Public Case #1
by Marc Lowe
You get up from the cushion at which you are seated one day and pack up enough belongings for an outing of indeterminate length. The season is autumn, and leaves of various colors lie scattered at your feet as you make your way to the train station; the time is midday, the sky clear and bright. A cool breeze wafts over your face, caresses it, calls attention to the fact that it is still there, is still yours. You board a train headed West, your destination the center of a city far from this sleepy little town where you grew up all of your life, a big city with brighter lights, larger signposts, more worldly inhabitants. The three-hour and twenty-three minute train ride passes quickly, immersed as you are in a book with a title you can never remember by Italo Calvino. When you step out of the train exactly three hours and twenty-three minutes later and ascend the stairs leading outside you behold a beautiful sunset, a sky stained orange and purple, made all the more beautiful by the smog the paper factory has cast across the sky’s canvas in a cloudlike pattern that is almost more real than the clouds themselves…
As you make your way down the boulevard various sights and smells stimulate your optic and olfactory senses: a small, wrinkled lady walking her dog, the smell of beef emanating from the exhaust system of a small restaurant, a vagrant vomiting into a bag, exhaust from a bus, two men dealing drugs on a dark street corner, cologne mixed with body odor, a wandering schizophrenic talking to himself, roasted nuts from a street vendor. The sky is darkening and you feel chilled as you pass by a police box with photos of various criminals posted on it and a large red light that glares at you like a boil inside of an eye. You see, through the clear glass entranceway of the police box, a male police officer and a scant-clad woman who looks to be a prostitute–he guffaws and slaps his thigh as she shakes her head and pointer finger, places a hand over her exposed cleavage. In that instant you feel lonely, insecure: you want to be held by someone tonight. Changing direction, you head down an alleyway that looks as if it will have what you are searching for.
The bright, flashy lights of a dance club draw your attention to it and, although you had not planned on stopping at any bars tonight, the temptation is just too great to resist. It is cold outside, the sky a never-ending enigma that promises nothing but more questions, more confusion, so you decide to take shelter in this hot wooden box from whence the sounds of a nameless song by the rock band Nirvana blares as young people dance like their ancestors must have danced long ago. Before you know it you find yourself arm-in-arm with a rail-thin woman at the bar, l’etranger, short black hair, a silver ring through her bottom lip, a tattoo of a symbol on her bare forearm that you recognize from somewhere but no longer understand the significance of. She warns you that she “has a past,” to which you reply that you don’t care, that everyone has a past, that people need to forgive each other for past transgressions, to move on with their lives, to live and love and… The stranger quiets you with her buttery lips, but you can taste the tongues of hundreds of other men on her breath and, despite yourself, you pull your mouth away from hers, brush her hands from your arms as if they were dandruff on your collar, apologize as you back away. You realize for the first time that the two of you had in fact been making out behind a church, and that a tall, bald-headed man had been standing in the shadows watching you the whole time.
The Next (Previous) Day
You wake up the next morning in a room the size of a walk-in closet with no recollection of how you got here. A chill passes over your flesh, and when you reach for a nonexistent blanket you discover that you are quite naked, your quivering flesh covered in tiny little goose bumps. You stand up from your place on the bare floor, stretch your limbs and yawn a lion’s yawn before noticing the crack that runs from the floor to the top of the ceiling in the far corner of the room. Curious, you approach the womblike fissure and insert the four fingers of your right hand. It is cool and humid inside and, without exerting any effort whatsoever, your body is drawn closer and closer towards the opening as if by some magnetic force; your hand and arm dissolves into the dark, seemingly safe space by degrees and, before you’ve realized it, you are no longer in the small room but, instead, crouching inside of a dirty toilet stall, fully clothed. A long crack runs the length of the wall behind the toilet and, putting two and two together, you soon determine for yourself that this is where you must have entered. There is a message on the metal wall of the stall, scrawled in crimson-red ink, that draws your attention to it. The message reads:
What was your original face, the one before your parents were born?
You recognize this to be the koan you were assigned by the priest at the old temple in Kyoto so many lifetimes ago (or at least it feels like many lifetimes ago), your first Zen-riddle, the one that has been gnawing at the back of your mind ever since you first attempted to wrap your brain around it; the one that, no matter how vociferously you have tried to expel it, keeps coming back to haunt you. Below the koan is another message in small, terse print that reads:
Your destiny is in your own hands. Meet me at the bar at 12:23. I’ll be waiting for you there.
You look at the dial of your wristwatch. It reads 12:21 a.m. As you exit the stall you feel the presence of the bald-headed man from last night (or was it tonight?) brush by you, but when you turn to look he is already gone. You are in the same bar as before and you hear the same Nirvana song pulsating like waves of ecstatic heat across the dance floor, though you could swear that it is now faster, more intense–a remix perhaps? The closer you get to the bar the hotter you begin to feel. Sweat runs down the nape of your neck, and for the first time since you fell through the crack in the wall you notice the almost overbearing weight of the traveler’s knapsack on your back, as if you are toting a large sack of potatoes. You wish to discard it, to shed it like the skin of a stick insect, but you simply cannot do that–you need these items for your journey or you wouldn’t have brought them with you!
A finger taps you on the shoulder, and as you swing your body around to meet his/her gaze (which has been boring a hole in the back of your brain like a prick of white light for some time now) a dry, muffled thud rings out; your cumbersome bag has collided with someone’s head. What have you done? The Nirvana song comes to an end and another begins, something slow and contemplative. At the very moment you look down to see who it is you have so carelessly knocked onto the floor (why hasn’t anyone else noticed?) a hand slides over your mouth, and before you can protest you are being dragged outside and blindfolded. This same hand, a hand that is simultaneously gentle and firm, pushes you down to the ground, forces you to sit cross-legged behind what you know instinctively to be the church where you kissed the woman with the tattoo last night. The cold cuts you to the bone, but resist as you may your koan–that damn, incorrigible riddle!–resurfaces in your mind.
What was your original face, the one before your parents were born?
You wish to scream out to the one who has oppressed you, to the hateful hand that has led you, through deception, to this inhospitable place so early in the morning, to tell it that you don’t know, that you didn’t have a face, couldn’t possibly have had one before your parents were born, that the question is intrinsically unanswerable, inane, pointless, dumb. Your belly roars, fire licks the inside of your skull, your legs go numb, disappear, your body turns to ash, to ether, to the absence of ether…
And then. Silence.
The Final (Following) Day
You get up from the cushion at which you are seated and brush a piece of translucent lint from your sleeve. Your wife, whose belly bulges like a partially ripened fruit, lies on the bed, a sliver of warm sunlight wafting in through the space between the curtains to illuminate approximately three-quarters of the intricate design that is inked into her fleshy arm. Your backpack sits where you had placed it the night before (or was it two nights ago?), unzipped and empty beside the door. As you glance back towards the corner of the room you catch a glimpse of your own bald countenance in the windowpane opposite the bed and, as if seeing yourself for the first time, burst into peals of inexorable laughter…