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1.
A beautiful woman loses her mind. So she goes on vacation with her lover
to Tokyo. Two days later, she jumps from the rooftop bar at their hotel.
Her lover watches her fall through the air. He sees her perforate the
roof of a minivan double-parked in the street, hears the unmistakable
sound of her crushing human impact. Witnesses on the street crowd around
the woman like insects. A few of them look up and point toward the roof.
The man stares back at them. He instantly loses faith in an ordered system
governing the workings of the universe.
2.
The man goes back to America alone. He stands for six hours at the airport
beside a whirring baggage claim. In that time, the passengers from eleven
other flights show up and leave. The man watches them grab at their suitcases
and golf clubs. His luggage never comes down the chute.
When he finally asks for help, an employee of the airline tells him it's
lost.
"Lost my luggage," he says, "How can an airplane just lose
luggage?"
"Well, we process a mountainous number of bags every day, Sir."
"That suitcase," the man says, starting to cry, "My lover
leapt from a tall building in Tokyo and I saw it and my suitcase was full
of her things. It was full of her clothes and her books and a tube of
her toothpaste."
The airline employee looks at her computer.
"I'm terribly sorry, Sir, for your loss," she tells him, "Let
me see if there's anything we can do."
She keeps her head down and abstractly types something into the keyboard.
3.
The man loses his high paying job as an actuary. After watching his lover
fall through a minivan roof, he can't stomach the work of risks and returns,
the crunching of numbers on the odds of an accident. This is difficult
to explain to his boss, Harry Bendis, a man who principally communicates
through racist jokes and surfacey insights about large breasted women.
Their final meeting is punctuated by countless pauses and coughs. Harry
Bendis says something about COBRA insurance and accrued vacation time
and the man nods his head. When the man gets up to leave, Harry Bendis
claps him on the shoulder.
"Well, the office just won't be the same after losing a helluva good
man like you," he says.
4.
For weeks, the man stays in his apartment alone, taking long showers with
his head down and his eyes closed. Finally, one Wednesday, he opens them.
He sees something purling in the soapy water, collecting on top of the
drain. It's his hair.
5.
Sometimes at night the man dreams he's in Tokyo. He's on the street looking
up at his lover falling down. A cluster of Japanese school kids is standing
beside him. The whole city is silent. Like he's trapped in a film still.
The only thing moving is his lover in the air and even she has a stillness
about her. Her fall is a kind of non-motion in motion. Like the flight
path of a knuckleball. He watches her body's slow descent reflected in
the tinted hotel windows. He counts to the number fourteen. Everything's
silent.
The minivan shatters completely when she hits it. Action in the street
unfurls like a massive sheet of metal. Instantly everything is screaming
taxi cab horns and weaving mopeds. Pedestrians in waves pour down the
sidewalk and crowd between parking meters and spindly trees. He hears
one woman laughing. The kids from the school huddle close to each other.
And then his lover starts to peel herself from the wreckage. She rolls
heavily off the minivan roof and staggers, grinning, toward him. In her
left hand he sees that she's holding her eyes. Her face is nothing but
sockets and automobile paint. Everything goes quiet again.
The man looks around at the Japanese people. They all stare back at him.
He realizes he's the tallest person there. A few of the people wave their
arms and say things the man doesn't understand. From blocks away a strange
un-American siren blares. The school kids whimper. Through a sheer act
of will the man tries to make himself shorter. First things first, he
thinks. But it won't work. And so his lover continues toward him, pointing,
a toothless, clomping, eyeless, bone-shattered, B-movie monster.
6.
The man's older brother comes to visit. At night, they sit and drink beer
in the man's dirty kitchen.
"Man oh man," the brother says, "I feel what you're going
through. When me and Julie's house almost burned down we almost lost everything."
Whatever respect the man had for his brother immediately disappears. He
gets up from the table and turns on the radio. The two of them listen
to a baseball game without saying a word. Their favorite team loses by
fourteen runs. Both of them get drunk. They do the same thing every night
for a week, and then the brother goes home.
7.
Weeks pass. The man loses touch with the rest of his family. They leave
messages on his voicemail he doesn't return. They write letters to him
that he just throws away.
8.
Eventually, the man loses interest in everything but anthropology and
nets. Anthropology he likes for its rough edges and disorder, its appreciation
of entropy, the way it has of making room for even the most opaque exceptions
in human behavior.
To get away from his dreams, he stays up at night reading Levi-Strauss,
Boas, Mead, and Geertz. He buys expensive maps of places like Sarawak
and runs his fingertips Braille-like across their terrain. He devours
sensationalized accounts of renegade ethnographers who disappeared into
a jungle one day and devolved into cannibals or murderous warriors. The
man sits in his bed and tries to imagine the way the jungle changed them,
literally altered the lines of their faces, how they became men wholly
lost to the world they started from.
9.
The nights he does sleep, his dreams get even worse. In one of them, he's
sitting next to his lover's beat-up corpse on the bed in their hotel room,
trying to narrate the action of what he thinks is a Japanese sitcom. During
a commercial, she asks what he did with her toothpaste. When he tells
her about the luggage and his flight back home, she gets up from the bed
and hurls herself out the window.
10.
He likes nets because they're his new line of work. After a few weeks
locked inside his apartment, he loses his coat and tie and corporate persona
and gets a job as a machinist at a net factory in the suburbs. Nine hours
a day, he mans a thrumming piece of equipment and watches as giant tines
weave the nylon inside. He wears a clay-colored jumpsuit with his name
on the front. For a while his co-workers all call him Newbie. When they
stop by his workstation during a shift, they yell misogynistic things
to him above the din of the engines. So he doesn't lose face, the man
nods and laughs. Then he makes something up about the severity of his
hangover.
"Let's just say tequila ain't my amigo anymore," he yells, "Made
me lose my fucking legs last night."
"No shit?" his co-worker yells back.
"No shit."
Then the man goes back to watching the machine.
The man knows most of his co-workers think of the nets they're producing
as traps. After all, he thinks, they're blue-collar laborers, rough men.
The direct descendents of Indo-Europe's first hunters. Most days the man
wants to be like that too. He envies his co-workers' wide cranial brows
and workman's stench, the way they can say "fuck 'em and chuck 'em"
without irony, their inborn sense that violence and loss are just the
world's default setting. But he can't will himself to do it. As much as
he tries, when he fixes his eyes beyond the "Keep Hands Clear"
sign, he can't make himself think of bloodlust and death, of tuna ripped
from the ocean or of a monkey dangling trapped from a tree in Zaire.
Instead, his mind pictures acrobats endlessly rehearsing. He sees a mistimed
release from an arcing trapeze, the unsure grip of a novice's outstretched
hands. Again and again he imagines one of them falling through the air.
A young girl with long hair. The moment at first is breathless and fierce.
Everything seems lost. But then, in one instant, the plummeting girl is
safe and alive, poised spread eagle above the merciless ground, redeemed
by the giant net spread out beneath her.
11.
He still dreams. His lover is an unending loop of suicides, comedically
resilient, like a cartoon. She offs herself and bounces right back, strolling
in the door and plopping down on the bed as if nothing had happened. She
invents infinite reasons for taking her life and infinite ways to accomplish
it in a Japanese hotel room. She turns the iron cord into a noose, uses
the laundry service bag to asphyxiate herself, gets down on all fours
and licks the electrical outlets. In the worst one, the man watches helpless
as she chugs gallons and gallons of cheap hotel coffee until her heart
explodes.
12.
One day, out of the blue, the man gets a form letter from the president
of the airline that lost his luggage. The letter says that within four
to six weeks, the airline will credit ten thousand miles to the man's
frequent flier account. "Customer satisfaction has always been a
top priority for our award-winning service staff," the closing of
the letter says, "and I hope these miles will go a long way in allaying
any inconveniences related to the loss of your luggage."
13.
A year goes by. He loses his hair completely. His eyesight gets worse
too. He still can't get rid of his dreams. He loses more and more sleep
staying up late into the night reading. He plows through ethnographies
of the Yanomamo and the Tallensi, wildly aberrant cases of neuropsychology,
essays on the taboos specific to New Guinea. One night, utterly exhausted,
he thumbs through a random book he has about Neanderthals.
14.
The book was written in 1912 by a scientist named Otis W. Joiner. The
man bought it at an estate sale for twenty-five cents. It's full of roundabout
language and grossly inaccurate woodcuts.
"The question of language," the book reads as the man nods in
and out of sleep, "as it pertains to our rudimentary but nonetheless
captivating ancestors has piqued the inquisitive paleoanthropologist's
interest since that fateful discovery of the first precious skull bone
in Engis. Did these beast-men-in their ephemeral moments free from savage
rage or territorial dominance-in actuality speak one to another? If so,
then of what did they speak? The fickle patterns of the weather? The myriad
tastes of roots and tubers? At night perhaps did they cast an eye on the
charging stars and comets and converse on life, death, and the hereafter
possible in the spaceless aether? Alas, my own appraisal of the skeletal
vestiges presently available must yield a qualified 'no.' Fossilized remains
patently demonstrate, simply in terms anatomical, their vocal cords were
far too rudimentary for speech, their minds far too roughshod for the
intricacies of vocabulary and any human grammar. And yet, as I consider
their advanced tools and their startling record of cultural survival,
I'm forced to concede the presence of some communicative apparatus. But
how? How did they tell one another of imminent threats and approaching
pestilence? How did the unshapely troglodyte articulate suffering in moments
of loss and squalor? What form did their empathy assume? The answer to
these questions is actually quite simple. They had no human speech, so
they sang."
The man closes his eyes and falls asleep.
15.
That night he dreams about making love to his lover's shattered body in
a prehistoric cave. He grabs at her thighs and breasts in the dark but
there's no substance to them. Her entire body is nothing but pith. But
he keeps telling himself if he thrusts hard enough she'll eventually throw
her arms around him. She never does. Instead, her body just lays there,
ductile and unfazed. Now and again, she speaks to him.
She says, "Do you think the shampoo here is poisonous?"
She says, "Capital vultures…"
She says, "You've really lost it this time, you know that, Chief?"
But he doesn't stop. He feels her pelvis disintegrating under his weight,
the ground beneath her frigid and hard. He cries. He pushes into her so
recklessly her right leg comes off. She starts laughing. He picks up the
leg and turns it over in his hands, gingerly examining the decaying flesh
by the unsteady light of their fire. He barely makes out the space where
the curve of her calf muscle used to be. He looks down at her and remembers
other inexpressible things.
"How could you fall in love with such a disaster," she sighs.
16.
When the man wakes up, he tries to find the paragraph about the singing
Neanderthals. He flips through Joiner's book, but can't find the passage.
He looks again and finds nothing. He flips frantically through all of
the books on his bed and his nightstand without any luck. He loses his
keys in the ruckus of books and shows up late for work.
17.
On his morning break, he tells his co-workers
everything. He tells them about his jumping lover, the lights of Tokyo,
about toothpaste, the huddling school kids, the lost luggage, and the
letter from the airline. He tells them about his terrible dreams and how
his love for the nets at his job was really a deep matter of salvation
for him; a small way to think maybe, one day, his work might save the
life of a plummeting acrobat. He tells them about time, how in the beginning
he thought time would erode all of this down and eventually let him lose
the memory of his lover's face and the dreams where she kills herself
over and over again. How it hadn't happened. How he knew it would never
happen and he would keep dreaming about it and if his lover ran out of
ways to kill herself in a Japanese hotel room, she'd move to a public
library or a restaurant or a church. It wouldn't matter. Last night her
leg came off when he was fucking her in a prehistoric cave for Christ's
sake. Then he tells them the story of the Neanderthals who sang in the
face of losing language and how even though he couldn't find the part
of the book where he read it, on his way in to work he promised himself
he would head home after his shift and not sleep again until he had, but
the gist of it was that the Neanderthals sang, they made music with each
other even in the face of losing a beautiful thing like language. He tells
his co-workers that's the whole point, the nugget he's been looking for.
The singing you have to do in the brutal face of losing something.
All the co-workers put down their donuts and look at him.
18.
After a few seconds, the co-worker named Gene says, "I don't ever
like to be the guy who splits hairs or says what's what, and God knows
I ain't got a lick of book smarts, but it don't seem to me like you or
this guy Joiner can just go around saying the Neanderthals lost the ability
to speak. I mean, how could the Neanderthals lose something if they never
really had it in the first place, right?"
The co-worker named Barry says, "The kind of nets we make here are
for pallet transport or for silt filtration in petroleum refining."
The co-worker named Bud says, "I didn't know you went to Tokyo."
The man looks back at his co-workers.
Michael
Jauchen lives in Lafayette, Louisiana. Some of his work has appeared or
is forthcoming in Night Train, Santa Monica Review, Sentence, and H_NGM_N.
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