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The Transcription, The Visit, Opus 110, Party Favors, Small World
by Gary Glauber The Transcription When the call comes, the eager writer smiles: a short deadline challenge to be met. Seems the man is being held against his will in some foreign prison. No impassioned pleas from Amnesty International have been able to effect change; petitions and global outrage go unheeded. There have been hints of unspeakable acts of torture, tactics to wash a brain spanking clean, exploring how much pain it takes to wound deep to the soul, sway and compel in the name of self-preservation. Boldly, the voice on the line explains, he has resisted. Of course, there is more. While hanging tough, the man managed to scribble out thoughts on the few pieces of anything resembling paper available to him. Somehow these scrawled notes were smuggled out and forwarded to the publisher, who now eagerly awaits a quick turnaround. The job is to type up the jottings, so that they may be printed, distributed, rushed to the marketplace, and sold to those who know and respect all this man has come to stand for. The package is sent by messenger delivery, and the writer signs for it. He opens the manila folder and gets to work. He is buoyed by expectation, hoping to find somewhere amid these incredibly tiny writings gems of true wisdom, some clear insights imparted, perhaps a clue to the meaning of life itself that reflection has illuminated, yet in all these thousands of words that darken these few pages, there is not only an absence of epiphany and enlightenment, but an entire vacuum of ideas, a void of reason replaced with the senseless ravings of a madman. These scrawled ramblings reflect a mind collapsed under great duress, someone fallen prey to the situation surrounding him, convinced now that such trite incoherencies are what life is about, grocery lists elevated to commandments. Who can say, he ponders, whether the commonplace is in fact the truest poetry imaginable, and what gets said in passing holds the key to our very existence? Perhaps some catalytic code exists that can decipher such pointless remarks into spun golden wisdom, the verities long desired and ever sought. Yet as he looks down at what’s transcribed here, there is doubt and disappointment, pages of pabulum that read like a combination of public restroom graffiti and overheard mumblings from Bedlam inmates, a sad compendium of what is left where a great mind once resided, now a shell crumbled under pressures of torture, incarceration, and more. The writer calculates hours, adding charges to the pages presented, for a job that offered insight of a different order. The Visit He remembers himself here those many years ago, that central lane where elms had stood ere the Dutch disease laid them low. Before these fancier buildings sprouted up like weeds, that spiffy new science center, the gym with its long rows of treadmills with TV attachments and rock wall climbing feature. My gym smelled of old sweat, he thinks, a dimly lighted track oval that encircled an ancient basketball court. He remembers that very same flagpole where he met the girl he so desired on that impossibly cold winter day when she managed the mean feat of rejecting him and still making him feel incredibly good about it. Now he has a beautiful wife and a son on the verge of matriculation at a place of higher learning. They are with him, shuttled along with several other parents and children on this late autumn mid-day’s tour. The co-eds seem prettier, the campus picture postcard tidy and each corner turned releases a flood of quiescent memories that remain invisible, undetected by others. As they walk through the humanities hall, he steals a glance at the placard of faculty office listings, searching for familiar names. He recognizes one, a professor who started here his freshman year, now a senior department member on the verge of retirement. He knows his son has no real interest, that this would be a safety school at best in spite of the attractive students, yet he has consented to come along on this exercise in paternal nostalgia, an early holiday gift from son to dad. The tour guide stops her backward walk and pauses from her canned talk that covers salient points of interest to field any random parent/student questions. A host of queries pops into his head, but not a single one gets voiced. He wants to know where the time has gone, how life can present this ironic turn of cycle, how history can in fact repeat itself. Instead, he listens to some concerned mom’s question about laundry facilities in the dorms and then shuffles quietly along, just another nameless visitor, a stranger in what once was a very familiar land. Opus 110 Every sound pins down a center of memory, a household command, the wind through the tulip tree, the reflex of putting that lipstick on. He is held fast by any of these aural triggers, even the long afternoon practice sessions, soothing showers of deft glissando, never getting all the notes quite right, but a strange comfort in the repetition. He knows now that all time signatures are irregular. No professional studio can capture what his mind conveys here, when a weekend return becomes a concert hall of echoes, a long program of le fugue reminiscence. Party Favors The dress color’s faded, the spirit seems wrung over by too many lost battles. So she feigns indifference, stays off by herself, quietly praying to a darker god. He finds her genuflecting, drawn by the intensity, overcome by the blue eyes. This is her fiery tagline, the very same one she rues, the shellacked surface of apathy as polite disclaimer, hiding a host of telling cracks. The night is polished with stars reflecting secrets, and shiny individual scars, each with a frightening yet compelling narrative saying this world’s a cruel place and here’s the hard proof. He cannot escape the smile, the whippoorwill’s sad call, this endless patch of night. Small World We were at the Floridian, enthusiastic kids in tow, hoping the buddy system might assist us through the heat wave, the long lines, and the next gift shop. We were in another world, dreaming of international espionage, not just negotiating a character breakfast, but the fate of all humankind: importance, relevance, esprit de corps. We were monitored round the clock. Paying far too much for way too little, yet slowly eroding, caving in to the overseer’s relentless wishes, seeing eye-to-eye in a friendly corporate way. Buying those mouse ears seemed a good idea at the time, but a week later, skin itchy and tan fading, contentiously ensconced back in the cubicle’s tenuous solitude, menial obligations and spreadsheets galore, we open our eyes as if emerging from a coma, and wonder, “What were we thinking?” |
Gary Glauber is a poet, fiction writer, and teacher. His works have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, as well as “Best of the Net.” Recent poems are published or forthcoming in Fjords Review, JMWW, Stone Voices, Blue Lotus Review, The Citron Review, 3 Elements Review, The Blue Hour, Stoneboat Journal, Stone Path Review, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Silver Birch Press, and Think Journal. He is a champion of the underdog who often composes to an obscure power pop soundtrack. His first collection, Small Consolations, is due out in 2015 from The Aldrich Press.
