May 21, 2007
Shelter (from the Munich Tales)
SHELTER
By Michael Kroetch
He was going to collect the wind. He would trap it in jars on his roof. He didn´t tell his parents about the idea. He kept the carefully chosen jars ready and hidden under his bed. To do it, he would go up into the tree that was outside his window and climb from it to the roof with a rucksack strapped on his back. He would have to be cautious not to jostle too violently the jars nestled inside the rucksack as he made his way up through the tree´s branches. For protection, each jar would be gently wrapped in swaths of old cloth. The cloth he´d selected was as special as the jars. It came from the shirts his great grandfather Leo had once worn when he spent time as a logger in the Rocky Mountains of Canada. Even though they had never met, his grandfather meant a lot to him. He knew the man would have approved of his plan for the wind. He would sometimes seek out the fabric of the old torn shirts when he was feeling most weak and alone. In touching the ragged cloth he thought he sensed some of his grandfather´s often praised strength and humor. These things he so very much desired in his own life, but could not find. He knew the people in his neighborhood thought him strange. His clothes. His hair. His face. He didn´t want to be strange. He wanted to fit in and be like everybody else, but somehow it never quite worked. But he knew having the wind would help. It would lift him up. If he could get it inside him, it wouldn´t matter what others thought. He would have the wind. He got the idea of the wind from an old documentary he´d seen the previous summer. It was on late one long hot night when he couldn´t sleep. The show had been about a man trying to decipher the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. The man claimed daVinci´s unusual creative power had come from his ability to pull the wind of life itself into his being and harness its energies. Even though the boy´s whole family had been long asleep andhe had wanted to be as well, when he heard these words, something galvanized inside him. And in looking at the image of da Vinci on the screen, he was struck even more by the uncanny resemblance between da Vinci and his own grandfather. They could have been twins. Almost. He did not decide right away to embrace the wind. Many months went by with the memory of the TV program becoming almost entirely lost in shadow. But then, seemingly out of the blue, the narrator´s voice would fire up again in his head and he would once more feel the lucid charge in his veins he´d felt that night he first heard about da Vinci´s secret. The feeling was so strong that it made him slink down to the dank, dark closet in the basement, where his grandfather´s old, ragged logging clothes were stored. When he was sure no one knew was there, he would open the cardboard box and run his fingers gently over the fabric, imagining them on his grandfather high up in a tree in the middle of the Canadian wind. In such special moments he felt his soul grow a little larger and a little more vibrant. And he knew then that soon he too would live in the wind. But not only that, he would also be a kind of home where it could find shelter.
May 20, 2007
Boat (from the Munich Tales)
BOAT
By Michael Kroetch
Originally it had been his boat. Originally it had been something that went through the water on missions from one place to another. Now it belonged to her and now it went nowhere. Now it stayed absolutely still in the middle of the room where most people would have put their television set. She had candles set up along the rims of the outside and at night would light them all and sit within them, listening. He was out there somewhere. He was going to come back to her. She knew it the same way she always knew, to the day, months ahead, when snow would first fall. He was not dead. Just lost. He was lost like a cat in a tree—except that he was somewhere out there in that wide water trying to find her. Her family had helped her bring the boat up the stairs and taken apart the doorway of her apartment to get it in. Her brother had done most of this work. Lucky for her abut his skills at carpentry. Unlucky for her about his sarcasms and sense of dark fun about her lover´s return. Her brother had tried to apologise afterward, but it was too late. Some things cannot be undone. And besides she hadn´t really been that angry at him. Really she just wanted to be alone with the boat. To run her hands along ist soft surface and hold it close against her chest. She missed him so much. In the wooden frame she could feel his breathing, sense his passion for life and even hear faintly that song he once sang to her after they´d made love and were cuddling, while outside the wind knocked the tree against the wall like Armaggedon was about to unfold. His voice had been so soft, so sweet. She felt in the words of the song like she was finally free from all fear—like that song was a home she could live in and be safe. When he finished she had wanted him to keep singing, but didn´t know how to tell him so. Instead she had looked into his eyes and seen the tears there. Such a man could get lost. That was possible. Certainly. But a man like that die? She knew better. She knew it was just a matter now of being ready in his boat for when he came back into view, waving to her, sending her his song of love and renewal and return. In the light of the candles she felt the words of his song rise up from within her. His words became hers just as his boat had become hers. She was standing in its hull with her arms outstretched to him, offering him the safety of her heart to rest on as she had rested on his.
May 19, 2007
Kindness (from the Munich Tales)
KINDNESS
By Michael Kroetch
Everybody was sure he could be a movie star. He had that kind of look. His was the easy, languid grace of a river at sunset. You liked him even before you met him. It was impossible not to. Something in his eyes drew you toward him. There was a slowness in them. A gentle thunder. You always wanted him to walk by on his way to the torpedo factory where he worked. And whenever he did, you always enjoyed seeing his footprints glitter wet on the pavement under the red marquee of the pizza place. He didn´t seem to notice your burgundy lipstick of the tiny black dress which you wore especially for him. But then again, you couldn´t be sure. With him you couldn´t be sure of anything. He was so full of surprises and tiny kindnesses. Plus, he was so different from everyone else. The thing that bothered you the most about the place where you lived was the sameness of it all and the sameness of the people. You only had to look at them once to know their whole story and what they named their cat—if they had a cat, that is, which many of them did, even though it was against the apartment complex´s rules. With him you didn´t know anything really, except how he made you feel. He could be thinking anything and you´d never know it from his little smiles and nicely polished shoes. You couldn´t really help yourself from wanting to know more about him. Sneaking into his apartment when he was at work wasn´t really an invasion, it seemed to be what he wanted you to do. He was just to shy to ask. Okay, so you broke that little window. Yes, that was probably not the nicest thing to do, but he would understand. You knew he would. Just like he would understand why you stood so long in his shower looking up at the spigot imagining him there waiting for the water to fall on him, how his skin would feel under your palms, wet, strong, alive with excitement and passion. How could it be wrong to get into his bed and lay there awhile and look up at the same ceiling he looked up at as he drifted off to sleep? This was not criminal behavior, you were getting to know him. That´s why you took all those photos of the pretty girl out of the album on his night stand, tore them up into tiny, tiny pieces and flushed them down the toilet. You were protecting him from her. She did not live anywhere around here and had never taken the trouble to visit him so she was obviously bad news and toying with his gentle heart. That´s why you kept searching for signs of her and everywhere you came across anything related to her, you destroyed it and erased all signs of your act. You knew he would be happy in the long run that you had done this. But it would take awhile and a lot of tender talking between the two of you, which you were more than ready to begin until you saw him standing behind you and no words came out of your mouth.
May 17, 2007
Lies (from the Munich Tales)
LIES
By Michael Kroetch
He was a puppet. It´s what he said to people. But then, he thought everyone was a puppet. Most just didn´t know it. Knowledge was important to him. He thought he knew more than most. Maybe he did, it´s hard to say. But what´s beyond all doubt is that he knew a lot about his own disease, where his soft spots were. At night they lit up his room. It´s why he lived alone. He had to. He feared sometimes they would get so bright and so hot they would ignite the room while he slept, catching the bed linen in flames first, then spreading to the curtains and beyond. It was easy for him to imagine the whole apartment complex consumed by flames that were born from his sleeping flesh. He was that kind of puppet with that kind of disease. But as much as he might talk openly and often about his theories on the vicissitudes of puppetness and puppetry, he rarely, if ever, overtly spoke of his disease. He collected data about the disease anywhere he could find it that would not leave a recognizable link back to him. The public library and the internet were taboo. He suspected most doctors also reported directly to the government about the topic as well, even if they swore the opposite and promised on scout´s honor to throw their own mother off a cliff if it was true. They were puppets just as much as he was, so how could he believe a word they said? He had enough trouble believing his own words. He knew he lied sometimes. He wasn´t sure why. It sometimes happened when he least expected. He would be telling someone about how to get to the nearest butcher shop and suddenly would lie and tell them directions that were completely false. He did not know if this was a result of him simply being a puppet or something related to his disease. He thought about such things for hours sometimes, pushing various possible justifications for either side of the argument. He knew the disease was spreading inside him more quickly than in most of the case studies he had examined. Why this was he wasn´t sure, but he was keeping careful track of his soft spots. They were the most dangerous areas. In such realms it seemed almost anything was possible, given the particular nature of the disease. The bright light that emanated from his body while he slept was among the more innocuous dangers presented by the ailment. He tried not to think about the more devastating repurcussions it could involve. Better to keep his mind occupied with the world of puppetry. As a child he had a whole set of puppets. Nice puppets Circus puppets. He took them with him everywhere he went. His adventures in the world were always shared by the puppets. But then the puppets got jealous when he left them home once. They set fire to his house and his family and everything he knew. It was after the fire that he discovered that he, too, was a puppet. A little boy puppet running in the street with a pack of matches and a smile as big as the North Pole.
Rare (from the Munich Tales)
RARE
By Michael Kroetch
He made the garden slowly. He could see it more or less complete in his head long before he had broken the ground to plant the first seed. He knew growing things took time and patience. He was not worried about the plants not surviving. He had worked with many plants over the course of his life and knew which ones would flourish in the environment he had at hand. He enjoyed helping the plants reach their potential and bloom into full beauty. He talked to them a lot, telling them how nicely they were doing and that they had nothing to worry about. That he would bring them fresh water every day and make sure they had enough nutrients in their soil. For them he would journey with his old frail body on his bicycle several miles to a coffee shop where his good friend Charlie was a janitor and get from Charlie the ground remnants from the previous day´s brewing of coffee beans. He would sprinkle these coffee grounds among his little friends when they were sleeping at night. He knew these coffee remnants contained just the right kind of nitrogen for his plants and that when they woke up in the morning, their roots would feed on what he had given them and this would make them strong and vital and able to reach u toward the sun. Seeing them succeed and grow lush made him smile inside. He was a simple man. He did not need much in life to feel satisfied, but he needed his garden. It was a place for him to put his love now that his children were grown and gone to other places far away. He enjoyed seeing his family when they returned on holidays with the grandchildren, of course he did. But spoiling the grandchildren with all his affections and presents and hugs on those few days out of the year was not enough for him. Every day he was able to spoil his plants and tell them how lovely and beautiful they were, even as seedlings when all anyone else could see was a stub of green. To him this stub of green was a small miracle. He knew how brief life was and had not only lost his wife but so many of his dearest friends over the span of his years. He knew these stubs of green were a way the world had of trying again. He liked life but knew he would not have so many years to enjoy his garden. That is why he was so very careful with each living thing he encountered and smiled at them all. He felt as if they all held some of him within them somehow, especially his own plants and flowers. When he saw them healthy and happy and green with their colorful flowers, he knew he could face his own death. He could feel his body growing weaker with the passage of days and years and knew that before long some of the plants he had helped bring into the fullness of their life would go on without him. This could have made him sad, but it did not. He was a kind man and kind also to himself. He was happy for all that he had experienced and certainly wanted more time with his plants and grandchildren, but also he knew there were limits. In time he would become coffee grinds. He and his plants would give way to the next generation and their kind. He tried to tell his plants this to give them some peace when he saw them reaching the end of their life cycle. He would kiss them after he said it and tell them once more how very beautiful they were. And rare.
May 15, 2007
Pretty (from the Munich Tales)
PRETTY
By Michael Kroetch
She had built herself up out of spare parts, old things she´d found around in the junkyard or on the street. Nothing was original. She had a man´s voice that came from a 1950´s educational movie designed to teach school children the proper way to dance. Her cheeks were stolen off a billboard that once featured a tough cowboy smoking a long thin cigarette. Her ankles had been a boxer´s. Nobody famous, unfortunately—not that she cared. The whole thing of who she was wasn´t supposed to last or even impress—it was just the getting by that counted, the getting through another day somehow. The war had given her some of her toes in the form of bullet casings. She liked them, how they jingled a little when she walked. Because her breasts had been replaced with hubcaps and her vagina with a Hoover vacuum engine, she wasn´t really sure she should be calling herself a “her” anymore. But she did anyway. It was more out of habit than some kind of political statement. Her belief in politics had been lost long before her teeth. She poked at the silicone microchips which now passed as her teeth. They needed cleaning. But then, in her world, what didn´t? Everything that wasn´t dirty or falling apart was already dead and sealed up waiting for Armageddon to roll around so it could unthawed and given a second chance. Personally she didn´t want another roll of those dice. She´d landed in this slim slice of history and was making do and getting by. Not well, maybe, compared to the uber-rich who came by her place every once in awhile on one of their sightseeing excursions, but not as bad as the scabrous unmentionables who still tried to have jobs and keep the military machinery up and running. Having replaced all semblance of the “her” that had once been human, she no longer qualified as being able to fight and also was not really detectable by their recruitment equipment. To their machines she no longer read as a biological entity and appeared more like a mobilized advertisement out harvesting data—more like what they themselves were, if the truth be told. But truth was another of those old conventions she'd jettisoned long before giving up her teeth. Truth was whatever it needed to be for those who could afford it. And, simply put, she couldn´t. Not that she minded. Her world was not about victory, honor, or honesty. It was about trying to keep her body, such as it was, together and functioning enough, just enough to get through to the next day. There wasn´t going to be another generation after her. She knew that much. She felt lucky to even be able to say there was going to be another day. She smiled at the thought of anyone wanting a child, given the what of the way things were. She smiled and then did a little bit of a jig, her bullet casing toes jingling along in an almost dainty and pretty way as she did.
May 14, 2007
Dissolve (from the Munich Tales)
DISSOLVE
By Michael Kroetch
He lived in the past—not his own past, not even a real past that had ever happened, but a movie past. Purely imaginary. Purely a dream. It had gotten so he could no longer speak his own words, but had to use phrases and lines from the dreamworld of the black and white movies he was almost continuously watching. His body was more and more not his own either; its gestures and movements were being taken over by what he saw on the screen. He seemed unable to stop it and not even aware it was happening—that he was being erased and replaced. He would smile the smile of a long dead actor and speak words which had once been written down for the dead actor to say, and when his lips moved and the words came out—it was impossible to tell that he did not think the words were his own. If challenged on the matter, he would get upset, outraged and switch to a different film and use those words of wild-eyed condemnation against his accuser. His family took it in stride. What else could they do? He was part of them. Even if he could no longer admit this to himself or possibly even believe it—he was still their flesh, their blood and so they took care of him as best they could. His movies always came first, but after they were over—and that was the good thing for his family, there was always an ending to his movies—after they were over, his family would try and get him to go outside. Even for a little while. Just to get some air and maybe see some real people and have a little bit of a life. But this he wanted less and less. He didn´t see the point of it. Why would he want to go out there into that desert? His family didn´t know what he was talking about. Desert? They lived in a city. It worried them when he talked this way, acted so dramatic. Why did he have to be so difficult? Of course they couldn´t say this directly to him, they didn´t think they could say anything directly to him anymore. For them it was like they had to figure out what movie was maybe happening in his head and what parts might be available for them for the purpose of getting through to him. It was more and more as if they were invisible or imaginary beings flitting around the periphery of his vision, unless they spoke in words or had gestures he recognised from one of his movies. If they were careful, they could hold long conversations with hi this way. But it was tricky. It was not easy. He knew the films so much better than they ever could and would get impatient if they kept messing up their lines. Once his sister had more of it than she could take. She broke out of the character she was trying to play and started shouting at him that he was driving them all crazy with this nonsense and he had to stop it. He had to stop it. He did not respond. He turned his back on her. He went over and turned on the movie which she had been playing in and began watching it from where she had broken down. His smile showed how much more satisfied he was to be again experiencing the real thing.
May 7, 2007
Flower (from the Munich Tales)
FLOWER
By Michael Kroetch
He believed in flow. He believed in goodness. He believed if he rode in a balloon above the city he would be able to see the goodness from there like you could see flowers on a sunny day in the field where he sometimes went running. Goodness was like a flower to him. It was not something permanent, but fleeting. His goal was to try and capture it on a map as it occurred, at least as much of it as he could from his balloon above the city. He had acquired a powerful telescope for just this purpose and found a “How to” book on the use of telescopes to help him use it as it was meant to be. Or sort of how it was meant to be. He knew he would be looking in the wrong direction for the goodness and that usually telescopes tried to find it in the stars. But he didn´t let this trouble him. He was not the sort to be troubled by what other people thought of him or what he did. It´s why he didn´t get bothered when his neighbors in the apartment complex all signed a petition against him for his late night noise antics of building the large gondola for his balloon. He used vestiges of things that they had thrown away and which he had squirreled away out of the large trash containers in the courtyard. His place was filled with castoffs: old bicycle tires, pieces of a broken gas stove, several smashed lamps, a torn hammock, some mildewed luggage that seemed to have been half eaten by rats, an ancient stereo system with speakers bigger than his entire closet. All of this and more he was using to fashion the gondola for his balloon. Soon he would have it ready for the launch. He calculated that the best day to track goodness would be in the middle of the week and so he´d chosen Wednesday as the day for his first journey. The problem was he could not get off from his job at the noodle factory on Wednesdays because that was always the day they sent heir biggest shipment off to Spain. He didn´t know what to do. He was afraid of his boss finding out about his mapping plans. He didn´t think his boss would really understand the concept. He knew not everyone was able to think as abstractly about life as he could. But he didn´t want his mapping of goodness to itself somehow involve an act of non-goodness with him lying to his boss and so he decided the only way to make it work out well was to for everyone was to bring his boss along on the journey. Of course for this he would have to reconfigure some aspects of his gondola design and the weight variables of extra ballast he´d need to bring along. But the ballast wouldn´t be too hard to work out, he had the two kitchen sinks he´d saved for just such an unplanned turn of events. He tied them to the side of the big unwieldy odd basket in his kitchen and smiled how nicely surprised his boss would be when he woke up after the sedative wore off and could look down through the telescope and see all the goodness blossoming so far below them.
May 4, 2007
Tickets (from the Munich Tales)
TICKETS
By Michael Kroetch
The ones inside her were black. They were the reason she did so well in school and was always so well spoken of. They were the reason she did so many things—including going to Antarctica to study climate changes from ten thousand years ago. Or winning the state spelling bee when she was ten years old. The tickets had reasons for existing, of course they did. She knew all about them. She knew they had names and dates on them. She knew they were evidence. And she knew she could do anything she liked, go to the bottom of the ocean floor in a diving bell with walls three feet thick to hold up to the intense pressure of the water outside, or sail up into the atmosphere where the membrane between sky and stars was thin as an eyelash. She´d done both and it didn´t matter. The tickets remained inside her. Solid. Safe. Unfettered. Waiting. Over the years friends had tried to help, especially boyfriends. And lord knows, she´d wanted help. Wanted to be free of the terrible weight of the tickets. One boy in particular had gotten in close to them. He almost seemed able to touch them. This had never happened before and she was astonished he had somehow been able to do so—gotten so near. She´d felt a mix of fear and excitement about it. Then she´d closed her eyes. She could hear it raining outside. It had been raining a long time. She could hear failure in the sound of the rain and knew when she opened her eyes that the boy would be gone. He would have gone away and left her alone in the apartment. In his place would be another tiny black ticket inside her. A new one. His name would be on it. And it would not go away even if years from now she might not be able to remember his face or his name. That wouldn´t matter. His ticket would still be inside with the others. When younger she had cut her legs in small places where no one would see, to try and let the tickets out. She had used a special knife for this that she purchased in a shop on the other side of the city. The same knife had purportedly been used by a magic healer in some part of Central America to cure women who had problems like hers. In his healing the man had used the knife to sever the heads of live chickens. She did not want to cut the heads off of chickens and so instead had cut into herself. But apparently she had not been able to cut deep enough to get to where the tickets were. It scared her to cut that deep. She had not wanted people to know what was happening. She never told anyone about the tickets. None of her friends. Not even the boy who by chance had gotten so near to them. She felt people wouldn´t understand and that it would backfire, and instead end up producing more of the tickets. And so she did what she always did and pretended not to know they were there, and to have more and more success in her life. She found that more than anything else, success worked for awhile to keep the tickets quiet.
May 2, 2007
Buttons (from the Munich Tales)
BUTTONS
By Michael Kroetch
He was from a different place. He had not been here long and still had many of the ways of doing things from where he had been before. Even his clothes were different. They had many extra buttons on them and in places people from here would never put buttons. He also spoke louder than people were used to speaking and made gestures with his arms that frightened them. Their words were new to him as well, and came out of his mouth all lopsided and broken sounding. Sometimes he seemed not to have any idea what he was saying or even how to do the simplest of things. Because of this, people were often puzzled by his behavior and became nervous if he came near them. If they saw him out walking on the street, they would often try to avoid him by crossing to the other side or by quickly entering a store as refuge. It was not that they did not like him or wished him ill, it was just that his clothes had all those extra buttons and in such strange places. Someone said all the extra buttons sewn into his clothes must mean something. Perhaps he was hiding something. Could be something dangerous. They ended up discussing the possibilities of what was behind the buttons for many days. During this time none of them spoke to him or dared to look at the buttons on his clothes. They grew ever more afraid of him and what his intentions might be. It had become quite apparent to them that he was anything but a positive presence in their lives and that he was making it more and more difficult for them to get through their daily routines. Something had to be done about him. They had to think of the children. They had to think about a lot of things. But what they tried not to think about was how different he was with his buttons, because they had already agreed among themselves that thinking about him and the buttons was bad. Better to think about a nice sunny day and walking in the park and looking at the trees and enjoying the sounds of the birds. But of course when they tried to do this, they could not. Him and the buttons were ruining everything! Someone proposed the idea that they grab hold of him by force, the lot of them, and pluck the buttons off the extra places on his clothes where the buttons served no obvious purpose except to cause trouble. This course of action seemed radical and extreme at first, but when considered seriously came to be seen as the only realistic alternative. In the process of achieving their goal, things went differently than they had expected. They did not anticipate that they would lose control and begin to beat and kick him once they had him subdued on the ground. After it was over, they held his buttons in their hands while his body lay there motionless. Inert. They did not know whether to be happy to have the buttons or not. Some kept their button as a trophy and pinned it on the wall, others burned their button. His body was not touched.
