Until the Sun Breaks Down: A Künstlerroman in Three Parts: I. The Tolerance of Slaves

By Joseph Nicolello

Written when the author was in his early and mid-twenties, Until the Sun Breaks Down is a contemporary American Kunstlerroman modeled on Dante's Divine Comedy. In three parts and one hundred chapters that mirror Dante's classic poem, Nicolello takes the reader through present-day American towns and cities: infernal, purgatorial, and paradisal aspects with nothing left off the table. At once a book that can be read without any prior knowledge of Dante as the chronicle of William Fellows, child of a poverty-stricken single mother and precocious student dreaming of something better than what society offers, the book will serve as a guide to untold disconsolate Westerners who are wondering what has happened to American literature; where Catholic voices might emerge from, and how; and a bulwark against militant atheism by immersing the subject head-on and elucidating how to remove one's self from technological desolation and recapture the essence of the Logos Incarnate, or the love that moves the sun and other stars.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Jan 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9781725269767

Joseph Nicolello

Joseph Nicolello is a graduate student and instructor at Fordham University. Before abruptly retiring from novelistic discourse at twenty-five years old to focus exclusively on pedagogy and scholarly writings, Nicolello also wrote the novella A Child’s Christmas in Williamsburg (October 2020).

Book preview

Prologue

The Chalice of Salvation and a Theme by Thomas Tallis

Thir song was partial, but the harmony

(What could it less when Spirits immortal sing?)

Suspended Hell, and took with ravishment

The thronging audience.

Milton, II.532–55

The train rushed full speed into Columbus Circle station on Christmas Day.

Piercing winds shot in frigid bursts through the frosty, ashen Manhattan streets, as Ms. Fellows took her newborn child on their walk the long way through to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The poor woman felt condemned to an unceasing interior conflict of a pessimism at times bulwarked by Isaiah, elsewise Aristotle. Multicolored Christmas lights flickered on and off as blissful crowds passed by one another with fleeting rosy cheeks and downcast, hopeful eyes; taxi-cab tires sped through salt and gravel as distant marching bands played on, echoing through the maze of colossal mirrored obelisks whose shadows cloaked all vehicles and persons.

At the red light, from the side of the stroller Ms. Fellows caught glimpses of her enraptured child. His eyes were wide, transfixed on the glittering phantom city around him. At Radio City she knelt to trace a hand through his light blonde hair. She kissed him above his pale blue eyes and they continued to the cathedral; and as if like clockwork, between each building the clouds split further away from one another, allotting the warmth of the sun.

Then all were seated in the church with that swooshing abruptness which is vast garments buckling down upon pews once again. Several thousand filled the famous cathedral, with innumerable more surrounding the pews, even the building itself outside, praying into folded hands outlined in dissolving cloud-like tunnels of rich winter breath.

An old man insisted the young woman sit down with her child, taking her stroller and gently wedging it in beside the rest. The rest of the crammed pew managed to squeeze an extra half-foot.

And a Merry Christmas to you, said the old man. He’d genuflected and vanished before Ms. Fellows could thank him again.

Months prior the doctors had tried to convince her to go give up the child; she could not, for she no longer had anything but that vision of her child’s ascent into young adulthood to become a man of his own. This she thought of. His father had long begun his descent into excess and exile—it was as if the reality of birth, to him, was the final conviction to give up on all of life.

When their son was born, he arrived late to the hospital. Upon seeing his son, he bared the same indistinct smile he might have extended across blanketed tables at office meetings, or the way one drunk would smile to a television program concerning reality.

He would leave soon; he had said so—it was the first time in years he had used an indefinite tone of voice concerning anything. But the lady had read both Dorothy Day and Kierkegaard on his then-present age; she could make it alone.

Yet each time she asked God a question she heard instead her own voice or could think of the sole image of the Queens sky at night compact with silence and a dome of futile cosmos, thought folding upon itself like searing summer light of magnified glass pressing down upon a parcel of leaves in the blacktop afternoon, wherein all good memories and ecstatic plans have fallen gray and ashen. He would leave, her faith had been lost, and she began to have things in common with those around her. Ms. Fellows was one for whom the rejection of orthodox marriage had borne no material fruit as it had been advertised; but there where no blueprint of the afterlife seemed irrefutably tenable, she could take up the cause of her son.

And the child was all she had in the perpetually leaden and increasingly barbarian world of Queens. The doctors ran around maddened and diseased as their patients and she was unable to forfeit life for the sake of finance and health—for there is an ethical ladder as there are textbooks and there are lungs; once the ladder is revealed to have no top one can begin to quit climbing and turn inward, rational, away from the stage of curtains.

He is gone now, she thought, fighting insomnia in the melon-green hospital gown.

She did not care, as a poor young woman cannot allow herself to care; let a man plant his seed and perish, taking unto thyself the armored acts of Virgilian preservation. She named the child William after both her father, a concentration camp survivor, and another man, the author of some plays and poems.

She took her thin, fragile hand to her cold forehead, ran her palm and fingertips along her nasal bridge and earlobe, in an unconscious test to see that she was still alive, and that all that had ended was the beginning. Nine months, she thought, of a child growing, developing, being inside of me, his little heart beating with me, and the shrill cries announcing his birth to signal the final ending of my spherical melancholy—to look, just to look at this vast movement of life and the year went by so fast.

Ms. Fellows went through an ashamedly mechanical genuflection, recalling the doctor who had knocked twice at the steel door, entering, smiling once to the young woman before speaking, his eyes upon his notepad before averting and reverting them with an air of accomplishment.

He is healthy, said the doctor, And fast asleep. Would you like to see him?

She outstretched her arms, ending the windowsill daydreaming, and mustered the energy to stand. Then she thought of a boy’s first Christmas, the bread of life; now she thought of the journey of their life toward the invisible city governed by love, hitherto a topography of the middle of the road, to form him well with sacred narrative and tender inspiration.

Colored rays poured in through the stained-glass windows and ran across the aisles.

All rise.

The pipe organ and the choir began as all rose. Pluming incense drifted through the church as she held William, fast asleep. The sunlight vanished and outside light snowfall began to come down upon the city.

She saw the years ahead as thorny but kept an ember aglow within her heart that when the city became too difficult she would leave, go to the countryside, that place where poverty is less paralytic and pronounced, where all that remained of her family had relocated some time ago. It would seem that her having never heard return calls from them ever since the pregnancy would have pressed a tac into the balloon of her last wishes; but things that seem certain are composed of mere assumptions, and assumptions transmit a love colder than death amidst the injured and insulted, whose spiritual armor transcends the mere bulletproof steel of odious, spectacular parades.

And the years were harsh, plagued with poverty, one-bedroom apartments, temporary jobs, and other means which bring people together. She moved from the city to the countryside becoming something of a town in Jerusalem, Pennsylvania.

Jerusalem?

Yes.

Like in the Bible?

Yes.

Oh.

Young William was often wary of how people seemed earnest in their recollections of childhood, and likewise dreams. There was a moment or two that he remembered, sure. But was it not all, for the most part, like looking back on a trillion atoms of soft blue? Nothing remained in hindsight but forms, ideas, and all of the past collided with the impossibility of the ever-present moment, disrupted by mysterious religious services and wafting incense more potent in reflected form than even in the real thing; the first springtime kiss from a simple heart, when the sidewalks and country roads transformed into clouds; the kindness of a strange relative saying things that took fifteen years to make sense.

For his earliest childhood memory was of sitting on his great-grandmother’s lap as the rest of the party carried on outside, in the kitchen, the basement. Always and forever, from adolescence to the grave, the aesthetics of alienation. But through all these voices, rooms, then one freezing weekend afternoon at something like a Confirmation party; for Christmas and birthdays were always spent in that little stone slab of backyard, on the other side of Long Island’s resplendent edge. William remembered nothing of what she was saying, through a toothless mouth beside a mole with hair, a tilted wig, glasses thicker than bottle caps due to legal blindness, and being surrounded by black and white pictures of people he would never know.

At the height of her tale that enhanced hypnotism knew no bounds, echoes of rabbinic lore, physiological reactions to that voice like quicksand in slow motion, sinking with the old plaster wall’s two dozen pictures collided with the Hebraic, Celtic presence of his grandmother, with all her genealogical tales of garbage pickers, puppeteers, cobblers, deckhands and dock guards, candy store clerks, cathedral and bridge builders immigrated from southern Italy, then in her mid-fifties or so, who like so many widows, took her dialed, possessive nature to the grave—for he was the golden child, he was her golden child in the house of flowers. His great-grandmother unraveled a world of clerics, rabbis, gun powder, circuses, magicians, fireworks, animals, folklore, or things beyond introspective passivity, delicate inquiries, narratives tailored for the nervous child occasional skyrocketing plot twists, recalled later in his life as a young adult, an emotion to which he was impartial, engrained into one’s mind and soul—nobility, exploration, love, hate, suspicion, endurance: all of these and more; though always lingering somewhere nearby, like the proverbial four-walled elephant, this clouding sense of nervousness, anxiety, which is the greatest gift of all to the poetically inclined, for anxiety cannot be taught, or learned. Anxiety, for him, was a sense of hyperconsciousness: the flash of understanding in a crowded elevator that we will all die one day; the sound of a million people chanting political monosyllables designed to destroy their dreams in the end; the impassive eyes of a beautiful woman as a police officer stands before her in the subway with the end of a machine gun inches from her face, her glass lenses lit not by outrage, but by the screen of her phone; of exiting the subway and seeing the human condition as insects, squirming out of a portable once-locked drawer; or walking alone in the light of dusk, simply and aimlessly enough, before realizing infinity not only goes north, east, west; it goes south as well, as the sweat beads fall and one breathes heavily, panicking, tender vertigo on a Friday evening under the sign of the hourglass, fit for storytelling.

I did nothing, it’s a story, said his great grandmother, clearly upset. I was telling him a story.

You can’t just go making things up all of the time. You can’t complete a sentence without exaggerating!

What’s the matter? said Ms. Fellows, taking William snug into her arms, What’s she said?

Ask him!

What did she say?

I didn’t say anything!

She told me about taking the trains into Coney Island when she was a little girl, William admitted, And all the colors of the lights, and ice cream cones.

And what else?

Nothing.

What else!

I was going to ask about the pictures on the wall when grandma came in.

You see, said his poor great-grandmother, exasperated, I just told him what I remember when I was his age. There’s no problem you don’t understand and never will, with adding a detail once in a while! I’m not hurting anyone!

He recalled this last sentence with crystal clear accuracy, the way an authorial martyr of cinnamon shops, streets of crocodiles, recalled watercolor clarity en route to the bread store in times of war. With parallel clarity, he recalled his grandmother whispering his grandfather’s survival in the death camps, there where each morning for breakfast a man was chosen at random and shot in the face—There are the Jews! Up! In the chimney!—and his sniffling mother walking out of the room in silence, taking William with her. But he would recall his great-grandmother weeping, surrounded by photographs of lost times and souls, and that shortly thereafter she passed away, and seven people attended her funeral. In any case, the elementary particles of his life had begun taking shape, as he was to start pre-kindergarten that autumn, when the leaves rustled through the streets of Long Island, and the western world had not yet been forced into collectively abandoning all hope.

He was a little man and thus endured his little Wertherian agonies, one by one dissolved by selections from his little crate of classics. It was a quiet life broken up by stays with relatives out in the Upper West Side and Arthur Avenue; Yankee Stadium and the museums; mother and son walking at sunset to the public library or a friend’s house; mama returning from a retreat, replenished inside and out; all the little fragments imaginative volumes in their own right, little nostalgias for the present.

And ah, the tales of another world, a past so cold and brutal! For Ms. Fellows had been brought up by nuns, whose severity formed in her both a love of wisdom and acute distrust of religious orders; and all that poverty of affect was reversed into a tenderness for her boy. Sister Shawcross’s rulers and cords were effective pedagogical tools; but the things one read in newspapers could render even St. Theresa an overnight Nietzschean turn. For one could not help but ponder what type of insane deity condoned such crimes! This was for Ms. Fellows no mere act of cruelty, but an act of nonexistence. But she then had her own model of severity, borne of nunnery, her father’s silence on Auschwitz, and her mother’s tragically young death; and this model was of all things to treat J.S. Mill’s Autobiography as a rubric for her little boy, a rule rather than an exception. William’s mother had the sort of authentic dreams that only poverty could produce, and which pain could only ever bring into fruition. Indeed, in the history of single mothers none went about things, as they concerned education, like her. And such rigor translated into elative, epiphanic joys, with William, external poverty demarcated by the lightning rush of comradely boyish love, as when he overcame that speech impediment; and all the rugged boys from that alien realm of sporting life, relationships that had hitherto been lukewarm at best had, on the same day, attained the gold star and stickers in Writing and Coloring alike. How that springtime Friday morning William kissed his mama goodbye and walked outside—where lo! There were the other boys, a good seven of them, chanting William’s name! O, how they carried him to school on their shoulders, laughing and singing through the neighborhood, when all the retired children of immigrants arriving home from Mass did stop and smile, making signs of the cross—and how they carried him, triumphant, up till his last day of the second grade!

There was also the flipside, such as that gray day he was made to sit before his class, mortified, for having said that it was much sadder when a dog died than when a person did; and that when asked by his Religion teacher what he meant, poor William reaffirmed that there would of course be dogs in heaven, citing in his way St. Francis of Assisi; and that was a light thrashing, if only because his mother hated to see him do unwell with teachers. And so a week up at Arthur Avenue, where his strength was made perfect in weakness. He sought in this hour to write a sequel to the Divine Comedy, and in fact spent the pocket change he made mowing lawns on poster-board and a three-part notebook, first mapping out a structure of the afterlife, then getting to work sketching bits of cantos here and there, 11 syllables per line, injecting saints he learnt of in Religion into his adolescent visions of the afterlife.

But there came the day when it would no longer suffice at recess to be the boy who neither played sports, roughhoused, nor did much more than write poetry that his mama approved of. Thus, he tucked his little notebooks away, learned soccer, and even to snap his fingers.

And having snapped them like so, the sound dissolved and the indifferent dream of high school was over; and there was neither poetical renown nor Harvard College in sight; just poverty, a sense of doubt, and the intuition of the instant.

Introvert, voracious reader, memorizing books since age two, timidity and the trivium, living in libraries; and still it seemed so strange for neither mother nor son to ever have adapted to the country. By the end of high school, after all those long childhood and high school years of infinite study, he was still unsure what he would do. He, like so many of many mortals and others of the age, lacked both fatherland and father-being. The Great Recession was upon on them.

He knew, standing in his cap and gown, his glistening palm bound to the scroll, unable to find his mother in the crowd in that sort of slow motion nostalgia for the present feeling he had seen before in so many films—he knew in his heart already how bad he felt at these prospective whistles, cheers, tears; they seemed not to celebrate the future as much as they celebrated unconscious climax as beginning, an explosion as the fuse, and that for many of his peers life would get no greater than high school. And that, after all, pretty much turned out to be the truth.

But for William high school was a bad memory all the way through. The best an upbringing of poverty could culminate in was an unspoken tragic weight preventing one from being free; but this itself led to a gilded prospect: that rather than remain shattered by a lack of institutional recognition and despising one’s life in a movement of perpetual victimhood that the technological lords and vassals advertised around the clock, there lied the prospect of an inward, Augustinian turn. Still, whether one is following Donne, Merton, both, or neither: no man is an island. For with the economy in accelerating decline, people seemed more wrathful toward one another than ever. No one spoke on the quiet streets anymore. People spoke with their eyes, staring into screens some centimeters from their faces. No one mentioned the forests ploughed down and turned into identical shopping centers, outlined in banks and pharmacies. The vacant mansions, the overflowing prisons, the suffocating rate of technology obsession, the Orwellian reality of just about every corner of life.

Where and whence a poverty-stricken mother might let her child’s happiness become hers in a life otherwise threatened by evil spirits as meaningless, an inconsequential existence, neither religious nor atheistic, but a terrible midpoint salvaged by her son’s mythical visions of a better life, there where aesthetics reigned king, and crushed mere tyrants less with brute force than the sublime, or Logos.

It was a time to throw caution to the wind in the name of celebrating one’s self; in the end, he knew it would be the sole way. But what was a self? What is a heart? For William so despised the world that at times he could no longer fathom either God or the opposite, moving into paralyzingly violent seasons in that acedia of the soul, saved in turn by the grace of poetics, and a refusal to cherish or mourn a world that was preordained for eradication; for objectivity is itself subjective, as they who venerate exterior diversity do so at the cost of any whatsoever within. His memories spoke to him through exilic nights of the highest poverty, alone, alive, one’s body consuming itself, recalling with desperation that golden-lighted station that is a future conceptualization regained, in the midst of widespread violence and idolatry beyond that of the Desert Fathers; for one never forgets time spent in New York City—and when for reasons out of one’s control he finds himself far away, yearning, it is the ember in the darkest of hearts which stays lit, and burns alone, where all temporal trends, political conjectures die screaming.

And thus trends, for the most restless, beaten-down souls, it seems almost situated there waiting for the fuse of ideological dynamite to get close enough to catch fire and begin to burn—then, one is ready to go anywhere, to consume all of life, to annihilate the past for the sake of recreating reality, to live by any means necessary.

So Ms. Fellows stood with all the rest of the auditorium, thinking, "Time goes faster every year. That’s all I know. If I’ve taught my son anything it’s to think for himself. And in this chorus of cheers and whistling I find it a poignant counterbalance to the disquieted pews from which we stood up from so long ago. He speaks of travel; let him travel! He speaks of hermitage; let him study, but let him find love, too! Love, in this mad world. It’s all become a race against time.

I thank God I am not young in a world that has become defined by stages of ethical decomposition, O God help them just cutting their aesthetic teeth in so thoroughly finished a world.

I. The Tolerance of Slaves

As cool as the pale wet leaves

of lily-of-the-valley

She lay beside me in the dawn.

Pound

1

Sing, O muses, ye who make visionaries of the blind; who, once scattered, became thyself in truth in the Triune God, or Trinity; who became through our mediated, Petrarchan mutations of time and space, the psalmody of altered consciousness, as the poet saw from his Augustinian mountaintop. O muses, ye deliver the condemned from destruction and cast a bath of light upon the most evil of ages. Sing, sisters of the sacred well, a transmission of prose poetics, a lightness in the gravity of time, prosody for the exilic and the damned, of interior anarchy and resurrection—and first, keeping with tradition, the former.

Nothing pleased William Fellows more than the prospect of seeking the color of the past to forget the drabness of the present; he felt himself dejected and out of touch with his age, and loathed that he had not been born into another fresh, intelligent age or generation, as history seemed so full of them. He had forgotten his profane public-school days before they were over, left with vague impressions they had been detestable, and longed always to leave his town in pursuit of himself. Yet he was far more apt to gaze out toward the sky, regardless of the season, more alive in its permanent silence than anything else, there within the pendant world and its scorching cartographic summers, crickets in full harmonic order, instrumental sounds of falling snow; wild horses o’er the creek-bridge in Spring, the contemplative rustling of autumn leaves; medieval cosmology and cork-lined walls, monastic habit and vanilla-tobacco candle.

And in terms on the current, ongoing war with its reoccurring flashes of patriotic enthusiasm, he sat cold and nauseated with disgust, as fireflies drifted through the diminutive cement slab of a backyard. He watched the miniature neon bulbs light up in the birdsong morning, sitting still as the grave, the most vivid nocturne solicitudes interrupted by the occasional passing truck, or the flashing blue light of a neighbor’s television set, or the distant, feverish click of a mouse, or the bowling-pin legs of a police officer, searching for something on the streets in the sterile night. Those days there were more police officers, cop cars, than ever, as it seemed one of the last professions still hiring.

Then the barren winter passed through and the crystalline windowpanes were cast in fleeting streaks of snow, passing through the distant fluorescent streetlamps, and before long a year had passed since graduation. He kept in touch with no one from high school. Following a flash of anxiety, or a moment of clarity, he began to pace his room.

I haven’t shaved in months! I haven’t even gotten out of bed! I never even eat! What am I doing!

He felt as though he’d crack up. He picked up a newspaper.

"Oh, well I can do that."

He signed up for journalism at the University to the great joy of his mother. She took him to school and sometimes picked him up. His eyesight and poverty prevented him from ever having a car; the accursed shareth.

Nor did I ever want a car, he’d tried explaining once or twice—yet in the highway-dictated suburbs, this thought falls on deaf ears. And if a prophet had no honor in his town or country in both ancient days and tomorrow, what things rendered him as such? Was it revolt against technology for its own sake, or something at once poetical and ontological? We know what Isiah, Christ, and Melville said—but what about William Fellows?

It was something like this:

Your doubt and rejection of that which is incorrigible is holier than a million automated prayers, phantom souls of corpselike hypocrites hovering in the ether of inaction.

He spent his days studying or sleeping in anticipation of greater nocturnal hours, somewhere far away, somewhere creative death was not ushered in—a place like the Paris and New York of old. No one knew of these places, though, the modern Place to Be, and so one felt infelicitous; this, of course, was far less a matter of pessimism than it was keeping up with current affairs.

He often turned his phone off though seldom did he receive calls during that summer of college courses, spending weeks and months listening to music, drinking filtered water, walking the cow, watching movies and documentaries having spent the day researching in an attempt to embrace the dying lights of American intelligence, individualism, sanity, even—the unquestioned, the unfathomable, the infinite smolders, and what then to rise out of such ashes?

He daydreamt of a time and place wherein one always felt as if he were being himself, wherein a simulated present had not been constructed by a simulated past, a place wherein one could pursue aesthetics in a docile world of sterile artistry.

Many townsfolk had generations of blood in the small steel town and spoke of leaving although they never did. In fact, those most desperate to leave seemed the most critical of anyone who dared do so. Jerusalem was a place one was better off staying in bed than ever going out into town. And if money came in, get out.

William had always found the country strange, having been raised in New York City, and at a point he exiled himself from the community and focused his projections inward. He could tell even then that most people he had known would never leave their miserable positions—aside from the occasional vacation—and their proceeding, surmounting human wrath would have to be dumped upon decency’s exposed shoulders: The thoughtful, the original, the depressed, the outsiders, and those who fell somewhere even beyond the outside of society, or at least felt such a way always, as one walked through the suburbs at night, and the pickup trucks roared past hurling garbage and screaming threats.

He could say he had never made a real friend in the town, or he could say that the town had never accepted him, and so he studied journalism at the University because it was something to do.

He looked himself in the mirror at night at times convinced he was growing steadily disfigured by a chronic solitude. For on the one hand there was Ms. Fellows walking in late from work, and the subconscious tension of his mother loathing the place of employment and all that entailed, and William’s simultaneous inability to help get her out of said predilection, despite daydreaming all through high school of extravagant rejoinders such as penning a bestseller that would set his first and last family member free. And on the other hand there was Octavia Savonarola, William’s friend, the mystic girl with blonde hair braided and wrapped around her head like a crown, and little brown specks in her eyes, having graduated university gone to the city that may as well have been another planet—for William was paralyzed by the penitential sentiment that comes with a prisoner of the suburbs visiting another in a place where one is so much happier, albeit not quite able to move; it is not unlike, he thought, a prisoner granted brief visitation rights across town: it is better to wait it out in one’s cell and go all the way when one is free rather than to endure the withdrawal that follows supplemental immersion. But one can get to feel such a downtrodden way sometimes for reasons visible and invisible, too, wherein the callousness of consciousness, the agony of perception in the land of the dead, could be enough to convince the finest human specimens of fatal afflictions, of despair come knocking.

Then the word on the street grew optimistic, which is always a warning sign. A new president was on his way into office to fix each individual’s every problem at once, and then things would be heavenlike, as they once were, although they never were, and in regards to such coaxing William had once said to his classmates, to passersby on the streets of disquietude, But my friends, the outside is the outside, the inside then impenetrable! Look inward for any sort of democracy! Inward! If you want to get to the core of things . . . Though one never quite says these things, or at least in such a romantic way, or at least not in newspapers . . .

And out of spite he went out to the morose galleries which seemed an exact replication of some never-ending, exaggerated estrangement from any sort of realness, bound in a dense, lost feeling William could never describe until much later, a vision upon a rooftop in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

What was that feeling which would be in the eyes of young men grown old all too soon, advertisements for the Army on a Saturday night, the celebration of imaginative ruins in the sudden worship of technological gadgetry accepted as necessity at asphyxiating rates—to ponder such thoughts sitting alone at the head of a packed bar, looking over at everyone until the pain became too great and you walk home alone, then—what was that feeling and why could everyone relate to it at night?

True wit, William etched upon his undergraduate portfolio, Is the brainchild of true depression.

He may or may not have believed this, but then one never could tell if someone had died with a smile on their face, or if someone had outstretched their index fingers in the night.

That sort of feeling—a feigned el norte—began to overcome him in all situations, beside hallways or windowsills, to reconsider the past as a straight line of days and nights of discouraged dreams.

So it all began like that, the pursuit of individualism in a false world, and it all seemed impossible late at night, but weren’t confusion and melancholia variables, options, and couldn’t one at least kill such things off using one against the other, in order to embark on an aesthetic exile as opposed to the incessant feeling of being engulfed by crippling despair in the modern world?

One could say William Fellows was in a forlorn state of mind when, through a strange turn of events, he met Helena Caravan.

2

Yet aside from this chaos of the mind, this confusion of the soul, this general lost feeling shining through each corner on the road of life like translucent ovular sunlight shines through windows upon particles of tubular, funneling dust, there was always New York, or Octavia Savonarola (One or the other—the same?—the only two that had never let him down, anyhow) rather, when there was time off from the school paper and university life.

After a daytrip to the city in the summer William sat at his desk and began to write in the collegiate columns of a journalistic assignment: At one point in time I was a prospective journalist. I kept up with all my assignments and finished each one, speaking and presenting at various colleges and state capitals on the east coast—but something has come over me and then, a feeling of being sampled within a tape-loop, a song whose sound one is better off accepting—in its absurdity brought on by repetition—than considering. Living a life of rich exploration seems to me much more valuable than anything else and yet I cannot begin to explain this to anyone around me without experiencing spite, stranger all the more because I know that anyone in the town longs to leave. Young people can no longer grow in the towns of America, wherein emotional capacities are concentrated by fusing shopping centers and sports teams. Though strange enough still, on the bus ride home today from Brooklyn I met an interesting character named Gideon who’s traveled the country, lives in Manhattan, and is just two years older than me. He sat down beside me on the bus, a regular looking student (Whatever that means), and explained that earlier he had been skimming through newspapers when it dawned on him that he was not reading the tales of death, politics, and weather anymore but that his eyes, he said, were as if moths being dragged across a stream of ink with a needle by its wings to a candle, reading over thousands of words whose elementary format never failed to make him feel as if the media was not just lying to him, but that the lies within lies were being conducted as a sort of retribution, his crime having been lifting the lantern of consciousness in a darkened land of bread and circuses. He could not have known I was a journalist, and thus I tried to not take it in a harsh light. I like to think I am attempting to break free; and so, I took to this Gideon character. He used the phrase, ‘Subliminal Fascism,’ and spoke with the zeal of a golden legend. He told me of his western travels, of windmills beaming at dusk, of beginning at the Brooklyn Bridge and ending at the Golden Gate. I subdued my enthusiasm for his mantra, but I think I will call him. He spoke of traveling the country with conviction, simplicity, and necessity. I think I will not go to class tomorrow. I think I will begin mapping out my own sort of individual ascension, and go out and see the land and live how I please, but I’m unsure for it is late at night and I haven’t a penny to my name, nor a philosophy of my own. But at this moment I realize that I must live on my feet and call this Gideon as he is at an aunt’s house not far from here for some days. We gathered the strangest looks from surrounding passengers, two young strangers raving about this, that, and the Zohar. If a friend is someone you can be yourself around, I found this brooding Gideon a friend right off the bat. Dark eyes, dark hair, wooly coat, boots warped from hiking and marching across the Williamsburg Bridge. I wonder if Octavia knows this Gideon? Ah, how I miss her company already, her virginal perfume! But one thing I never understood about the one who’d published on epistemology and phenomenology was her love for an apparent Catholic saint called Therese of the Child Jesus. Octavia attended elementary school with nuns whose affiliation was with this person I had never otherwise heard of; I still find the name and concept infantile, and frankly do not understand how a philosopher could love such ridiculous things! Child Jesus? Nuns? Her autobiography? This is mania! I suppose after 9/11 automatic suspicion ought to run free over amiable consideration, but for some reason or another I disavow that sentiment.

He stayed in bed, revisiting Proust, and thought of the aesthetic poverty of the land, its predetermined political religions, his single mother and the tight money, and both the collegiate dreams and moral propaganda he had come to reject with Nietzschean ferocity. He feared not being considered strange, but of failing to unlatch an artistic life, of absorbing richness from the ordinary. Yet he had no artistic skill. But what had Gideon spoken over, rumbling through the Holland Tunnel: ‘The Art of Life.’

He called Gideon at once.

Ah, William, yes! I’ve drunk all of my aunt’s wine! She speaks of a creek; you could take me there in a few days! I‘m gonna stay for a week out here by the airport and get my thoughts together.

Yes, William said, trying to recognize the song being lowered on the other side of the line. Leonard Cohen: ‘Winter Lady.’ There’s a creek that runs straight through Jerusalem.

And—and could you pick up some weed?

Sure, I know a guy. We’ll meet downtown, near the university, atop the hill. I have to return a box of Wagner, and we’ll go from there. I’ll get you some black twist.

What is that!

Enough weed for a spliff outlined with thin little snakes of opium.

I’ll call you soon then bud, glad you called—I’ll borrow my aunt’s car!

Yes, yes, and I’ll get everything else together.

Well, what movies do you recommend I consider watching this evening? You had mentioned interesting things on the bus I never got to take note of—

Let’s see, he said. "Once Upon a Time in the West, Werkmeister Harmonies, Weighed but Found Wanting, and . . . where is it . . ."

Ah, we can learn from each other then!

"And of course, Berlin Alexanderplatz."

You don’t say? Well, William, if I could drive, I’d come pick you up. But now, you call me or I’ll call you tomorrow and we’ll meet again! Maybe head back to the city together!

That would be good!

Get thy bearings! cried Gideon. William knew once he got in with Gideon and the rest of New York reunited, proper, he could forget all about his current doldrums and the past that had fallen apart as the seasons changed. He set his assignments aside. He had been a fine student for all his life out of desire and idleness, and it seemed about the correct time to get a taste of the nonacademic life.

Along the baron, snow-filled alleyways, and sloping mountains of snowcrest forestry stood aspects of the university. William returned his discs and thought of Gideon, this sudden madman, rumbling into town in some hours and knew not what to think—he knew just that he felt happy. But first he would meet Guy Winthrop, get the weed, and escape as soon as possible.

Come on in, man!

There was always something so disheartening about the bedrooms of drug dealers. Guy took out an old mason jar while William observed how much the poor, degenerate Guy resembled the subway rodents burned into his mind from childhood, the human-animal aspects of this old high school acquaintance of his from whom he’d bought weed, with his hands and words almost slithering around the chaos of his bedroom that had not changed since high school, which smelt of stale tobacco and bongs, the peeling wallpaper covered in areas by black light stars and tie-dyed tapestries, in other areas concert posters rumpled above stained rose-red lounge seats.

I don’t know what I’m doing, Guy said with confidence. My parents are unemployed and it’s going to take me years to pay off two years’ worth of loans.

Why don’t you just stay another two and get your degree?

It was just the community college, Guy said, in a sad tone that at once fractured his pseudo-outlaw appearance. William realized he had known Guy for a decade, and somehow that seemed impossible; were there any other points in history whereby one could know a person for three thousand days and have no idea whatsoever what their actual philosophy of life and death entailed? And I’m beginning to wonder what the hell is going on.

What do you mean? William said, sitting on the edge of Guy’s torn twin comforter.

With my life, with anything—everyone I know is out of work and I don’t wanna keep selling drugs. I keep thinking I’m going to make mad money and damn, you know, it never works out. I been having nightmares of being thrown in jail. Do, do you have a job?

He paced the room, readjusting the draw strings of his camouflage cargo pants, weighing out the weed on the digital handheld scale.

No opium, eh?

Couldn’t get any. My bad man.

It’s alright, Guy.

He picked at the forest green clump, tossing seeds into a coffee cup.

You work?

Writing articles for the papers sometimes, William said, But then again not so much as of late. Just going to school. Trying to figure everything out myself.

Guy took great delicate care to sprinkle an extra layer of weed into the bag. He zipped the bag and looked up with cringed, bitter eyebrows, before clicking off his scale and turning to his phone. He looked up again, enquiring, "For what? Newspapers? All the newspapers are getting bought out. You’re not going to find any work there, in that business. Things are just getting worse, too. Gas is up again."

There’s still work in the journalism field, he said, somewhat puzzled. Online.

I don’t know about that.

William assumed something was wrong in Guy Winthrop’s personal life. He wanted to get the weed and get out. He could feel the bad vibes in the room with an almost overwhelming urgency. Guy swallowed a pill with blue Gatorade.

I just read an article in the paper is all that it’s useless to be a journalist anymore. No one reads anymore.

You’re like an old man, William laughed, You’ve got all your life ahead of you and you’re nasty all about things you don‘t know. You need a vacation.

I never see you around anyway. You never call me.

William considered the proper means by which to cancel this current inquisition and relayed off the top of his head:

If you want my opinion on what you’re saying—

Yeah.

Well, I guess I’m starting to believe that journalism is too sterile a disembodiment of the language, the newspapers encapsulated for some terminal gray disease. I’m losing my faith in journalism as a lifestyle, but I must stick with it. It’s something I can do. My cup of tea has been endless research amongst all forms of art by any means necessary. I just sit around for days on end researching. Watch three movies a day, read as many books as possible. Sometimes I wear a bandana around my head so that it won’t explode. Researching what? Everything at once.

Guy ignored most of this sentiment, sealing the cellophane paper over with the blue flame of a black match.

I meant to ask how did you get down here today? It’s so damn cold outside.

I walked.

Now Guy’s bloodshot eyes lit up. He burst into forced, if not hysterical, laughter. William returned the laughter, his anxious laughter faring far less brevity, longevity. He despised everything about Guy Winthrop. Of course, he had no opium. Of course, he spoke with confidence about things he knew nothing of. Burroughs, de Quincey, and every other unknown junkie: a terminal bore sans junk. None save Walter Benjamin could have drugs extracted from his aura and remain a caustic saint, cracked mystic, and glorious literary martyr all at once.

In the divine, or human, comedy of his interior life, William had his own circles of hell, Parisian bowels, lost illusions, Balzac’s Lucien mountainside in a strange ecclesiastical carriage: Guy was running around the outskirts of Dante’s circle where sodomites and usurers dwelt together; for the one took something and made nothing out of it, while the other took nothing and made something out of it. Guy Winthrop, in turn, took chemicals and proffered one an opportunity to forget all about remembering, and risked a ruined life by emulating useful cinematic, auditory idiots, there in the haunting of souls in mountainside suspension.

But William was content to skate through the Hell of Jerusalem, Brutus and an inverted ring of ice, cast in smoke then vanishing into the worlds of Virginia Woolf and Bruno Schulz, there where the banal living died, and the dead reigned, roaring with life.

I’ll give you a ride home then. I just have to do something, emphasizing ‘Do.’ William waited for ridicule concerning his lack of car before explaining he would soon meet a friend, looking out of the window and out to the cold, colorless winter sky. Yeah, I’ll give you a ride up there then, with a quick exchange of the bag, the cash, the aimless whistling.

William observed the fair quality of the weed, that it looked better up close, and knew Gideon would appreciate the smoke amidst his travels.

They barreled ahead toward campus in the sports car, on-looking the old, desolate streets, which William had never been able to consider comforting. He considered telling Guy of his outing to the city, though Guy was of the aforementioned kind to despise that sort of exuberance out of warped inheritance. William kept quiet.

Women.

Oh?

The radio host exhibited faint rhythmic forms of communicative propaganda. These days statements were just in the beginning of repeating statements and phone numbers three, instead of two, times.

What of them, these women? William inquired.

Want to come out to my girlfriend’s dinner party tonight, said Guy, lighting a mentholated cigarette. I don’t want to be there all by myself.

William considered the strange array of ersatz criminals gathered around some one’s mother’s basement, how he had never spent time with Guy Winthrop in years and never had even as teenagers for any extended period of time, or that Guy Winthrop did things and knew women and had friends, all of this common sense coming out of the blue, wild in blue, like blocks of ice falling from automatic lights which lined the courtyard past the Film Vault leading to the beige Admissions townhouse, and with this surge of considering going into public with Guy some random optimistic light shone inside of him in strict contrast to his recent, ceaseless pessimism, and William replied affirmatively.

Then William regretted accepting, assuming it was just a slight reaction to getting closer to meeting this fascinating New York vagabond or whatever named Gideon, that he felt like Ishmael going out to smoke the tomahawk pipe with Queequeg, that maybe he was losing his marbles and was shocked to accept how good it felt to break free from regular dogmatic, dull outings he’d subscribed to for long enough, to captivate these Christians and Cannibals, and give the lower depths a beguiled chance.

Emerging to the outskirts of forestry, coming to the last red light before turning off of the glacial, winding hill of a road, Guy sent text messages as his whispering lips mouthed in the light of his screen, emitting miniature clouds. He lit his cigarette with another. William considered that Guy Winthrop might be OK after all the second he recalled this encounter terminating at some point, and later on returning to Frame’s Montaigne.

At flatland he looked out upon the Pennsylvanian winter scenery, the gleaming hills of afternoon snowfall interweaving with the crisp brown and green forestry, the distant land which stretched to Philadelphia all down the Delaware River, here, there, everywhere now within a maze of intersecting bare tree limbs which wavered across the scarce, flashing sunlight in vague gestures of emergence, casting a purple-gray light across the windshield while the last traceable ringlets of evaporating gray clouds dissolved amongst the faint, almost-concealed sun. Through the cracked rearview mirror the last porches of warped furniture, tobacco cans set in bronze pile atop once-creaking, now discarded screen doors, colorlessly connected porches in agonizing repetition, life spiced by the odd holiday arrangement or political banality, broken garages and driveways laden with pieces of scrap metal and steel,