No. 01
Soul Dust
Alex Arias
I want to tell you a story.
It's not a story about anything. There's no moral to the story. There's no hero.
No protagonist, no antagonist. And there's no great resolution at the end. Come to
think of it, I don't think you'd be interested. So, nevermind.
Why are you still reading? There's no story here, nothing to tell. Just a guy that
lives upstairs and does the same thing that you do: eats, sleeps, shits, goes to work,
and repeats the cycle until it's impossible to repeat by yourself and you're forced to
subcontract some of those activities to family, or friends, or the feds. It just depends
how much surplus compassion is lying around out when you get there; whether it's someone
else's or the lonely compassion of your own foresight. Either way, you go from passion
to pension. It's the same thing in the end. And there's really no story.
I came here to work for room and board. I used to have a plugged-in life. I took part
in all the churnings and yearnings, the go get-em's, the victories major and minor that
are part of city life or, come to think of it, suburban life. Like I said, it's really
all the same.
But I felt I could see farther down the road than others. Maybe not, maybe they see
just as far down as I do and just feel differently about it. But when my life's sloppily
strewn path crested to a small rising for a moment, I had a little glimpse and I looked
farther down. I saw there was no moral at the end. No destiny; truth be told, no
destination at all.
I've watched life depart. The last thing my old friend, from childhood, said to me when
I went to visit him in Arizona — in that hospital room to which he was assigned, not for
care but for storage — was that he felt like a fool for having tried, through his regular
letters, to persuade me he was fine — living an open life all this time out west,
underneath a promise of blue sky. I remembered, particularly, one color-drained print
he'd sent me: in it, he's standing next to a motorcycle, surrounded by desert.
So, a blue sky and a brown desert: one of them isn't being ironic. I remember thinking,
upon first seeing it, that the motorcycle jacket seemed too bulky for him, that it must
be intended to hide something. It was hiding his ever-thinning frame. But some parts of
yourself you can't hide: the yellowing of edges — wrists, neck — where time's patient,
steady deconstructions are revealed.
I flew out to visit him those many years ago. I've since realized why I went. I went to
show off — to compete, to continue our perpetual game of one-upsmanship in a different
setting. Look how great I look! My leather jacket isn't hanging off of me, and I've got
expensive-looking jewelry accenting my healthy, just-manicured hands. I wouldn't have
imagined myself as capable of such ugliness — I didn't think of it as ugliness at the
time — but I did: I went to the hospital dressed in my best clothes; I made sure to look
great. I wanted him to see how good I looked. But notwithstanding his misleading
photograph, I couldn't have expected that he was well. He was, after all, in a hospital.
Yet I thought about me more than I thought about him.
Cushioned in my expensive clothes, I perched on the hard, solitary chair next to his bed
and I watched him. He turned one life-drained eye — a gelatinous orb, the surrounding skin
having long since started its march of desertion from his sockets, making the blue in his
eyes seem larger and more penetrating but seeing less — hauntingly toward me in slow
motion. The kind of thing you would witness in horror movies, done for dramatic effect but
here, while the effect was dramatic, the intention wasn't. He was simply weak and it took
all his energy and a great deal of the little time he had left to turn his head to me. And
he said he felt like a fool. In other words, he was thinking of his appearance. He was
thinking of how I might regard him. He didn't look the way he had led me to believe — and
there, at the end of his road, we were still competing.
There is no moral. And therefore there is no story. What's the point of a story with no
moral, with no ending? When Rory died, it didn't provide a resolution or even an ending.
His life didn't end. It just stopped.
So I'm sitting here. My bedroom is all browns except for the little bit of blue in Rory's
eyes that you'd be able to make out if you lifted the picture from that funny little table
and took it out of its frame, and looked very closely. I live upstairs from the Main Street
Store — it's actually called that — in this small town. As you'd expect, they sell a little
of this and a little of that. It's a very small town, the kind that posts its population on
a sign. The small store and the small owners are the type that would populate an old Stephen
King novel. Flat characters. Undrawn, to me. Lives, no doubt, as rich and intricate and
complex as any city slicker's but to me, mercifully, they seem flat. That's why I chose this
town, these people, and this life.
When I looked down the road and saw there was no moral, I couldn't continue pretending
we're all part of a narrative that arrives somewhere — at some sort of resolution. We're
not. We don't. There isn't one.
And, if there is one that I just can't be sure of or in which I should have faith but that
I nonetheless can't be convinced exists despite the long-suffering and well-intentioned
ramblings and convoluted reasonings of the pious, well then, I'd just as soon live as if
it's not there. I've dined long enough on delusions and wishful thinking, anticipating
dessert. Spiritual cul de sacs are beautiful, but they still don't lead anywhere.
I like it here. In this rectangular state, with these rectangular people. It's dustier than
I would've thought. The desert gets on everything even if you keep the windows firmly closed.
Somehow it gets inside anyway. Actually, most of these little windows were painted shut.
Probably seemed like a good idea at the time: let's paint and refurbish! Revitalize the room
and make it fresh again. But it still didn't keep the dust out.
I like the dust, though, because I can see it and deal with it; I can remove the kind of
dust that accumulates on furniture a hell of a lot easier than I can remove the kind that
settles on the inside: that soul dust that settles over you no matter how many coats of
paint you apply.
I've seen these families watch, confused, as their children run away to big cities to chase
their tales of hopes and dreams. But I'm here for the opposite reason. I'm here because, in
this town as far as I can see, there is no hope: a blessing, better than false hope. No airy
promise of one in the (you can't see it from here) future. No resolution.
The sun is shutting down the store. The eternal sky stretches and exhales, promising nothing.
In imperceptible stages, it persuades the shafts of fading light that stripe my wooden floors
to stretch themselves out, beyond their will, and change shape, and leave. Time for another
ending.
It's black now. No streetlights here. Good night.
A. A.
