was not really sure what else to do. It struck her that a temporal appreciation of familial comforts was certainly ineffectual - she needed something more. It then occurred to her that the generations must continue, string like, twisting through time on the heels of tradition and family and Culture. So she went to his house.

The home was to be cleared out that afternoon but she did not really think much of this plan. To her, Mobius would always be this place. She would come here and hear her grandfather’s voice when she was young, though she never really understood what he said - his thick Bavarian tones oppressing her American, childish ears with their heaviness. She was always tired, but he would give her push-pops.

The first place she went was his closet, where she came upon a brown corduroy coat with the elbow patches still intact (brown suede). It was clunky, but with great effort she lost herself in it. Her hands parely passed the sewn on ovals, but she was Mobius and that was all she knew. Slid her feet into worn slippers, walked to the bedroom. Through the light blue sheets she stumbled, white pillows seemingly ominous - turned grey through the years. She felt wetness on her hair, and went damp to the study.

Mobius’s closet of a study was not the Holmesian vision of wall to wall bookcases with leatherbound volumes. There was leather, but only on the handle of a stained iron letter opener and on the covers of thin notebooks. She opened one. The year was 68. She read Mobius’s script as though it was hers, the jacket still obtuse on her frame. She wanted to get inside of the text and be read by him - she despaired her ignorance of his interpretation; why did he underline here - what causal justification for this bracketing? this star? Mobius was awake now, and she decided the new energy should not be wasted.

She felt less fuzzy when she put the pad back, as though the roundness of his cursive reppelled her cursed focus back into sharp. Perhaps tonight she would use his toothbrush.